Must we aim at profit?

Part of some occasional musings of what Warring States philosophers can tell us about today. Or, how you can aim at profit and lose everything.

A painting of Confucius

During the Warring States (476-221 BCE) China was a mess, a constant warfare of small state against state. Bigger states invading smaller ones, massacring the local population in the process. Epidemics. Famine. Underpopulation. Yet philosophy thrived in this context, and we have some of the brightest minds in philosophy, including Mengzi and Xunzi who bequeathed us their thoughts on why it was all going so wrong.

One lesson we can draw from the Warring States philosophers is the value of profit or benefit to the population. We see this concept in the Great Learning (Da Xue), a short text that was one of the four classics of Confucianism that scholars had to learn in later years to pass the exam (the other three were the Analects, the Mengzi, and the Mean). It has a long history of composition, some of which was during the Warring States Period.

I was not familiar with the Great Learning but I am slow-reading it now for an informal group where we translate the text section by section (you can find an old translation here). While the work is slow and my classical Chinese still pretty non-existent, translating this and reading it slowly is a strangely moving, profound experience that I feel grateful for.

An overarching theme of the text is a kind of benevolent paternalism toward the people. The text opens like this (what all follows are bad translations by me. Some of our translation group are a lot better and have more background in classical Chinese, but for obvious reasons I can't use their translations)

The way of the great learning
means enlightening your enlightened virtuous power,
loving humanity,
and finding repose in the highest excellence.

A lot of discussion was about the third line “在親民” You can translate 民 as multitude, folk, or the people of a state, or simply as humanity. But 親, qin, is tricky as it is sometimes rendered by a character that closely resembles 新, xin, which means renew (the same character you have in 新年, xin nian, new year). The neo-Confucian Zhu Xi (1130-1200) took it to mean that a ruler should renovate, educate, renew the people. But Wang Yangming (1472-1529) was convinced that 新 was a Song Dynasty copying error, and thought the Da Xue says a ruler should foremost love the people. The character 親 does not mean love in general, but love the way you love a family member of relative, so a close love of familiarity.

We now think Wang was right, so a ruler enlightens his enlightened virtuous power by loving the people. Loving the people, showing concern for them, should lie at the beginning of government.

In section 4 we read about a prince (junzi, 君子) who cultivates his character the way you polish, grind, and burnish jade (a lot in Confucianism is about constant self-examination and self-improvement, and wow there are so many synonyms/words for polishing jade in classical Chinese).

And then it goes on, 詩》云：「於戲前王不忘！」君子賢其賢而親其親，小人樂其樂而利其利

(My bad translation)
The Odes say: We will not forget the Kings of old. 
The prince values what they valued, and cherishes what they cherished. 
The common people delight in what they delighted and benefit from their benefits.

So, it takes a junzi to understand the moral underpinnings and statecraft of the ancient kings, the common people can see the concrete fruits of it: the benefits 利 and the delights 樂. If the government is sound, and if it flows from a genuine concern and love for the people (combined with smart and judicious policy decisions), then the people will feel the benefits.

The concept of benefit is intriguing because we can see it mentioned book that is also from the Warring States, namely the Mengzi, Book 1. The full translation of this passage comes from Bryan Van Norden's excellent Mengzi translation:

Mengzi had an audience with King Hui of Liang. The king said,“Venerable sir, you have not regarded hundreds of leagues too far to come, so you must have a way of profiting my state.”

Mengzi replied,“Why mustYour Majesty speak of ‘profit’? Let there simply be benevolence and righteousness. If Your Majesty says, ‘How can I profit my state?’ the Chief Counselors will say,‘How can I profit my clan?’ and the nobles and commoners will say, ‘How can I profit my self?’ Superiors and subordinates will seize profit from each other, and the state will be endangered. When the ruler in a state that can field ten thousand chariots is assassinated, it will invariably be by a clan that can field a thousand chariots. When the ruler in a state that can field a thousand chariots is assassinated, it will invariably be by a clan that can field a hundred chariots. To have a thousand out of ten thousand or a hundred out of a thousand is plenty. But when people put profit before righteousness, they cannot be satisfied without grasping for more.

So there is a crucial distinction in both Mengzi and Da Xue between love and concern for the people, and the concrete fruits of that concern, namely the material benefits the people feel. In Warring States China such benefits were peace, populousness (underpopulation was a serious problem given warfare, bad harvests, and pestilence), and social harmony.

By contrast if you aim directly at making profits, then everything becomes a zero-sum game. Our governments, by and large have done the latter. This explains their response to climate change, covid and other threats. For instance, we have seen how governments, even those who initially held out such as China and New Zealand, essentially threw in the towel with covid.

The way we see governments behave you would think no-one died of covid anymore rather than it being still a leading cause of death, and you would think there are ample proven treatments to long covid (sadly, there are none). Basically, governments seeing their profits/growth slacken have decided to let it rip, rather than instating smart policies such as upgrading air quality in buildings such as schools or instating mask mandates in healthcare.

The same is happening with climate change. A recent survey study interviewed thousands of young people (age 16-25) in ten countries (India, Philippines, Brazil, UK, US, etc) who are anxious about climate change, but particularly feel anxious at a government that does not represent them at all and doesn't do anything for them.

This direct aiming at profit with disregard for the wellbeing of the people is exactly the sort of thing Mengzi had in mind in his unsustainable grab for immediate reward without long-term planning or any consideration for resource depletion.

The people may not understand the 4D chess that might (?) lie behind some policy decisions but they do feel the concrete effects of this negligent politics on their daily lives. And so, they feel betrayed and unhappy.

The Da Xue says that people can have a direct sense of how their rulers are doing by feeling the concrete effects. This argument reminds me of Jean Jacques Rousseau's remarks on the general will (or will of the people), who uses this idea to craft his idea of direct democracy. While the Warring States people could not democratically elect their leader, they could for instance, vote with their feet, or offer no resistance at all if a foreign nation invaded (please, yes, hope you are better than that other guy!)

And what we can learn from this for today is that the focus on short-term profit is dangerous. The people feel it is not working. Some go for some fake vision of prosperity offered to their tribe (far-right politics) some are disillusioned and check out of political life. Overall, the focus on immediate profit rather than the wellbeing of the people is politically destabilizing. Leaders must brighten their bright virtue and love the people before they begin to think of growth percentages and other measures of short-term profit.