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Your best bet is the Burton Watson translation. The Niesenhour (ed.) translation, in 12 volumes, is the complete deal, but it is meant more as a scholarly reference text than a useful read: more footnotes and philogoical notes than text, in many cases, plus a printing of the full classical Chinese.
re: the KMT — Interesting question here, but even the mainline Blues do not want reunification with China on Chinese terms. Thsi has always been something of the plan from the Chinese side though–they have always hoped to reach a political accommodation with a KMT led government. I don’t think more than 20% of the electorate might support such a thing though. Likewise in the military: those corrupted aren’t corrupted on ideological terms, but on financial ones usually.
On the other hand, if it looked like Taiwan was about to be damaged in terrible ways by the PLA… that *could* induce some desperate measures.
There is a very thin, very thoughtful book on Confucius called The Secular as Sacred. Its reputation is mixed but I think it provides a new window into thinking about what the authors of the Analects were trying to do. The real interesting thing in Confucuianism (I think) is “li,” usually translated as “ritual.” That book has a thought provoking take on that.
@Louis-
No, I haven’t read it! But part of my lament is that Su Shi’s brilliance is often in his prose works–his essays, travelouges, and so forth. A collection of his poetry is welcome but insufficient IMHO.
I have not read them all, but I know the Jackson one is not a complete translation. My copy of is the paper back box set; each volume was very slender, however, and could have feasibly been consolidated into one book. Check and see how many chapters it has.
I don’t actually think there is a huge connection here. Afghanistan is not important. Taiwan is. Getting America out of Afghanistan means more focus an be placed on China. This move should reassure them.
The problem is not one of resolve but confidence. Walter Russel meade’s op-ed in the WSJ captures this aspect of it well, I think. This should reassure allies in Europe and Asia, but it was incompetently executed, and that does shake confidence a bit.
Jeff–
Would love to hear from you sometime, in private or in this private space about your experience at AIT.
I came across a long article the other day that David Brooks wrote in Nov. 2001. He wrote something close to “currently the GOP is divided between those who believe that Bush will go soft on capital gains, and those who believe he will go soft on Iraq.”
It was a revealing turn of phrase–both on the toughness angle behind each of these impulses (for what does “going soft” mean but not being tough enough?) and for the weirdness compared to the current political moment, where neither capital gains taxes nor foreign adventurism has much energy behind it.
I think that most state level thinking, and frankly a lot of the freedom caucus thinking in the house, is still traditional fiscal conservative in style. I just don’t meet that many conservatives younger than say 35 who fit this mold though–if they exist they seem to gravitate towards libertarianism proper. So on the long term I don’t know how viable that is? I suspect Nikki Haley will try and wear this mantle, so we will get a test case in 2024 to see how much sympathy there really is for this sort of thinking moving forward.
“I’m guessing the old and new testaments are probably like that too-attending to the aspects of life that are going to be most relevant to most people most of the time. ”
More true for the Old Testament than the New. The New Testament’s rules are almost all extra-familial; relations with one’s neighbor and one’s enemy are emphasized over relations with one’s father, mother etc. Likewise the Pauline epistles, which are a bit more practical minded (over the broad principles of the Gospels) focuses more on communal life in the Church than on family life proper.
“Might that have the opposite effect from the one conservatives intend? ”
Yes. Forbidden knowledge is a sexy thing, unless you have a replacement ideology on hand to condemn the knowledge forbidden as beyond the pale. I am skeptical this works.
@Pdrichlet-
Thanks.
A few more thoughts — or rather questions.
Does this low-iq stuff matter?
Scott Rozelle argues that the countries that have escaped the middle income trap are those with a highly educated workforce. Mexico, Thailand, etc. fail to get out because they have populations with >35% high school graduation rates. The same is true for China today. Rozelle suggests that educational potential is somewhat locked in at an early age: babies who underperform will suffer as children, children who are undernourished or not taken care of will further underperform on top of that, and adult education doesn’t work. Whatever you have among the younger cohorts today will affect you for 30-40 years.
Garrett Jones’ research suggests that median national IQ is a big part of economic growth https://mason.gmu.edu/~gjonesb/
Of course the US and many other developed countries have education and IQ gaps, and this has not stopped them from developing: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-iq-by-state
But there is a scale gap here. 70% of Chinese children alive today have rural hukou, and are locked out of the proper education system. Can the powerhouses in Shanghai, Jiangsu, etc. drag the rest of the country upwards with it? The striking thing about China is that the country is a bit like pockets of South Korea and Taiwan stapled to a Kyrgyzstan 600,000 million big. I am not enough of a development economist to assess whether this dooms them to a middle income trap or not.
One possibility is that the two Chinas simply continue diverging, with eastern coastal urban China, whose population centers are the size of many countries, growing ever more advanced and higher incomed while the rest of the country stumbles. What are the social costs of this?
I argued in this piece (https://scholars-stage.org/fissures-in-the-facade/ ) that it is not lowering growth that might threaten Chinese stability, but the perception that the game is rigged. Would this leave to a widespread perception that yes, the game is rigged?
How do we square Rozzel’s claim that China needs more education, more university graduates, etc. with the 内卷 rhetoric in China right now, this feeling that competition for the highly educated has grown too intense, too crazy, that there are not enough plum spots to go around?
“If we consider periods like the 1920s and 1950s as “low tide” periods rather than changes in the trend”
That is exactly how I was thinking of it myself. The generation that came of age in the 1920s was a bit like that Gen Xers. Cynical and disengaged from the crusading of their parents, but not willing to go out and overturn the new cultural changes they swept in, nor for that matter, really seeing a need to.
@Michael,
There is a lot to praise in that Hananaia apiece, but I don’t think it makes the argument you want it to. He argues convincingly that certain aspects of civil rights law legislation empower certain sorts of woke policy now. But the spirit does not proceed from the law. Legislation passed in the 1960s cannot explain why current “cancel culture” drum beat only really began around 2014, for example. Americans were not engaging in street battles and losing friendships over this stuff in the year 2000. The old laws give the Woke weapons, if they can seize them. But the drive to seize them <i>as a mass phenomenon</i> is new. I don’t think this can be understood absent the new moral fervor surrounding these issues.
When I say that we’re at peak woke, I don’t mean that we’re going to see the reversal of various woke type politics that have been enacted over the last a few years. You could perhaps compare it to the War on Terror—we still have the Department of Homeland Security, a greatly expanded NSA and FISA courts, and so forth—even if the sense of crisis and moral fervor that drove the creation of these bodies in the early aughts is now gone. The War on Terror still exists somewhere in the background but no one calls it that anymore and very few people care about its course. (The progressive movement is another example: if the youth of 1925 were ashamed to see themselves described as a progressive, the government structures built in the last decade did not go away, even as the culture turn to different issues.
Regarding this:
“is still in the early, fanatical revolutionary stage. They actually believe it, and they haven’t yet comprehensively destroyed the country, so they aren’t cynical yet”
I don’t actually think this is true. That is the interesting thing about hanging out where the liberals and leftists: you see but there was a lot more discontent on these issues than is apparent from the twitter strike squads. There is an enormous amount of cynicism about the gamesmanship involved. And I think a lot of that cynicism is very close to breaking through.
I dislike comparisons with the Soviet Union or other communist regimes. I’ve written about this before in the context of Maoism. why I think that particular analogy is inappropriate: people forget that the great terror involve, you know, <i>terror.</i> Backing up Soviet political correctness was a gulag, secret police, a system of informers, state executions, immense outside geopolitical pressure, and recent experience with civil war and massive invasion, which tinged the general culture of violence and viciousness. There is no parallel for any of that in American life.
I cannot quite decide what I think of this. I am generally resistant to those who want to equate any aspect of American life to the 1930s totalitarian experiments; those who do this are fundamentally unserious sorts. I certainly fear cancellation, but it is a limited, frustrated fear. It is not at all the sort of terror that drove writing to its doom in Stalinist Russia. I cannot imagine being in a circumstance where I, like Gorky, would beray my friend’s life to save m own. And that is precisely the point. That sort of decision is abstract, theoretical, unfelt. We cheapen the terror by trying to pretend our dissents in any way come close to what it meant to denounce Stalin at the height of his power.
On the other hand, there are little nuggets of insight that deserve a full essay. “Modern literature, properly understood, has largely been about incels, and the periodic efforts to purge them for something more “optimistic” (1934, 2021) have been waged by people who do not really know what literature is.” Is this really true? is all of literature the story of inceldom? And if so, is that really a good thing?
It is easy for writers to write of misery. Only the greatest of the great can describe happiness with beauty and insight. If Smith is right and modern literature must center itself on the incel experience, then modern literature may not deserve to be defended.
