The Master said: "Poor food and water for dinner, a bent arm for a pillow – that is where joy resides.  For me, wealth and renown without honor are nothing but drifting clouds."
Analects, 7.16

     Things are starting to look very bad, economically.  It seems clear now that the most recent rescue attempt (I prefer "rescue" to "bailout" and I see the issue not as a "Wall Street bailout" but as a "rescue of the banking system") is insufficient to the scale of the problem.  Stock markets are symptoms of deeper problems in the financial system.  And that system reaches into every corner of American society, and societies all around the world. 

     We all will face some material limitations in the near future.  Car loans will be more difficult to secure, as will mortgages and other credit.  People will lose their jobs.  The big Christmas buying season will likely be dismal.  We will have to settle for less.

     Beyond the material difficulties many will face, I wonder about the cultural effects of economic crisis.  Will deep and long recession bring with it a rise of communitarian thinking, pushing back against the possessive individualism of liberalism?  And what might that look like, culturally?  I'm really not sure.  But a Confucian response, which may be considered a form of communitarianism, would encourage us to seek not the comfort of wealth and renown, the products of an individualized focus on profit, but rather look for solace in "honor," which in this case would imply the cultivation of our closest loving relationships. 

    For a Confuician, the relevant "community," the collective that defines and nutures and indiviudal (outside of which an individual can not exist individually), radiates outward from those closest loving relationships.  It grows from the daily interactions we have with family, neighbors, friends, co-workers, and others we come in contact with.  If we attend to those obligations first, something we can do even in constrained economic circumstances, we can find our way through the bad times.  That's what the Master might say….