SIGHTINGS NO.4: ENLIGHTENED DESPOTS

'Sightings': the term used by Prof. Jonathan D. Spence to describe formative encounters of China by Westerners.

A recurring feature of China's interaction with the West in the modern period is the influence the 'Middle Kingdom' has had on political theory on distant shores - that influence is reciprocal, but I want to focus on the direction of travel Westwards in this post, because I think it is a less familiar, but no less important, story.

I want to tell that story by focussing on two events that best reflect the curiously distorted influence Chinese political practice - or at least how it has been perceived by certain influential Western thinkers - has had on Western politics itself - the eighteenth-century model of "enlightened despotism", and the more recent bundle of ideas loosely named the "Big Society."

What I find most fascinating of all is how many of the theories underpinning the "Big Society" - drawn from behavioural economics and psychology - represent a secularised version of the "natural law" ideas that were used to justify the rule of enlightened despots in Europe. Advocates of both presented Chinese political theory and practice as imperatives that showed the necessity of Europe adopting reforms.

THE DECLINE AND FALL AND RISE OF ROME

In the era of the Enlightenment - what Jonathan Israel has called "a world-transforming ideology...which aspired to conquer ignorance and superstition, establish toleration, and revolutionise ideas, education, and attitudes by means of philosophy" - philosophers and theologians became fascinated with China.

With the caveat that the Enlightenment was more a set of shared premisses than a unified doctrine, thinkers challenging various objects of conventional wisdom - the Biblical account of creation and history, the conflation of religious piety and moral virtue, the political power of the clergy and aristocracy - looked to China to provide counter-examples which might broaden the horizon of possibilities for the West and rejuvenate civic life.

As the historian Norman Hampson argues in The Enlightenment, many Deists (who believe in an impersonal and passive creator - a Divine Providence - who ordered the universe according to rational laws which men can discover using reason) seeking to challenge the power of established churches initially saw developments in history, rather than in the sciences, as their strongest weapon:



Voltaire (1694-1778)



"The Chinese millennia themselves constituted a problem for, to quote Voltaire, "authentic histories trace this nation back, through a sequence of 36 recorded eclipses of the sun, to a date earlier than that which we normally attribute to the Flood." [...] As the cosmologists reduced the status of the earth to that of one planet among many,  early anthropologists and their more philosophically-minded readers reduced the classical-Christian civilisation and its history from being the story of the divine will made manifest to an account of one of the more fortunate branches of a numerous family. [...] Educated opinion was aware of the intellectual challenge of non-European societies, a much more direct and fundamental challenge to traditional Christian beliefs than any which seemed likely to come from the scientists."

As well as being used to challenge accounts of what had gone before, China was used in arguments about changing the present. The Enlightenment philosophers got most of their information about life in present-day China from the accounts of Jesuit missionaries (whose social status I touched on in a previous post).

Here is a portrait of Matteo Ricci, the most renowned of the Jesuits, who lived in China from 1583-1610:

And here is the cover of the first Latin translation of the Analects of Confucius, from 1687.

Unfortunately, these were heavily biased descriptions of Chinese society and governance. To counter criticism from Rome (chiefly from Dominicans and Franciscans) that they were endorsing idolatry by participating in traditional Chinese rites of ancestral worship, the Jesuits tried to portray these as purely "civic" rituals, and to do this they presented a picture of a Chinese state that perfectly embodied Neo-Confucian ideals of harmony, wisdom and benevolence.

This distortion of the evidence by the Jesuits was to have far-reaching and unintended consequences. In his book East-West Passage, Michael Edwards writes that, "The Jesuits had, in fact, by stressing the importance of natural law in practical politics, put into the hands of eighteenth-century thinkers ammunition for the defence of  enlightened despotism."

To portray Chinese rites as being secular, they inflated the importance of Neo-Confucianism (not, strictly speaking, a religion but a set of beliefs that does not require the existence of an immortal personality) in Chinese life at the expense of alternative belief systems, and thus depicted an entire society acting by its maxims - but, in so doing, they supplied Enlightenment thinkers with a model of a peaceful, happy and prosperous society governed by its most highly-educated members without the countervailing powers of established religion or hereditary aristocracy.

Consequently, Hampson tell us, "An idealised Confucianism came to be equated with the pagan values of ancient Rome, and free-thinkers, disconcerted by the fall of the Roman Empire, could now point to China for proof that their secular values were no less politically effective than Christian ones." Foreshadowing Aristotle, Confucius wrote that: "Peferct is the virtue which is according to the constant mean... To go beyond it is as wrong as to fall short." In The Search For Modern China, Jonathan D. Spence writes: "Unable to find a "philosopher-king" in Europe to exemplify his views of religion and government, Voltaire believed Emperor Qianlong would fill the gap, and he wrote poems in the distant emperor's honour."

OF MONARCHS AND MONADS

Walter W. Davis has described how the Jesuits, "by their devious efforts, inadvertently played themselves into the hands of libertines and rationalists who saw in Confucian philosophy the basis for natural religion." Neo-Confucianism was, in several key respects, a convenient cipher for Deists such as Voltaire and Leibniz, who used "natural religion" to advocate a form of government known to us as "enlightened despotism."

In the first place, both belief systems were conceived of as peaceful solutions to the threat of religious warfare - in Europe, memories of the Wars of Religion were all too sharp, whilst in China orthodox Confucianism was adapted to assimilate encroaching Buddhism and Taoism, and in 1692 the Emperor Kangxi issued an Edict of Toleration towards other faiths.

 At the same time as defenders of natural religion in the West were arguing against the doctrine of "original sin" and for man's "natural" inclination towards the good, they received word that all Chinese similarly believed "man is equipped through reason to understand the immutable and harmonious moral order of the universe...he has a natural propensity for doing what is right and good." And they had a shared view of an impersonal cosmology - Davis writes of a "remarkable coincidence between deism and the Neo-Confucian conception of an impersonal Tao or Great Ultimate."

 

Leibniz (1646-1716)

Also, they each premised ethical systems on man's free will, the basis for which is man's ability to comprehend, and live in conformirty with, the laws governing the universe. As Donald F. Lach has written, the central thesis of Neo-Confucianism is that "Heaven is Law" (T'ien is Li). Li is universal and is coexistent with, and inseparable from, matter (Ch'i), although "Ch'i is subordinate to Li. [...] Li is the eternal law of righteousness which affirms the spirituality and ethical perfection of T'ien."

This is a strikingly similar account to the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's metaphysics, as Leibniz himself recognised at the time. In 1697 he wrote Novissima Sinica (Latest News From China), based largely on his dialogue with Jesuits.

"The condition of our affairs, slipping as we are into ever greater corruption, seems to me such that we need missionaries from the Chinese who might teach us the use and practice of natural religion, just as we have sent them teachers of revealed theology."

The notion that all things in the universe are governed by fixed and immutable forces that, properly grasped, show us the right way to live is found in Neo-Confucianism and in Leibniz's theory of "pre-established harmony", which, according to Davis, describes "an orderly universe created and constantly being regenerated and changed by the dynamic development and action of monads according to their God-ordained natural propensities." Or, as Edwards describes it, "a view of the universe in which the greatest possible variety was held together by the greatest possible unity"; from both perspectives, "the universal and the particular are complementary and interdependent aspects of reality."

Here is an audio version of the chapter on Leibniz from Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy.

The video below explains Leibniz's conception of "pre-established harmony" and monadology better than I can hope to here. The key point is that it avoids the Cartesian difficulty of explaining how mental events can be said to "cause" physical events (the "mind-body problem") by positing a pre-ordained, harmonious coincidence, rather than a physical causal link, between the two.

What Leibniz then did was, essentially, to project a belief in the Christian God back onto ancient Chinese history. Lach writes that: "According to Leibniz, the Chinese "worshipped the great God in the virtues of particular things, under the name of spirits of these things, in order to appeal to the imagination of the people.""

Neo-Confucian astronomical
chart, 13th-Century

Leibniz was a universalist who believed that religious truth was potentially accessible to all, but that it dependend on the use of rational faculties to aggregate and reconcile the infinite fragments of life scattered across the globe; if he could show that the Chinese, when they had been worshipping nature and their ancestors, had all along been worshipping God's laws (and, indirectly, God) without realising it, he could then safely celebrate the achievements of Chinese civilisation without being accused of championing "superstitious atheism."

Leibniz sent a copy of Novissima Sinica to August Hermann Francke, a German Lutheran pastor and professor of Oriental languages at the University of Halle, and the two entered into a correspondence that lasted until Leibniz's death in 1716. During this period, Halle emerged as a centre of language studies, which was the reason it held such interest for Leibniz - he was enthralled by the possibility that contemporary written Chinese contained what remained of a mythical Adamic "universal language", as described in the Old Testament.

August Hermann Francke (1663-1727)

Michael Edwards tells us that scholars who had grown up in the shadow of the Thirty Years' War "sought for the universal language they were convinced had existed before Babel. Some believed it might be Chinese; by elaborate and totally unfounded argument they came to the conclusion that China had been peopled by the children of Noah before the confusion of tongues. It was even suggested that Confucius was a Christian prophet." Francke's unrealised ambition was to establish a Universal Seminary at Halle that would unite German Pietists and the Eastern Orthodox Churches in preparation for using Russia as a launching-pad for sending Protestant missionaries to China.

According to Lach, Leibniz thought that if that artificially-contrived language could be re-discovered, it could serve the purpose of overcoming religious strife in the world and reveal that all true ethical systems were derived had the same divine origins: "a means of communication through which philosophers from all parts of the world could transmit abstract ideas, precisely and accurately, despite cultural and linguistic differences."

He became obsessed with the enigmatic trigrams and hexagrams in the ancient text, the I Ching (Book of Changes). Current scholarship suggests that these mysterious forms were simplified depictions of cracks that formed in tortoiseshells when they were heated in divination rituals.

The book itself is vague about their exact significance - Lach writes: "according to its own appendices the I Ching was constructed in order to picture in simple symbols those universal laws on which humans should model their actions". Leibniz inferred from this that the Chinese had, from the dawn of their civilisation, arranged their society according to meticulous and highly rational, even if largely unspoken, moral laws that reflected the law of nature.

Decades earlier, he had invented a system of binary numbers in which two rather than ten was the base scale of notation - in the patterns of the I Ching he thought he could see a codification of the same system. As Lach puts it, "he believed that the binary arithmetic was not an invention but a "rediscovery" of Fei Zhi's [the Han-era transmitter of the original text] principles."

The connection between universal religion and universal language made the University of Halle a centre of the German Enlightenment, and a cause celebre of the archetypal self-styled "enlightened despot" - King Frederick the Great of Prussia (Frederick II), who reigned 1740-86.

The University of Halle had been founded by his paternal grandfather, Frederick I, but his predecessor had considered closing it down as it became engulfed in controversial religious dispute - it was kept going, and allowed to operate with expanded royal priveleges, by Frederick the Great, as part of his wider policy of religious toleration and education. "Men", he wrote, "ought to be made to feel ashamed of fanaticism."

Here is a BBC documentary that assesses Frederick's legacy as an "enlightened despot" in more detail.

The arguments in Halle centred on whether Rome had been right to condemn the Jesuits for their conduct in China - but it took place between different Protestant tendencies. Halle was a centre of the Pietist movement, which Edwards has described as a "controversial current within German Lutheranism, a reaction to the religious warfare which devastated the German states, and also to the rigid formalism of Orthodox Lutheranism."

According to The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church it was a revival, chiefly among younger students, of the ideal of faith through good works as opposed to a fixation on ideological purity, and inquisitions that inevitably followed: "it developed into a hard-and-fast system of penance, grace and re-birth... [It] was characterised by various philanthropic activities (centred in Halle) and by its contribution to the missionary movement."

To their critics, the Pietists came perilously close to suggesting that morality was independent of God's will. But, under the towering influence of Leibniz, the Pietists maintained that this conclusion needn't follow from their doctrine of "pre-established harmony": all it implied was that a society full of people who knew what was right and good was insufficient for a good and right society - they had to actually do something to make the world a better place. Their proselytising activism and charity thus had a metaphysical basis: each dimension in the universe evolves by its own laws, so that one may conform to God's will in one dimension without necessarily doing so in all others (though, due to pre-ordained harmony, it was possible to act rightly in all respects).

What mattered was doing the right thing, according to the circumstances of each time and place - this was "the spirit of Halle." For Enlightenment philosophers such as Smith, Hutcheson and Malebranche, the human capacity for empathy - "irresistible compassion" - was a crucial God-given impulse that allowed us to act morally without always rationalising it in advance. In the name of the "General Welfare", and of promoting "a more enlarged spirit of charity...among Protestants of both denominations", Francke created a network of charitable schools for orphans - the Frankesche Stiftungen. They were built from a belief that there was room for the "improvement of the mind" alongside "the eternal salvation of souls." Benjamin Franklin wrote that the example of Halle inspired him to create catechism charity-schools in America for educating negro slaves.

Here is one of the charity-schools in Halle.

ALL RELIGIONS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

One of the leading philosophers of the German Enlightenment thought the Pietists rather naive, and they in turn saw him as a treacherous atheist - so much so that they hounded him out of Halle altogether. His name was Christian Wolff.

In 1721 Wolff wrote his Oratio de Sinarum philosophia practica (Discourse on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese).

Mark Larrimore has argued that Wolff wrote the book to challenge "the understanding of ethics as obedience to the utterly unconstrained commands of an omnipotent deity" - and in so doing, he appeared to many of his peers to be going one step beyond the Pietists. Where they had argued that motivation was not all that mattered in ethics, he appeared to be (though was not in fact) arguing that it did not really matter at all.

Confucius (551-479 BC)

The central conclusion Wolff drew from China was that non-believers "were not only capable of recognising the good but were also capable of leading lives of virtue in pursuit of it", and it was that led the Pietists to surmise that "It not atheist in intent...Wolff's system was surely atheist-making in effect." In point of fact, Wolff held that the ancient Chinese were neither believers nor atheists: "An atheist is someone who denies that there is a God. But one cannot deny God if one does not know distinctly what God is."

Instead, "the Chinese realised that virtue consisted in being moved by the intrinsic value of the good, not just in obeying the command of a superior" and they practised "an inductive consequentialist ethics that employed historical examples in place of rules and that found its motive in the just pride of the virtuous."

Wolff argued that humans are capable of three degrees of virtue, which are categorised by their motivation, and which must be progressed through in the following order: empiricism and lessons of experience ("there are natural powers sufficient for the practice of virtue"); natural religion ("consideration of divine Providence"); and divine revelation. He believed that the Chinese had not advanced beyond the first stage but, to their credit, had achieved the most virtue possible within those limits.

More pertinently, he saw his own Orthodox critics as trying to pass to the third stage before completing the second, and he sought to use the example of China to educate them on the importance of toleration and learning: "philosophy was what Christians needed, too, and to appreciate the relevance of philosophy, the example of the Chinese remained indispensable."


A 'Potemkin village'

 Returning to Halle, we can see this city as a critical juncture in the flow of ideas among the most famous of the European monarchs who styled themselves as "enlightened despots." During his final two decades, Leibniz collaborated extensively with the reforming government of Peter the Great of Russia, and both he and his colleagues from Halle helped found the Russian Academy of Sciences - thereby indirectly influencing the continuation of modernising reforms under Catherine the Great.

Meanwhile, Wolff's paean to Chinese "benevolent absolutism" reached Frederick II via one of his former students and, according to Davis, it was a powerful influence on the King's ideological development. Another influence was Voltaire with whom he enjoyed a lasting if turbulent friendship. Voltaire, who wrote a play to propagate the model of China's meritocratic state bureaucracy ('Confucian Morals in Five Acts'), told Frederick, a man who described himself as "a king by nature and philosophe by inclination": "Graft a sovereign onto a philosopher...and you will have a perfect sovereign." Although Frederick wrote to Voltaire, "I leave the Chinese to you...the European nations keep my mind sufficiently occupied", the influence of "far Cathay" was subtly pervasive.

In 1740 Frederick distilled his political vision in the form of an anonymously published rejoinder to Machiavelli's The Prince, called Anti-Machiavel.

Against Machiavelli's proposition that there exists an irresolvable tension between private and public morality (or between that of rulers and that of subjects), Frederick contended that the wise ruler could amalgamate both the most moral, and the most efficacious, ruler - according to the doctrine of natural law, a ruler could know better than his subjects what was good for them and coerce them towards that end, since they would be bound by innate reason to retrospectively acknowledge it as legitimate.


Maria Theresa and family

 An enlightened despot was, in theory, only a midwife to the rational desires of his or her subjects - the "first servant of the state." "A society could not exist without laws", he wrote, "but it could certainly exist without religion, provided that there is a power which, by punitive sanctions, can compel the masses to obey these laws. This is confirmed by...the government of China, where Deism is the religion of all the leading men in the state."

In a nod to Confucius, Frederick argued that rulers should set a moral example to those beneath them, or else the moral compass of every man and woman in the nation will be put out of kilt:

"If it is bad to debase the innocence of a private individual, whose influence on the affairs of the world is minimal, it is much worse to pervert some prince who must control his people, administer justice, and set an example for their subjects; and must, by their kindness, magnanimity, and mercy, be someone to be looked up to."

Accordingly, Frederick's reign - and that of the other enlightened monarchs - was an energetic one. He streamlined the civil service to make it more responsive to his instructions, simplified the legal codes to provide transparent and predictable justice, abolished torture, and provided limited guarantees of freedom of press and of belief. Here is a description taken from The Columbia History of the World:

"Frederick the Great dominated the Prussian nobility, built a large, well-trained army, the best in Europe, and reduced the proud aristocrats to the status of bureaucrats in the service of their war machine. [...] The rapidity of unification and the emasculation of the nobility left Prussian society without any group strong enough to resist the crown... No earlier sovereign anywhere in Europe so thoroughly dominated the machinery of government. He was Europe's closest approximation to an Oriental despot."

Oriental despotism was not without its Enlightenment critics. As alternative eyewitness reports from returning merchants became more widely available in the mid-eighteenth century, attitudes hardened. Montesquieu - who believed liberty was best safeguarded by a government divided into three branches, but also that ideal forms of government for particular societies depended on environmental conditions - argued that the much-admired "public tranquility" of China "was no more than the product of a climate "which naturally disposes the inhabitants to slavish obedience.""

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a declared skeptic of enlightened despotism, wrote:

"In Asia there is an immense country where honors for learning lead to the highest offices of the State. If the sciences purified morals...the peoples of China would be wise, free, and invincible. But there is no vice that does not dominate them, no crime with which they are not familiar...of what purpose have been all its wise men?"

In a sense, critics like Rousseau were doing the same thing as the Sinophiles but in reverse - using China as a counter-example to currents of Enlightenment thought to which they were opposed. Rousseau, for instance, obviously found highly convenient the negative reports of a country supposedly ruled by its most highly educated members, since his main argument in the First Discourse was that the sciences corrupted morals.

Larrimore tells us that "Sinophilia faded with the rise of romanticism, historicism, and imperialism" - in other words, currents of thought that are alternately regarded as offshoots or reactions against early Enlightenment philosophy. Crucially, it faded with the declining vogue for enlightened despotism; as Edwards has written, "The Sinophiles never really considered the people as worthy of their proselytising endeavour...They believed in the Confucian principle that a virtuous administration, operating within the harmony of natural law, was the only way to stability. They were reformers, not revolutionaries." But the late eighteenth-century was an age of revolution, not reform - when it came to that, the enlightened despots blanched, and back-tracked on their promises of reform.

As far as the suggestion that philosophers should rule went, the monarchs "treated such suggestions as they did the chinoiseries of their palace, as a pleasant gloss on the business of living."

BEYOND FREEDOM AND DIGNITY

I hope this is not too jarring a transition, but I want to jump forward to the late twentieth-century, and to the rise to prominence of behaviourism in public policy-making - because there is a link to both China and enlightened absolutism.

In 1971 a psychologist named B. F. Skinner wrote a book called Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which laid out his stark case for "radical behaviourism." Here is how the Oxford Companion to Philosophy defines this school of thought:

"The thesis that all behaviour, public or private, is governed by the laws of classical conditioning or operant conditioning. Skinner argued that thinking, choosing, and deciding  - things about which more draconian forms of behaviourism vowed silence - could be analysed as private behaviours with characteristic causal relations to overt behaviour and as subject to the basic principles of operant conditioning."

Simply put, Skinner believed that humans are wholly products of their environments: "Even revolutionaries are almost wholly the conventional products of the systems they overthrow." Once the causal connection between environmental factors and behaviour was understood, experts would be able to predict and manipulate people's behaviour without ever having to ask them about their thoughts and feelings.

Here is an excerpt from a BBC documentary, Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words, which shows Skinner at work - and how he drew lessons about humans from his experiments with animals.

He believed his theories had important applications to the governance of society and in Beyond Freedom and Dignity he explained that the problems humanity faces today are the consequences of the naive Enlightenment belief in progress through science and technology alongside an emphasis on the fanciful notion of free will:

"In trying to solve the terrifying problems that face us in the world today...we play from strength, and our strength is science and technology. [...] But things grow steadily worse, and it is disheartening to find that technology itself is increasingly at fault. [...] As Darlington has said, "Every new source from which man has increased his powers on the earth has been used to diminish the prospects of his successors. All his progress has been at the expense of damage to his environment which he cannot repair and could not foresee.""

But Skinner too was an optimist in science - the problem as he saw it was not Enlightenment optimism per se, but its incompleteness, and the need to develop a science of behaviour that would yield "a behavioural technology comparable in power and precision to physical and biological technology".

Skinner's ideal society was much closer to a model of technocracy than of democracy as it is usually understood. In the name of the General Welfare people's freedom had to be restricted, because they could not be trusted to make rational decisions - but it was no good doing this through a coercive authoritarian state apparatus, since people did not like feeling that they were being forced in this or that direction, so the means would just have defeated the end. Instead, a third party ought to modify the social environment so that people are left free to choose what they want to do - but the choice is framed in such a way that they are very likely to choose what the third party knows is best for society overall.

A "struggle session" against "counter-revolutionaries"

In the 1970s Skinner said that China in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution represented the closest real-life approximation to his model society. I am not sure how much he knew about what was really happening at the time, but it is not hard to imagine how he arrived at that conclusion - a state proclaiming itself to be the servant of the people, putting power back into their hands, with the ulterior motive of actually strengthening the power of the state vis-a-vis its citizens by making the culture of state agents more responsive to their preferences.

He was not unaware of the dangers inherent in his peculiar fusion of libertarian elitism, but he believed that, once it was set up, his system would be self-sustaining, and would incentivise those it empowered to use their power for the General Welfare - guided by a "science of values."

"Who is to construct the controlling environment and to what end? What will the putative controller find good, and will it be good for those he controls? These are really questions about reinforcers... When we say that a value judgement is a matter not of fact but of how someone feels about a fact, we are simply distinguishing between a thing and its reinforcing effect."

"If a scientific analysis can tell us how to change behaviour, can it tell us what changes to make? This is a question about the behaviour of those who do in fact propose and make changes. People act to improve the world and to progress towards a better way of life for good reasons, and among the reasons are certain consequences of their behaviour, and among these consequences are the things people value and call good."

If this sounds rather familiar, it should not come as a surprise - the authors of the influential book Nudge collaborated with one of Skinner's colleagues (you can read more about the connections here). Below is a talk given by one of the authors, Richard Thaler, in which he explains that politicians should see their role as being "choice architects", who should "design a society in which people make better choices, as judged by themselves." He calls it "libertarian paternalism" - "libertarian" because people are left to choose and "paternalist" because choices are framed as the state sees fit.

The Prime Minister David Cameron has cited Nudge as an important influence on his thinking, and on his decision to establish a Behavioural Insights Unit in Number 10. The ideas of "radical behaviourism" have also played a part in the evolution of his "Big Society" agenda. Critics of the Big Society, mostly from the left, often argue that it is a fig-leaf for ideological public spending cuts, and that it is hopelessly naive to simply "roll back" the state and expect civil society to automatically flood in and close the gap.

I think that these criticisms have some validity, but I also think that they miss the point that the Big Society was never premised on this kind of hydraulic interpretation of society. This much is clear if you read Cameron's address to the Young Foundation in 2009, where he set out the assumptions his team were starting from: it is not just about the state of Britain's finances, it is the state of Britain's morals, which has "broken" its social fabric. Since the late 1960s, so the argument runs, the British state has grown inexorably, not just in terms of resources, but also in terms of its functions and reach into previously off-limits areas of private life.

The result is that citizens have become individually far less responsible, so that state retreat, by itself, is unlikely to catalyse 'third-sector' substitutes - what is required is an interventionist state that will reshape society and supposedly make it easier for people to do the right thing by providing examples of moral leadership. To illustrate the point, the speech is worth quoting at length:

"Just because big government has undermined our society, it does not follow that retrenchment of the state will automatically trigger its revival... We understand that the big society is not just going to spring to life on its own: we need strong and concerted government action to make it happen. We need to use the state to remake society... The state must go further than enabling opportunities. It must actively help people take advantage of them. Our reforms depend for their success on a social response: and that is not something we can leave to chance."

"The Big Society also needs the engagement of that significant percentage of the population who have no record of getting involved - or a desire to do so. The Big Society demands mass engagement: a broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation... Government, by going with the grain of human nature, can better influence behaviour... Sunstein and Thaler have argued that with the right prompting, or 'nudge', government can effect a whole culture change. It needn't even involve government doing anything... Culture change is much harder than state control. It will take more than a generation."

Even the branding of the Big Society is not new: in Hainan province during the 1980s-90s a series of political reforms designed by a scholar named Liao Xun were tried under the slogan, "Big Society, Small Government" (xiao zhengfu da shehui). K. E. Brodsgard has written that the project failed to create a "special political zone" (equivalent to the coastal "special economic zones") because of basic contradictions inherent in the "Big Society" ideology itself.

Most importantly, for all the talk of greater "transparency", the philosophy of nudging presumes - requires - a certain knowledge-gap between government and governed: if people know in advance that they are being manipulated towards a certain goal (even if that goal is what they may want from a rational, long-term perspective), they are likely to change their behaviour, because people don't usually like the idea of being manipulated. As David H. Freedman has written in The Atlantic:

"The central irony of Skinner’s theory is that to control our behavior, we must accept a fundamental lack of control, acknowledging that our environment ultimately holds the reins. But an individual choosing to alter his environment to affect his behavior is one thing; a corporation or a government altering an individual’s environment to affect his behavior is another... The very definition of the Skinner box is that the inhabitant is not in control. In fact, he may not even know he’s in the box."

But isolating an important part of political decision-making from public scrutiny can actually make it harder to make stable, long-term decisions for the General Welfare because individual decision-makers cannot build a base of mass support and are thus vulnerable to sudden changes in direction driven by issues of personality and administration. It is notable how few of the reforms enacted by the eighteenth-century enlightened absolutists outlived them. Likewise, Brodsgard observes of Hainan:


Lee Kuan Yew (1923-)



"What appears to be part of a process towards a kind of civil society, in the sense that powers and functions are given back to society, in fact is often a reflection of purely administrative measures. The bureaucrats and Party people decide which functions are to be shed and which should be retained. It is all too often a process of bargaining rather than real analysis of what is needed to create a well-functioning public sector."

More recently, the Economist reported that the CPC has revived this agenda in Shenzhen, but "Li Luoli of the China Society of Economic Reform points out that the local ministries and developers have been able to ignore Beijing because there is no specific local body behind political reform."

It is interesting to find how much of the Big Society was motivated by a perceived need by Western governments to streamline their "wasteful" welfare states in order to compete with the Asian "tiger" economies (and, in the post-Mao period, China). Lord Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong and a man on the left of the Conservative Party, saw himself as a spokesman for the "Enlightenment values" of liberal democracy and liberal economics, against a tide of hyperbole about supposedly superior "Asian values" that - as interpreted by the erudite Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew - emphasise obedience to family and state before individual liberty.

Yet in his book East and West even he acknowledged that the West had something to learn from the "Asian values" thesis:

"The West, it is said, government has become too big as a result of the exaggerated ambitions of politicians and the demands made on them by voters. Citizens in a sense sell their votes to the highest bidders...they are being bribed with their own money. Government finds itself taking decisions, assuming responsibilities, that properly belong to individuals, families, firms. [...] By avoiding the creation of a costly welfare burden for their taxpayers, Asian governments have helped create the growth which ensures that fewer people need welfare support."

And, for Patten, that economic success has an ethical foundation that Western governments could learn from in creating Big Societies:

"Certain basics about human nature [argues Lee Kuan Yew] do not change. Man needs a certain moral sense of right and wrong... Westerners have abandoned an ethical basis of society, believing that all problems are solvable by a good government, which we in the East never believed possible. [...] Those of us who believe in liberal economics have to be careful not to become crude advocates of a mindless materialism and of a concentration on the individualism of human beings as economic agents that obfuscates their civic and social roles... Successful liberal democracies need smaller governments and bigger citizens - bigger citizens playing a larger role in partnership for the common good... We need to seek a new point of balance in our societies, that draws on the experience of smaller governments in some Asian societies."

Here is an interview with Lee Kuan Yew during a trip to the U.S. in 1967. When an American journalist asks him what he makes of the student protests across the country (at 15:30), he replies to the effect that people will always protest against their government, but it is the government's job to ensure that its policies are ones they will later look back on and approve of retrospectively - a sentiment of which I am sure Voltaire would have approved.

At length, I think we have come full-circle. Just as the "enlightened despots" of eighteenth-century Europe were in a sense Christianised versions of theorised benevolent Oriental despots, it is also plausible to see the "radical behaviourism" of B. F. Skinner as a secularised vision of enlightened despotism (in which Darwinian natural selection has taken on the role of divine Providence, and "nudging" technocrats the role of far-sighted philosopher-kings).

Moreover, just as the Jesuits reduced the complexity of China to the principles of Neo-Confucianism in order to justify their assimilationist approach to missionary work, so too have latter-day Western commentators on "Asian values" often simplified a messy reality in order to argue for the necessity of reforming welfare states in the West - and that the way to do it is to harness the power of the state to transform cultural values.

The constant thread running through this story has been the notion that the universe is characterised in a meaningful way by "pre-established harmony", and that, ironically, this can be used to legitimise alternative forms of government to participatory democracy. But if this is true, why don't the enlightened despots ever seem to agree among themselves?

JINGDEZHEN: WHEN THE WEST COPIED CHINA (2)

This is the second instalment of a three-part feature. I am telling the story of how Europe came to desire Chinese porcelain, and the ability to make their own. Here is part one.

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MALADIE DE PORCELAINE

After the opening of sea routes to China allowed large quantities of porcelain to be safely transported across long distances, European elites - those who could afford it - became obsessed. As I mentioned previously, it was at first a predominantly royal fixation - according to a disapproving Daniel Defoe, the craze for luxurious 'china rooms' in England was started by Queen Mary (1689-94):

"The custom or humour, as I may call it, of furnishing houses with chinaware, which increased to a strange degree afterwards, piling their china upon the tops of cabinets, scrutores, and every chimney-piece, to the tops of the ceilings...became a grievance in the expense of it, and even injurious to their families and estates." 

In the seventeenth-century, there was even a moralising backlash in Europe against what Samuel Johnson termed "a contagion of china-fancy." This was partly just another manifestation of exasperation at wanton decadence. 

But in an age of growing Puritan influence the hostility was sharper towards collecting porcelain, which, because of its rarity and exoticism, was used by the playwright William Wycherley to symbolise sexual intercourse.

In The Country Wife (1650), Wycherley has a female admirer entreat the libertine Mr. Horner, "...don't think to give other people china, and me none; come in with me too." The married Lady Fiddler interjects, "What, d'ye think if he had any left, I would not have had it too? For we women of quality never think we have china enough." Mr. Horner seems to be exhausted when he replies, "I cannot make china for you all." Anyway, you get the idea.

Europe's insatiable appetite for porcelain was first and foremost about conspicuous consumption, and the desire to signal one's elevated social status, particularly as the pressures of social change kept pressing - firstly the centralisation of absolute monarchs seeking to curb the autonomy of their aristocrats, secondly the ascendant merchant classes of the Industrial Revolution. In the midst of material change, traditional landed elites grew anxious about status-distinctions in society becoming blurred by the purchasing power of the nouveau riche.

This need was acutely felt in the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries, when mercantilist doctrines - the belief that a nation's wealth was a function of its store of precious metals, and the protectionist measures that flowed from that belief - determined economic policies over much of the continent. Mercantilist monarchs asserted centralised control over industries with potential for growth, offering advantageous terms to entice new commercial ventures to set-up in capitals and major cities, where they would be more easily regulated. Urban populations grew as aristocrats and merchants alike congregated to ply for royal patronage. As Janet Gleeson observes in her magnificent 'The Arcanum: The Extraordinary True Story of the Invention of European Porcelain': "In such refined, moneyed surroundings there was clearly a ready market for new luxury products... Here was a golden opportunity. Porcelain was the white gold for which all of Europe cried out."

Oriental porcelain - and the cult of refined "taste" that went with it - seemed at first to serve this purpose of maintaining a visible hierarchy in a society that was being shifted about and shaken up. But for the European elites to have to depend for such a valuable prop on workshops in inland cities on the other side of the world was intolerable. In the bumpy transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasty in the first half of the seventeenth-century, the flow of export porcelain was temporarily suspended, and European consumers had to switch to inferior imitation porcelain from Japan and the Netherlands. 

Here is a pair of Kakiemon-style porcelain elephants (featured in Radio 4's A History of the World in 100 Objects) that would have been exported from Japan via the Dutch East India Company as a seventeenth-century substitute for Chinese exports:

On the one hand, constraints on supply served their purpose, by preserving its aura of exclusivity, but on the other hand it meant that monarchs and aristocrats competed against each other ever more fiercely to differentiate themselves.

More to the point, as time went on the porcelain trade became a one-way haemmorage of currency from Europe to China, and the source of a disconcerting balance of trade deficit. It was as if the trade was expanding to treat the symptoms of mercantilist economics whilst exacerbating the underlying condition.

What was needed was to get the means to produce porcelain for oneself. But only the Chinese knew how it was made, and - given its important function in their domestic politics - they had kept it a closely-guarded secret. Solving the mystery would require cunning, imagination - and espionage.

MASTERING DRYDEN'S "WORKMANSHIP OF HEAVEN"

There were many efforts to relieve this "maladie" before the first porcelain was successfully made in Europe. To begin with, all they had to guide their experiments were the vague and inaccurate reports from Western visitors to China. Marco Polo, who visited the court of Kublai Khan (1215-94) provided an early and misleading description:


"They collect a certain kind of earth, as it were from a mine, and laying it in a great heap, suffer it to be exposed to the wind, the rain and the sun, for thirty or forty years, during which time it is never disturbed. By this it became refined and fit for being wrought into the vessels." 

Even this was probably of more practical use than contemporaries who, by leaps of imagination, proposed that it was made from powdered eggshells, lobster shells, or ordinary clay buried for over a hundred years.

Commercial centres in Italy were amongst the first Europeans to attempt reproduction, in the sixteenth-century. The guiding hypothesis was that the hard and translucent properties of porcelain indicates compositional similarities with glass. Following this lead, Venetian traders in the sixteenth-century only managed to make a kind of cloudy glass. Their Florentine rivals managed to produce something more akin to a distant imitation by adding glass and sand to imported kaolin clay, but it would still have fooled no-one, and was unsustainably expensive to make.

Almost a century passed before the next serious attempts. In the 1660s, separate efforts by John Dwight of Fulham and the Duke of Buckingham yielded partial successes but were not followed-up with adequate financial backing. At the St. Cloud factory near Paris, attempts to imitate the Florentine formula yielded the surprising invention of "soft-paste" porcelain. According to Gleeson, "it was far finer than anything else that had so far been made" but was "still lacking the perfection of true porcelain."

In the seventeenth-century, potters in the Netherlands were mass-producing tin-glazed earthenware to take advantage of the political unrest in China that had halted their porcelain export. This 'Delftware' was a good surface imitation, but lacked the translucence that made real porcelain so desirable.

Here is an example of a blue-and-white Delft vase from the seventeenth-century:

Europeans would have to settle for making tin-glazed earthenware, stoneware and soft-paste porcelain - all somewhat lacklustre substitutes - until a twist of fate would bring together in their hands both the scientific knowledge and the practical know-how.

AN AREOPAGUS ON THE YANGZI

The first detailed description to reach the West of how the Chinese made their porcelain was contained in the letters of a French Jesuit priest called Pere Francis Xavier d'Entrecolles.

The role of the Jesuits in Chinese society is a curious anomaly. Amongst foreign visitors, they were granted unparalleled access to the hidden sanctums of state power. They won their special treatment by providing scientific and mathematical knowledge that was highly valued by the imperial court, such as astrological advice. But they also attained their status by conforming to Chinese cultural norms and downplaying features of Christianity that had no clear Chinese reference-points - so much so that they stood accused of heresy by rival orders, and were officially disbanded by the Pope.

Thanks to his status, Father d'Entrecolles was able to observe the porcelain production-lines at work during his travels around central China in 1698, and he inscribed what he saw in two letters, in 1712 and 1722. 

He denied that he was motivated by financial considerations: "Nothing but my curiosity could ever have prompted me to such researches, but it appears to me that a minute description of all that concerns this kind of work might, somehow, be useful in Europe." The second part of that sentence is something of an understatement.

I especially like the way that Father d'Entrecolles describes learning the secrets of porcelain-making whilst trying (and, like most Jesuits, probably failing) to convert the potters, painters and sculptors: "These great workshops have been for me a kind of Areopagus, where I have preached Him who fashioned the first man out of clay." He portrays a rationalised and restless industry, with over eight thousand kilns blazing day and night to meet the desired production: "The heavens are alight with the glare from the fires, so that one cannot sleep at night." Centuries before "Asian values" would be used to explain the competitive edge of East Asia, Father d'Entrecolles tells us that Christians are disadvantaged by the highly specialised division of labour:

"Within these walls live and work an infinite number of workpeople, who each have their allotted task, and a piece of porcelain, before it is ready to go into the oven, passes through the hands of twenty persons, and that without any confusion... This is very laborious work; those Christians who are employed at it find it difficult to attend Church; they are only allowed to go if they can find substitutes, because as soon as this work is interrupted all the other workmen are stopped."

He make some rather telling remarks about the international dimension of all this, noting that many European consumers who appreciated the porcelain but were disparaging about the painted designs were unaware that these designs had been sent over to China from Europe, perhaps because some particularly savvy merchants realised there was a market for unflattering comparisons: "Certain landscapes and plans of towns that are brought over from Europe to China will hardly allow us, however, to mock at the Chinese for the manner in which they represent themselves in their paintings."

The letters are also proof that the secrets of making porcelain were fought over as fiercely amongst the Chinese themselves, as they were between China and foreigners. We are told that the Kangxi Emperor (1662-1722) ordered the imperial porcelain manufactory to be transported to Beijing so that he could learn the secrets from firsthand observation.

The attempt failed, most likely because the producers chose to subvert the authority of the court. As I mentioned in the previous instalment, porcelain had an important function as a symbol of the Emperor's standing.  Although the Emperor had annotated diagrams, withholding from him the infinite subtleties and contextualised knowledge of production was in effect denying him the means to exert increased power across his territories from the centre.

This was taking place in the context of the Qing dynasty re-imposing Ming-era demands and controls on the industry after a brief, more experimental "transition period". The dynamics are reminiscent of the more unrealistic, utopian schemes attempted in China during the twentieth-century - social actors withheld information from the state as a way of resisting centralisation, but the resulting information-deficit only exacerbated the discconect:

"The history of Jingdezhen speaks of different pieces, ordered by the Emperors, that the potters have tried in vain to make. The father of the reigning Emperor ordered some boxes... They worked at these pieces for three consecutive years, and made nearly two hundred examples, not one of which was successful... These, said the old people of Jingdezhen, cannot be done, and the Mandarins of this province presented a petition to the Emperor supplicating him to stop his work."

As it happened, the earliest production of European porcelain would follow a strikingly similar pattern...

THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE

There was one crucial problem with Father d'Entrecolles's letters - he got the days mixed up.  A court official of Dutch origin named Claudius Innocentius du Paquier had tried to recreate the Chinese process by following the letters, "but even after careful scrutiny of d'Entrecolles's descriptions and numerous painstaking trials, all his early attempts to make porcelain were dismally unsuccessful."

Despite these false starts, at about the same time, another European stumbled upon "white gold" whilst trying to make real gold. 

The story of the first real porcelain production in Europe is fascinating, and Janet Gleeson's book really brings the episode to life with a sense for historical drama.

Several years before d'Entrecolles's first letter, a brilliant and ambitious alchemist named Johann Frederick Bottger had persuaded Augustus II, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, that he could use his knowledge of the 'arcanum' - the mythical formula for transmuting base metal into gold - to replenish the royal coffers. Augustus needed to find a way to fund Prussia's costly war with Sweden, but when Bottger failed to deliver the goods on time Augustus had him imprisoned indefinitely.

In 1705, he was transferred to Albrechtsburg, a royal castle overlooking Meissen, where he was allowed to experiment in a laboratory-cum-prison. Here is Albrechtsburg, otherwise known as the 'Saxon Acropolis':

At Albrechtsburg, Bottger collaborated with one of the king's councillors, a nobleman called Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnaus. Tschirnaus was an expert in glass manufacturing, and he was convinced that glass held the secrets to making porcelain. Together, they began to focus on unlocking the secret.

Here is a short feature about Albrechtsburg, and Augustus's royal collection:

Although he learned a lot from his colleague, Bottger pursued a different strategy. As Gleeson describes it, his approach was both more 'modern' and more 'medieval' than Tschirnaus - he treated the problem of turning rock into porcelain as equivalent to that of turning lead into gold; the solution, as he saw it, was not to discover how porcelain was like glass, but to identify the precise ratios of the various ingredients that would yield the desired substance - and he "embarked on a series of carefully conducted experiments" to methodically ascertain the truth.

Here is a portrait of Bottger:

The crucial discovery was made in 1708, but it was not reported to the King for another year, by which time Tschirnaus had died, so history has tended to downplay his contribution.

Augustus was ecstatic - he was no different to his contemporaries in succumbing to "china-fancy." In his youth he had witnessed the extravagance of Versailles, and "under his rule Dresden metamorphosed into his own version of Louis XIV's splendid court." To showcase his achievement, in 1710 he transferred production to a factory in Meissen. But there were deep-seated contradictions between the King's desire to make the industry a commercial success, and to keep his monopoly on the "arcanum" of porcelain.

Arriving at the arcanum by a mixture of scientific method and imagination, it took time to get to grips with large-scale production. To begin with the factory was notoriously inefficient (Tschirnaus had called the Dresden kilns "bowls of chance").  More problematically, the entire organisation was conceived so as to minimise the amount of valuable knowledge accessible to any individual worker at any particular stage of production. As word of the 'miracle' at Meissen spread, the town became filled with spies hired by rival industrialists and foreign princes, and the factory became a virtual prison for its underpaid employees:

"Non-payment of wages caused obvious hardship and unrest among the hard-driven staff, who were still kept as virtual prisoners in the Meissen precincts and officially forbidden to come and go as they pleased. Forced to work for weeks, sometimes months, on end for no pay, they became audacious and lawless. On one occasion they ignored the usual restrictions and abandoned their jobs, marched to Dresden and confronted the King during his leisurely morning ride. On this occasion their wages were paid but they were not always so lucky."

Gleeson cites 'An Historical account of the British Trade over the Caspian Sea' (1752):

"In order to preserve this art as much as possible a secret, the fabric at Meissen...is rendered impenetrable to any but those who are immediately employed about the work, and the secret of mixing and preparing the metal is known to very few of them. They are all confined as prisoners, and subject to be arrested if they go without the walls; and consequently a chapel and everything necessary is provided within." 

Whereas d'Entrecolles had compared the factories at Jingdezhen to chapels, at Meissen the factory had really become a chapel...inside a giant prison.

This is the exterior of the factory (it even looks like a prison):

The segmented production meant that the workers often worked for years to acquire such specialised, context-specific skills that, even if they were free to leave, they would have few other options. But in case he had left them in any doubt, "Augustus inculcated the workmen with the fear that if they were discovered to have discussed what they knew with any outsiders they would suffer the severest punishments. Talking about porcelain-making was in Augustus's eyes tantamount to treason."

A more dangerous side-effect of fragmentation in the long-run was that the factory was riddled with corruption, top-to-bottom. Feeding the air of paranoia, it bred toxic rivalries between different sections of the factory. Workers supplemented their meagre incomes by smuggling out blank pieces, painting them in their homes, and flogging them on the black market. In response, Augustus ordered that all Meissen wares be stamped with an iconic pair of crossed swords, as a guarantee of quality (he did not live long enough to see it become one of the most faked logos in history).

On his deathbed Bottger was confronted with the dilemma of choosing a new "arcanist" to inherit his secrets: "The safest way to ensure that these secrets were secure was by sharing them among several trusted employees. Each would be taught part of the formula and no-one would fully understand, or be able to replicate, the entire process." So strong was the prevalent atmosphere of mistrust that, in the end,  his secrets only survived him because he had disclosed them whilst very drunk: "Bottger's porcelain-making genius had, in effect, died along with him. It was, ironically, largely thanks to his indiscretions that the secrets of his later discoveries were passed on at all."

Those "later discoveries" pertained to the most important stage of refining the process - producing porcelain that was equal to, or better than, that which was made in China. Unfortunately for Augustus, the recipient of this information was one of the several workers at Meissen who escaped and defected to his rivals. In his case, the rival in question was none other than du Paquier, the court official who had earlier tried to recreate d'Entrecolles's Areopagus, and whose factory in Vienna produced "the first piece of true European porcelain made outside Meissen" in 1719.

Augustus's ambitions only snowballed in the last remaining years of his life, even as the foundations of his pre-eminence were being eroded from within. Deciding that 'china rooms' did not befit a man of his stature, he called for the construction of an enormous "porcelain palace", to be made entirely - or to the greatest degree physically possible - of porcelain. A visitor in 1730 described his astonishment at the plans, which included a 'porcelain zoo', "of a hundred and seventy feet in length."

Here are some porcelain herons built for the zoo in 1732:

The King never lived to see the palace being built, and his son and heir Augustus III abandoned the project. But if he had survived into the late eighteenth-century, he would have seen the pre-eminence of Saxon porcelain pass, first to Vienna, then to France, and spread across the continent.

And this process of diffusion unleashed waves of innovation that would soon re-orient the pre-eminence of porcelain on a global level. 

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In the third and final part, I will explore how European porcelain came to outshine that of the Chinese. The focus will then return to China, examining how the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen preserved their political importance in the post-imperial era, and why traditional porcelain-making in China today is kept alive by the thriving market for fakes.