Ep. 313: Mozi’s Political Ethics (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to Partially Examined Life Episode 313. Part 2. We've been discussing Mo Tzu with Tzuchien Tho here and I understand we have you at least for part of this second half. Let's get into it. I had a point that I thought was a key puzzle little piece here, which is. This is actually in the funeral section on page 70 which answers the question how do people become evil? Which is through deprivation. Right. This funeral section is all about why should you not put extraordinary amounts of money into funerals and take three years out of your life to mourn when your parent dies and things like this.

Well, it's because everybody needs to do their jobs. We need to keep generating wealth for the state. If those in superior positions do not attend to the affairs of government, disorder will result in. If those in inferior positions do not pursue their tasks, there will not be enough food and clothing. And here's the key point. And if there is not enough food and clothing, then the younger brother seeking help from the older brother but receiving none, will feel no more love for his older brother, but instead will come to hate him. Same with the son, the minister seeking help from his lord but receiving none will become disloyal.

1:12 Wes: Then evil and cats and dogs living together,

1:15 Mark: then evil and immoral. People with neither clothing to go abroad in nor food at home will be stung by shame in their hearts and will give themselves up to uncontrollable evil and violence. Thus thieves and bandits increase in number and law abiding persons grow few. So there you go. There is a material. It's not just like some people are just evil or we just all have free will, it's people are driven to evil from deprivation.

1:38 Tzuchien: It does include that mechanism inside though. Right. So it's the material conditions turn the heart evil. So he does have that as a mediating mechanism. Presumably one can still choose to be loving. Presumably because we're against fatalism. But the law of averages. I don't want to put words in Mozi's mouth, but in general, yes, there's a reason why people steal.

2:03 Wes: It's because they don't have enough slippery slope from big funerals to total societal breakdown.

2:10 Tzuchien: Exactly, exactly.

2:12 Wes: But it really is more about the use of state resources.

2:15 Seth: I vacationed years ago with my wife and some friends in Bali, which is one of the few Buddhist islands that are part of Indonesia. And no matter what economic state you're in, the amount of expense and effort that goes into building these temples and making offerings to the ancestors and all this, it's extensive. I mean, everybody spends an inordinate amount of their resources on. And it's a point of pride. Right? Have your house, temple in your domicile and you would see these shacks that have these very elaborate altars and there's just a huge amount of expenditure there. And it's like, wouldn't that be better spent feeding their kids or you know, that sort of thing. And it feels very close to home.

3:02 Tzuchien: Yeah, Mozi would not be into that actually. Yeah, I mean, just like we've making a lot of comparisons to Plato. Right. So Plato also wants to get rid of all the poets from the city,

3:12 Mark: although that's for spiritual reasons, not for public expense reasons.

3:16 Wes: It wasn't because of the parades that

3:18 Dylan: he wanted to get rid of the poets, it was because the corrupting of the soul.

3:21 Mark: We have this sections on moderation in expenditure on moderation in funerals. And then later we have this section against music, which really is against all art, you know, because he has this very materialistic, you know, maybe in a state of plenty. He just doesn't seem to recognize that, you know, people want drama, that, you know, you can feed them music and art and that'll help them through the hard times. You know, just that people have spiritual needs and not just material needs.

3:48 Dylan: Well, it's interesting that you read it that way, Mark, because I was expecting to read it that way. I was expecting it to be a platonic, esque screed against music. But then I read it and it's like, it's against gigantic parades.

4:01 Wes: It's against the misuse of taxpayer dollars.

4:06 Dylan: Yes, exactly. I did not get any sense, even in between the lines, that there was a kind of moral judgment regarding music that rang to me like. Or even an aesthetic kind of sense that it's better for your soul to not do this. It was more like, it shouldn't be a priority, and we certainly shouldn't be investing lots and lots of resources into that activity.

4:28 Wes: Yeah. So music here is associated with governmental authorities and big public displays that cost lots and lots of money. Russia.

4:36 Dylan: He doesn't care about the benefit that Mark is talking about. He doesn't acknowledge it at all.

4:42 Wes: So. Well, he says, does this do anything to rescue the world from chaos and restore it to order? I hardly think so. You know, somewhere conceivably he could have responded to someone who said, well, actually, it does save the world from chaos because it has a certain psychological effect.

4:57 Tzuchien: That's the Ruists, Right? Social harmony is mirrored in musical harmony for the Ruists. Right. So Kong Tzu famously was somebody who had music in his classrooms.

5:10 Dylan: Right.

5:10 Tzuchien: So when Kongzi is teaching class, there's a person in the corner playing the zither and that Kongzi loved to harmonize in choirs. So for Kongzi beauty, artistic, musical beauty is a way of reforming a human being's sense of care and sympathy. Again, the Ruists in general are not optimistic about how certain concepts, ideas, ideologies can transform people. They put a stronger emphasis on affective, emotional reform to cultivate caring, sympathetic people. Whereas Mohists think, wow, that's the origin of the sliding slope from thinking that music has a moral purpose to these great expenditures.

Whereas Mo is saying, no, no, no, what we need to do is we need to install ideological apparatuses that can instill the sense of impartiality and we need to get rid of the distractions from building this moral meritocracy where it's acts of impartiality that push you up the meritocracy and this music, art, these other forms of things, they distract from this ideological sort of device.

6:29 Wes: Yeah, I think distraction is a good word. Right. So it's more than just the taxpayer stuff, but it's also about being distracted from one's duty, keeping gentlemen from attending affairs of state. So let us try enumerating. This is on page 114, enumerating the various duties of the people of the world and see how music interferes with them. And then, you know, farmers must leave home early and return late, sowing seed, planting trees and so on. Women, women must do this, people must do that. And the idea is that we already have a set of tasks that completely fills up our time, right? It's a very zero sum thing. There is no time for leisure. So music would necessarily take us away from those important tasks, which is a really weird argument when you think about it. There's got to be some leisure time, right? And then couldn't music fit in there?

7:17 Tzuchien: So I think it's sort of. His leisure is a very simple one, right. It's a very minimalistic one. And it reflects a little bit. I wanted to bring this up earlier, is the kind of, if you will, the class basis of the Ruists versus the Mohists. So Kong Tzu is a descendant of aristocracy, you know, these kind of poor aristocracy that perhaps some generations ago were rich but sort of lost their wealth. But he reflects this upper class sensibility, right? It's all about the great books. It's about music and. And courtly manners and etiquette and all of that.

Gentlemen coming from afar, et cetera. This book collects the moral philosophical writings. But Moz has other books on engineering projects. He has even a kind of a logic manual. So Moz really is coming hailing from the kind of, perhaps not the very, very bottom of society. Otherwise he probably wouldn't be able to read or anything like that. But the kind of craftsman class, the kind of engineers, kind of skilled working people. And his sort of attitude, if you also, if you look at his metaphors, right, so his metaphors are always those of engineers, right?

The plumb line, the compass. These are workman's tools. These are workbenches and measurement tools, tools of house builders and furniture makers. He's kind of a working class person and in a lot of the more epistemological sections of it, doesn't really speculate very much. He's sort of very commonsensical. He doesn't want to discuss abstract problems of divinity. He just Basically says, you know, people think that ghosts exist. There's plenty of evidence out there. Let's just accept that. This kind of class basis of his work. So the attitude towards leisure is much more of a kind of simple life.

You have your friends, you have your loved ones, people from your neighborhood, whatever. You hang out and eat food, you know, not this kind of high art, music and poetry and all that.

9:19 Mark: So I don't know if this influenced what Watson decided was worthy of putting in this book, but from what I've heard from other sources, the thousand page book that this comes from, or 700 pages or whatever it is, is almost certainly not written all by one person. Even in the section that we have, it's all like Mo Tzu says, like, so it's right. It's his students. So probably the engineering book and the logic book, these are like later Mohists who are adding to the.

9:44 Tzuchien: Mozi comes from that class anyhow. I mean, very little is known about him, but it does seem like he comes from that class. And what he built was not necessarily an academy like what Ruism did, but a political movement. And they were most effective in the dimensions of dissuading war. So it's a political movement where basically you're trained by your. These teachers to sort of be good at rhetoric and dissuading war. And if war was not able to be prevented, they would travel personally to those weaker states and build defenses and booby traps and things like that.

They would help cities defend themselves against aggressors. So part of the Mohist training was civil and military engineering seems to be part of the thing. Maybe he didn't write these down in treatises, but part of the sort of education that you would get by joining the Mohist sect would be a training in doing this kind of thing. So Mozi did not just expect his followers to be good at thinking about impartial care, but he also expected his students to bring it about. And so some of this knowledge was preserved in the school because of this kind of practices.

11:02 Mark: I don't know if people know that. In the deleted scene from Home Alone, Kevin McCallister is reading from the Large Book of Moe about all those booby traps. And that's why. That's why we get that in that film.

11:15 Tzuchien: All right, okay. So pun aside, actually there actually is some good. There's a case from the Mythbusters, you know, this television show where there's this device that they created which is underneath the city. They would put huge drums of water and so it would be a detection device for marching armies. Because in ancient times, warfare was horses, 10,000 men trampling the ground, even if you couldn't hear or see them. Guards in the city could detect the movement of large armies by looking at.

11:52 Dylan: It's Jurassic Park.

11:53 Wes: So seismometer.

11:54 Dylan: Oh, yeah, seismometer.

11:55 Tzuchien: So, for example, one of the Mohist innovations was something like a seismometer for incoming troops and they could sort of then block themselves up. And you know, in the ancient times, siege warfare, it was almost never that you could just, just take the walls of another city. It would be very costly. And so if you were able to effectively close yourself off, it was more costly for the aggressor to continue the siege than it is if you had a well sort of stocked city. So, for example, things like this. So the Mohists really taught smaller states, vulnerable cities, how to defend themselves against larger states by setting up devices like this. So this is like historically. This is historically attested.

12:37 Mark: I think that against offensive Warfare section might be a good way for us to get into some of the problems that we alluded to in the first half of the discussion with the will of heaven versus these very concrete detectable things. And tied together by this argument against fatalism that if you are righteous, if you do your job, if you govern your state justly, everything will fall into place, people will be attracted. I. I've referred to this, I think, as like the unity of virtue, as opposed to the heteronomy of virtue that is, is there's no question of two moral, two good actors coming into conflict.

Like, that's just not even for Plato or for Mo Tzu, that's not a possibility, and probably not for Confucius either. So this against offensive warfare, it starts out with this very commonsensical, like, think about how much damage warfare causes. Like if you think killing somebody in a domestic violence incident or something, an everyday murder is bad, well then killing 10 people is much more. And then a ruler who's like, I'm gonna send my people into the Ukraine because that's our historic land and kills millions or thousands or whatever. You should not say, oh, well, they're the leader.

It's political. War is a different thing. Like, no, it's just causing harm, it's just killing. So that's the beginning of it. But then he has to counter, well, what about all the fighting that happened in the past? Weren't some of those? And in fact, if you say that heaven's reward the righteous, then somebody who ends the day governing all over these little states that They've conquered, for instance, it seems like, haven't they been rewarded by heaven? So he has to give this reinterpretation of, oh no, you know, it seemed like the righteous ruler conquered somebody else, but that was because they were punishing them for their wickedness.

Actually, heaven works through us individually. And so heaven told this past ruler, take out these unrighteous people. Which just seems to just open the door for the kind of thing that he is explicitly arguing against. The people who are aggressive now like to dress up their aggression in all sorts of fancy. I'm righteous. But yet he has to allow that has happened in the past because otherwise you need a hermeneutic lens for your history to make it fit his principle.

14:55 Wes: Yeah, this is the problem with, you know, if you have a just war theory in which only self defense, right. That's the only legitimate reason for conducting a war, which means when someone else is invading your territory. And then, you know, of course there's, you could go further than that with pacifism and say it's, it's never justified. But the problem is in the concept of self defense where it can be expanded and it can. One can say, well, this is a preemptive strike. Well, they were about to attack. Well, they weren't attacking necessarily, but they were aligned with my enemies and they made me feel insecure or they were wielding soft power.

They were going to undermine my government by having a democracy in the neighboring state, any of that stuff. So everything can be recast as a form of self defense. And unfortunately, I guess that's not exactly what his examples involve because his concept. Right. Is punishment. Right. But it's the same sort of idea. It's like saying, well, murder is bad, so war is even worse. But sometimes we kill people as a punishment and sometimes we can look at war on analogy to a system of justice type thing where someone is getting punished. So, you know, as Mark points out, it's weak and it opens the door to just the types of justifications that we would want to reject, you know, when it comes to contemporary cases.

16:13 Seth: That's an interesting play there in this particular part of the text where I'm trying to think of the analogy that I heard before where you have framework for making judgments about actions that's based on your personal experience and your interactions with individuals and groups. But there's a point at which like, so you say, okay, I can see my family, I can see my neighbors, my friends. But when the scope of trying to make a judgment about things that extends beyond as Wes, you said earlier, you know, circles and circles and circles. There comes a point where you're unable to apply the judgment about right and wrong or righteousness when it comes to affairs of state because there's just simply too much, too much information, the scale has gotten too big.

And I think part of what he's trying to point at, and it seems to be in this tradition that much of what we've read in quote unquote, Eastern philosophy, Eastern tradition is very much concerned with leadership, with statecraft, with the ordering of groups of people. I don't want to say it's anti individual, because that's not true. But there seems to be a concern, there's a political aspect to all of the philosophers that we've read, which isn't always the case when we do philosophy in the Western tradition, especially when we're talking about, like metaphysics.

So there's an ethical and a political dimension to everything that at least I have come across. And right here what Mozi is pointing towards is that even somebody who has good judgment about the local, about the particular, can struggle to expand that judgment as the scope becomes less and less particular. It's very difficult to take a universalist point of view. It's very difficult to exercise the kind of judgment that you exercise in your home for the state. But I think what he's trying to say is, but that's what's necessary, right? And what I find interesting in positioning this against some of the other traditions and some of the other texts we've read is that I think there's a whole, just in the same way that we have Greek and the, you know, Roman and Stoicism, and we have all these different pragmatism and we have all these different movements in the West.

Our perspective, which if I'm going to draw, here's a name drop, Edward Said Orientalism, is that we tend to think of non Western texts as being universalized or as being homogenous. And clearly that's not the case. Right? So there's this thread, there's the Taoist thread, there's a Buddhist thread, there's a Confucius thread. There's all of these different aspects, all of which are competing attempts to solve certain kinds of philosophical problems. It just seems to me that statecraft, ethics, ordered society, politics are much deeper themes that seem to be desired to be addressed by all of these different themes in the quote, unquote, Eastern tradition, where we've divided the world up into metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, and those sorts of Things and it's.

I'm 54, I'm starting to wax eloquent now. I've reached the point where I can start just. I'm going to start writing giant stream of consciousness screeds at this point because I've just. But I'm enjoying this track. It's forcing me. I'm enjoying reading these texts. It's forcing me to rethink sometimes in a very uncomfortable way, the way I think about philosophy and the way I think about argument and reason. But there's a structure and an intent and a meaning that is worth attending to.

19:58 Tzuchien: I would just attempt some comparativist philosophy. I mean, I think some of it is also having to do with this idea. It's like when you think about morality and ethics, I mean, obviously its role in social harmony and how that social harmony can be promoted or constructed is going to be at the heart of that question. But on the contrary, if you have a strong spiritual ontology, if you will like some seat, some substantial notion of spirit or soul that is the sort of the bearer of moral worth, then morality is going to have to first speak to that sort of inner spiritual constitution as a soul or kind of some seat of the will, rather than to have that speak to that.

That dimension rather than to the social aspects and maybe the social aspect as only a secondary feature of that. Whereas I think here, I mean, from the tradition, from the Ruist tradition onward, we have a very. Despite all the talk of ghosts and things like that, I mean, these ghosts are essentially just dead humans, right? There's nothing particularly divine about them. So I mean, even when they talk about ghosts, it's talked about in a very secular way. Right? So I think that is the most striking thing about this philosophical tradition is that it is a secular philosophy with very, very little influence from or like the divine spiritual world is just another version of this world.

It doesn't have any particularly sacred overtones. There's no justice once and for all, no future, you know, kind of paradise or anything like that. The paradise stuff only comes with Buddhism, so. So in a way, it's a tradition that's totally foreign to this development that we've been talking about.

21:53 Dylan: That all sounds right from what I read, except for the extent to which ghosts or the world of the dead is the same as the world of the living. It seemed like ghosts were all about implementing a conduit for right action and balancing the world. And so that world is absent. The conflict would be a world in which we would understand what right action was the world would be rebalanced.

22:21 Tzuchien: Yeah, it's interesting because he didn't really talk about that other world as having a kind of autonomous existence. Rather, ghosts are always just intruding in our world to sort of carry out revenge and punish the wicked. Right. I mean, so has a very stereotypical dimension, which actually, after having read it several times, I'm not convinced that Moors actually thinks ghost exists. He just thinks that it's better for people to think that it does exist, regardless. And we just need to pretend like it exists because that's good for the people.

22:53 Dylan: Yeah, especially at the end of that section where he's saying, you know, and if they don't exist, what's the worst that we get out of having dinner together?

23:00 Tzuchien: Yeah, he said the quiet part out loud, right?

23:04 Mark: Well, I think that was in the context of sacrifices. So once you bring in this like, well, expensive funerals, waste resources, people should be. Then it seems like, well, then we. Where is the line? You know, Seth mentioned the grand temples in Bali, but what about just any wasting time, going to church, wasting, you know, whatever. You're making sacrifices at all. And so he emphasizes in that one section, well, look, when we make a sacrifice, we don't throw the food in the street, you get to eat it. So as long as your sacrifices are like that, you know.

But it still seems like. I'm not sure why you would say, certainly this expense is too much for a funeral. But he also, you know, stresses moderation. There's some countries where they just. They scrape the skin off the dead and then they throw the bones in the street, whatever that gross quote was. So, like, that's clearly too callous. Clearly we need something psychologically, or maybe it's a matter of respect for the dead so the ghosts don't get mad at us, like how we actually balance these expenditures, that there are these supernatural elements that it's not entirely a matter of, like, if he's going to say it's a zero sum game, our attention, our time, we are constantly needed to do our utmost just to keep society ordered and keep food on the table, then anything that distracts from that of like placating the ghosts just for the ghost's sake, not, you know, being just to each other.

And that makes the ghost happy or sacrificing to the gods. It seems like there's potential in that for waste.

24:31 Tzuchien: Yeah, it sounds like a very tiring life. And again, I'm going to bring up the communist revival of Mohism. You know, it really is the sort of Ideal Mohist kind of citizen is a good sort of the new socialist man, right? I mean, this idea of this kind of frugal, impartial, hard worker does what they do to benefit the people. You know, it's all very sympathetic with the socialist sort of ethos.

25:01 Seth: What about the way that we see when we try to draw parallels to the notion of character and virtue? It seems when we talk about this text, but also other texts, it's about the cultivation of virtue and character, which seems to be analogous to what we see, for example, in Aristotle. Do you feel like that connection is appropriate?

25:21 Tzuchien: Essentially, there are no figures in this range in this canon that doesn't see their mission, at least partially as creating a formula for the cultivation of virtue and the set of behaviors that are pro social and creates harmony. And so they all agree that that's what they're doing. The only question is, what is the most effective way and what is a way of cultivating that virtue that doesn't then further down the road lead to something bad? So Mohists will criticize the Ruists by saying, your emphasis on filial piety and partialness can look good now when it's practiced within the family, but writ large, it leads to bad things.

And the Mohists would say, no, no, no. What we need to do is we need to create social prestige for morality. We need to create this meritocracy. We need to instill fear into people by claiming that ghosts exist. So those are all the mechanisms, right? And so it's a mix between sort of the internal belief in impartiality, but also the external rewards and punishments that come out. So there's also this emphasis on punishment. Now, later thinkers that are part of this train that Mohism partially gets absorbed in is the legalist school, the representative being Han Fei Zi things.

I'll stop it with all that moral talk. What we need is we need to identify morality with law, and we need to use the harshest punishments possible. So forget about ghosts. If you get caught, we're going to cut off your tongue and blind you. The hardest possible thing that choice is to say, if you live in a place where people will just bring the hammer down, then you have no choice but to be upright and moral. Then that will just be part of who you are. So again, the huge differences, but not on the level of question about what it means to cultivate virtue, right?

The question is, what are the means that we use to cultivate these good behaviors? Mohists, I think they still kind of straddle the line between being internally inspired by certain moral ideals, like impartiality, like things like that. And then also a regime that creates rewards and punishments not as harsh as that of the legalists.

27:48 Mark: Do you think we should be doing at some point some Han Fei?

27:51 Tzuchien: Oh, absolutely, yes. You need to round out the story because part of this is like, who wins? Do the Ruists win? Do the daoists win? Who sort of is the last person standing in this big terrain? And the truth is that Han Feizi is the one that wins. And Han Feizi. So the legalist is highly synthetic. So that's also a good thing if you do spend some time reading it, because Han Feizi is brought up within an academy that taught all the schools. So he would have attended an academy where in the morning you would have a Confucian teacher, then in the afternoon you would have a Maoist, and then later on you have a daoist.

And the teachers would kind of debate each other and the students would sort of of take notes and sort of come up with their own arguments about which one is better or worse. So when you read Han Fei Zi, it's very arresting because he shows himself to be a thinker who has kind of absorbed the best of all of the thinkers. And he can sort of very adaptly move between different registers, that is to say, including Taoism. So he turns the sort of. More. I don't know if you've discussed this when you discuss Tao Te Ching, but. But he takes the more sort of despotic dimensions of the Daodejing into legalism.

So somehow the most subtle ideals of Taoism ends up being the sort of what's behind the sort of extremely rigid philosophy of legalism. But anyhow, it's a very dialectically dynamic text, and he sort of moves between different things in a very deep way. I don't like the philosophy that results, obviously, as a kind of authoritarian in philosophy, but as a thinker, he's very, very interesting. And I think he's pushed to those kind of conclusions because he basically thinks the rest, the other things don't work. Ruism is too soft. Mohism is too pie in the sky.

Actually, he does retain a lot of Daoism, but he sort of said the only thing that really will bring harmony is one leader has to crush everyone else. And we need to institute this. That's how you stop war. If one person wins, then you don't have any more. Then you need to do a very rigid system of rewards and balance. And some of that has echoes in Mohism, for example.

30:07 Seth: Right.

30:08 Tzuchien: So anyhow, it's an interesting figure that is really worth considering. Something like the gem at the end of the period.

30:16 Mark: Well, thanks, Tzuchien, so much for injecting your scholarship and experience into this.

30:21 Dylan: Thanks for joining.

30:22 Tzuchien: Thanks again for inviting me.

30:24 Mark: So let's get into that. The will of heaven section, you know, if it wasn't clear for my description, I can't interpret this. Purely pragmatic. Like, I think that he has a cosmology in mind that is, you know, inherited in part, but like a definite. It's not just ghosts, it's heaven itself will punish you. And heaven is directly the head of the political line, you know, so the emperor, the son of Heaven, obeys heaven. So we haven't really sort of put these pieces together in terms of the meritocracy at the beginning. The always adopt the opinion of your superior, which is the second section. And how that feeds into this, the will of heaven is that, yes, all the rulers should adopt the position of their superior. Heaven and the position of their superior. Is this, roughly speaking, consequentialists, utilitarianism.

31:11 Wes: It's interesting because it tries to integrate the concept of right into political hierarchy. Right. Where we might say concept of right transcends that. We might say every ruler is subject to the law, and the law is higher than that. Here the law, quote, unquote, and heaven seem to become the same thing. Right. So what does heaven desire and what does it hate? Heaven desires righteousness and hates unrighteousness. And that's what I'm equating with some larger concept of justice. But, yeah, go ahead.

31:38 Dylan: Well, yeah, and on 83. So the will of heaven is to me, like a compass to a wheelwright or a square to a carpenter. The wheelwright and the carpenter use their compass and square to measure what is round and square for the world. Saying what fits these measurements is right. Right. And what does not fit these as wrong. So the political world, to your point, Wes, you're shaping it based upon the will of heaven. Right. And not just saying that you're subject to it. You're saying that the just world is or the righteous world reflects it.

32:08 Wes: Yeah. Righteousness means doing what is right. Page 84. So heaven is pure eminence and pure wisdom. So we get all these, you know.

32:16 Seth: Yeah.

32:16 Wes: Dylan, I like the pointing. You know that important passage about kind of having a model.

32:21 Dylan: Yes.

32:22 Wes: On which to act. And you get a little bit of a. It's hard not to be reminded of something like the Timaeus Right. Or any association between cosmological order and harmony and then some kind of normative social order or system of justice. Those two things seem to seem to converge. But the idea seems to be that, well, if you're a Confucian and you think, and I don't know if this is Confucian or not, but if you're thinking in terms of these hierarchies and social roles and who has the authority. Right. It's kind of a neat move to integrate the right, what's right and make that. Well, that's just the top authority, that's just the head honcho is the right in its personification as heaven. Next in line is the Son of Heaven.

33:10 Mark: I was just going to read 84. Righteousness does not originate with the stupid and humble, but with the eminent and wise.

33:16 Seth: That was something I wanted to bring up, but I was going to rewind Back to page 82. I don't know which of these threads I should pull on. There's a strong anti democratic theme in all of this, in everything we've read, simply because, you know, the demos is the ignorant and the unenlightened. And if you ask them to choose their rulers, which I think is evidenced by what we're seeing at least here in the United States these days, it's meritocratic.

33:43 Dylan: Right. In a kind of radical way. And it's also not concerned at all with the notion of the individual as being an autonomous actor who should be maximizing their freedom and that the state should be somehow involved with that.

33:59 Wes: Identifying with one's superior is a relevant chapter there where I think where everyone has to believe the same thing. Right? It's that extreme where it's important to enforce ideological conformity so everybody's aligned in

34:15 Dylan: the same way and everybody knows their role and how they fit. And you have harmony by having everybody fulfilling their role. And so part of your moral guide is am I filling my role in the right way? And so a ruler has a ruler's role and a subordinate has a subordinate's role. And the ruler has obligations with respect to how they treat their subordinates, just like the subordinates. And those are partly in things for the benefit of the subordinates. Right? Proper rule involves all those things. But you definitely are filling a role. It's not about maximizing your autonomy or there's no principle of notion of freedom and individual autonomy that we would be used to in the West.

34:57 Seth: It seems like there's an inversion here from my perspective where we have settled on in the west have settled on Democracy as a way to curb the excesses of extremism in one form or another, at least that's purportedly what systems of checks and balances and all that sort of thing are supposed to do. There's a sense in which here there's an all or nothing. So it all hinges on whether the person who's leading the state has good character and identifies the right people to govern the state. And if that's not the case, then it all goes south. I mean there's no gradation here. Either you have a well ordered state or you have a disordered state.

35:38 Dylan: It's completely aligned with the notion of an individual. Right. So the state is just another version of an individual.

35:45 Seth: And the corrective action there is not internal. If a state is disordered, like if you think about the way the mechanism works here in the United States, if there's disorder, we have, you know, the judiciary, we have the legislative, we have the executive. There's all these different there. It's like if the state is disordered, then heaven is going to have to identify another state to come in and correct the excesses or the defects of the state. So it's very black swan event kind of structure. We talked about this all the, not all the time, but over 15 years.

I'm sure we've had the conversation many times about the whole concept of a benevolent dictator. Like we all think, you know, it's like political systems are fraught with problems. But if you only had like the super virtuous philosopher king come in and said everything right. It is the thing that will solve all the problems. I'm not saying it's the best.

36:33 Wes: If such a person existed.

36:34 Seth: If such a person existed. But they're gonna die. If they exist and they're gonna die.

36:38 Wes: They'd have to be un. Uncorruptible and. Yeah. And all knowledgeable and godlike. But yeah, yeah.

36:44 Dylan: This is straight out of James Madison with right. Federalist Papers 10. If all men were angels, no government would be necessary.

36:50 Wes: Yeah. And if one man were an angel, if one man and were an enlightened dictator, that would be your government.

36:56 Mark: But yeah, Tzuchien threw out like, oh, we're talking about a non ideal theory here. And I, I think that's a really useful distinction to make that we don't often make in these discussions of between how things work out ideally versus there are actually bad actors. So how do we deal with that? And I think those are separable things that you sort of sketch out your utopia, assuming that you should align Your will with the people above you. Because as Tzuchien said, the meritocracy has already been in effect. So they're only above you because they are morally superior.

And so of course you should be in line with them. But of course he recognizes that some kings are wicked, some rulers are. W. You know, so what. What do we do about that? I think as a practical matter, it's exactly the same answer as the Confucians, which is you remonstrate with them, but you don't rebel against them. You absolutely. And in fact, he accuses the Confucians in that last chapter that we read of Confucius. He just went into that state and they were about to do something horrible, and he just didn't volunteer his opinion at all. He just let it happen.

Whereas, you know, Confucius obviously himself says, like, no, no, give your opinion. Remonstrate. Don't let them. Oh, just you're in charge, I guess. I don't know nothing like, no, you have to get your opinion out there. So the Moists are at least, you know, putting aside their straw man of the Confucians about this are very much in favor of. You need to speak up to power, but if they overrule you, you know, you got to go with it.

38:22 Wes: When Mark complains about a chapter on Slack, I know it's his favorite chapter and he's not going to be able to resist talking about it.

38:28 Dylan: It's like a scab he can't cut.

38:30 Wes: Yeah, yeah. But I found this very entertaining as well. Well, actually, as I said, but it

38:35 Mark: was a lengthy book and so we were just trying to figure, like, can we make it a little shorter? You know, it was 130 pages or something of reading, and so, like, can we cut it short? And it turned out to be extremely skimmable. I don't know. Would you recommend people read this book?

38:50 Wes: Overall, it's a short read. I mean, you can read even if you don't skim. It's a very quick read and it's. I. I think it's entertaining, actually. The introduction talks about its repetition and how it's kind of boringly written and all this stuff. I was surprised that I didn't find it boring in that way. I find it philosophically quite thin on its surface. Although, as usual, it can be the springboard for more interesting reflections. But no, you're not going to get stuck down in the weeds in this text at some point. So it goes very quickly and it's entertaining.

39:22 Mark: The weeds are just the textual. How do we know that there are ghosts? Well, it says so in the ancient text. Well, which ancient texts? And so for some reason that was c. Fit Watson to include that in that section of like citing the various texts that talk about the ghost. But I think he was just trying to demonstrate the methods of proof.

39:41 Wes: The ghost chapter is a fun chapter too. If there weren't ghosts, people would be punished for their, you know, for their wrong deeds.

39:49 Mark: But anyway, we'll have a third part just for the supporters, where we go a little more into these parts of the text that we haven't hit. What do you guys have on their list in the remaining time that we have here right now?

39:59 Wes: Do we want to get more into the fatalism section? Because we've alluded to it. Yeah. I had said in the beginning, it kind of sounded like, well, first of all, that's where you get your three tests. Origin, validity, applicability. But it's also the section that you might think it has a kind of existentialist flavor. But he's arguing against the idea that he wants to claim that good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior punished and that what happens to us isn't. Wasn't just a matter of fate. Right. So that we could be good people and then subject to a bunch of unlucky accidents.

So that's what it sounds like. Maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but it'll say things like, fatalism is the way of evil men. Believing fate has decreed you poor versus belief believing will make you lazy. Right. You have to believe that if you work hard, you are going to reap the rewards of that, for instance. And people who just believe, well, you know, my. If I'm poor or it's just the system. And you could replace fate with arguments about social circumstances. Right.

41:00 Dylan: It's also the mechanism by which rulers just have a kind of extension of authoritarianism that isn't for the benefit of their people. It's a mechanism of the status quo.

41:12 Wes: Well, ideology. Yeah. This is what Marx called ideology. Right. Which is to say what's contingent and changeables represent presented as. As natural and inevitable. And one could say it's just faded. That some people are in a lower class and the other people are in the bourgeoisie. Yeah.

41:26 Dylan: And so it has both those elements that's, you know, there's the fatalism that leads you to say, well, not trying to change your own circumstance or try to improve your status or. But it also acts as a mechanism by which those with power and resources are Able to just preserve them because, well, this is just the way it is, I guess.

41:47 Mark: So instead of fatalism, social Darwinism, the people who are the winners obviously deserved it. They've been rewarded by heaven. They've been rewarded by ghosts. Ghosts don't just punish. There's a story in there of a ghost that showed up and gave you treasure.

42:01 Wes: You know, people that's.

42:03 Seth: Yeah.

42:04 Mark: So are there some quotes in the fatalism section that we want to look at here or. In the will of heaven, whoever is

42:11 Wes: punished by the authorities was destined by fate to be punished. It is not because of his evil actions that he's punished. So this is the advocate of fatalism, believing this rulers would not be righteous and subjects would not be loyal. Fathers would not be loving and sons would not be filial, older brothers would not be brotherly, and so on and so forth. So then, 122, how do we know that fatalism is the way of evil men? In ancient times, there were impoverished people who were greedy for food and drink and lazy in pursuing their tasks. And as a result, they did not have enough food and clothing and found themselves troubled by cold and hunger. But they did not have the sense to say we are weak in virtue and unworthy and we have not indulgent pursuing our tasks. Instead they say fate has decreed that we shall be poor.

42:54 Mark: He might as well say shithole countries there. I find this super straw manny and offensive.

43:01 Wes: And I mean there are, you know, as Dylan was pointing out, there are different strands here and ways to take it. One of them you could see as being in favor of. Of economic and social justice. Right. Anti ideological. And then the other, as you pointed out, you could see a social Darwinist. It's an interesting tension, but I mean

43:19 Mark: if you're forward looking again, I, I think that all these shenanigans about, well, that war was just a punishment. It's all about just interpreting the past. And because they're such slaves, you know, not the Mohists, but like all the schools arguing at this time to there were these sage kings and a lot of what we're doing in philosophy is figuring out how to be like them when the Mohists should have just said. Fuck tradition. Because that's that. He says that in places here, like just doing what is traditional is not what is right. Like that's his analysis for why people still have elaborate funerals.

And some of the other things he points out is you have to, you know, use the will of heaven, use your compass. That is the clearest thing in the world to apply the utilitarian calculation, whatever my secular interpretation of that. Yeah. So if we're just looking forward, then I, I don't think he has really any of these problems. I guess that's a question to you. Like, do you feel like. Because that whole, like, remonstrate but give in. Is that just a practical thing or does that necessitate a belief in, well, the emperor is there divinely. The people that are above me are there only because they've been rewarded by heaven, the meritocracy has worked.

Or can the most admit that no, things are pretty messed up and we should expect to have to burn some of the existing structure down, even if, you know, we want to put a different hierarchical structure in its place.

44:43 Seth: Well, as I said earlier, I'm not clear that there's room for an emancipatory strategy in this. Like, if you're in the state which is disordered, which is not ruled by the sons of heaven, what are your options?

44:58 Mark: I mean, emigrate, I guess that's the other thing is if you have a

45:00 Wes: great state, you'll attract people, emigrate, reform from within, or rebel.

45:07 Dylan: There's very little of that. I mean, it doesn't seem to me that it's aimed at. If anything, it's a plea for, or an argument for how the rulers ought to behave.

45:18 Wes: I'm thinking about the rebellion problem is always a thorny. When I'm thinking about Kant. And Kant was not a big fan of rebellion and overthrowing the government. Right. Even if it's horribly unjust. And there's a lot of other, you know, we could. They have a lot of other examples, you know, Socrates and the. Was it Crito, you know, not willing to flee even. Even if there's an unjust law and an unjust result for him. So his idea, of course, is that you stay and you try and reform within. You do your best, but you always remain subject to the law.

But I think the fear in those cases is that the people shy away against, shy away from the concept of rebellion and revolution because the consequence is often just worse than the unjust state. Right. We saw that even in our anarchist episode, rebellion revolutions typically just go wrong and people end up starving. So your first order of business is to figure out how, after a revolution, how are you going to prevent mass starvation, mass famine? It's as practical and nitty gritty as that. So you have an unjust state, but it's still a state and it's still structure.

And the thing that follows revolution, the Danger is that it will be entirely unstructured and incapable of serving anyone.

46:32 Dylan: And we're talking about the Warring States period here. Right. It's easy to understand that stability is high on the mind just like it

46:39 Mark: was for Hobbes right to do some closings here. This is not at the top of my list. I'm a little prejudiced by this collection of Chinese philosophy that I have was saying prefacing the Mohism section by this is so philosophically thin and unsophisticated. There's a reason to spend all this time with Confucianism, Ruism as we're now calling it and Daoism that there just isn't here. But if you want to understand the history then you absolutely have to at least understand like what the main moist doctrines were. And of course as you were just saying Wes like this is a pretty fun read.

It's fine you know you it's and it's skimmable and it's open to us as usual for good conversation. So I do not regret that we had it on our list. But I think the judgment of history that I don't know it's at least really interesting to think that somebody I would have put it in my book about when I was supposed to mention who. Who invented stuff like utilitarianism, consequentialism that like wow, this was back at this point that's pretty unexpected. So that by itself and you know the reflections on whether this universal love matches the Christian one and other stuff made it worth the opportunity cost of

47:51 Wes: entry and it is more sophisticated than Larryism or Curlyism. It's my terrible mark joke.

48:00 Mark: I was at least I was was

48:03 Wes: the temptation to do that at least

48:05 Mark: happy that when I was initially seeing that moist was spelled M O H I S T because like you don't want it to just be spelled moist. But then in one of the sections the source I looked at they just called it moist like the the most thought they did spell it without the H. So we didn't even say yes Motu and Mo2 and we have all the same same transliteration problems we had with the Dao and his name was Mo Ti I guess but it wasn't a single guy. I don't know. Tzuchien seemed comfortable talking as if this were a guy and he had a style. Thanks for listening.

Next time we're going to be as I think we've mentioned, talking about Mencius. We have yet another scholar guest to give us some more idea of what was next in the Mosm Trap Mencius elaborates his views in much more detail than we got in Kongzi and Confucius himself. So we're gonna be able to revisit that and consider those, I think probably more historically influential arguments because they were just spelled out in much greater detail. If you want us to cover other things as part of this Chinese philosophy thing, when we're done with this, please reach out to us.

Pl partialexaminedlife.com or use the contact form on our site or through our Facebook or Twitter or however, thanks everybody and good night.

49:32 Dylan: Good night.

49:32 Wes: Good night.