The most fertile era of Chinese intellectual culture was between 550 BC and 200 BC, in what came to be called the Axial Age, when China was divided in many kingdoms, with the same pattern of constant warfare and intellectual life as Classical Greece. It was the era of Confucius, Laozi, and Sunzi.
Spandrell shares the story from that time of The Bow of the King of Chu:
A King of Chu was out in the country on a hunting trip. He had a world famous bow, and the best arrows in the realm. So he was out there hunting dragons and rhinos (real story), when he dropped his bow. Lost it. The precious bow! His retinue was looking for it like crazy, but then the King told them to stop. “Stop looking for it. A Man of Chu lost his bow. A Man of Chu will find it. No need to search for it.”
To European ears this sounds like a pretty awesome king. A great loving king who cares about his subjects. He lost his precious, world famous bow. But it doesn’t matter, because he lost it in his territory. One of his subjects will find it, and use it for the good of his country. King or subject, we are all men of Chu, so who cares? What a great King. The stuff of legend.
The story soon became a cause of commentary across the other kingdoms in China. Every single one of the Hundred Schools had to publish their official stand on this story. What do you think of the King of Chu and his lost bow? It’s kinda like modern journalism, where everybody has to rush to publish their stance on every item of the news. Psychologists call this “common knowledge”, the social phenomenon where everybody is compelled to comment on something precisely because everybody else is doing so. This creates evolutionary pressures to reduce the total amount of information in society so that everything can be common knowledge and thus become efficient gossip, the fuel of human sociability. But I digress.
A modern nationalist would say that the King of Chu was an awesome king. But what did Confucius say about it?
‘The King of Chu is a humane king, but he’s still half-way. He could have said “a man lost his bow, a man will find it”. Why specify “A man of Chu”?’
The King of Chu wasn’t good enough in Confucius eyes because he dared put priority on his subjects, and not be equally nice to all humanity. Because Confucius, of course, was a humanitarian. A universalist. The King of Chu was a petty man who cared about his subjects, not about the entire humanity.
So basically, Confucius today would approve of Angela Merkel and Bryan Caplan. Thanks dude. No wonder he was never taken seriously by any of the dozens of kings of his time, and died a low-class civil servant. His universalism however was catnip for the nascent class of non-aristocratic bureaucrats, who developed it for centuries after his death. They loved this “we are above armies, borders, and that gruesome stuff. We care about righteousness and love, about what is right for all humanity”. This in 300 BC. Do you see now why the First Emperor burnt their books and buried the scholars alive after he unified the Empire?
Reminiscence of Orson Wells and Borgias and warfare, da Vinci, Renaissance vs Swiss cookoo clock in “Third man”?
The eternal Chinese philosophy of the benevolent dictator. That ideal ruler.