Back From China

Greetings All, I'm back from the Orient (again). Still fascinated by getting a chance to meet & live with these people first-hand, because I assure you that stereotypes don't really work there. It is an extremely complicated place. However, some generalizing is required unless we want to just throw our hands up & stop asking questions, because we know that the common culture gives people a common frame of reference for most of their internal & external activities.

So, with that in mind, I would like to share some results of a little mental experiment I've conducted while in China. Because of the sheer number of people, I've tried testing a few of the assertions made in Franciscan U. philosophy of the human person class against the culture.

1. Persons belong to themselves, & therefore cannot belong to another.

It is true that every person & relationship is colored by the uniqueness of the individuals in question, but it is in conflict with other forces - citizens belonging to the state, workers belonging to the factory, or possibly children belonging to the parents. But I noticed that even in factories where everyone dresses in drab uniform, many will accentuate their individuality & independence by adding a pink scarf, or a bit of jewelry, or a crazy hairdo. People inherently know of their own dominion over themselves & seem to naturally rebel against the idea of conformity, sameness, or ownership, even in China.

2. Persons are wholes of their own, & never mere parts.

In a country with something approaching a billion & a half people, it is tempting to for both the individual & the state to take this approach - that every one fits into the society as gears fit into a machine. However, people do not fit into society like parts of a machine; they are a complete machine unto themselves. Or if you prefer a more organic example, people are never arranged in society like organs in a body, each with its own & purpose & function, but each individually only making sense when properly fitted into the whole. No, persons are wholes bodies, literally & otherwise. Newman said each person is an "infinite abyss unto himself."

However, people feel a little uneasy about the idea of a billion and a half infinites walking around, and perhaps we either tend to avoid or downplay the responsibility that comes with having such a completeness of existence unto ourselves. This is evident in China, just as it is in our land; however, there is some evidence that people in China are waking up to their birthright as an infinity, as a whole unto themselves. Much of the clamor for material comforts & the rampant rise of consumerism in China may be a kind of unhealthy expression of this discovery of self, not as a part, but as a complete whole.

3. Persons are never mere instrumental means, but are ends in themselves.

In a pseudo-Communist society, the first three of these proposals resonate rather strongly. In this statement, we say that a person must act according to their own wills & nature, & that no one can appropriate that self-determination, either with or without the person's knowledge or permission. It is unclear to me if the idea of self-determination is strongly present in China, though I have undoubtedly met many individuals who have the strength of character that manifests personalistic self-determination. It is only a recent development in Western philosophy that people are their own ends & therefore determine themselves. But on a natural level, we seem so beholden to so many ties & limitations, whether family, friends, church, work, school, society, politics, charity, even our own bodily limitations & failings. With all of these present, no wonder we have such a hard time seeing ourselves as the strong self-determinants we were meant to be.

Unlike here in the U.S. where most people seem to work to provide a high living standard capped by the pursuit of leisure, in China, the cost of living is much higher, the work load is much heavier, & just getting by is the order of the day. It is the rare individual that has the space in their lives to ponder such things. Perhaps this is one reason for the recent emergence of a full-bodied philosophy of the person - people have a hard time pondering such things when they don't know if they will be able to feed their family.

There are also some other cultural factors like history or religion that are harder to pin down. It seemed to me that most people in East China are Buddhists. Even if not practicing, they seem to carry some of its ideas in their thinking - such as the notions that everything is in essence a unity & that everything proceeds in cycles. These seem to rub harshly against the concrete individualism, self-distinction, & self-completeness proper to each human person. Also, the pervasive belief in luck, astrology, & magic seem to undermine the person's self-determination in favor of spiritual forces that just blow us along for the ride.

In the end, the most interesting results were found by comparing my observations of the Chinese culture to our prevailing post-modern culture, & then to contrast those with the notion of person proposed by Catholic Christianity. There are more similarities than one might think between East & West, but I would finish by noting that history shows that the attempt to build a society without accounting for the nature of the human person will generally leave man in the most depersonalized & unhappy state.