In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Ban Wang about his article “The Clash of Civilization and World Community: The West and China,” from Telos 199 (Summer 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss whether it still makes sense to speak of distinct human cultures; if the very ideas of China and the West need to be discarded, or, if not, what the basis of such distinctions would be and why they persist; whether there is a human commonality that lies below and beyond age-old cultural norms, and if so what is its content and what forms does it take; how both Chinese and Western forms of universalism have converged to form a cosmopolitan unity; how multiculturalism and identity politics have undermined cross-cultural interaction and a universalist vision; and what alternatives there are for affirming both universalism and local culture. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 199 are available for purchase in our online store.
The Clash of Civilization and World Community: The West and China
Ban Wang
To claim that East and West can never meet is to make a false claim. But in recent years, the myth of civilizational clash has become the currency of international relations and cross-cultural understanding. This stance spawns the stale but fake news that China and the West are locked in a collision course over civilizational norms—individualism vs. authoritarianism, state capitalism vs. neoliberalism, democracy vs. autocracy. This view is in the grip of “civilization” as if it were the genetic code of a body politic that has remained unchanged across thousands of years and countless generations. A cultural DNA is said to constitute the identity of a national society, placing China on Venus and the West on Mars. The West evolves liberal democracy as its vital essence, whereas China has been bedridden with the century-old pathology of autocracy.
Here, “civilization” is a blanket and meaningless term because it regards a political-cultural order as being sealed in an organic, unchanging, and ahistorical totality. Now, if we probe into “liberalism,” surely a core Western value, the term quickly dissolves in messiness and has meant different things for different people and in different historical times. If the twentieth century was the American Century marked by rising democratization, critics of hegemony and imperialism have long questioned how “democracy” can be meaningful in describing the identity of Pax Americana and its military-corporate complex. Within the West, opinions over the centuries have been intensely divided about liberalism’s meanings, polemics, and mutation in history. On the reverse side, controversies have long raged about the pros and cons of authority and authoritarianism in all civilizations. Do autocracy and democracy shun each other as water and fire? Can authoritarianism grow out of a democracy? Can liberal institutions beget fascism and autocracy? Indeed, the current Western world is attesting to this trend, for all the talk of the West as the bulwark of democracy.
To have a meaningful comparison, we need to move out of the all-encompassing labels of civilizational identity and delve into changing historical contingencies, contexts, and responses. We need to attend to historical circumstances and contextualize ideas and revise our understanding of the inherited norms. Speaking of mutual interpretation between China and the West, Benjamin Schwartz, an eminent scholar of Chinese studies at Harvard University during the Cold War era, proposed a critical and historical approach. In encounters between East and West, he noted, Western observers habitually “assume that the West is a known entity.” But this “deceptive clarity” of Western culture disappears as soon as we look at its past and current history. Not only have the best minds of the West long been divided in their efforts to grasp the meanings of Western modernity, but many controversies have also surrounded such key words as liberalism, socialism, and nationalism.[1] Turning to China, the observers also feel confident about the culture as a known quantity and habitually resort to “the spuriously lucid concepts” of civilizational proportions, such as “preindustrial,” “Confucian,” or “ancient society.” But to achieve a genuine cross-cultural understanding, we should begin by immersing ourselves as deeply as possible in the specific problems facing both China and the West—in the specific context and eras of history. The more we delve into the complex details in the encounters and entanglements of two cultures, the more we feel that we are not dealing with two known entities and two civilizational identities. We will be forced to see how impoverished and ill-equipped the ready-made and inherited perspectives and categories are. Indeed, we are dealing with two moving targets, which are to be better known through research, fact-checking, and rethinking. We are in fact dealing with “two vast, ever-changing, highly problematic areas of human experience.”[2] Schwartz’s advice projects a historically fluid and variable ground for understanding differences and similarities between two life-worlds. Furthermore, mutual reflection is not for the sake of making cultural difference firm and absolute, and of drawing firm lines between “us” and “them.” Although critics are necessarily culture-bound, they should yearn for a common ground of human civilization: “One may nevertheless hope that there does exist a realm of the universally human lying below and beyond culture which makes a certain degree of self-transcendence possible.”[3]
Inquiry into historically specific contexts may open the door to an awareness of a cosmopolitan civilization partaken by all humans. It becomes possible to envisage how humans build institutions through evolution and adapting to nature, and how different groups build differently but also through learning, exchanging, adopting, and sharing among each other. It is true that we are all raised and live within our own inherited cultural spheres, but a horizon of human commonality lies below and beyond the age-old cultural norms. Against the thesis of civilizational clash, the more urgent question today for the cross-cultural critic is not how civilizations are sharply different but how differences can be transcended and flow into a common world.
The aspiration for “a realm of the universally human” puts Schwartz squarely in the Chinese tradition of tianxia, which means “unity of all under heaven.” Chinese thinkers have long harbored the aspiration that different cultures and civilizations can and should contribute to and partake of a universal culture based on common humanity. Confucianism, for example, urges that the gentleman strive for harmony but not uniformity, and that in harmony each component remains distinct and different.
Rooted in ancient cosmology, tianxia has an ancient lineage in tianli (principle of heaven). Dong Zhongshu of the Han dynasty elevated this universal moral authority to a cosmic order where humans live in tune with heavenly designs. Neo-Confucianists of the Song dynasty extended the idea and conceived the principle of heaven as inner-directed reflection. They deployed this transcendent principle to critique the political agenda and practices that fell short of it. In Zhu Xi, the prominent Song Confucian philosopher, the principle of heaven comes to light through an arduous practice of self-cultivation, reflection, and learning. Moral activity is both personal and political, both moral and institutional: it expands from the inner mind outward and becomes embodied in the fabric of community and affairs of governance. Deemed immanent within rituals of everyday experience, the principle of heaven takes on flesh and blood by being enacted in the daily conduct of serving families and fulfilling mutual obligation toward fellow humans. Participation in a dense welter of everyday moral duty and deed not only generates spiritual meaning but also promotes institutional reform.
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1. Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), p. 1.
2. Ibid., p. 2.
3. Ibid.
