Ninety years ago, John Dewey, one of the founders of American Pragmatism, went to China and gave a series of lectures across many parts of the country for over two years -- his longest stay overseas. It was a momentous time in China where people were hungry for new ideas. Dewey's lectures were well received. However, asides from his educational philosophy which had a lasting effect on China, his social and political philosophies were deemed too modest for a country ripe for revolutionary change.
I recall this little-known anecdote in Sino-U.S. relations to illustrate a couple of points. One is that I believe pragmatism still offers the best hope for dialogue and cooperation between Chinese people and American people. It did not work out ninety years ago; I do not see it happen any time soon given that Dewey's pragmatism is not mainstream in the U.S. and China has not emerged from its shadow of political control. But I have hope for the future. Two is that there was a reason for China's embrace of communism ninety years ago. Simply put, Chinese people were too destitute. As Warren Buffett observed, even Americans became very responsive to communism during the Great Depression.
And it is this second point that is related to our current affair of the world. As the global economic crisis seems to deepen everyday and ordinary people experience more and more hardship, the danger is ever more present for various extreme ideologies to take hold. It rests on our political leaders not to allow this to happen.
Many people have written about the global economic crisis. Since I had the chance to think about the issue in connection to my thoughts about China's democratic future, I'd like to add my two cents.
Many a time in our recent history, scholars of various stripes have pronounced the end of ideology. But the truth of the matter is, as long as there are divisions along various lines in our society, there will be ideologies. Ideology in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. What we need to guard against is ideological extremism. Since pragmatism is inherently modest, it should be relevant to our situation at hand here. Just like thirty years ago when China embraced pragmatism to save its economy from collapse after decades of rigid socialism, today's world should consider a similar philosophical approach to get itself out of the current global economic slump after decades of unfettered capitalism.
This unfettered capitalism has neo-liberalism at its foundation. Claiming to be a revival of classical liberalism at the beginning, neo-liberalism has become nothing short of liberalism taken to the extreme. In order to justify unrestrained personal greed and free-market fundamentalism, neo-liberals often refer to Adam Smith's invisible hand from The Wealth of Nations as their justification. The problem is not their going back to the source. The problem is their intellectual dishonesty in interpreting the source.
More than just the founding pioneer of modern economics as he is widely known, Adam Smith is also a moral philosopher. His first major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, though rarely mentioned by today's neo-liberals, provided ethical and philosophical foundations to his economic theories. Besides using invisible hand to describe market in the creation of wealth, he also used the same term to describe morality in the distribution of wealth. As Smith put it himself: "What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable." If socialism means more equitable distribution of wealth, one could say Smith is a socialist.
Another similarly distorted fact about Adam Smith is that he is an individualist. Far from explaining all human behaviors on a narrow presumption of self-interest, Smith developed his theory of sympathy as a centerpiece of his moral philosophy. Today, it is precisely this lack of sympathy for others that underlies much of the moral decline in our societies. As neo-liberalism became the dominant ideology of our time, self-interest and personal greed are increasingly used to justify all sorts of immoral behaviors. One of the consequences is that many people think it is perfect acceptable to be dishonest if there is a gain to be made personally. Business executives manipulate books and rules in order to award themselves extravagant paychecks. Economists - I have seen them both here and in China - develop theories in order to serve their respective interest groups. Journalists report stories in order to conform to the prevailing ideologies, etc, etc.
In political arena, this narrow individualist focus and lack of sympathy for others lead to an unwillingness to appreciate opposing views. Ideological positions become entrenched and political debates become confrontational. As a result, politics is increasingly polarized.
Pragmatism enables us to see a situation objectively. And objectivity is needed to ensure that the baby is not thrown out with the bathwater when saving capitalism from its past excesses. For example, while objectively everyone would agree that protectionism is a sure receipt to turn the global recession into a depression, we can still witness a worrying trend towards adopting various protectionist measures around the world lately.
Acknowledgement (20090317):
If there are anything new in this blog, they are built on what I read in the public domain. To perhaps state the obvious, these include, among others: All recorded words by Warren Buffett that I could get my hands on, and in particular, an interview recorded in the book I.O.U.S.A. by Addison Wiggin and Kate Incontrera; Speeches, interviews and other public comments by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao; A recent essay by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd; Adam Smith in His Time and Ours: Designing the Decent Society by Jerry Z. Muller; Adam Smith and His Legacy for Modern Capitalism by Patricia H. Werhane; And The Unconscious Civilization by John Ralston Saul.
