I have long thought about why Confucius places so much emphasis on the cultivation of our closest loving relationships.  He tells us constantly to respect our elders; he also says that we should cherish the young, which I take to mean our children especially, and help our friends.  Spouses should care for one another.

    Many people see in this a deep Confucian desire for social order: if we solidify these close relationships, then a broader social order is more possible.  And that is part of it.  But I also think that Confucius recognizes, at least implicitly, the emotional power and necessity of love.  We should care for our parents because, at some deep human level, we love them, even if our lives with them have been difficult.  Likewise for children and spouses and friends.  Building upon those loving bonds makes us better people and allows us to extend humanity in the world.  This may sound like an anachronistic assertion – taking a modern sensibility and projecting back into the different world of the past – but I think there is some truth in it: for Confucius, love was essential for human fulfillment; social order was a secondary effect of Humanity based on love.

     And here I find modern grist for this notion.  In a recent issue of the New Yorker, Oliver Sacks writes a very poignant piece about a man who has experiences a profound amnesia.  He cannot remember things that were said or that  happened literally minutes ago.  But through the blur of no past and the rush of a constant present (think about that for a while), he recognizes  his wife:

How, why, when he recognized no one else with any consistency, did
Clive recognize Deborah? There are clearly many sorts of memory, and
emotional memory is one of the deepest and least understood.

….

It seems certain, likewise, that in the first two years of life, even
though one retains no explicit memories (Freud called this infantile
amnesia), deep emotional memories or associations are nevertheless
being made in the limbic system and other regions of the brain where
emotions are represented—and these emotional memories may determine
one’s behavior for a lifetime. A recent paper by Oliver Turnbull,
Evangelos Zois, et al., in the journal Neuro-Psychoanalysis, has
shown that patients with amnesia can form emotional transferences to an
analyst, even though they retain no explicit memory of the analyst or
their previous meetings. Nonetheless, a strong emotional bond begins to
develop. Clive and Deborah were newly married at the time of his
encephalitis, and deeply in love for a few years before that. His
passionate relationship with her, a relationship that began before his
encephalitis, and one that centers in part on their shared love for
music, has engraved itself in him—in areas of his brain unaffected by
the encephalitis—so deeply that his amnesia, the most severe amnesia
ever recorded, cannot eradicate it.

 I think this captures an unspoken assumption of Confucian thinking.  Our closest loving relationships are the strongest social bonds we experience; and if we develop those well we can realize our innately good human nature and make good judgments about whatever challenges the world sends our way.   Our loved ones are the last thing we forget, and therefore should be the first thing we think of.