My Confucius
The good life for the rest of us
The Book:
The Authentic Confucius: A Life of Thought and Politics
By Annping Chin
Scribner
2007
The Talk:
Over the years I’ve read about Confucius. Even so, I would’ve been hard pressed to explain him. After reading Annping Chen’s 2007 biography The Authentic Confucius: A Life of Thought and Politics, I feel like I know him better, though he remains an enigma to me. This is no fault of Chen’s book. Confucius is mysterious.
And yet there’s something appealing about him all the same. So while I can’t say I really understand Confucius, perhaps I can put together a few words about what I find personally interesting about him.
Among the consultant class
At a surface level, Western readers might see Confucius as a kind of Socrates or Jesus figure. He spent a good portion of his adult life as a wanderer. He had disciples. He often spoke in cryptic, metaphorical, or allusive language about the right way to live. He said profound things, like “Do not impose on others what you do not desire yourself,” which might suggest he was a kind of universal moral teacher.
And yet what’s most interesting about him is that he was not a philosopher or a spiritual guru. As Chin tells his story, Confucius spent his life actively (if indirectly) seeking employment and trying to advance as high up on the government ladder as he could. His advice about what was “right” was ultimately in the service of reforming the rulers of his time, and he wanted to increase his status in order to have the greatest influence he could on the powers that be.
Once Confucius asked a man who worked for Qu what his master had been doing. The servant replied, “My master wishes to make fewer mistakes, but he has not be able to do so.”
Confucius was part of a class of nobles who had lost their hereditary wealth. They technically had aristocratic lineages, but they had to work for others, providing service in order to live. They attached themselves to rulers as advisors, consultants, or, in the way we think today, as executive coaches.
What this class of gentlemen offered rulers was skill in arts, rituals, and history. They guided leaders on how to speak, what to eat, how to dress, what habits to cultivate, and how to perform rituals correctly. They also offered advice on statecraft, and some were military experts.
In a way, what they offered was the benefits of meritocracy within a hereditary system. A social hierarchy based on heredity didn’t ensure leadership talent, but this mobile noble class allowed management talent to circulate between kingdoms and dukedoms. A kingdom might be stuck with a foolish or incompetent ruler, but if they surrounded themselves with skilled officials, it could mitigate their weaknesses and steady the ship of state, so to speak.
Some advisors would’ve obviously been flatterers, but others garnered a reputation for being tough talkers. Advisors survived pragmatically: Being too money obsessed was seen as in poor taste, but one couldn’t disregard money altogether. Do you work for a bad lord and sell out? Do you rationalize that you can reform him? Or do you hold out for a leader who has some potential to be receptive to your ideas? It was a precarious kind of existence. The higher your integrity, the more likely you were to be unemployed. To be unemployed and on the road in that era was to be a social “nobody,” and Confucius was unemployed much of the time.
Along the same lines, the disciples of Confucius were not looking for enlightenment. They were looking to have Confucius teach them how to be true gentlemen, to have style, taste, manners, presence, cultivation, wit, and gracefulness—with the ultimate goal of getting a high-status government position. In short, Confucius was a career-seeker, and his followers were career-seekers, too. It was personal development in service to professional development.
The precarious moralists
It would be anachronistic to call Confucius middle class. But in reading Chen’s book Confucius feels very much like the spirit of middle-class-ness.
In his book Class: A Guide Through The American Status System, Paul Fussell writes:
The middle class is distinguishable more by its earnestness and psychic insecurity than by its middle income. I have known some very rich people who remain stubbornly middle-class, which is to say they remain terrified at what other think of them, and to avoid criticism are obsessed with doing everything right.
Perhaps you manage your money well, perhaps you earn a salary, but the concern is always that if you stop working, the money stops. And while you might be comfortable now, you’re just one employer decision away from having to start over. Thus, you care very much what others think of you.
Without alternatives, middle class people make a virtue of necessity and embrace the hustle of continual self-improvement. (You better work, bitch.) Fussell writes:
Because he is essentially a salesman, the middle-class man develops a salesman’s style. Hence his optimism and his belief in the likelihood of self-improvement if you’ll just hurl yourself into it.
To be middle class is also to be educated and to aspire to more education. Education and money influence each other. Money provides education, education secures more money. Education matters to middle class folk in a way that it doesn’t to other classes. For this reason, middle class people are the keepers of the culture—because culture is how you secure your status. (Culture wars are middle class wars.)
In the early modern era, merchants became as rich as aristocrats, and so they needed education and books on manners in order to cultivate “nobility.” In the Victorian Era, the middle class was obsessed with manners and being civilized, doing things the genteel way. The post-war American middle class followed the same pattern, hungrily seeking out how to cook the right way, parent the right way, manage finances the right way.
What we mean by “right” here is partly about being moral (taking personal responsibility, having integrity, fulfilling one’s duties) but it’s also about doing culture correctly. How to dress, what to eat, how to talk, how to decorate one’s home, what to value, what to like, what aesthetic sensibility to cultivate. One should not use plastic bags. One should drink 8 glasses of water per day. One should save 10% of one’s income. One should have an accent pillow on one’s couch. One should learn a foreign language.
In the middle class, personal dignity, honor, and status are always at risk. Culture is how middle class people shore up their dignity when the money isn’t enough. Our family can’t afford that, but what we have is character. We may not have much, but least our house is clean. I can’t afford that luxury item, but I’m fashionable because I bought the dupe.
In the middle class, professional advancement and social improvement are intertwined. And there’s a general reformist impulse. (1) Get a good job that (2) makes the world a better place. If only we could fix our culture, many of our societal problems could be fixed, we think. Moral improvement, left or right, is what this country needs! And it starts with media diet, phone habits, food consumption, bike lanes, church attendance, decolonizing your bookshelf, etc. It starts with culture.
The middle class ethos is moralist without being idealist. Be ethical—but don’t risk your job unless it’s really bad. Seek reform but don’t sacrifice your own hard-won social status. On the center-left, question capitalism but don’t harm it. On the center-right, reject the world while accruing worldly success.
This is how I began to wrap my head around the teachings of Confucius. When he talks about the importance of performing rituals correctly, what he’s talking about is culture. He wants to improve society through culture, by attempting to influence rulers (and the influencers of rulers) to do better in ways that make society more orderly, more peaceful, and more benevolent. At the same time, he’s also trying to teach his disciples the necessary mindset for getting ahead and increasing their social and economic status.
Family values
In some cases, Confucius seems to give advice that sounds wrong to modern Western sensibilities. When presented with a case of a son testifying against his father in court, Confucius responds:
In my native place, those who are considered upright are quite different from this man. Fathers cover up for their sons, and sons cover up for their fathers. Being upright lies therein.
For Confucius, filial piety (son honoring father) often ranked above state obligations because the family was the source of benevolence, of humanity. Ideally, if sons honored their fathers, and cultivated appropriate family kindness, this would radiate out and improve society as a whole. In contrast, to cut off one’s family attachment was to become un-human, in a way. It was to become a nakedly political being, unfeeling and cruel.
Unprincipled virtue
Confucius was reluctant to subject the family to the state. That said, it wasn’t a hard and fast rule. In fact, Confucius did not articulate any rules, but instead made judgments based on the facts of each situation. Confucius puts down leaders who doggedly keep their word, even when circumstances change:
Men who insist on keeping their word and seeing their action to the end. They have stones for brains and are inferior indeed.
True integrity, in the mind of Confucius, requires savvy situational awareness. Chin writes:
[The good man] is not even slavish to the path he himself as trodden, for experience would teach him that every occasion is different: the circumstances change, and they change even as the occasion unfolds. Thus, each time, he has to size up the situation and decide how to make his next move.
One might think of it this way: Keeping one’s integrity often comes down to knowing the right time to leave a bad situation. That could mean contradicting yourself. It could mean walking away from sunk costs. But you’ll have saved yourself.
Confucius is hard to pin down because he lives in this middle space—one might call it the real world—in which one neither acts strictly according to principles nor abandons virtue for raw power. He is always balancing goodness and necessity. His ideal gentleman is both benevolent and prudent. The “right” answers are rarely clear cut.
Life without escape
A lot of thinkers throughout history were either doing their thinking as leisured landowners or as world-rejecting ascetics. Plato was an aristocrat. Jesus calls his disciples to leave their parents and prepare for a near-future kingdom without marriage. Athens recommends the life of leisured contemplation; Jerusalem, the life of prayer.
Confucius is different. In a way, he’s trying to define the good life for the managerial class, in which career, family, culture, and status are all active concerns, in play and in tension. Getting life “right” requires requires ambition, pragmatism, social connections, situational awareness, education, cultural savvy, all harmonized together—all, Confucius would add, without losing your humanity, your heart.
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