Second Enlightenment
* Book: Wang Zhihe (王治河) and Fan Meijun (樊美筠). Second Enlightenment 第二次启蒙. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2011. 478 pp. Paperback 59 yuan, ISBN 978-7-301-16690-1.
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Description
"In August 1998 the Center for Process Studies, Claremont Graduate School of Theology, California, sponsored an international conference on Process Thought and the Common Good. Among the more than three hundred participants from twenty different countries at this twenty-fifth anniversary of the Center, seven were from the People’s Republic of China. Two of the Chinese delegates, Wang Zhihe and his wife, Fan Meijun (coauthors of the above volume), decided after the conference to identify with its sponsoring Center. With a master’s in philosophy (Peking University), Wang was an associate at the Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS, established in 1977). His special focus and research was on Western philosophy. Fan has a master’s degree in Chinese traditional aesthetics (Peking University) and a Ph.D. in history and Chinese thought, Beijing Normal University. For two years, she taught at the Southwest Normal University, Chongqing, followed by a professorship in the Department of Philosophy of Beijing Normal University (1987–2002).
She is the author of six books on Chinese aesthetics and its relation to education.
When Deng Xiaoping emerged as the paramount Chinese leader in late 1976, the central goal of his remaining life’s mission was to continue the disrupted modernization process of the People’s Republic. His strong emphasis was on science, which he regarded as the most crucial factor in the modernization process. To accomplish this gigantic task, Deng advocated sending tens of thousands of China’s brightest and best abroad to gain the science and technology that the country needed so urgently. Even for those who do not return to China but remained abroad, he confidently predicted, they would, in the long run, still be an asset to China.
To accomplish this gigantic task, Deng advocated sending tens of thousands of China’s brightest and best abroad to gain the science and technology that the country needed so urgently. Even for those who do not return to China but remained abroad, he confidently predicted, they would, in the long run, still be an asset to China.
How true was Deng’s prediction, especially with regard to both Wang and Fan as assets not only to China but to the United States as well. Since the Claremont conference, Wang completed his doctoral studies in religion in 2007. Fan had returned to China to finish her teaching obligations. In 2002 she and their son rejoined Wang in California. Along with others, Wang was instrumental in the establishing the China Project of the Center for Process Studies. In 2005 Wang and Fan expanded the Project into the Institute for Postmodern Development of China for more programmatic activities with the PRC. Wang assumed the role as the latter’s executive director. Through these two channels, Wang and Fan have been working indefatigably for more than a decade in U.S.-China intellectual relations under the rubric of constructive postmodernism. They have overseen publications of the work of the Project and Institute, translations of articles and books on process thinking, especially the writings of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), John B. Cobb Jr., David Ray Griffin, Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, and others. They have worked closely with their natural contacts in China in bringing individual and groups of scholars to Claremont and opening doors for their American counterparts to enter China on lectureships, scholarly symposiums, and conferences where East-West exchanges happen. The first international conference in China on process thinking, Whitehead and China in the New Millennium, was held in June 2002 at the Beijing Normal University (Fan’s alma mater). Since then, more than twenty networks on process thinking have been established in universities throughout China, where articles, papers, and PhD dissertations were and are appearing. Fan and Wang have successfully organized fifty symposiums or conferences, with representative names such as Toward an Ecological Civilization—the Perspectives from Marxism and Constructive Postmodernism."
Discussion
Jay McDaniel:
"An Enlightenment for All Ages
As Wang and Fan make clear, the new enlightenment is not simply for elites. It is a people's enlightenment: indeed a young person's enlightenment. It celebrates the dreams of youth and the wisdom of old age, neither to the exclusion of the other.
For my part, I see something of this new ethos in the college students in the images below, singing at a coffee shop in Harbin, China. Some of them attend Heilongjiang University in Harbin and others attend liberal arts colleges in the United States, including Hendrix College, where I taught for many years. Their aspirations for cross-cultural dialogue, for empathic connections that transcend national boundaries, are part of the Charter for Compassion. They are singing their way into the 21st century enlightenment.
The 21st century enlightenment can include a sense of nationalism, but it is modified by a sense of world loyalty. The students in the photographs are patriotic in their ways. They love what is lovable about their nations and criticize what needs criticizing. We were in China in July and we celebrated the Fourth of July.
But their patriotism is qualified and enriched by a recognition that there is beauty in other nations and cultures, and by a wider sense of loyalty to the world. The Americans among them do not say "America is Number One." They say "America is a great nation, and there are other great nations. Let's work together." They want to make dumplings, too.
* An Enlightenment that is Ecological
Most of these students are environmentally minded and so are their Chinese friends. For them the world is not only the human world of nations and ethnicities, religions and politics. It is the planet itself: a web of life that includes other living beings, too.
Whereas the first enlightenment emerged in the eighteenth century in the West and focused on the human, the second enlightenment is more global. It is emerging in multiple places simultaneously, as enriched by multiple cultural points of view. It is emerging among people who want to live with respect for life and environment. It is an eco-enlightenment.
The eco-enlightenment is not anti-business. Quite to the contrary, it is pro-business. But it sees business as in service to community, not ever-increasing GDP. The new enlightenment moves beyond the logic of the marketplace to a logic of community, beyond a logic of greed to a logic of compassion. Markets are to be be in service to community, not the other way around.
Back, then, to Matthew Taylor. I have said that he makes a very good case for it in the video on the 21st century enlightenment. He was formerly an advisor to Tony Blair. He is the executive director of the RSA, which is a 250 year old charity, based in London, whose previous members include Charles Dickens, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Benjamin Franklin, and Stephen Hawking. Here's a description of its mission:
"The RSA is an enlightenment organisation committed to finding innovative practical solutions to today’s social challenges. Through its ideas, research and 27,000-strong Fellowship it seeks to understand and enhance human capability so we can close the gap between today’s reality and people’s hopes for a better world."
According the Taylor, the core values of the 18th century enlightenment were human autonomy, reason, progress, secularism, and the centrality of economics in politics. These values formed an ethos, an attitude toward life, that influenced many in the West and have since been exported throughout the world. They had their good sides, but they brought with them three kinds of logic: the logic of technological progress, the logic of markets, and the logic of bureaucracy.
The limits of progress and markets are that, while they are very productive, they are indifferent to "a substantive concern for the general good." According to the logic of technological progress, if something can be discovered and developed, it should be discovered and developed. According to the logic of markets, if something can be sold, it should be sold. The invisible hand of the market decides what is worthwhile.
The limits of the logic of bureaucracy are that it puts the rationality of rules above the rationality of ends. When people are absorbed in a logic of bureaucracy, it becomes more important to fit into the system, to follow the rules of government or the workplace, than to consider the ethical implications of their actions.
Underlying these three logics, says Taylor, there has been a problematic image of the human self. It is that of the self as a skin-encapsulated ego, cut off from the world and other people by the boundaries of the skin, whose well-being can be separated from the well-being of society and who is master of his destiny. On this view there is a conflict between being fulfilled individual and dwelling in community.
According to Taylor, a 21st century enlightenment will challenge this view of the self with help from insights from the cognitive and social sciences. Both kinds of science provide much experimental evidence to suggest that our selves are integrally connected with our natural and social environments and that "happiness" itself partly consists in having rich relations with other people. The research is clear, says Taylor. If you want to be a happier self, have happier friends.
This is exactly the image of the self that is important to process thinkers in China and the United States. At our best, say Wang and Fan, we can be free individuals who enjoy creativity on our own, and we can simultaneously realize that our own well-being lies in being related to others in constructive ways. We can appreciate individual rights and community rights, seeing them as complementary not contradictory. We can approximate meaningful degrees of harmony in our societies and meaningful degrees of harmony with the earth.
We can evolve toward what China calls "ecological civilizations" that are free from the stultifying logic of the marketplace and bureaucracy, and free for a fullness of life in expanded circles of empathy. Wang and Fan are not cynical people. They are sophisticated, hopeful people. There is hope in their hope."
More information
- See perhaps also the "five principles of a Second Enlightenment" of the International Futures Forum, at https://www.internationalfuturesforum.com/second-enlightenment