Perhaps it’s just me, but I am constantly noticing Mencian resonances in various current events.  Two items thus jumped out of today’s NYT:

     First, US law-makers over-rode President Bush’s veto of a bill on health care.  The bottom line: the legislators are responding to a powerfully held popular notion that the government does bear some responsibility to ensure that the people are cared for.  Although Mencius himself does not discuss health per se, his views on humane governance can be comfortably extrapolated to included contemporary health issues.  This famous passage come immediately to mind: 

If you want to put my words into practice, why not return to fundamentals?  When every five-acre farm has mulberry trees around the farmhouse, people wear silk at fifty.  And when the proper seasons of chickens and  pigs and dogs are not neglected, people eat meat at seventy.  When hundred-acre farms never violate their proper seasons, even large families don’t go hungry.  Pay close attention to the teaching in village schools, and extend it to the child’s family responsibilities – then, when their silver hair glistens, people won’t be out on roads and paths hauling heavy loads.  Our black-haired people free of hunger and cold, wearing silk and eating meat in old age – there have never been such times without a true emperor (1.7/1A.7)

        Food, clothing, environmental responsibility, education, social security – those are Mencian obligations and  goals.  Adding health care to the list seems quite natural and easy.  This is not to say that Congress always functions as a “true emperor,” far from it.  Rather, in this particular case Congress made a collective decision that is in line with what a “true emperor” would do.  And, depressingly, all of this is just another reminder of how Bush is not, and has never been, a “true emperor.”

       Second, this story about the biologist Edward O. Wilson raises Mencian issues.  Wilson thinks about the interaction of genetic and social dynamics and how that interaction shapes biological communities, humans included.  I do not agree with all of his arguments over the span of his long career.  But his current understanding, that social dynamics can effect genetic and biological processes, reminds me of Mencius.  Here is Wilson:

It is through multilevel or group-level selection — favoring the
survival of one group of organisms over another — that evolution has in
Dr. Wilson’s view brought into being the many essential genes that
benefit the group at the individual’s expense. In humans, these may
include genes that underlie generosity, moral constraints, even
religious behavior. Such traits are difficult to account for, though
not impossible, on the view that natural selection favors only
behaviors that help the individual to survive and leave more children.

     Mencius holds that people are innately good.  While genetics was not a possibility for Mencius himself, his notion of various “seeds” of human goodness, and his insistence on the internal quality of our impulse to Duty, all suggest that Humanity (ren) is hardwired within us.  That might suggest that Mencius comes down on the genetic side of the argument.  But he is more complex than that.

      While contending that human nature is inherently good, Mencius also points out that that goodness must be cultivated and shaped.  That is, the internal capacity for benevolence can only be fully realized through support from the social environment, which is similar to Wilson’s point above.  That Wilson pushes on a bit further to argue that constructive and beneficent social interactions can lead to species success through natural selection would only please Mencius.   He would, after all, tell us to think about barley:

Mencius
said: “In good years, young men are mostly fine. In bad years they’re mostly cruel and
violent. It isn’t that Heaven endows
them with such different capacities, only that their hearts are mired in such
different situations. Think about barley:
if you plant the seeds carefully at the same time and in the same place,
they’ll sprout and grow ripe by summer solstice. If they don’t grow the same – it’s because of
the inequities in richness of soil, amounts of rainfall,or the care given by
farmers. And so, all members belonging
to a given species of things are the same. Why should humans be the lone exception… (11.7)