Every nation is a complex organism, and exists as an intricate web of human relationships both within itself and in its external relations. No matter how one generalizes the character of a given country, there are individuals who defy it to one degree or another, and yet it remains true that there are net cultural tendencies that form the personality of a people. We find, upon examining the three major nexi of global civilization today - America, Europe, and China - that each is guided collectively by an essential philosophy that is, on reflection, complementary rather than antagonistic to the other two. This is a tantalizing hint at how a more unified world may coalesce over the long-term.
First, I should emphasize that all of these philosophies already existed in the character of humanity before they were ever articulated, but they were first systematically addressed in cultures where they would both find receptive audiences and be tolerated by authorities. It's entirely possible that similar ideas were voiced earlier in different cultures, but were met with indifference leading to historical oblivion or, more likely, violent suppression that erased all traces of them. We can therefore say that the origins of the philosophies as received by history are no accident, but a reflection of cultural character.
I. China & Confucius
Kong Qiu, known in the West as Confucius (and "Master Kong" in China), lived in a time before the unification of China - a period characterized by frequent warfare among the disparate states, destructive competition among rulers and the warriors who served them, and widespread poverty in the general population.
Despite these problems, Chinese civilization at the time was relatively vast, populous, and already strongly rooted in tradition, so the main problems confronting people were seen less in personal terms and more in terms of relating to others: I.e., acting in ways that promote social harmony, reduce friction, and most effectively contribute to the whole. This was not an arbitrary emphasis, but a cultural necessity in a highly developed society whose progress had been stymied by conflict and corruption.
The chief action principle of Confucianism is Study: You must strive to most closely absorb, understand, and conscientiously implement the wisdom of ancestors and authorities. Innovation is acceptable within the framework of received wisdom, but that which is too revolutionary would promote conflict, and thus is immoral and irresponsible.
At its basest, this emphasis leads to stifling authoritarianism, but at its best it encourages sincere commitment to the well-being of others and willingness to carefully control one's own desires in order not to harm the state of other people. The hero is he who best does honor to tradition while avoiding conflict either through action or inaction - i.e., being neither ambitious nor overly resistant to changes imposed by necessity. The villain is he who is reckless, or who values something more than social harmony.
Modern China is hardly an ideal Confucian state: It is rife with corruption, brutality, imposed ignorance, and reckless exploitation. And, needless to say, the founder of the modern state (Mao Zedong) could quite honestly be articulated as the anti-Christ of Confucianism, having thrown away an entire generation (both in lives and economic progress) in pursuit of arbitrary changes that essentially all failed.
But the overall impetus of the culture is, and has remained, Confucian: A fact that has had the bizarre result of leading to Mao's continued veneration, since it's more Confucian to treat him as a beloved founder rather than a destroyer - simply telling the truth that he was a monster would be too bellicose and irresponsible from that perspective. It's for this same reason that the Chinese Communist Party continues to be tolerated as a legitimate authority, despite no longer promoting anything resembling Communism - or even, for that matter, anything politically left-of-center.
That isn't to say there aren't democratic revolutionaries in China whom Thomas Jefferson would have been proud to meet, or even that a majority of people share this particular outlook, but the net result of their actions is in a direction that reflects Confucian thinking. It is the core of the civilization - not necessarily created by Confucius himself, but simply recognized by him and proceeding along the natural lines he clarified.
Like all philosophies, these principles exist everywhere, but they don't necessarily resonate: It makes no sense to be more concerned with social harmony than individual freedom in a country with low or moderate population density - you would just be unnecessarily limiting the energy and dynamism of your society. And it certainly makes no sense to be traditionalist and authoritarian if your society was, in historical terms, born yesterday: There are no "authorities" upon which to rely, because your circumstances and national character are totally new.
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II. Europe & Plato
Plato arrived on the scene at the height of the Athenian Empire, which was a paradoxical combination of democracy and naked military aggression: The kind of tense contradiction that often gives birth to radical ideas. While the Greek states were a mixed bag politically, and the people of Athens likewise, the social environment was uniquely driven by a sense of aesthetic purpose: The quest for formal perfection - to best represent, whether in government or in art, natural archetypes that exist beyond the tangible.
Pursuit of this ambition was behind the incredible ability of Greek sculptors to capture human likenesses in animated or naturalistic poses, and in the oddly mesmerizing ratios that guided their architecture. It may also have been the reason that democracy came to be articulated as a consistent political ideology rather than merely flaring and sputtering out as it probably did numerous times in other parts of the world: That is, its populations were small enough, and yet individually educated enough, that democracy was not a dead letter as it would have been almost anywhere else in the ancient world.
However, democracy is not (and never was) a central principle of either Platonic philosophy or European culture, despite its presently being the preferred form of government in Europe. Rather, what drives Platonism is the concept of Forms: Perfect, rational things that exist beyond ordinary human perception, and that the good things of our world merely approximate and the bad things pervert.
An example of simple Forms would be geometric constructs - lines, planes, circles, triangles, squares, etc. You can't actually see a circle, triangle, or square, because they can't be created perfectly in the tangible universe: Rather, you must simply approximate them by drawing figures or constructing things out of matter. The political and social Forms are more complicated, but suffice it to say that they follow the same pattern: Perfect, rational ideals.
Life and politics, therefore, are not a process of inventing anything, nor necessarily of copying what has gone before, but of striving to recognize and express more perfectly the Forms that apply to any given area of human endeavor. You must strive to be a conduit for realizing abstract perfection in all things, whether art, government, or even warfare, and elaborate on your work until you have achieved the greatest approximation of the Form to which you aspire.
Unlike Confucianism, this outlook has been a prodigious engine of conflict for millennia, as artists, philosophers, politicians, warriors, zealots, and bigots have all sought to perfect their craft without regard to others. Democracy, constitutionalism, the Roman Empire, Christianity, the Byzantine Empire, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the United States of America, Marxism, Nazism, and countless other things besides, were all products of this European ambition to achieve perfect representations of ideas. The result has been both profound wonders and unimagined horrors.
Now, one may be deceived that modern Europe is more existentialist than Platonic, but in fact existentialism is just one of the things that sprang from the Platonic ideal: Just one among many Formal perspectives with its own internal elegance. If one looks at how Europe actually behaves, existentialism is still nowhere near to being the central principle that animates its choices.
Neither, in fact, is democracy: It just happens that fascism and Communism were found aesthetically wanting when, far from implementing the Forms that originally inspired them - respectively, the Romantic military ideal and the ideal of the noble Common Man - they revealed themselves degenerate and hostile to the principles they alleged to support.
Rather than achieving constructive order and pursuing heroic glory as it claimed, fascism turned Europe into a charnel house, randomly victimizing people on the basis of arbitrary bigotries. And rather than promoting the "simple virtues" of the working class, Communism promoted the values of bureaucracy - secrecy, intrigue, obscurantism, and entrenched prerogative. European democracy is just a pragmatic circumstance due to the lack of attractive alternatives (as Churchill is once noted to have said, in more eloquent terms), not something intrinsic to the character of the culture.
The hero is he who makes art of everything: The poet theologian, the philosopher king, the warrior historian, the scientist painter. It is actually a special category of crime in many European countries to destroy valued artwork, even if you're the owner - in fact, it's theoretically possible for someone to be charged with defacing their own artwork. The villain is the philistine - the ugly and shallow mind incapable of distinguishing beauty from atrocity in their given domain of action, and who thereby corrupts and violates the Forms.
Now, this is not how most Europeans consciously think, anymore than most Chinese walk around with a copy of the Confucian Analects in front of them - it's just how their societies evolved and the values they tend to exhibit in the choices they make.
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III. America & Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche was not an American - he didn't even live in a democracy, let alone an individualistic culture. But as in Athens, there was a deep contradiction at play that allowed his and other profound philosophies to surface: A uniquely rigid and authoritarian political culture due to the Prussian influence, coupled with a commitment - some would even say "savage passion" - for fearless, transgressive intellectualism.
There was, in German philosophy, this constant tension between the Warrior Ethic and the Clerical Ethic - between the insurgent and the establishmentarian - and it was an incredibly strong tension relative to most other cultures, where either the latter was absolute or else was weak due to democratic influences. Rather, in Germany the two were both passionate and strong, and their titanic struggle reflected the social forces that shaped the character of the nation.
Out of this milieu, on the border between intractable philosophic forces; between chaos and order; Nietzsche articulated a world that we create by our choices - not merely passing on received wisdom from ancestors or channeling some mystic vision of perfection, but actually engaging in simultaneous discovery and creation on a moment-to-moment basis. His philosophy finally and totally transcended the Platonic roots of European civilization, and brought down all philosophy to a single, shattering question: What do I choose?
All three philosophies ask this question, but the meaning is different in each. For Confucius, "What do I choose?" is a question asked by an individual of their ancestors and the society's authorities. For Plato, "What do I choose?" is a matter of recognition and appreciation - a person is querying their higher, rational sense of the Forms to seek out what is perfect. For Nietzsche, "What do I choose?" is a moment of creation - a little Big Bang that changes the world.
Germany as a whole was ultimately not able to make positive use of Nietzsche's philosophy in the 20th century: Stalin loomed and pushed the political consensus to the radical right, and meanwhile the non-Marxist left was lost in the grips of existentialist ennui: A Platonic Form with its own beauty, but not conducive to standing in the way of people determined to seize power. The result was that the cataclysmic struggle within the soul of Germany resulted in the destruction of Europe, but parallel developments that had occurred before and contemporary with these events (the rise of the United States) were its salvation.
Of course, Nietzsche had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of the United States (which was before his birth), and has had minimal direct impact on its culture, but I use his as the philosophy associated with this country because it most closely describes our basic animating principle. In other words, it was a German who articulated it because Germany was the place most conducive to it being articulated, not because Germany was an example of what he was talking about.
The basic lesson of Nietzsche was radical at the time, but is now spouted as a truism in every children's cartoon and PG-rated adventure movie: The future is an infinite unknown for you to choose at every moment, not a passive acting out of prophecy or endless elaboration of static ideals. It is, as Frank Herbert articulated in his Dune series, a universe of infinite surprises and eternal change: A "Golden Path" with no roads before you but those you build, and no footprints behind you but those you choose to look back and see.
Plenty of people in any given culture believe this implicitly due to their personalities (i.e., "free spirits"), but the United States of America is really the only country that believes it on a basic, unconscious level rather than simply appreciating its intellectual or narrative elegance.
It's the reason our society has a tendency to shock people: When we are written off, we change and end up achieving things our critics not only thought beyond us, but that they know for a fact (i.e., choose to make the case) are beyond them too. And when we've gone so far that there's no turning back...we do turn back, and make horrible asses of ourselves. We are fickle, idiotic...and brilliant.
I tell you, one must have chaos in one's heart to give birth to a dancing star.
But again, I am not saying that Americans are a society of radically original people - quite the contrary. We are, taken superficially, quite mediocre, boring, and lazy. But we have within our culture the basic value that elevates originality to the status of human godhood. Perfectionism, punctilio, and elaboration of what exists are regarded with much less enthusiasm than successfully bringing something new into the world, which has the unfortunate consequence that, in many cases, we simply appear to do nothing if there fails to be any major breakthrough in one area or another.
This, however, is a mistaken impression. Americans have no aesthetic sensibility - this much Europeans will heartily agree with. And as a result of that, we tend not to have much instinct for knowing the difference between a shit idea and a stroke of genius. The only way we can proceed, then, is to try things and see what happens: In other words, our history is a Looney Tunes pastiche of interwoven brilliance and idiocy, and this much we can see all around us even today.
As a consequence, we occasionally run into something profound that Europe, in its Formal sensibility, had never given much air to, and China, in its emphasis on harmony and stability, might even have regarded as immoral if considered in the Confucian context. Of course, this can go either way: Slavery as practiced in the US was the most heinous that ever existed in the history of the world, making even the Spartan treatment of Helots look humanitarian by comparison. And we also had the recent "unpleasantness" with Bushism.
But we invented telephones and powered air travel, freed Western Europe from the self-imposed nightmare of fascism, invented television, the personal computer, the internet, the mass-produced automobile...on, and on, and on: Things that have either tangibly or inspirationally increased the freedom of mankind. Most recently, we elected someone President who is from the most disadvantaged racial minority, whose name sounds "foreign," and who lived much of his life outside the contiguous US. This too shocked and inspired the world, and so long as we exist, we will never stop inspiring and horrifying other countries: It's who we are.
The hero from this viewpoint - which encompasses both destroyers and creators - is he who successfully achieves originality in their given domain, bringing into the world something that is at least partly novel. It doesn't have to be perfect, or even necessarily functional from the beginning, it just has to be cool. In fact, "cool" is a word that best describes what Americans want out of reality: Not a stately, elegant perfection as Europe would choose, but a forwardness and attitude of light, youthful exuberance that is irreverent and yet sincere.
The villain is that which stultifies, stagnates, and obstructs; that which imposes excessive limits, or attempts to do so without a legitimate ethical basis (or with too paternalistic an attitude). We don't despise hypocrisy so much as we despise the banality of most hypocrites, but find an original way of doing it and we will either love you or love hating you. What would be regarded as an amazing aesthetic achievement in Europe due to how well it evokes archetypes might be ridiculed as "derivative" by Americans for precisely the same reason.
Of course, as I said, originality is a rare thing, so most of the time we just content ourselves being mediocre: We have little interest in being excellent at what we do, unless what we do is original. Those of us who become entrepreneurs and scientists tend to have a disproportionately large share of the avant garde in their field, but once something is established our cultural tendency is to become bored and do things half-assed. Hence the cognitive dissonance in other countries' perceptions of us: A nation of dullards continually churning out technological and social revolutions.
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IV. It...Could...Work!!!
While these philosophies don't necessarily work together in the same place, one finds they can still cooperate as separate pieces of a whole. If your priority is to try something potentially disruptive, you probably want to do it in a society that celebrates the very idea of disruptive change rather than one that will either be cautious or hostile. If you want to elaborate a system into its utmost perfection and beauty, you'll find more appreciation in a society that is guided by that same purpose. And if your underlying goal is to promote order and harmony against chaos, you would likely find a more receptive environment in a conservative, authoritarian culture.
This is how things are already shaping up: Despite the economic power of China and its large expenditures on business and science, entrepreneurs and scientists from other countries are not moving there in large numbers to make use of them. They may invest in it, collaborate with its scientists, or contract with it, but they overwhelmingly find it better to keep their core operations - whether labs or corporate headquarters - at a distance to avoid being buried under the weight of its political and cultural environment.
Still, China has many long-term advantages in light of the Confucian ethic: Anything that is best done slowly, deliberately, and according to established principles will eventually find its most effective practical realization there. Its Empire was functional in a way that the closest European analog, Byzantium, could never even have aspired to be, and similar efficiencies have already come into play with respect to mass-production - a domain in which the US was previously dominant.
I also will note that China is likely to exceed the US in technology and scientific innovation temporarily, as its efforts to catch up to us give it momentum, but I do not expect that dominance to last more than a generation: It is a fundamentally conservative culture, and like the Arabs who for a time greatly exceeded Europe in progress and education, will not be able to sustain it. You cannot sustain innovation in a culture that preaches authority: It will simply go a certain distance and then stop, waiting for more mischievous civilizations to come up with new ideas to copy.
Meanwhile, the European aesthetic sensibility is also highly valuable to the world, and people from every corner of the globe still go there to find appreciation for their artistic vision in any given field of human endeavor. They inject an artistic eye into areas of life that, in other cultures, are treated purely as matters of drab necessity: Everything from law to public transportation to organized crime is undertaken in ways that often look interesting or exhibit attractive principles.
They are not, like China, primarily concerned with stability and efficiency, so they will gladly stop short of fully realizing either in order to serve the cause of beauty. However, Europe does have a much more profound attention to detail and desire for intricacy than the United States, so it can be seen as a middle ground between American and Chinese values.
And if you have an idea that would smash the status quo with a wrecking ball and make an instant laughinstock of the current leaders in your field, there is no better place to go than the United States. Not because we make it easy for new ideas to prosper - it's not easy anywhere, ever - but because we adore the very concept, and celebrate successful examples as gods among men (and women). It is the only country in the world where novelty is widely held to be a virtue rather than an irrelevancy or a sin.
Again, all these processes are ongoing everywhere, among all cultures, but different cultures are animated by different central values. This may form the basis of a peaceful and functional world, if America is energetic in pursuing its nature as a trailblazer; if Europe is energetic in elaborating upon Forms and ideas to create more beautiful and more perfect versions; and if China (which we can say also includes the rest of Asia, for the purposes of this discussion) continues to study, adopt, and make more efficient the best practices of the world. Hopefully some day soon China will also be able to incorporate some form of democracy, because ultimately it can't keep going without some kind of freedom and accountability, and the United States won't be able to tolerate the kind of domination its growing economy will hand to unelected foreign power.
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Now, allow me to anticipate a couple of the likely objections:
- You're generalizing.
Yes, so are you. That's how human perception works. The question is not whether there are exceptions, but whether it's true enough to give insight. I obviously think it is.
- America is or will be irrelevant.
Highly unlikely. We have a large population, an illustrious history, and values that celebrate novelty - we will continue to produce assholes and heroes.