Most of us know all this, to some extent. But from a Confucian standpoint, we can do it even better. We can understand that no norms can tell us exactly what to do once we are out in the messy world, juggling myriad roles and emotions and scenarios. The only norm is goodness. For Confucius, cultivating and expressing goodness are the only ways to become an ethical person.
Creating and Altering Rituals
Confucius is often stereotyped as a rigid traditionalist who urged his followers to spend their lives following social conventions and fitting into specific roles. But by now, it should be clear that he taught the opposite. As we conduct our rituals and gain a sense of goodness, we become the very opposite of rigid. Not only do rituals help prevent us from becoming stuck in any one role, but also training ourselves in rituals means learning when and how to create or alter them.
In fact, the Nature That Emerges from the Decree tells us that rituals originated in just this way. In the earliest days of human civilization, people experienced moments when, amidst the riotous, negative encounters they were having as they bumped up against one another, things actually went well. (Think of something as simple as asking for something rather than just grabbing it, or assisting a friend who was struggling rather than ignoring him.) People took note of the positive effects of these encounters and began to repeat them, and these became rituals. Over time, people developed a repertoire of rituals that helped guide them to behave well toward one another and to help teach future generations to do so as well.
We too create and alter rituals. Imagine that you walk into a room and see that your wife looks concerned about something. In the past, whenever you’ve seen her in this sort of a state, you’ve sat down next to her and encouraged her to talk it out. Giving her room to express her feelings has always been the established ritual.
But a Confucian perspective would emphasize the complexities: meaning, in this particular situation, understanding what kind of attention she needs right now. This could mean recognizing that doing something different—just holding her close, silently—is best for her at this moment, because you sense that what she needs most right now is to be reassured by your presence. If you do this, you create a new ritual. You do something new, quite intentionally, based on your experience with the rituals you two have used before, your knowledge of your wife, and your reading of the situation. If this works, she will respond differently in turn, and this will slowly become a ritual between you two. You’ve altered previous rituals and created a new one. And in doing so, you have created a new reality for the two of you: a reality in which you have forged a better connection.
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If we succeed at expressing goodness continuously, what do we get out of it? At times, Confucius’s disciples asked him similar questions. In fact, they asked whether he thought we are rewarded after we die for the good things we do for others. His response was simple:
“You do not yet understand life—how could you understand death?”
Confucius’s answer wasn’t to say that we should, or should not, believe in an afterlife. Rather, he was emphasizing that we should concentrate on what we can do in the here and now to bring out the best in those around us.
Although Confucius’s focus is not on one’s own happiness, he was intimately familiar with the deep happiness that comes from striving to become a better human being. When asked to describe himself, he replied:
“He is a person who is so impassioned that he forgets to eat, who is so joyous that he forgets to be worried, and who grows into old age without noticing time passing by.”
Cultivating Ourselves to Cultivate a Better World
“Overcoming the self and turning to ritual is how one becomes good.”
Remember the history of the please-and-thank-you ritual. What seemed a minor shift several centuries ago eventually became part of something greater. A new world began to develop, one where people could imagine what it would be like to treat one another like equals, and then experience momentarily what it felt like to treat one another equally. Over time, we have become a world where it is generally believed that people should be equal.
We tend to believe that to change the world, we have to think big. Confucius wouldn’t dispute this, but he would likely also say, Don’t ignore the small. Don’t forget the “pleases” and “thank yous.” Change doesn’t happen until people alter their behavior, and they don’t alter their behavior unless they start with the small.
Confucius taught that we can cultivate goodness only through rituals. Yet it is only once we conduct our lives with goodness that we gain a sense of when to employ rituals and how to alter them. This may sound circular, and it is. This very circularity is part of the profundity of his thought. There is no ethical or moral framework that transcends context and the complexity of human life. All we have is the messy world within which to work and better ourselves. These ordinary as-if rituals are the means by which we imagine new realities and over time construct new worlds. Our lives begin in the everyday and stay in the everyday. Only in the everyday can we begin to create truly great worlds.
4
On Decisions: Mencius and the Capricious World
Imagine trying to come up with a plan to jump-start your life. Perhaps you’re an ambitious college graduate just entering the workforce, or you are stuck in a midlife crisis both personally and professionally. Or maybe you’re trying to decide whether to marry your girlfriend, or else you and your spouse want to start a family but aren’t sure how to make that work with both of your demanding careers. And then imagine that you embark on your plan, only to run into setback after setback: you send out dozens of résumés, to no avail. Your girlfriend decides she doesn’t want to get married after all and breaks up with you. You and your spouse have a baby born with a serious condition that will require intensive full-time care. Despite all your planning, you are faced with unexpected results, and it is crushing.
One of our philosophers experienced something surprisingly similar in his own life. In the late fourth century BC, during an era of strife now known as the Warring States period, Mencius, a Confucian scholar, decided that the time was right for the beginning of a new dynasty based on Confucian teachings. Although already quite an old man, he began going from state to state and talking to their rulers, hoping to persuade one of them to hire him as an advisor, listen to his teachings, and put them into practice.
After many years, the ruler of the state of Qi appointed Mencius to a prominent ministerial position and gave him many audiences. Everything the old philosopher had devoted his entire life to seemed about to come to fruition: he would be the philosopher standing behind a good king and helping him usher in a new and peaceful age.
But it soon became clear that the ruler of Qi was not interested in learning from the scholar’s teachings. When the king waged a war against a neighboring state after tricking Mencius into seeming to have urged him to do so, Mencius realized with despair that his work there was done. The king had used him to make his aggressive act appear virtuous and had no intention of listening to him. It was too late for him to go elsewhere. Mencius would never become the philosopher to a worthy ruler. He left Qi and returned to his home.
Mencius faced an all-too human dilemma: a profoundly disappointing setback had wrecked the plans he had laid out so carefully. He railed against his fate. He reproached Heaven.
But the experience shaped his philosophy greatly. Mencius would argue that the very things we believe to be true when we plan out our lives are also the things that, ironically, limit us.
How we live and make decisions comes down to whether we believe we live in a world that is coherent and stable or one that is—as Mencius taught—unpredictable and capricious. But how can we live a good life if we give up the notions that the world is ordered and just and that mapping out our lives is how we attain success? How do we plan for anything, decide on anything, if we live in a capricious world?
Coherent and Capricious Worlds
; When we plan for the future, we tend to assume that the future is predictable. Of course, we pay lip service to the notion that life can change on a dime and that nothing is certain. But we’re still often taken by surprise when things don’t turn out the way we’d expected. And that’s because when it comes to how we live our lives, we tend to behave as if there are certain stable factors we can count on in a world that is coherent, and this assumption affects our decisions.
Mozi, one of Mencius’s contemporaries, held this worldview. A man of humble birth who made his own way in the world, he eventually founded a tight-knit religious community, and his philosophical writings sketch out his vision of a just society in which anyone who worked hard would prosper.
Mozi shared the Confucian idea that society was failing to enable human flourishing. He too believed people should be encouraged to be ethically better. But unlike the Confucians, Mozi and his followers (the Mohists) didn’t believe that rituals were a tool for helping people to become good. Instead, they dismissed them as meaningless and formulaic, a waste of time that prevented people from focusing on what was really important. And what they thought was really important was sincere belief: in this case, to Heaven, or Tian, the deity who they believed had created the world.
For Mozi and his followers, Heaven was a moral deity who laid out clear guidelines of right and wrong. Humans had to follow these guidelines in order to live a good life. If they did, they would be rewarded; if they did not, they would be punished. In the current age, Mozi believed, people were failing to follow these guidelines, and this was what was leading to immorality, societal decadence, and political turbulence. The Mohists envisioned rebuilding society modeled on Tian’s moral code. Mozi thought that if people were taught to believe that some sort of just, moral code underpinned the universe, this would compel them to behave ethically, resulting in a better society. With their emphasis on sincere belief, their suspicion of ritual, and their commitment to a coherent and predictable world created by a good deity, the Mohists were in many ways quite similar to the early Protestants.
Protestant ideas have helped shape much of what we take for granted now in the modern world. We may or may not still believe in God, but we still believe in the same basic framework. We are stable selves who live in a stable world. We should act as rational-choice agents, calculating what will benefit us and what will cause us harm. If we look within, discover who we are, set out a plan for how we can flourish, and then work hard to fulfill that plan, we will prosper and grow as we should. In short, we are Mohists.
Furthermore, while Confucians thought of goodness as something you couldn’t describe in the abstract but as something you understood differently according to each situation you found yourself in, Mozi’s notion was abundantly clear: goodness was always whatever benefited the greatest number of people. He declared that how people feel about those they are closest to should not matter, for there should be no gradations of love. Rather, men and women should strive to care for everyone equally. Four centuries later, Jesus preached similarly the virtues of loving thy neighbor, loving thy enemy, and turning the other cheek. And in our own day, we are encouraged to donate to charity, volunteer our services, care for the unfortunate.
Yet of course, Mozi recognized that people didn’t naturally behave ethically, and that their emotions and selfish desires got in the way. He believed that society should be set up to nudge people toward correct behavior. These incentives included rewards (success, money, fame) when people did things they should, and punishments (failure, demotions, fines) when they did not. If people believed they lived in a world with clear notions of right and wrong—where hard work would be rewarded and bad deeds punished—they would be persuaded not to follow their baser emotions but to strive to become good people. Mozi was certain that once the right system was in place, the result would be a society in which everyone benefited; a world of what he called “universal caring.”
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Mencius disagreed strenuously with Mozi on all of this. At first glance, his stance might seem puzzling: What could possibly be objectionable about a just world where hard work brings prosperity, there are reliable standards of right and wrong, and everyone is cared for equally?
But Mencius held a very different worldview, one rooted in Confucian thought. He saw the world as capricious. Hard work would not necessarily lead to prosperity. Bad deeds would not necessarily be punished. There were no guarantees of anything; no stable, overarching coherence to the world that one could count on. Instead, Mencius believed, the world is fragmented, in perpetual disorder, and in need of constant work. And it is only when we understand that nothing is stable that we can make decisions and live our lives in the most expansive way.
This is an unsettling idea, and we know that even Mencius struggled to accept it. In fact, he is the philosopher whose life and character we know the most about: the Mencius, a collection of his teachings compiled by his disciples after his death, is rich in detailed stories, dialogues, and anecdotes that portray him as utterly human. This is what makes the text so compelling: it conveys a sense of what it means to be a fallible human being, in all its complexity. Mencius is no serene Buddha, no selfless Jesus. Far from being a placid and benign wise man, he comes across as a brilliant, mercurial, strong-willed, arrogant, and complicated figure—a man who struggled to achieve goodness and at times failed to live up to his own philosophy.
Given this view of the world as continually knitted together by human actions, Mencius found Mozi’s ideas particularly dangerous. He believed that Mozi’s ideas would not result in a world of social harmony and universal caring. Instead, they would result in a near Pavlovian world where people had been conditioned to do what they had to in order to gain rewards and avoid punishment. It would be a world, in fact, in which people had been trained to think of their actions purely in terms of self-interest: What do I do to get what I want?
In fact, Mencius believed one could only become ethical by not thinking there exists any coherent system of rewards and punishments. After all, if you believe one exists, then you will not strive to become a better person; you will act in order to gain benefits for yourself. Mozi’s grand social vision of how to create a perfect world of universal caring would, ironically, lead instead to a world filled with selfish profit seekers.
Mencius feared that attempts to shape human behavior in such a calculated way would end up dividing our cognitive thinking from our emotional side. Realistically, how could we ever love a stranger’s child as much as our own? Of course, removing our emotions from the equation was precisely Mozi’s point: the mind should allow us to decide rationally what’s good or not, free of whims and desires. But Mencius believed that what set good people apart from others was that they had not lost touch with their emotional side; instead, they held on to and assiduously cultivated their emotional responses. And that was how they knew the right thing to do—the right decision to make—in any situation.
This philosophical difference between Mozi and Mencius represents the difference between those who see the world as coherent and those who see it as capricious. On the one hand, you have a world in which your actions are shaped by a belief in universally applicable rules; on the other is a world that you can never count on, one that you build anew constantly by cultivating yourself and your relationships through small actions.
How We Decide
Even today, though we hardly realize it, our decisions are shaped by whether we see the world as coherent or capricious. Most of us, like Mozi, see the world as coherent. We know full well that things don’t always go according to plan, but we also tend to assume there is a general way the world works: if you work hard, you’ll do well in school; if you get a good education, you’ll find a job you enjoy; if you marry the love of your life, you’ll live happily ever after.
Typically, we rely on two folk models to make decisions, both of which are rooted in this idea that there is some stability in the world.
There’s the
“rational choice” model: we are rational creatures capable of making decisions logically. We do voluminous research, make lists of pros and cons, and weigh risks and benefits to achieve the best outcomes we can. We carefully think through which class to take, whether to go to graduate school, or whether to accept a job offer in a remote city.
Or else we favor the “gut instinct” model, in which we make decisions based on an intuitive feeling about what feels “right.” We decide where to go out for dinner, where to travel on our next vacation, or which couch to buy for the living room.
Ultimately, most of us employ some sort of combination of the two. We do the research, but then go with what feels right.
Given his fealty to the idea that the world is capricious, Mencius would consider both decision-making models to be misguided. If we believe we can decide by calculation alone, we will think we are indeed deciding rationally, but those decisions will be derailed by unconscious factors. This isn’t news: plenty of research on decision making concludes that emotions often hijack rational thought.
But that certainly doesn’t mean we ought to rely instead on gut instincts, which are often little more than the manifestation of untrained or even selfish desires, and not based on a true sense of the right thing to do.
There’s a third approach. We can constantly hone our emotional sense so that it works in sync with our mind, in order to make decisions that open up the future rather than close it down. We do not live in an unchanging world, and that is why the last thing we should do is remove emotions—which allow us to grasp all the nuances of a situation and navigate through it from any starting point.
You will not mend a troubled relationship with your sister by sitting down for a single big breakthrough heart-to-heart talk. It will happen instead through the tiny decisions you make about how to behave and respond every time you talk, even when she’s pushing all your buttons. Consider what happens if you shift your focus to examine your everyday interactions with her, while recognizing all the small details (including her responses to your own demeanor) affecting those interactions. Just as the world is not stable, these interactions are not fixed. If you understand that, then you can work simultaneously to alter the situation and the relationship by honing your emotions so that your better responses create a better trajectory.
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