(This is a continuation from installments posted earlier:

Bring Social Science Back onto the Daoist Path, Part I (1): Eastern vs. Western Worldview

Bring Social Science Back onto the Daoist Path, Part I (2): Political Economy

Bring Social Science Back onto the Daoist Path, Part II: Culture Theory)

IV. Mainstream Western Culture Theory：
From Mind-Matter Dualism to Mammonist Hegemonism
(continued)

(2) From Atomistic Individualism to Fragmentizing "Human Rights"

Ideas such as "freedom", "democracy", "human rights" were originally catchwords used by the then rising bourgeois class in their struggle against the feudalist ruling class for their own economic and political rights and benefits. But now they are being trumpeted as "universal values" embodying the spirit of Christianity and applicable to the whole world. Indeed, at that time, these ideas were also favorable to the interests of the laboring classes -- the opposite side in the then new labor relations -- in spite of the bourgeis class’s initial intention. And, taken at face value, they seem to have been derived from the Christian teachings on universal love and equalty. But actually, the worldview underpinning these catchwords is atomistic individulism. Therefore, when the big bourgeoisie, on gaining monopolistic power over the society and even controling the whole world, are now using these slogans in defense of the new unjust world order and their special interests, we cannot but open our eyes wide to see through the true historical implication of these slogans. The undeniable fact is: These slogans have for a long time been identical with the deafening roar of warplanes, cannonballs, rockets, missiles, etc., leaving no peace for the world. This author has discussed about the hypocritical nature of bourgepois "freedom" and "democracy" in other writings. Here we will see their theory on human rights has not a leg to stand on academically, as shown below:

a) Atomistic-individualistic theory of human rights concerns "rights" only and ignores "obligation" 
 As we know, "right" is a concept regarding social relations between people. It involves both a subject -- the right-holder (e.g., a citizen of the society) -- and an object -- whomever one claims the right from (e.g., the whole society or whoever governs the society; the right claimed could be that of equal labor relations). But the object can also be the subject, e.g., to guarante a dynamic balance of social relations and the realizaton of citizen rights, the government needs to claim the right to govern from all citizens. To a citizen with civic rights, to subject him/herself to necessary supervision by the government is an obligation. On the other hand, a modern civilized society, or its governing body, has the obligation to see that all citizens enjoy an equal status in labor relations and in profits distribution. In a word, right and obligation are the two inseparable sides of one thing as if of one piece of paper. Human rights theorists often advertise themselves as advocates of free and equal exchange between people. If so, then the matching between rights and obligations constitutes a truely free and equal exchange relationship.

 The bourgeois class, as initiator of the Individualistic human rights theory, has always, either as a ruled or ruling  class, been championing for power and wealth for the individual self, much more for doing one’s duty to others, to a collective group, to the whole social community. And they do practice what they preach. It is true, and therefore understandable, that, at the time when the bourgeois class was just rising, there were thinkers and statesmen who sincerely believed that the interests of the bourgeois class were compatible with those of the whole society and that their service to that class was also a service to the whole society and the entire population. But, the big bourgeoisie at the top of the social power ladder, with its limitless expansion throughout the world, has long since turned from a revolutionary force to its opposite and become the culprit for all the conflicts, crises and chaos confronting humanity today, thus setting themselves in opposition to the whole world population. The “human rights” they are touting now are being usd as a camouflage for their hegemonic "rights". Wherever this Western version of human rights theory is practised without a matching sense of duty, it just tears the society apart and corrupts social morality. Therefore, people should not swallow, sill less to tolerate, such a hypocritical theory but have to expose its true nature.

 b) Atomistic human rights theory confines its application to individual entities to the exclusion of social groups and naton-states as collective holders of rights
Bourgeois human rights advocates are keen on ensuring a few fortune-seekers the right to exploit hired labor while denying laborers as individuals and as a class their truly basic right to equally own, manage and benefit from the materials of production they are applying their labor to, to equally own, manage and benefit from the business they are a part of, and the fruit their labor yields. So, talking glibly about the right to minimum living standard (or to social welfare) without concern about the equal right to ownership, management and profit distribution is actually denying the working people their right to equal human dignity, i.e., treating them merely as working machines or as two-legged cattle that need only to be fed or maintained for smooth functioning. Can there be any more hypocritical idea about “human rights” than this?

The relationship between labor and capital as the two major social groups of the day is the most basic social relationship of the contemporary world that needs to be dynamically balanced from time to time. If the government is denied its duty as the agent for bringing about such dynamic balances between classes, i.e., denied its right as a group entity to manage such important social affairs, it would only mean to force the working class to rise up and exercise their basic human right as a group by all possible means, not excluding revolution, because the capitalist class generally would not take the initiative to respect the laboring people’s basic rights and “to diminish superabundance and to supplement deficiency” both in human dignity and in material gains.

Bourgeois human rights theorists, however, try every means to belittle and deny the state government its right as an entity representing the interests of the while society in internal and foreign affairs. Their touting for “small government” is not meant to reduce red tape for a positive purpose but to indulge a minority of people to exercise their privileged “human rights” to enslave and exploit the majority. Their noisy cry about “human rights prevailig over state sovereignty” directed at those developing countries who would not swallow their hegemonic way of reasoning is not meant for concern over their workers’ right to equality in labor relations and to life with dignity but meant to preserve their hegemonic power over the world’s peoples for good. Otherwise, why do they turn a blind eye to the super-exploitation of those sweat-shop workers by Western MNCs? Why do they turn a blind eye to the Western monopoly capital relentlessly robbing and exhausting the natural resources and future livelihood of those "periphery" and "semi-periphery" countries? Why do they turn a blind eye to the Western financial tycoons controling the world economy and playing all kinds of tricks just to fatten their purse while wreaking havoc all over the world at the expense of all others? Why? Why? Why? 

It is true that there are still many problems to be solved in protecting human rights in the developing as well as developed countries; but the solution of these problems should not follow the standards and ways imposed by the Western bourgeois ideologists, bacause the real situation of human affairs has proved that those standards and ways are not the solutions but the very causes of the problems and will cause even more problems -- the human rights situation of the world will only further deteriorate. Only by basing human rights on the principles of "rights matching obligations", "equality in labor relations", "the dignity of labor", and "mutual respect between nation-states for each other’s sovereignty", i.e., principles for achieving dynamic balances on multiple levels, can real human rights be realized step by step. To impose on other peoples that kind of "human rights" that go against these principles is an act of cultural hegemonism that serves only the interests of economic and political hegemonists.

(3) From the "Mosaic View" to the Splittist "Ethnic Minority Self-Determination" Argument

Another trump card in the "human rights" set played by cultural hegemonists of world monopoly capital is so-called "ethnic minority self-determination". Bourgeois human rights advocates have always been adopting a pragmatic approach to the ethnic minority issue. As apologists for old and new colonialists, imperialists and hegemonists, they have always been national chauvinists, ignoring other peoples’ right to life, to natural resources, and to autonomy in choosing their own social system and way of life while taking the whole world as a source of wealth that they can manipulate and use at will. As hypocritical supporters of certain ethnic groups’ claim for the right to self-determination, their true motive is either to facilitate their control and exploitation of such groups of people or to play the geopolitical trick of "divide and rule".

On the issue of ethnic relations, Western human rights advocates are not entitled to lecture to faithful successors to the Chinese cultural tradition. Since ancient times, the Chinese Daoists represented by Laozi and Legalists of the Huang-Lao school have advocated restraint from greediness and aggressiveness (虚静、守下), opposed mutual conquest, enslavement and exploitation between different ethnic groups, objected to unjust wars, morally and practically resisted and beat back aggressions, promoted ethnic integration through equal labor relations and free intermarriages, assimilated many nomadic tribes on the Northern and Western borders, including the Mongolian and Manchurian conquerors, into the inland agricultural civilization with a way of living and thinking that advances harmony between Nature and man and among human beings, upgraded the material and spiritual life in those ethnic minority areas, including Tibet and Xinjiang, and also enriched the life and culture of the inland areas. This constituted a sharp contrast to the Western tradition from the ancient Romans, to the crusaders, and to modern colonialists and imperialists, who have all the time tried to conquer the world with iron-and-blood and impose their self-centered, pitting-man-against-Nature and man-against-man way of thinking and behaving on other peoples, thus inciting the two World Wars and the atom bomb disasters in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the cruelest tragedies in human history.

In China, whether in the past or at present, there might have been mistakes and problems in the central government’s handling of ethnic relations. It has been an issue about how to improve the dynamic balance between different ethnic groups and between the governing entities on different social levels towards shared prosperity and happiness, i.e., the gradual realization of the above-said universal value. The solution is definitely not to split the already integrating great family of nationalities into hostile and warring rivals, creating opportunities for foreign meddlers with ulterior motives. If only judged by the genuine universal standard of value as reflected in the original classics of all major belief systems of the world, it is quite obvious which tradition in handling ethnic relations, the Western or the Chinese, is closer to that standard. Today, the Western tradition is being boosted on an even greater scale, a global scale, with even worse consequences. It is a part of the hegemonists’ continuing expansionist policy scheme to pragmatically resort to the slogan of "ethnic minority self-determination" with a view to splitting up other nations. Whereas, China has to clear away the disastrous influence of overall Westernization on the economic and political relations and social morality throughout the nation, including the ethnic minority areas like Tibet and Xinjiang, and resist pressures from the Western hegemonic powers in order the better to carry on the tradition of national integration through "equal labor relations" and "matching the unification of territory with that of kinship relations".

In a word, the atomistic human rights fallacy and the splittist "self-determination" argument can only lead to a fragmentized and chaotic world. The two are both poisonous ideological drugs deceptively labeled by cultural hegemonists with the purpose to kill, and, so, not to be believed.

(4) From the "Mosaic View" to Cultural Relativism and "Clash of Civilizations" Fallacy

In the part on political economy in this essay, the author points out the erroneousness of mainstream Western "mosaic view" in splitting up politics from economy. The same error also finds expression in the splitting up between culture and economic-political system of a society. And this mosaic view of culture has been the mainstream of Western cultural tradition.

Culture in the broadest sense consists of material culture (the ways, skills and techniques, standards, and levels of production and life), spiritual culture (philosophical, religious and ethical thoughts, and art and literature), institutional culture (social economic and political relation patterns and family-clan-ethnic relation norms as written laws or unwritten rules of convention), and sign culture (language, secular and religious symbols and rituals, etc.). These four aspects of culture are all closely related to one another and all indispensable, not like the various items of food in a combo dish or the various colors in a mosaic pattern, of which one more or one less makes little difference. Material production is the foundation for physical survival of the society; institutional culture defines the economic and political power relations in social production and life; spiritual culture presents the guiding principles for and thoughts and sentiments on such relations and life in general; and sign culture serves as the carrier and\or symbolic embodiment of such principles, relations and thoughts. Holders of the mosaic view of culture often split up the four aspects and discuss a certain aspect in isolation from others. Here are the prevalent manifestations of this tendency:

a) Some mosaic view holders try to ignore or obliterate the relatedness between the spiritual aspect and the material and institutional aspects of a culture and dissever a specific spiritual culture from its related mode of material production, institutional patterns, and way of life. They choose to praise and promote or to censure and reject a culture in disregard of the living reality related with it; they trumpet abstract and purely conceptualized "universal values" such as freedom, democracy, human rights, etc., thus covering up the anti-freedom, anti-democracy, and anti-human rights nature of the actual, immoral social relationship patterns behind those tempting hallmarks of that kind of culture. When introducing other ethnic cultures alien to theirs, they tend to accentuate and hyperbolize their sign culture as if it was the essential part of that culture, no matter what social relation patterns, ethical values and philosophical belief their symbols and rituals stand for. Anyway, what determines their government’s policy towards an ethnic people, whether to stir up and encourage them to fight for "self-determination" or to subdue and bully them, is whether that group can serve their hegemonic purpose or not, having nothing to do with their culture at all.

b) The central part of a culture is the values inherent in its spiritual part. But culture studies in the mainstream West, while turning a blind eye to the extreme materialism and spiritual degeneration in its own culture without a correct self-assessment under the influence of a prevailing superiority complex, tend to adopt a novelty-seeking attitude towards alien cultures, mostly just displaying what is peculiar, odd, or primitive in the material life, social institutions and rituals of the people under study, as if putting on a monkey show for “civilized man”, and generally not bothering to dig into, or even making light of, what is deep there in their spirituality, i.e., the lasting values reflected in their unsophisticated folkways that show the natural closeness and harmony between Nature and man, and man and man (this novelty-seeking attitude is evidenced in mainstream anthropological field reports, research works, textbooks, etc.).

c) There ARE differences between cultures of different geographical areas, ethnic groups and historical times, differences in whether the values embodied in the people’s material and spiritual life are more or less compatible or in contradiction with the way of Nature and human justice, i.e., differences in the degree of superiority or inferiority; all are not the same, and just throwing them together without distinguishing between what is compatible and what is not about them would not make up a world culture supposed to be integrated by universal values. But the distinguishing judgments should not be made according to the subjective feelings of a certain group of people of a certain era, still less by the perception and ideology of a handful of privileged people, but will gradually come out through a long-term comparative assessment and test by human history across ages.

However, Western colonialists, imperialists, hegemonists and their apologists have been trying all the time to cover up the aggressive and predatory nature of their policy and behavior by claiming their culture as the most superior. Now, as they are faced with criticisms from peoples of the whole world, including upright Europeans and Americans, for their spiritual depravity and institutional inadequacies, and while continuing to brazen-facedly export via rockets and missiles their hegemonic mammonism disguised as “universal human values”, they are hypocritically clamoring for cultural relativism so as to appease ethnic minorities at home for internal stability while disseminating abroad the fallacy about “clash of civilizations” to continue playing their old trick of “divide and rule” and instigating ultranationalist and/or religious extremist sentiments and violent conflicts between ethnic groups in their target countries with a view to subjecting them one by one to their control and exploitation or even making them serve as cannon fodder in geopolitical conflicts. 

As mentioned above, it is inevitably natural for human civilization to go gradually, through goodwill communications and peaceful competition between the variety of cultures of different ethnic societies in different geographical areas of the world, towards a great harmony based on ONE genuinely shared value standard unfolded in an ethnicity-related variety of ways and forms. Cultural relativism, however, runs counter to this long-term historical tendency of the "globalization" of human culture in the above-said direction. It is a specious theory expediently fabricated for the purpose of softening up the world’s people’s rejection of their mammonist culture.

To acknowledge the diversity of culture can be viewed as a gesture of concession, when compared with bald-faced cultural hegemonism. However, only displaying the symbolic forms of different cultures under the banner of “cultural pluralism”, as if putting on a kaleidoscopic variety show, while trying to obscure the possibly nobler social values behind some of those symbols and their corresponding economic-political relation patterns and at the same time maintaining big capital’s monopoly of power over national and world affairs including public discourse on all social issues – this is still cultural, besides economic-political, hegemonism.

As to the assumption of "clash of civilizations", which is also based on cultural pluralism, it is not any different in essence or even more sinister, as it attributes the present-day global confrontations and conflicts to the world’s peoples’ struggle against superpower hegemonism by distorting it as "evil" challenges by culturally "backward" countries and peoples to "advanced" industrial civilization, thus covering up the really evil doings of Western monopoly capital and their political and cultural agents in the form of aggression, intervention, domination, sowing discords among peoples, and waging stark wars. Hence, the prevalent talk about "clash of civilizations" is a deceptive scheme that will endanger the whole mankind and must be exposed.


To sum up, from the belief in the "superiority" of European-American culture to the mammonist core principle underpinning the Western theories about freedom, democracy, and human rights and about "clash of civilizations", all based on the mind-matter split in metaphysical philosophy and the atomistic-mosaic view in social philosophy -- all are but an extension of anti-Nature’s way， anti-human Justice capitalistic economics and politics in the cultural field. To change the capitalistic economic and political order of the present-day world, those culture theories, which together have been serving as the ideological foundation of this order, have to be refuted and rejected.

Conclusion

     Infinitely vast is the universe; eternally lasting the way of Heaven. Whoever goes with it will prosper; whoever goes against it, perish. No greediness and assertiveness that runs counter to mind-matter unity and the way of dynamic balance will ever last for long. The moment the cancerous growth reaches its climax is the time when its removal begins. The resurgence of Eastern philosophy on the world stage is the beginning of this beginning. The working of the Dao is independent of the will of any individuals or groups. The revival of Eastern culture will indefinitely shine over human history with greater brilliance and for a longer time than the Western Renaissance centuries ago.

     Successors to the Daoist-Legalist (Huang-Lao) school, while respecting the diversity of human culture, and valuing and learning from what is good in other schools of thought and other ethnic cultures, firmly believe in the vitality of Eastern culture, which embodies the pursuit for equality and universal love through “diminishing superabundance and supplementing deficiency” and embodies the way of dynamic balance of a multi-dimensional whole; firmly believe that, through free communication between different civilizations, i.e., without interference from any hegemonic power or state terrorism, through mutual assimilation of each other’s historical experiences between different cultures, and through mutual application of what is good in all thought systems to future practice, the various branches of human culture will sooner or later come closer to each other towards a great harmony, appearing as a unified civilization of the globe, laying the foundation for a real paradise on earth, and shining brilliantly through the universe in all directions. This great harmony will blossom in a variety of diverse cultural forms (“和而不同”) unified by a common goal – living together with mutual love and accommodation.