The new semester has started.  I am now busy with class preparation (I read everything that I assign for classes right before class so that it' s fresh…and that steals the time I have to read other things). And I have taken on some administrative duties (Chair of the International Studies program here).  All of which means less time for blogging.  But let me try to fuse class preparation and posting…

For my class, "Nationalism in East Asia," I have the students first read Ernst Gellner's little book, Nations and Nationalism.  It's a punchy read.  He makes a strong case ("strong" in the sense that he argues it vigorously) that nationalism is a product of modernization, especially industrialization and that the "nation" (by which we can presume he also means national identity) is a product of nationalism; as he famously states: "It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round." (54). Thus, he goes on at some length distinguishing agrarian society from industrial society, and in that distinction I can see something that explains why Confucianism might have a hard time gaining intellectual traction under conditions of modernity.  Take this paragraph (pp. 23-24):

If cognitive growth presupposes that no element is indissolubly linked a priori to any other, and that everything is open to rethinking, then economic and productive growth requires exactly the same of human activities and hence of human roles.  Roles become optional and instrumental.  The old stability of the social role is simply incompatible with growth and innovation.  Innovation means doing new things, the boundaries of which cannot be the same as those of the activities they replace.  No doubt most societies can cope with an occasional re-drawing of job specifications and guild boundaries, just as a football team can experimentally switch from one formation to another, and yet maintain continuity.  But what happens when such changes themselves are constant and continuous, and when the persistence of occupational change itself becomes the one permanent feature of a social order?

The point about "cognitive growth" links back to his analysis of the effects of industrial modernization on intellectual life: the rise of analysis – breaking down received knowledge into smaller parts and seeing how and why they might fit together, and whether they might be reconfigured more effectively.  It's a new kind of rationality, a new epistemological skepticism. 

And something similar happens in the social world as well, and the social and intellectual feed off of each other.  It's reminiscent of the great line from Marx:

Constant revolutionising
of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier
ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones
become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into
air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face
with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

I wouldn't say Gellner is a Marxist, his analysis of nationalism runs counter to much of Marxist thought, but he certainly has a materialist bent to him…

In any event, when I re-read that passage of Gellner's above, it immediately made me think of the modern fate of Confucianism.  These two lines stand out:

Roles
become optional and instrumental.  The old stability of the social role
is simply incompatible with growth and innovation. 

Social roles are the constituents of Duty (yi) and for a Confucian, even a modern Confucian, they cannot be optional and instrumental.  They are essential and necessary.  Indeed, a modernized Confucianism, if it is to preserve the basic elements of the ancient philosophy, would have to reject the idea that the "old stability" of social roles is somehow so incompatible with modern industrial and post-industrial life that they, the roles, can some be disregarded.  That's why Ames is trying to develop a Confucian role ethics.

I imagine that if Gellner were to attend one of Ames's seminars, he would simply laugh at the impossibility of a role ethics in a modern industrial context.  Who's right?….