Condensed translation by Sherwin Lu
EDITORS NOTE: This is an excerpt from a longer essay in Chinese by the author under the same title, which is a reply to critiques of his multi-volume work The Great Qin Empire (《大秦帝国》). How to assess the historical role of China’s Qin dynasty is a key issue in the assessment of the Chinese civilization and it involves what kind of criterion to use: a Platonic idea, i.e., a spiritual absolute, or the practice by the people, i.e., historical practice of generations after generations of all people, and the effects of such practice in terms of doing harm or good to the greatest majority of all people involved. Hope this essay can help find the right answer.
THE TEXT
Historicist Value Standard
What is historicism? In examining the historic heritage of the Chinese civilization to distinguish between what of it is good and what is not and determine what is worth inheriting and carrying forward by us today, historicism means to do all this in light of the basic view that history develops in stages and that the development of history is essentially that of human practice. In more concrete terms, it is to make a comprehensive assessment of the values of the constituting elements of the civilization (events, personages, ideas, etc.) of a specific era or series of different eras and to determine their roles in history, by judging how far they met the prevailing social demands of that time, how they influenced social practice, and how far geographically and historically their influence can extend in later developments of the human society.
In other words, if an event, or a person, or an idea in history went along with the social currents of that time and served to promote the development of the society, bringing benefits to the country and people, and continued to help invigorate the nation in later times, such historical elements can be considered as having positive values for civilization and positive historical significance; the deeper their involvement in social life, and/or the greater their impact, and/or the longer-lasting their influence on later history, then the greater their role in the history of the civilization.
In contrast, if an event, or a person, or an idea in history, was divorced from social currents, failed to promote the social development of that time, or even caused directly or indirectly social destruction or historical regression, bringing about a certain degree of losses to the country and people, such historical elements cannot be considered to have positive values: they only left behind them what we call historical lessons.
This value standard for judging a civilization has been established on the principle of viewing the development of history as that of human practice. This principle requires us to examine any historical events, personages and ideas, judge their values for human civilization and define their roles in history by the impact they have left on social practice as has been evidenced by the development of history. No established verdicts in historical records, nor any moral creed supposed to be transhistorical, i.e., absolutely binding on all times, nor any imported value concepts said to be absolutely universal can readily serve as our standard for judgment of a civilization. We have only one standard, that is, the result as tested by historical practice. No matter how many famous personages are there for our contemporaries to quote from to support their conclusive value judgments about such historical elements, no one can obliterate the truth about history as tested by history itself.
Practice is the only criterion for testing a truth. About this proposition China has witnessed a nation-wide discussion, which helped clarify many confused notions and avoid many superfluous controversies so that people can focus on making necessary reforms and carrying on constructive endeavors. This principle is not only applicable to an assessment of the most recent happenings, but also to the judgment of history. It is appropriate and sound to base our nation’s value standard for judging a civilization on the principle of historical practice. If divorced from or ignoring the test by historical practice, any value judgment of historical elements would definitely sink into the mire of irrelevant gibberish.
Historicist value judgment is rooted in the following epistemological line of thought: Social practice is the viable foundation for human civilization; Theories born of purely mental activities may not pose as absolute truths; Human civilization develops in stages, not all in one single step, so that there is no value criterion valid for all stages of a civilization; And justice in state policy options is only relative to that corresponding era, that is, there is no absolute criterion for justice that is good for all times. Of the above, acknowledging civilization as developing in stages and its development as that of human practice are the two key points. With the former acknowledgment, we would be able to get closer to historical reality and find out what is reasonable in the cultural heritage of each period of an ethnic civilization, recognizing the generally advancing creativeness of historical activities in all their extensiveness and sophistication. With the latter, we can go beyond judgments made from personal point of view and get as close as possible to what is universally significant in specific historical activities and examine the true value of cultural heritage in the broadest perspective.
The judgment of the value of a civilization is the end product of the study of history on a philosophical level. Without the two major acknowledgments mentioned above, such studies and judgments would yield no results that could shed any light on social reality but remain as absolutely abstract and irrelevant nonsense clothed in academic jargons. It is because any value standard in absolutely spiritual and theoretical terms would make it impossible for any population in any times, including our contemporaries, to know what to do, i.e., to decide on one’s line of action.
Spiritual Absolutes as Value Standards
What is opposed to the historicist value standard is to use some transhistorical, absolutely spiritual notion as the criterion for judgment. In the current public discourse, it finds frequent expression in two forms: the exclusive humanity concern, i.e., to use humanitarianism as an immutable criterion in judging a historical event or person; and a specific ideology-based goal, e.g., to designate institutional democracy as the paramount objective for all times and use it as a criterion to judge the political culture in Chinese history. The proponents of such criteria pose themselves as agents of God, dedicated to preaching about judging history and current reality with a standard that transcends all historical times.
In history, there have appeared many different spiritual standards claimed to be immutable and timeless, such as the “kingly way” of state management (王道), “rule of virtue” (德治), “benevolent government” (仁政), humanitarianism, “human rights”, “the supremacy of democracy”. Undoubtedly, there is relative truth contained in all these principles, which may help people in a way to avoid one-sidedness when used as important points of reference in trying to reach a lofty goal. However, if such spiritual concepts are held as something absolutely independent of varying geographical and historical conditions, as immutable value standards that transcends all historical stages, not to be tested by historical practice, and are applied as a sole criterion to the assessment of immensely rich and ever-developing human social practice, they would prove themselves to be inadequate. Essentially, to use a certain spiritual absolute as the sole standard for judging history and social practice amounts to denial or unawareness about society developing in stages, about human history hinging on practice, about the relativity of the value of cultural heritages, and about the relativity of truths.
While the bubbles of spiritual absolutes are being puffed up unbridled, everything under them would be reduced to ashes.
For instance, at certain times in history, a country might face threats from foreign invaders. At such times, the government might have to lead the people to war and/or build up huge defense constructions, both costing huge amount of human resources and lives. About such events, about the leaders involved and their related policy ideas, those who judge everything solely by the humanitarian standard would hold a negative view and accuse such leaders and army generals of “cruelty”. They would even frame up stories as evidence of their “cruelty”, such as the one about a woman wailing in agony over the death of her husband from hard labor for building the Great Wall, wailing so loudly and movingly that the Great Wall collapsed. When such stories were passed on from generation to generation, they fallaciously became part of history.
But what if some government gave up resistance or had not prepared for it so that the nation was destroyed? Those ‘humanitarian” judges would of course still accuse the government leaders and army generals but using different rhetoric to show their own sense of justice. In any case, they never bother to consider the relativity of value assessments about different choices of state action at specific times, nor to think that justice in state actions may have different manifestations in different stages of historical development. In other words, they are only obsessed with some spiritual absolute, and to prove the soundness of using it as the paramount standard, they would either wantonly bowdlerize history records or resort to folk stories to twist historical reality. There have been too many such instances. For example, to show the benevolent nature of King Wu of Zhou’s revolutionary war against the malevolent King Zhou of Shang, Mencius dismissed descriptions in history records about the bloodiness of the war by saying “How could the most benevolent war against the worst malevolence shed so much blood as to float the pestles (以至仁伐至不仁，何能血流漂杵)!” Such is the way they measure things: they select their shoes by size specifications alone, never by their own feet!
In the same way it has so happened in China in recent decades that many patriotic heroes in our history were deprived of their aura by such categorical judgments. They were denounced as parochial; the resistance wars they fought against aggressors no longer made any sense. Qu Yuan was no longer a patriot; Yue Fei no longer a national hero; etc., etc. -- all drown in the bubbles of spiritual absolutes. By extension, our efforts at reforms in contemporary times in order to revive the nation could also suddenly become meaningless someday; the efforts made by all generations, including ours, could instantly become insignificant. Furthermore, all human practice and all great achievements of any time, except the advocates of such bubble-like values themselves, would mean nothing, so long as they have cost blood and lives.
Objectively speaking, nobody would tolerate bloodshed and loss of lives for no good reason. But when at a critical moment for the survival of a nation or urgently needed reform of the society which called for some sacrifice, such sacrifice was heroic and historically valuable for the continuation of civilization, no matter whether it was made by a leader, an organizer, or a fighter on the battlefield, or a worker on the construction site. They should all be remembered by later generations. To denounce such leaders and heroes for the sacrifice involved is to deny the justice of the choice made by the people of that time. Suppose the American people changed their mind and passed a negative judgment on their War of Independence and on its leader Washington just because of the bloodshed involved, that would definitely be laughed at by the whole world.
Any civilization as it exists now has been the accumulated result of its development through history from one stage to another. Therefore, there has been no absolutely immutable value standard running through all stages of history. To make relatively truthful judgments on the historical heritages of our civilization, we need to base our studies on historicist principles, i.e., to use measure sticks that relatively match the different stages of history and make value judgments on historical elements as relatively truthful summaries of human practice. Only thus can we dispel the thick clouds over our long history and establish a system of principles for the assessment of the value of our nation’s tradition as a civilization; only thus can we have a clear interpretation of the history of our civilization. If a certain spiritual absolute is upheld as an all-time standard, it would negate human historical practice as the real test for truth and discourage our search for truth through practice. If our great cultural heritage that has been tested by historical practice is nullified, our creative power in the past demeaned, and our historical achievements dismissed in the name of revering life, etc., it would definitely weaken our will to make necessary sacrifice in the struggle for social justice and a better future. When, under the accumulated negative impact of such fallacious ideology, our spirits are totally paralyzed, we can only bow before a world hegemon.
This is why this author is opposed to spiritual absolutes in value assessments of any civilization. So long as our nation’s practice-based approach survives and develops, the evil spirit of such absolutes will no longer be able to do evil to us. |
