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?

TURNING CAVERNS INTO THOROUGHFARES

Twenty years after the famous 'Earth Summit', delegates from across the world travelled to Rio de Janeiro recently for the 'Rio+20' follow-up conference. Much of it seems to have been spent trying to explain the inadequate implementation of earlier commitments on global warming and environnmental protection in the intervening period. It was larger but also less ambitious than previous summits, establishing a process to agree on the definition of contested terms.

I am not going to discuss the details of the summit in this post. Instead I want to explore the history of China's participation in international environmental summits. It is often heard that China's involvement in these negotiations promotes democracy within China because it makes the central government dependent on (relatively) independent environmental NGOs and civil society groups exposing local officials who violate China's robust body of environmental protection laws.

That is true. However, the Communist Party has also used certain discourses of environmental summitry to expand the reach of the state into the lives of its people. In particular, these summits have often strengthened the technocrats in the CPC vis-a-vis the liberals, by creating the impression that national governments have less agency than they had in the past and thus making the ability to choose between governments seem less relevant to the problems society faces.

But before that, we need to go back to a time before climate change became a permanent item on the international agenda.

SQUEEZING LAND FROM ROCKS

In the 1950s, the slogan Ren Ding Sheng Tian was proclaimed throughout China - it means "man must conquer nature" and it embodied Mao's confrontational stance towards the natural world.

Nature, argued Mao, was there to be tamed and harnessed for human purposes. Traditional Chinese ideas about living in harmony with nature, such as in Daoism, were outdated relics. Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Zedong-Thought revealed that the obstacles to man's mastery of his environment were not inherent in nature but were political; once the control of technology was placed in the hands of the people (via the Party), they would be free to use it to liberate themselves and achieve their fullest human potential.

One can see this as an expression of the ideas Marx espoused in his Grundrisse:

"Nature does not construct machines, locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules, etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will to dominate nature or to realise itself therein. They are organs of the human brain, created by human hands; the power of knowledge made into an object."

It has become fashionable to denigrate not only the often brutal means the CPC used to achieve these ends, but the ends themselves, and the way they conceived of the basic relationship between man and his environment as reflected in their great optimism about technological solutions. A well-respected recent examples of this is Judith Shapiro's book, Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China.

Her central argument is that the violent, repressive tactics the CPC used to try to tame nature are inseparable from the end goal itself:

"Few cases of environmental degradation so clearly reveal the human and environmental costs incurred when human beings, particularly those who determine policy, view themselves as living in an oppositional relationship to nature - as well as to each other - and behave accordingly. The relationship between humans and nature under Mao is so transparent and extreme that it clearly indicates a link between abuse of people and abuse of the natural environment."

Shapiro sees this connection as essential because she sees the efforts of man to achieve rational control over nature as doomed from the start and thus a contributing factor in man's exploitation of his fellow man - and she sees it is a doomed mission because she believes that biology explains all (or almost all) human behaviour, so that man has no vantage point "outside" of nature from which he can bend it to his will.

The Mao era certainly seems like a perfect case-study for her thesis, with its legacy of land degradation, air and water pollution and ecological destruction. But the connections between Mao's ambitions, his policies, and the environmental damage is not so simple. Shapiro is right to link the exploitation of nature to the exploitation of human beings, but I think the case of Mao's rule shows that she has the direction of causation the wrong way round.

A basic idea about man's relationship to nature does not automatically entail particular policies (unless, perhaps, you are a Behaviourist); rather, there are a range of different social, economic and cultural systems that can be theoretically derived from the basic Maoist concept. The factor that determined Mao's choice of policies was not so much anthropocentric ideology as it was a fear of imminent war, and his perceived need to dramatically accelerate China's industrialisation. It was this imperative, processed through a highly authoritarian state machine, that drove the worst environmental excesses of the Mao era: not an excess of rationality, but rational calculation "bound" by the irrational pressures of the Cold War.

Seeing the unsustainable policies adopted in pursuit of crash-course industrialisation as "irrational" misses the point that key decision-makers in the CPC could not foresee a future for China without it - if China could defend itself until the threat had passed, then it would have the space it needed to develop rationally. In the meantime, the threat of war could be used to mobilise efforts for industrialisation on an epic scale.

The perceived need for speed is crucial to understanding the PRC's unique - and uniquely disastrous - strategy for catching-up to the West. Instead of first developing light industry and modernising antiquated Chinese agricultural practices, the government aimed to get as much food as possible out of the land as quickly as they could by labour-intensive methods, and to use this to feed an enlarged urban workforce, who would then supply the countryside with the fruits of heavy industry. The 'Great Leap Forward' was supposed to be a big kick to get a virtuous circle in motion, but - to put it mildly - it failed to generate the required abundance of food.

Below is a CIA documentary about the start of the Great Leap. It features an exhibition of impressive-sounding farming machinery but the Great Leap was meant to be the progenitor, not the child, of modern technology: "This was the only steam shovel I saw in China. But this was only the beginning they said. The Leap Forward was only the first step."

Alongside the Great Leap were other harmful schemes born from similar motives: factories relocated from coastal areas to inland provinces where they polluted downstream rivers; mountains blasted ("turning caverns into thoroughfares") and hillsides terraced causing floods; rivers dammed, raising the water table and turning nearby crops into swamps; Lysenkoist schemes for planting grain in deserts ("squeezing land from rocks").

Another prominent slogan of the period was Ren Duo, Lilang Da ("with many people, strength is great"), which reflected Mao's view that a large and growing population was a net benefit for the PRC. But many academics in China who feared the environmental consquences of promoting large families. Chief among them was an economist named Ma Yinchu.

In 1957 Ma went public with his 'New Population Theory', which argued that the government should adopt policies to control fertility and reduce the high rates of population growth. Politically, his timing could not have been worse, coming as it did at the start of the Great Leap. Over the next three years he was attacked as a "Malthusian" undermining socialism, before being purged from his post as President of Peking University.

It would be another twenty years until Ma's - and Malthus' - arguments were accepted by the Party.

ONLY ONE EARTH...BUT TWELVE WAYS TO DESTROY IT

In 1972 the UN Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm. It was the first major meeting of governments from around the world to discuss the environmental damage caused by modern economic growth and the need for international solutions.

China participated even though it was in the late stages of the Cultural Revolution, issuing notably modest statements that acknowledged its own environmental problems. Directly and indirectly, the conference had a major impact on China's future development.

In the same year, a seminal book was published by a group known as the Club of Rome that received a great deal of attention and publicity because it seemed to capture the spirit of the conference. It was called The Limits to Growth, and it captured headlines by claiming that, on present trends, the world was headed for general and catastrophic environmental collapse. It did this by running twelve different statistical models of industrial society on computers.

The graph below shows the "standard" projection:

As the video below illustrates, the urgency this vision of pending collapse gave to the environmental movement chimed with the themes of the conference, with its emphasis on the need to go beyond national sovereignty and adopt a global system-level perspective.

A year later, in pursuit of better international relations, Premier Zhou oversaw the first National Conference on the Environment in Beijing. As in the international arena, the Beijing conference was followed by a flurry of small leadership groups, follow-up meetings and policy frameworks over the next few years. In his article on the environmental legacies of Mao and Deng, Richard Sanders writes that at this time:

"There was a noticeable change of attitude towards the environment. Perhaps influenced by the 'Limits to Growth' debate in the West, ecology became a political topic and the concept of 'environmental hygiene' was replaced with that of 'environmental protection.'"

'Peking Man'

According to Susan Greenhalgh, the key to understanding policymaking in the PRC in the late 1970s is that "hard" science had come to be valued above all other disciplines as a criterion for decisionmaking and, because of the damage the Cultural Revolution had inflicted on the Universities, this was only to be found in the military and aeronautic research establishments. Non-military branches of science had been heavily politicised under Mao - for instance, archeologists were required to affirm that the remains of 'Peking Man' confirmed Engels' theories of primitive communism.

One of the luminaries of aeronautical research who had benefited from state protection and largesse was a scientist named Song Jian. Song was an expert in 'control theory' - controlling the behaviour of dynamic systems, which in his case meant controlling how missiles moved in the sky.


Song Jian

 In the early 1970s China steered its population policy towards 'family planning' measures, increased availability of contraception, and so on - "later, longer, fewer." Song was one of the scientists the government drafted to advise on further measures necessary to reduce population growth. Searching for a framework, he read Limits to Growth, and was won over by its message that governments had to act urgently to counteract man's "natural" tendency to destroy the planet.

The book had been co-written by engineers and adopted a systems-analysis approach to the problems of sustainability and demography, which saw the world as an interconnected system in need of management and control. It is full of block diagrams of "vital" social variables, like this:

To Song, this was exactly what China needed to solve its socioeconomic problems: more plain, hard scientific facts and less sociology and economics, which always led to arguments and political instability. He had studied cybernetics in the Soviet Union, which was closely related to system dynamics; the great Russian cybernetician A. N. Kolmogorov defined his field as "the study of systems which are capable of receiving, storing and processing information so as to use it for control." Here he is at work:

Song told his colleagues that he was astonished when he first began studying graphs of demographic trends, because they reminded him of the trajectory of a missile. And this was the insight that guided him in designing China's population policy - it was essentially the same as guiding a missile smoothly to its target.

He did this in spite of the many criticisms levelled at Limits to Growth in the West. In a scathing review of World Dynamics, a forerunner to the model elaborated in Limits, the economist William D. Nordhaus described its treatment of empirical relations as "measurement without data." He went on to summarise the book's static and simplified view that human beings are incapable of recognising problems and finding solutions without the state controlling their behaviour:

"Human society is a population of insentient beings, unwilling and unable to check reproductive urges; unable to invent computers or birth control devices or synthetic materials; without a price system to help ration scarce goods or to motivate the discovery of new ones."

In 1975 Song travelled with a delegation of scientists and mathematicians to Twente University. On arrival there was an administrative error and he was left with a young mathematics professor called Geert Jan Olsder to keep him company. They went to a bar and chatted over beers, and at last Olsder revealed that he had published a paper earlier in the year entitled 'Population Planning: A Distributed Time-Optimal Control Problem.' To Song's delight, the paper tried to mathematically derive a solution to the same problem he had been studying, even using the same metaphor: "Given a certain initial age profile the population must be "steered" as quickly as possible to another, prescribed, final age profile by means of a suitable chosen birth rate."

As Susan Greenhalgh has documented in a fascinating narrative, Song was able to persuade the Party leadership that drastic action had to be taken immediately in the form of state-imposed one-child policy because he was able to ride the tide of "scientism" prevalent in the PRC at that time and he used his credentials to outmanouevre strong opposition from the "humanistic" disciplines:

"Song and his colleagues laid out their ideal vision of a birth-planning technocracy in which state technicians were in charge of designing and running a multi-level system of social engineering aimed at managing the growth of the entire population from the top, with little input from the objects of control at the bottom."

 In early 1980 he reframed it as not just an environmental issue, but an "extremely urgent strategic duty":

"By arresting the fierce growth of human numbers, China could accelerate its own modernisation and help alleviate a global crisis. Through population control, China would join the world's powers as an economic powerhouse and a socially responsible member of the community of nations."

The irony is unmistakeable: a coercive and intrusive policy for which the PRC has been much criticised was adopted in order to win plaudits from abroad.

As with Mao's Cold War-fuelled dash for modernity, China adopted the one-child policy out of a belief that it confronted an imminent threat to its security - this time emanating from environmental degradation and greenhouse gas emissions. But whilst the CPC in the '50s and '60s had seen the temporal constraints of the Cold War as amenable to change through politics - as it had tried to do by "exporting revolution" - by endorsing all of the Malthusian assumptions in Limits to Growth in the '70s and '80s the Party effected a subtle but hugely significant shift in its ideological position.

RED AND GREEN AND BLACK ALL OVER

In 1992 the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) - the largest environmental conference of world leaders since Stockholm - met in Rio de Janeiro. Since 1972 there had been many follow-up conventions, agreements and working groups, such as the 1985 Helsinki Agreement on limiting sulphur dioxide and the 1988 Montreal Protocol on restoring the ozone layer.

A feeling of underachievement still hung over the 'Earth Summit', which led the delegates to try to achieve something bolder. Among the outcomes were the creation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (which is still the forum for GHG reductions negotiations today), a landmark convention on biodiversity, the 'Rio Declaration' of 27 shared principles and priorities and Agenda 21, a non-binding action plan for implementing "sustainable development." But it lacked quantitative targets and timetables.

PRC representative,
2002 Johannesburg Summit



China's government attended Rio, led by the Premier Li Peng, although at the time there were still no indigenous environmental groups inside China to participate. The negotiations in Rio proved somewhat fraught. Coming after a coalition of developing countries had failed to create a 'New International Economic Order', a big sticking-point at the summit was the precise meaning of the "common but differentiated responsibilities" nations of the 'North' and the 'South' supposedly had for paying to protect the environment (for the same reason, the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol).

And in each of the follow-up meetings over the last two decades the failure to agree on a division of the costs, and to implement the sharing of "clean" technologies amongst developing and developed countries, has obstructed progress on other fronts. The failure of national governments to implement serious sustainable development initiatives - let alone finding a detailed balance between development, equity and environmental protection they could all agree on - has made negotiations over binding targets for GHG emissions reductions into a proxy war. In 1997 - year of the 'World Summit II' - the General Assembly of the UN declared that: "Much remains to be done to active the means of implementation...in particular in the areas of finance and technology transfer."

These tensions reached a dramatic high point in the closing session of the 2007 Bali Climate Change Conference, where the organisers were blasted by the Chinese delegation and the U.S. representative appeared to make an astonishing u-turn after criticism from developing countries:

Against this backdrop, China's recent environmental record presents us with some stark contrasts. On the one hand, it is a world leader in producing renewable power sources and low-carbon technologies; on the other hand, it is the world's largest aggregate (but not yet per capita) emitter of greenhouse gases with extreme hotspots of air and water pollution and degraded land.

Here is a video of an informative talk on China's environmental strengths and weaknesses by Jonathan Watts, who was until recently the Guardian's environmental correspondent in China and is the author of When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind - or Destroy It. (There are also interesting talks on this subject by Elizabeth Economy and Orville Schell.)

China has set itself ambitious targets to get 15% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020 and prior to the 2009 Copenhagen Summit it committed to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 40 to 45% from its 2005 level by 2020. In a recent article, Watts summarised the Chinese government's main environmental achievements:

"There have been several ambitious steps forward in terms of environmental policy: anti-desertification campaigns; tree planting; an environmental transparency law; adoption of carbon targets; eco-services compensation; eco accounting; caps on water; lower economic growth targets; the 12th Five-Year Plan; debate and increased monitoring of PM2.5 and huge investments in eco-cities, "clean car" manufacturing, public transport, energy-saving devices and renewable technology. The far western deserts of China have been filled with wind farms and solar panels."

Below is a graph showing the downwards trend in China's energy intensity or, seen another way, the increase in its energy efficiency:

This would still mean that China's overall GHG emissions will continue rising: they aren't predicted to peak until 2030, by which time they may have doubled - the rate of economic growth is projected to outstrip the rate at which carbon intensity falls. When the U.S. called on China to make a binding commitment to reduce the rate of growth of its emissions, the PRC responds by pointing to its relatively low per capita emissions and the failure of the industrialised nations to come good on existing commitments to fund and share green technology. Many of the voluntary programmes to reduce GHG emissions are due to expire in 2020.

Isn't the fundamental reality here that progress towards solving a serious problem is grindingly slow because governments have reached a stalemate, but are managing to create just enough of an impression through summit diplomacy that they are still moving forwards?

For those of us who believe in anthropogenic climate change, there seems to be one unarguable proposition: China cannot take the same path to prosperity that the West did. In the first Industrial Revolution per capita energy use increased proportionally with the population, but because China is industrialising later, with a larger population, taking the same path would likely cause catastrophic climate change. Similarly, China can't clean up its environment in the same way that Western countries did, by outsourcing its dirty industries, because the world is running out of buck-passing destinations (or, at least, viable and affordable ones).

Indeed, the trend is towards "insourcing" polluting industries to far inland provinces, as illustrated by the map below (carbon monoxide concentrations indicating hotspots of GHG emissions):

But just because China can't follow the Western route to "clean" prosperity does not mean there may not be alternative routes, and some of these alternatives may in fact have been available to the developed countries, albeit perhaps at too great a cost, whether financial or sociopolitical.

Because the other fundamental reality is that China does need to develop. Most of the symptoms of its environmental malaise can be traced back to its dirty "halfway" model, and the Party's attempts to keep the society segmented and divided to avoid the tensions caused by massive inequality from spilling over.

For instance, with water being diverted it would make sense for farmers to be relocated to urban areas rather than staying put and depleting the non-replensishable water table on which everyone depends, but the government is worried that this would lead to ethnic riots and other violence breaking out in its cities. And it would be more environmentally sound to clean and convert coal at its source before piping it to where it is needed, but because of lopsided price liberalisation in China's energy sector, this is resisted as it would effectively mean piping any profits out of the poorer regions where coal mining predominates. China's dispersed rural Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs) contribute a disproportionate share of both its GHG emissions and its pollution.

New clean-coal technologies are costlier than conventional equipment but because of their relative stages of development and associated opportunity costs, China can still operate them more cheaply than the U.S. But the industrialised world is unwilling to collaborate with industrialising countries to develop green technology on the scale required.

China either needs to retreat, or to move forwards in an entirely new way. But I would argue that, in political terms, a sustainable future has to mean one that is secured by people themselves, through political movements that are rooted in people's shared aspirations, and not handed down to them by international bureaucrats. The real problem is that climate change negotiations are being framed in terms of a conflict between the developed and developing world, rather than as a conflict between people around the world and their national governments, which are too alienated from eachother to share technology or to allow their own people the freedom required for indigenous innovation on the necessary scale.

So those who see a link between the alienation of man from his environment, and from his fellows, are correct in a sense. I just think it is wrong to see that alienation as a feature of nature rather than as an aspect of a contingent political arrangement. Malthusianism and technocracy will not solve our problems - we ought not to abandon our confidence in technology and innovation just because those principles have been abused in the past.