Wang Huning: America Against America. No publisher listed. 1991.
In 1988, a thirty-five-year-old Chinese professor spent six months in the United States. Based at the University of Iowa, he found time to visit some thirty cities and twenty universities in an attempt better to understand the United States. Today, Wang Huning serves as a principal adviser to Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping, as he did to the two previous chairmen. He is a member of the CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee and the CCP Secretariat, having recently stepped away from his role as director of the CCP’s Central Policy Research Committee. Someone in the Party hierarchy must have liked his book.
Whereas Tocqueville visited America in order better to understand ‘democracy’—by which he meant a civil society in which no titled aristocrats existed—Wang wanted “to get to know this number one capitalist country in more detail and in a more realistic way” than had been possible for recent Chinese scholars. He was particularly interested not so much in the American economy, however, in American capitalism, but in “the political management processes of American society.” He does, nonetheless, hew closely to Marxian categories as he proceeds.
“Why is there an America?” Wang means this not as a historical question but a question of comparative politics. “The United States, like China, constitutes a special phenomenon of humanity in the twentieth century,” but whereas the “ancient civilization” of China “has declined in the modern era,” “lagging behind the modern nations of the world,” America, with its “short history of only two hundred years, has become the world’s leading developed country today.” As of 1991, Americans had ‘solved’ the problem of modernity; Chinese had not.
This doesn’t mean that America faces no serious problems, Wang hastens to remark. His title, “America Against America,” means that the United States features both “positive and negative forces” arrayed against one another in “inherent contradiction”—as of course Marx would have highlighted in his analysis of any capitalist society. Democracy in America is shaky, at best, since “powerful groups that dominate politics are above the common people.” These groups are “private consortia”—oligarchs who hold no official place in the government. This notwithstanding, Americans continue to think of their regime as democratic. “My idea is to oppose the imaginary America with the real America,” the American dream with the American reality.
Wang writes that Marx and Engels had predicted the collapse of capitalism, inasmuch as capitalists produce “their own gravediggers,” namely, the industrial workers or ‘proletariat,’ who eventually will rise up and overthrow the bourgeoisie and institute state socialism. “After all these years,” Wang quite sensibly admits, “it should be said that capitalism is still developing and cannot be underestimated.” To be sure, “the judgments and analyses of historical materialism are correct in terms of historical development,” but that development is still in the capitalist stage, awaiting “the maturation of historical conditions.”
As for China, Wang cautiously suggests that its difficulties come from a dogmatic ideology which featured “a total rejection of capitalism,” preventing Chinese from “learning from the advanced experience of other countries.” All human societies have “conflicts and needs.” Therefore “it should be useful to understand what methods different human societies use to resolve contradictions, mitigate conflicts, and meet needs.” His “original intention” is to analyze such methods as now established in the (real) American regime—just at the time the Soviet regime and empire had failed, it should be noted—in order to contribute “to the development and progress of Chinese society.” Indeed, authorial glances at China may be seen throughout the book. The CCP had seen what had happened in Russia; it did not want that to happen in China.
First and foremost, far from being egalitarian, America is an “uneven land.” This unevenness and indeed contradiction begins with the minds of Americans, who “talk about innovation all day long” but also worry that technological development finally may work “against the nature of man,” leading to his destruction. These worries register the power of a still-powerful tradition, by which he must mean Christianity and perhaps natural right. “When you walk into America you walk into this kind of doubt.”
These doubts notwithstanding, America has in practice embraced modern technology, part of the “modernization process.” Can this process be advanced under public ownership of the means of production? And does modernization require political democratization? These are the questions Russian communists had failed adequately to answer, questions Chinese rulers must answer.
Wang observes that the international status of the U.S. dollar stems from the post-World War II Bretton Woods agreement; that status underwrites American economic power in the world. The implication is obvious: If China is to accelerate its climb to replace the U.S. it must work to get rid of Bretton Woods and to establish a new financial order, preferably with its own currency as the centerpiece.
Technology as seen in American capitalism has contradictory effects. What Wang calls the “Four Cs”—cars, calls (phones), computers, and credit cards provide the means of “political socialization and political communication,” but these are ‘externals’; “the only real consolidation [of a political community] is when the system is actually infused into the lives of the people”—what Aristotle calls the Bios ti, the way of life of the regime. On that score, Wang follows Marx’s critique of capitalism, claiming that it leads to universal ‘commodification,’ the practice of treating everything as a saleable commodity. “Even people become commodities.” That is, insofar as America can be described as a coherent regime, its organizational principle is dehumanizing.
Capitalism also spurs vastly increased demands and an increasingly complex system for supplying them. Such demands and complexities filter into non-capitalist societies, as well. The resulting “complex intertwining of modern society, politics, economics, culture, entertainment, health, art, transportation and other fields, have posed a serious challenge to the management system of society. Can a political and administrative system bear all the burdens of modern society?” Wang observes that “no political and administrative system has the capacity to directly manage and assume all the responsibilities,” except in small places like Singapore and Hong Kong. The United States and China alike must face this problem, presenting rival solutions to it.
It is this analysis, in the opening pages of the book, that induced many of Wang’s readers in the West to take him for a ‘liberal.’ He is not. He has no principled attachment to liberty, only a pragmatic sense that the sort of ‘totalitarian’ tyranny attempted by Mao Zedong is impossible to achieve. The past three decades have seen substantial improvement in technologies of control; the Chinese Politburo hasn’t hesitated to avail itself of them. Liberty might be justified by natural right, as seen in the American founding, or even by certain forms of historicism which esteem liberty as a permanent instrument of human progress. Wang endorses neither of these defenses of liberty. The liberty he endorses can (and has been) here today, gone tomorrow.
In the United States, he claims, associations are made possible by commodification. “The real essence of commodization [sic] is not that everything becomes a commodity, but that the commodity is in a rational mechanism of operation.” People voluntarily organize businesses, markets, unions, and even social groups because such associations are useful for production and commerce. “The development of the commodity economy has led to a dual structure of governance in society: the social self-organized system is responsible for all kinds of specific matters, and the political system is responsible for coordinating the various self-organized systems.” Government “still as to regulate activities in various fields, only now it has changed from direct to indirect.”
Contradiction arises in this modern form of capitalism because commodification “corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems,” problems government then must address. True, “the political an administrative system will be more powerful and effective [when] managing dozens of large self-organized systems than managing thousands of specific activities,” but the challenge remains.
The psychic costs of commodification have been resisted by a few small groups in the United States. Since “the real driving force of modernization is in the inner world of people,” and some people reject the effects of that force, one sees such folk as the Amish (“simplicity, nature, and self-sufficiency”) and the Amana communalists in Iowa. With the Amish, fear of “the disappearance of the safe environment, modernization, and even any social change will encounter an incomparably strong resistance”; it is likely that Wang intends his reader to draw the parallel between the Amish and the Chinese peasants. As for the Amana, they abandoned collectivism in 1932, partly because too many of their members were freeloading but mostly because the religious zeal for it had faded. “Under the powerful lure of this prosperous society, the younger generation turned to other values,” and “once this shift occurs in the younger generation, it is difficult for any force to ensure the longevity of the institution.” Here, it is likely that Wang intends his readers to think of China’s changes from the two Maoist generations, including the fanatical Red Guards of the late 1960s, to the somewhat more relaxed governance that prevailed in the years after the tyrant’s death. The Chinese Communist regime thus faces two types of challenge: one from ‘conservative,’ Amish-like peasants, the other from young people who resist the austerity imposed by their rulers. Mao undertook to solve the first problem by murdering 20 million or so peasants; he undertook to solve the second problem by inciting youth to attack those elements of the ruling elites Mao regarded as insufficiently strict, turning youth rebellion into an instrument of his own ruling power. Wang likely finds both of these remedies unpalatable and unnecessary.
Although commodification has led to a certain kind of organization of civil society, Wang also seeks to understand the spirit of American politics, which he understands in historicist terms as “the product of the interaction of inheritance and environment.” He begins with Henry Steele Commager’s book, The American Spirit, published in 1950, which takes the decades between 1880 and the 1940—that is, the Progressive era—as crucial to understanding the ethos of Americans. According to Commager, Americans during that period undertook a “highly selective” attitude toward the political inheritance handed down to them by previous generations of Americans and by Western civilization generally. In his view, “the political system and judicial system have changed very little in two hundred years, but the social organization has changed radically, and the psychological aspects have been revolutionized.” It isn’t clear how it had changed, as the character traits he cites—optimism, ‘can-do’ attitude, broad vision, materialist sensibility, a practical approach to politics, innovativeness, common sense, and a practical religiosity—seem not that much different from the spirit of 1776. In an obvious instance of mirror-imaging, Wang claims that Americans “despise other nations and peoples almost to the point of paranoia.”
He agrees with Tocqueville on the social, if not economic, egalitarianism of Americans, although he denies that Tocqueville’s claim was empirically true, citing the status of slaves, women, and Indians. This egalitarianism, as far as it goes, has resulted into some unusual features of American life: “parents rarely control their children and children rarely respect their parents, but family life is happy”; “the military is lax in discipline but can fight wars.” This egalitarianism extends to intellectual life. “Hegel was convinced that he had discovered the ‘absolute spirit,'” but “the spirit of the American people is that there is no ‘absolute spirit.'”
As to the Spirit of ’76, it instanced “the spirit of bourgeois revolutions at the same time,” particularly the English revolution of 1688. “Its basic principles were the creations of English and French thinkers during the bourgeois revolutions in Europe.” Those principles—again, conceived in more or less Marxist fashion as the products of historical circumstance as driven by socioeconomic conditions—included freedom, equality, individualism, democracy, and the rule of law. These are sentiments, not products of reason; the syllogistic form of the Declaration of Independence doesn’t register in the mind of Mr. Wang. Indeed, these sentiments have “no definite meaning because they have no definite content,” a claim that would have surprised Thomas Jefferson, who found so many of them in Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, and Sydney—not a sentimentalist among them.
Wang departs from Tocqueville, however, in contending that the strongest sentiment among Americans isn’t the love of equality but the love of freedom. This is because (contra Tocqueville and also contra himself, a few pages earlier), “the equality guaranteed by the Western system is only formal political equality, not social or economic equality”—a charge familiar to readers of Marx and his epigoni. It is precisely liberty that interferes with the establishment of social and economic equality, “especially the right to freedom of private property.” Liberty is the sentiment associated with the spirit of individualism; in “today’s world,” animated by that spirit, “equality can hardly be the dominant value,” which is undoubtedly why pretended egalitarians who organized dictatorships ‘of the proletariat’ work so hard to stamp it out.
Turning to the U.S. Constitution, Wang finds the same bourgeois spirit. “Its basic provisions were certainly designed to safeguard certain interests.” This constitution “reflects a pessimistic, not an optimistic view of human nature,” which he deems “a major difference between Western culture and Eastern culture,” which does indeed lack the notion of innate depravity in human beings, although it manifests such depravity with as much vigor as anywhere else in the world.
The three basic institutional principles established by the Constitution are representative government, decentralization (he is fascinated by the New England town meeting), and limited government, including the limitations established by the rule of law. All this notwithstanding, “it must not be thought that those who framed the Constitution had all the toiling masses in mind and were framing the Constitution for them”; rather, “what they had in mind at that time was first of all to maintain their interests, a new ruling group”—the oft-refuted claim of the Marxist historian, Charles Beard. Wang sees clearly and accurately that the Constitutional changes which have prevailed in the last 100 years often have come through judicial interpretations, really reinterpretations, of the meaning of the document, not by the difficult process of formal amendment. “The path to a society’s political development lies in turning political principles and beliefs into political rules and political traditions,” and it is to political scientist Theodore J. Lowi to whom Wang turns for an account of the American regime has changed since the Founding.
In The End of Liberalism, Lowi identifies three republican regimes in the United States: the federal republic of the Founders, which lasted until the 1930s; the New Deal republic founded by FDR, which centralized more power in the national government, which deployed the theory of John Maynard Keynes, regulating economic activity more vigorously and redistributing wealth; and “judicial democracy,” whereby judges effectively take over many of the legislative functions by artful reinterpretation of the Constitution. The American Third Republic has reacted to the excesses of the Second Republic, which committed the country to various ‘programs’ which proved too expensive to maintain. At the same time, the Americans wanted somehow to retain the benefits they had been receiving from the Second Republic, which has led to yet another instance of ‘America against America.’
Despite its divisions, America does have a “national character”—and a “colorful” one, at that. Although “the most innovative people in the world,” Americans remain “conservative in the realm of values.” They bring this off by maintaining “a clear line of distinction between value and technology and materiality,” the first seen in the “public sphere,” the second in the “private sphere” of production and consumption. This demarcation (as it were) forces Americans to be free, to innovate and thereby make money, if they want to enjoy material comforts. This was especially true in the early decades of American settlement, as Europeans struggled and won a war against primeval nature, but the same spirit endures. With no ruling aristocracy to impede this progress in the name of a morality that might have inhibited it (Wang may well have Confucianism in mind), Americans saw no real contradiction between their Christianity and their quest for material progress. Add to this Americans’ national pride, their desire to be “first in the world,” their individualism, and their democratic-egalitarian willingness to let people get what they want, and you get a dynamic society—highly productive but also perpetually threatened by instability. Wang doubts that Americans’ “values” can be maintained in the face of such disruption.
“American society is the least mysterious society”; its denizens do not regard the heavens, nature, man, politics, society, or education as imponderables. This contributes to its characteristic innovative materialism but such “demystification [also] has the tendency to make people lack authority, neutrality, self-sufficiency, self-confidence,” living as they do in “a society in which everyone harbors the idea that everything must not be finally believed.” No society can survive on an ethos of undiluted skepticism; skepticism “can be the greatest driving force” for innovation or “the greatest destructive force.” In this, America exemplifies with unusual clarity “the conundrum of human society” as such: “we can’t have mystification and we can’t have no mystery.” By contrast, China has been a “defensive culture,” one which has resisted the challenges of modernity. Wang seems to want a more ‘balanced’ China, a China which has abandoned its defensiveness but does not go so far as the “aggressive culture” of Americans. Except, perhaps, in one area: “Sometimes it is not the people who master the technology, but the technology that masters the people. If you want to overwhelm the Americans, you must do one thing: surpass them in science and technology.” Mr. Wang’s elevation to the Chinese Communist Politburo suggests that the Chinese oligarchs took the point.
To do this, Wang avails himself of Rousseau’s notion of civil religion, whereby society “sanctifies” the secular. American has done this to some degree with its culture of two political parties, its political heroes, and its ‘celebrities.’ “In such an individualistic, self-centered society, sanctification is the best mechanism for spreading core values.” More seriously, Americans have a strong “work ethic,” which he deems “society’s most valuable asset.” To establish that habit of the heart, a society must “find a way to make each person feel that they are working for themselves, not for others.” As a matter of fact, social organizations “rarely allow everyone to work for themselves,” exclusively, as that would mean “that society would not be a society.” “The key thing is to make people feel this way, this belief.” Civil religion, indeed, if not exactly along Rousseauian lines.
“At the core of American life is the protection of the private sphere,” the source of America’s power. This has its disadvantages, however. Friendships are superficial, since Americans move around a lot in search of material gain. Families suffer, for the same reason. Sexual liberation has prevailed, but the benefits promised by the likes of Herbert Marcuse have not, in Mr. Wang’s polite phrasing, become “obvious.” The individualistic American heart is a restless “lonely heart.” “I am afraid that in America, the best can exist and the worst can exist.”
How does such a society govern itself? To some extent, the largely independent private sphere of commerce and industry runs smoothly, thanks to the operation of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” guided mildly by some government regulation. “Money becomes a fundamental medium in the management of society,” as “people manage money, and at the same time they use money to manage people.” “This system is independent of the government, independent of the political system,” “undertak[ing] a large and complex management process by itself.” Here, Wang again follows Marx, who contended that “the commodity economy is [only] apparently a relationship between things, but in fact it is a relationship between people,” and the “non-governmental money mechanism regulates people’s thinking, emotions, and behavior.” True, “Americans like to be governed least, but they like money most,” and “the logic of money is to lead people to be governed” by those who have it. Today, the American national government has a lot of money; it can control the people “indirectly by legal means,” which include the direction of tax revenues. Indeed, American tax laws are “most detailed.” Everyone “has to report income to the government. In this respect, Americans are the least free.” This does focus their attention on political life, however. Those who give “a certain amount of money to the government” feel “a responsibility to monitor it,” knowing “they have a vested interested in who they elect.” “The tax system fosters a sense of responsibility, however passive it may be.”
Another means of governing the American individualists is through science and technology, which require specialization (an instrument of division, not of union), obedience to machine processes, and well-organized networks to discover and communicate discoveries. “Today, the application of technology has become one of society’s most powerful means of managing people. To a large extent, American society is governed by technological processes.” “People obey technology more than they obey politics,” as “education constantly derives [sic] and develops the energy of technological governance and the culture of technological governance.” This “logic of science and technology is inevitable” in modernity, and it must be said that Mr. Wang’s Politburo acts as if it is.
Still a future member of that body, Wang deplored American political parties. They lack what he considered the characteristics a real political party to be. Although both of the major parties “represent the ruling class of society,” the capitalist class, they are mere “rabbles” with no membership criteria, no “systematic theory,” no “complete platform” that binds members, and no “tight organization” sustained between elections. Rather, each resembles “a national franchise, with each branch doing its own thing to sell its products. This is almost “unbelievable” to a Chinese Communist, but it does generate the energy in each party to contest elections vigorously, and electoral victory is the only thing the party chiefs care about. Elections matter because the ruling class is far from homogeneous, consisting of a variety of interest groups (“one of the characteristics of capitalist societies”) including business, labor, and farming. Political competition has led Americans to develop a political culture consistent with capitalism. Its political advertising, its lobbyists (sellers to the elected buyers of policies), and the advantages joined by “the wealthy and powerful groups” all leave politics with “no special status.” It’s all just business. This might be undermined by “a few more serious recessions,” which might enable the now-insignificant radical parties to find a ‘market’ for their offerings; such economic pressure can happen if “one day the economic level between the East and the West is reversed.” But endemic to the competitive system itself is the very undemocratic esteem for the winners, for “excellence.” “Many scholars have recognized that the phenomenon of rule by excellence is contrary to the principle of popular democracy,” although it “is produced by” that democracy. Since “worship” of excellence exhibited by the American civil religion “undermines the principle of democracy,” another tension setting American against America arises, and “which direction it will go cannot be predicted yet.”
With voters in the public spheres and stockholders in the private sphere, America sees formal democracy but substantive oligarchy. Here, he cites Marcuse with approval: “The space of the private has been violated and reduced by the realities of the technological world. Mass production and mass distribution demand total appropriation of the individual.” Marcuse intends this as a critique of capitalism; it isn’t clear that Wang objects to it, so long as the Communist Party—a real party—remains in control. Indeed, he also agrees with Alvin Toffler’s argument in The Third Wave, that majority rule has “become increasingly obsolete.” “Behind the façade of ‘participatory democracy,’ the process of centralization is accelerating dramatically,” as a substantial percentage of Americans now work for a governing body as bureaucrats. This has been allowed to happen because democratic elections and the other practices and institutions of formal democracy, especially if expanded to an ever-widening electorate endowed by the government with an ever-lengthening list of ‘rights,” distract the people from the real rule of the bureaucrats, the public-sphere counterparts to the private-sphere capitalists. “There’s a wonderful thing about the American political system: you can’t say it’s undemocratic, and you can’t say it’s democratic.”
While competitive elections make it “possible to tolerate dissent,” inasmuch as “those who disagree” with the majority of voters “are voted out and do not have a lot of grievances or grudges against anyone,” candidacy in those elections is unattractive. “Being a candidate” in an American election “is very hard. There’s a lot of running around and doing a lot of things during the day.” Congressional elections are not “attractive and inspiring, and most people seem to be indifferent.” The indifference of democratic citizens to the means by which they are (at least ostensibly) governed leads Wang to intone, “It has been said that the greatest enemy of democracy…is not tyranny, but democracy itself.”
Once elected, successful candidates become part of the American “political pyramid.” “For large countries, finding the right kind of institution is more beneficial than anything else. Federalism has unwittingly served precisely that function in the United States.” (“Unwittingly” betrays the fact that Mr. Wang never quite got around to reading The Federalist, but the fundamental point is right.) Always with one eye on China, he quickly adds, “of course, not every country has the conditions for federalism”—quite possibly a reference to the history of the provincial rulers who have rebelled against Chinese emperors more than once in the country’s long march through the centuries. For example, in America county government “is pivotal in political life,” its functions being “closest to the voters.” But again, there is “no apparent backwardness or ignorance in the counties of the average agricultural region” an “important condition for county politics to work”—one that he may not see in China, and one that Chairman Mao most assuredly did not see. “The county is small enough that everyone can see what the country officials are doing,” voting them in or out accordingly. “In political life, the people have nothing to say about national politics or state politics,” where “class interests” are more “directly reflected.” “But they have a real say in grassroots politics.” Wang sees in local governments the “feet” and the “hands” of the central government. “With effective local governments, the central government will be like a tiger with wings, like a fish in water.” But how can this be, if the counties are democratic, the states and federal government oligarchic?
The answer is bureaucracy, a civil service system that extends to the local level. “The functioning of the administrative system is the part of the iceberg that is underwater, and party competition is only the part of the iceberg that is exposed to the air…. The machinery of the administrative system is the civil service, which is the cornerstone of the American political system.” Whether it is with the Congressional liaison offices, which spend the bulk of their time linking constituents to the bureaucrats, or with such mundane (and therefore habitual) operations as issuing driver’s licenses (managed by departments of transportation, but accessible by the police), the practices of “soft governance” contribute to American social stability in a “capitalist society” that would otherwise be untenable.
With respect to capitalism, Wang shows considerable interest in the way capitalists and workers have reconciled, to some extent, in the United States. “Such a provision would have been unthinkable in the West fifty years ago”—counting back from 1941, at the time Stalin was entrenched in the Soviet Union and Mao was a few years away from seizing rule on mainland China. Marx’s ‘scientific’ predictions were based on the prevalence of what Wang calls “hard regulations,” regulations governing the production process; these tend to alienate labor from capital by enforcing production quotas, hours of work, product quality. But contemporary automation and electronics “make these regulations redundant,” shifting managers’ attention to “soft regulations.” By these he means the way in which workers now control the machines; today, Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz simply would have paused the assembly line. “Thanks to automation, management has become easier” because the automated factory changes the psychological condition of the worker, shifting his mind and heart from feelings of powerlessness to (apparent) empowerment. Thus “the development of capitalism has used technology to resolve the conflicts that may arise between labor and management over technology,” “easing social conflicts” while improving productivity and profit margins. “In Marcuse’s words,” American business “has been rationalized.” One problem persists: reconciling “people’s inner worlds” with what remains an irrational commitment (in Marxian eyes) to working hard for the profit of someone else, not society as a whole. “This will be a difficult problem for Western society for a long time.” Or not.
What especially disturbs Wang is the impersonality of American business. “American management is rigid and strict,” one might say rule-driven. Chinese management “is about flexibility and mobility,” by which he really means it centers on “interpersonal relationships.” Family ties and payoffs are more prominent in that model. “It is worth exploring what path Chinese society should take to create a better organizational mechanism for political development.”
Moreover, quite apart from capitalist management in businesses, “the inhuman phenomena of capitalist society depicted and criticized by Marx, Engels, and Lenin have now been resolved by the government” through the institution of “legal and political regulation” of civil society and the provision of social services. Here, Wang foresees a circumstance in which the American regulatory and welfare state will run out of money in the face of ever-increasing worker demands, causing “political upheaval.”
Much of the inner world of American workers and capitalists alike centers on religion, “a fundamental part of [American] social life.” “Many Americans are psychologically dependent on religion or religious organizations,” although for some churchgoing serves primarily as a means of social connection, not so much of worship.
Wang is dubious. Admittedly, “religion has a social function,” but “the problems of religion are also obvious and cannot be denied.” Religion “constitut[es] a strong system of organization”; in doing so, however, it “can independently organize the people who belong to it according to its own principles”—principles which might contradict those of the ruling party. Similarly, religion has “the ability to constitute an ethical value system that guides and coordinates people’s behavior,” potentially at the expense of the authorized morality. And its ability “to form a powerful radiating system that can spread its activities and ideas to the community as a whole” might come to rival the state apparatus. Hence “in many societies religion is the main cause of social unrest.”
The solution consists, first, of a strict “depoliticization of religion”; “religion cannot be the instrument of politics”—as seen in countries with an established church, which Wang calls “authoritarian foolishness”—or “become the master of politics,” which brings on ” kind of foolish tyranny.” Second, religion must not be allowed to become a superstition, by which he means it must not make pronouncements on matters scientists consider. “Religion lies more in the cultivation of personal moral sentiments, the pursuit of self-discipline and devotion.” When it poaches on science, it substitutes “blindness and fear of self”—i.e., fear of believing your own discoveries, unaided by divine revelation—for “rational process.”
Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and other “great thinkers” have extolled “the indispensability of religion in an ideal society,” and (in very un-Marxian fashion) Wang proposes that “a society without religious life would lose an important self-governing mechanism,” so long as that life is coordinated by the regime and “not allow[ed]…to transgress common norms.” The United States has accomplished this. “Americans are very rational about religion, just as they are about science and technology.” They bring this off because “the high level of development of science and technology constrains the potential for irrationalization of religion.” By a “strange process,” in America “the more knowledge advances and the less dangerous religion becomes, the more active religion becomes,” confining itself to the realm of moral sentiments but powerful within that realm.
Science and religion both animate the regime of education, to which Wang now turns. He is interested in American education primarily as a means of supporting the regime from one generation to the next—the problem Abraham Lincoln addressed in his address on “the perpetuation of our institutions” to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. “The strongest foundation for the existence of an institution is the identity of a society. Whether the new generation agrees with this identity or not is related to the question of whether a certain social system can be reproduced. The most important mechanism of institutional reproduction is the education of society.” Additionally, in democratic America, education replaces aristocratic inheritance, becoming “the passport into the upper class” for persons of no wealth. [1]
‘Aristocracy’ thus reappears in the school system itself. “Teachers are often distrustful of school committee people; they believe that educational policy should be in the hands of teachers and that education should not contain a political element.” Wang quite sensibly remarks, “In reality this idea is unrealistic; I am afraid there is no education without politics, and I am afraid there is no politics without education.” Thomas Jefferson and Mao Zedong didn’t agree on much, but they agreed on that.
As usual, Wang associates this point with his own regime’s obsession with modernization. As he puts it, society should become “a grand furnace of science and technology that smelts the spirit of modernization”; “in a society that keeps the achievements of modernization closed, it is the human spirit that is ultimately closed.” Therefore, “the most important function of higher education is not to produce excellence, but to equip each generation with a sense of modernity.” Exhibit A among the universities he selects for consideration is Massachusetts Institute of Technology, not Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. He marvels at the size of MIT’s budget and also at the fact that most of its funding comes from private sources. In China, this would not be allowed, except in the sense that the regime suckers Western business corporations into the country and then pirates their inventions—thus maintaining the regime while taking advantage of private enterprise, after the manner of V.I. Lenin’s New Economic Policy.
Harvard comes next, but not Harvard as a whole. Wang studies the Kennedy School of Government, which he calls “the cadre school of America”—a “cadre” meaning the ruling elite. Whereas “the traditional European conception is that politics can be treated as an art,” the “American conception is that politics can be treated as a technology,” turning policymaking into “a science.” As he rightly observes, this approach comports with administrative statism, with bureaucracy as the new ruling class. This is even more obvious at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, “the first school of public administration in the United States,” established in 1924. There, the focus isn’t so much on policy as on administrative technique itself, training administrators for entry into the civil service system. “The purpose of the civil service system is not to recruit the best people in society, but to absorb the most talented people in society for government management” by subjecting them to “rigorous” but not “overly theoretical and academic” training.
Military matters being never distant from the Chinese regime, Wang also visited the U.S. Naval Academy. He was surprised by its large political science department, which aims at acculturating future Navy officers to the American regime, thereby making military coups less likely—a point surely to be taken by the Chinese Communist Party. In America and everywhere else, “spreading the basic principles of a society among the military is a strategic measure for socio-political development.” Remarkably, Wang writes that “in developing countries, the first step should be to spread the concept of democracy among military personnel,” although one’s astonishment fades in reflecting that “democracy” means something quite different in the People’s Republic of China.
Wang illustrates the American art of war by describing a football game the Midshipmen played during his visit. Football reflects the “American focus on honor,” which supplements the love of money. “Americans are all about strength”; unlike Chinese, they use “no very subtle tactics,” exerting “strength to get there fast.” This even extends to speech, as “Americans are very outspoken” (especially at football games, one might note). Wang doesn’t say it, but his Chinese readers will recognize the distinction between, for example, chess and go, a distinction that can carry over into military and political strategy.
In sum, “the purpose of education is first of all defined as the training of qualified citizens. From this, we can see that the young generation, no matter what kind of school they enter, whether it is a general university or a military academy, [has] to be baptized with the American spirit.” Today, Mr. Wang would immediately recognize what is at stake in the Leftist takeover of many American universities. He and his colleagues doubtless welcome that.
Complementing the universities are the ‘think tanks’ or, as Wang calls them, “thought factories.” These organizations formulate public policies, publicize them, and monitor the results of policies implemented. Wang evidently regards as distinctively American the practice of explaining policies clearly, not only when think tanks do it but also, perhaps especially, when public officials do it. “In contrast, the political spirit of many societies is not so, but to avoid explanation. This is also a political art under certain conditions”—conditions that obviously prevail under the Chinese regime. American openness follows from its spirit of free commerce—commerce in ideas, not only in material goods. To some extent, this is good, since knowledge won’t yield “social progress” unless it is disseminated. “There [was] no shortage of ideas in ancient China that were outstanding for their time, but none of them became the driving force behind the progress of this society, much to the sigh of relief” among the ruling class. Chinese has lagged in the race for modernization because it has had no such “dissemination mechanism.” “The role of information dissemination”—the Enlightenment project—in “the evolution and development of Western societies cannot be underestimated.” In America, not only universities, think tanks, and public officials but libraries, museums, and similar institutions constitute a decentralized network of knowledge dissemination. Such decentralization provides the additional benefit of relieving the central government of many burdensome expenses.
The theme of decentralization leads Wang to consider small cities in America. Iowa City, for example, features so many shops, such good houses and utilities that “except for young people who have the idea of going out to make a living, the general public is emotionally stable”—so much so, that many “have never been out of Iowa.” This is a benefit of the prevailing “commodity economy.” “If there were any forces that could restrict people from getting rich, small towns would not have developed.” And once they did develop, they contributed a much-needed measure of social stability to American life. Overall, “the modernization of American society is not based on big cities like New York, but on thousands of small towns, and big cities are just the top of the hill.”
Nonetheless, all is not well. The individualism Tocqueville saw has finally yielded a decline in marriage, as seen in ever-higher divorce rates and children born out of wedlock. Parents do less than they once did to care for their children and children often do not support their aged parents. By contrast, “Chinese culture contains a strong element of raising children for old age, and filial piety is one of the basic concepts of Chinese culture.” Even so, disruption of the traditional family may come to China, too, since “raising children for old age is a product of agricultural civilization”—the small farm has always been the family farm—and “is bound to diminish under the impact of industrial civilization,” which the modernizing Mr. Wang and his colleagues advocate.
So what? “Aristotle said more than 2,000 years ago that the family is the cell of society.” Aristotle sees in the family the three forms of rule: marital/political, parental/kingly, and masterly/tyrannical. That isn’t Wang’s point, however. In a society like America, where the individual is “the real cell of society,” not only material support for the aged but the resolution of disputes becomes increasingly a burden of the state. No longer does the paterfamilias judge disputes among his relatives; these now end up in family court, probate court, or civil court. “This has become a major problem for economic and social development,” leading to higher rates of poverty and of crime. And “all the government can provide is the material conditions; who will regulate the emotional problems?” The dilemma has reached China’s doorstep, as Singapore, “a Chinese society and a newly industrialized country,” now sees “the danger of family disintegration.” Whereas Marcuse hoped to replace the “civilization of technology” with “a civilization of love and lust,” Wang more sensibly asks, “What kind of emotions should human society maintain in addition to sexuality?”
American society also neglects the young in its education system, leaving them ignorant, faithless, and undisciplined. Wang dismisses the claim that increased funding for teachers’ salaries alone can meet the crisis. True, “in a commodity economy, the power of money is irresistible;” “without a force to guide it, people will be profit-oriented.” so salary increases would lure more people into the teaching profession. But what will they teach?
No wonder, then, that “the concept of America, in today’s world, must be associated with drugs”: “No drugs, no America.” China saw this when opium importers from the West infested their country in the 19th century. In today’s America, the wave of drug use “exceeds the various forces that have impacted the country throughout history.” Because “Americans believe in the right of each individual to determine his or her own destiny, a right to personal freedom that cannot be taken away,” why would many not claim a right to use drugs? This claim challenges the Western concept of liberty. “It is unrealistic to say that a person can enjoy full rights,” but Locke, Rousseau and others “failed to address practically” the limits of liberty, and Americans have yet to do so, either. “I am afraid that we still need to do some re-conceptualization of human beings.” One might add that such a reconceptualization did occur in China, as its rulers embraced the militant and decidedly anti-individualistic charms of Maoism.
Drugs fund organized crime. “These groups threaten society,” as well, building up what is in effect a rival regime within the country. Wang argues that the American regime cannot counteract this challenge to its authority for two reasons: the legal principle that an accused person is to be considered innocent until proven guilty; and the principle of social liberty, whereby “it is a right for anyone to organize themselves.” Under the innocence principle, “no one’s behavior can be criminalized and prohibited at the outset.” And under the liberty principle, “anyone can associate,” including criminals. As a result, crime runs out of control, beyond the power of government to stop it.
It must be said that Wang here shows his true political colors. In the name of fighting crime, he advocates preemptive state action. No need to prove guilt, and no need for any association not sanctioned by the state. Clamp down on people before they get the chance to act badly. “The American political system is a very successful one in terms of giving and allowing, but it is not a commendable one in terms of prohibiting and preventing.” How one somehow reconciles “giving” with prohibiting and allowing with preventing, he does not say. Americans have reconciled them by passing laws prohibiting certain actions, funding police who arrest and interrogate suspected criminals, then putting those criminals on trial with a presumption of innocence. Similarly, some associations are legal, some not, but whether a given association is judged licit or illicit depends upon it having its ‘day in court,’ where it can defend itself against its accusers. To put it mildly, the Chinese regime doesn’t think so.
Other social problems include poverty (especially “dull-eyed, slow-moving” panhandlers) and racial tensions between whites and black and between whites and Indians. Americans “are outwardly polite and respectful of a set of different cultures, but in reality they despise” those cultures—as clear an instance of ‘mirror-imaging’ by a Chinese scholar as one is likely to find.
Wang’s account of America’s “spiritual crisis” parallels his treatment of the criminal threat. Citing Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, with its critique of cultural relativism and nihilism, especially in academia, he leads his reader to a decidedly un-Bloomian conclusion. “If society is left to develop naturally, traditional values will be difficult to preserve, and the trend of social development will always be to constantly eliminate the past,” as “the new generation will inevitably have no concept of the past, and without education there will be no continuity.” This is most acutely true in a democratic society. “Who, then, will perform this social function?” We know who the Chinese Communist Party thinks should perform it. This isn’t to say that Wang isn’t on to something, since what Bloom was excoriating was precisely the failure of university educators to preserve not only ‘the tradition’ but the philosophic way of life. Regrettably, Chinese Communists would preserve neither.
In his final chapter, Wang discusses the challenge Japan then posed to American economic dominance. With no little exaggeration, he claims that the Japanese “now have control over the U.S economy” via investments in American companies and domination of American markets. The Japanese have pitted their “collectivism” against American individualism, personal devotion against American personal enjoyment or hedonism, and regulation against liberty. But Japan is only “the first nation to challenge the United States” (presumably, in the period following the collapse of the Soviet Union); “in the next century, more nations are bound” to do so, as well. “It is then that Americans will truly reflect on their politics, economy, and culture,” as “the unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” reaches the surface. Obviously, Wang numbers China as one of those “collectivist” rivals to America, and it is likely that he expects China to win.
Note
- Indeed, “one of the major defects of human beings is that the cultural knowledge and ethics acquired by the previous generation cannot be inherited and must be reacquired by the next generation”; the titled aristocrats can give birth to persons entitled to rule by law but not by natural right, if cultural knowledge and ethics are inherently worthwhile characteristics of any ruler.
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