Mengzi said, “People care for each part of themselves. They care for each part, so they nurture each part. There is not an inch of flesh they do not care for, so there is not an inch of flesh that they do not nurture. But if we want to examine whether someone is good or not, there is no other way than considering what they choose to nurture…One who nurtures the petty parts becomes a petty person. One who nurtures the great parts becomes a great person.” — Mengzi, translated by Bryan Van Norden, Book 6A1.
Did you know that an anti-far right protest in Munich this Sunday (January 21) was disbanded early by the police because they could not handle it? The protest ended early because of “overcrowding", it was one of many protests against the far-right AfD. You can watch some footage here:
We rarely hear about this.
And when we do, as with the massive Black Lives Matter protests in the US in 2020, when huge numbers of people including in sleepy segregated suburban places in red states such as where I live came out in large numbers to protest the murder of George Floyd, the full significance of these protests and the feelings behind them are not fully acknowledged. I think we do not yet see the full electoral significance and the broader political relevance of the pro-Palestine protests and actions in the US, Israel, and elsewhere recently either.
Instead, we hear again and again about Trump rallies and victories of far-right parties. We get detailed analyses about why people in red states, or poor white working class folk cannot but, inevitably, vote for an insurrectionist bigot. That's just human nature.
Some large news outlets even tell you that you should attend a Trump rally to get a much-needed dose of realism. (I advise you, don't do this, especially if you are a vulnerable minority, they cannot guarantee your safety.)
We keep on hearing about the “real concerns” of (often mainly white) folk who don't want refugees to come to their country, but we don't hear nearly enough about the very real concerns of those same people who don't want their environment and our climate to be completely screwed up by our unwilling governments.
Which of the many concerns of the multitude gets platformed in the news is very selective. The media do their best to remove our lingering concerns, for (to give but one example) repeat infection with a dangerous virus. They normalize infection, encourage children to be sent to school sick, peddle unsubstantiated theories about how getting infected is in fact good for you, and avoiding it leads to debt for your immune system. They further marginalize and shame the few voices who say this is not a feasible long-term strategy as being mentally ill or overtly anxious.
On the other hand, if the populace or a strategically relevant part of the electorate has a negative attitude toward refugees, then this becomes the excuse to push through schemes and legislation such as the Rwanda scheme that will send refugees that seek asylum in the UK to Rwanda, even though this is dangerous for those people, may violate international human rights laws, and prohibitively expensive as well as ineffective.
I don't want to play down the fact that people do in fact have these worse inclinations. There's a reason the far right keeps on winning, and it's not just because of economic anxiety. The policies are vote winners because many people don't like immigrants and refugees. I don't want to play down the fact that people, mainly those in countries that still struggle with their colonial past and still struggle to be liberated from aristocrat, elitist and religious regimes, really do have anti-refugee, Islamophobic etc sentiments.
But we should not play down their nobler sentiments either. We are complex human beings. As Mengzi (the pre-Qin Chinese philosopher famous for saying that human nature is good) acknowledges, we have nobler parts and petty parts.
How we evaluate ourselves and others comes down to evaluating how we choose to nourish those parts. One way to be able to nourish your greater parts is to keep your sight on them. How can people aspire to these nobler sentiments if news coverage focuses intensely on every far-right victory, while dismissing our collective slow awakening to the deep hurt and rifts caused by white supremacy and other supremacist ideologies as “wokeness"?
It will not be easy to liberate ourselves from these oppressive ways, which are captured in far-right parties and their ideologues and further amplified and platformed by mainstream media. But meanwhile protests and awareness are growing. It is important to keep aware of that and to retain our faith in humanity and its inherent goodness, as Mengzi did.
Thank you for your quick response to the events in Germany and your thoughts. We in Ukraine would also not like to be distracted by informational pretexts and false goals. Solidarity with those who are sometimes hard to hear but who are becoming more and more, and the movement is more powerful is the nurturing of an essential part of the public body, which must be taken care of, as the wonderful Mengzi you quoted wrote.