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| Park Jiwon (1737-1805) |
The Joseon Dynasty was notable for employing scientific and
objective methods in its practice of governance. The civil service examination
was the key element in its effort to ensure that the most capable individuals
would run the government. Although some kind of national examination system was
in place during the previous dynasties dating back to the 8th century, it was
during Joseon that the exam became the primary avenue to positions of political
power. Pastreich pointed out that the yangban,
which is frequently translated as nobility, did not originally refer to a class
but designated those individuals who had passed the exam. The exams were in
principle open to anyone except for slaves and those who belonged to the lowest
class, such as those who made their livelihood as butchers. Of course, the
children of the wealthy had the decided advantage of being able to dedicate
long hours to study, so that in practice, the nobles came to dominate the ranks
of the officials.
Pastreich pointed out, however, that the Joseon emphasis on
merit was connected to a concern for objectivity. The Joseon Dynasty kept
annals for 400 years in order to be able to analyze political decisions and
events in an objective and dispassionate manner. Neither government
administrators nor the king was allowed to interfere with the writing of the
official record. Indeed, the king himself did not have access to these documents.
Pastreich told a story in which the king fell from his horse. The king pleaded
with the chronicler not to record for the ages this embarrassing incident. The annals
in the end reveal the powerlessness of the king over the writing of history:
not only did the scholar record the king's mishap, but also documented the
king's own request that this moment of humiliation be suppressed.
The concern for objectivity resulted in a certain premodern
version of checks and balances in the Joseon Dynasty. The fact that the king
was denied access to the annals meant that it would have been supremely
difficult, if not impossible, for any sovereign to believe truly that reality
could be transformed to adjust to his wishes. Objectivity was associated not
only with an understanding of practical realities, with the capacity to respond
crises in the most appropriate and advantageous way, but was also strongly
identified with a moral outlook. The civil service examination, Pastreich
observes, demanded not the regurgitation of facts but focused on ethical
questions, asking the student what would constitute the right course to take in
complicated moral predicaments.
The second part of the lecture focused on the philosopher
and writer Park Jiwon, who was born in 1737 and whose work Pastreich has
translated. He emerges in Pastreich’s account as a kind of reformer within
Joseon, who renewed the ossified Neo-Confucianism of his day with a close study
of the lives of ordinary people. The scholar-officials of the time had become
more inward and disdainful toward worldly realities because of the Manchu takeover
of China. The collapse of the Ming Dynasty, so deeply admired by the
scholar-officials that Joseon, not yet recovered from the trauma of the
Hideyoshi invasion, became embroiled in another devastating war with the Manchus,
led them to the resigned belief that the only way to maintain the Confucian
virtues was to be as independent as possible of a China that was now ruled by
barbarians. The idea of Korea as “Little China” took hold during this period,
the belief that the best part of the Chinese intellectual tradition had been
preserved in Korea.
Park took a dissenting view. He visited China to observe the
day-to-day life of the common people. Park thought that it was important to understand
the lived reality of China, instead of honoring the ideal China that the
barbarians had irrevocably ruined. In Park’s stories, beggars discuss
philosophical questions, and virtue is revealed as something even the lowliest
people, like collectors of human feces, are capable of practicing. Park was
driven by the conviction that virtue should overcome social barriers. Though
out of favor with his time, Park and his work came to be valued by later
generations, who sought to modernize Korea. They found in it the inspiration to
embrace technological innovation as well as to reaffirm the meritocratic outlook
underpinning the civil examination system.
Pastreich’s wide-ranging talk presents a fascinating points
of comparison not only with respect to modernization in the West and in East Asia
but also to the divergent ethical systems driving modernity in these different
civilizations. It is interesting that modernity in the West has been frequently
advanced and driven by the repudiation of morality. The political philosophies
of Machiavelli and Hobbes for example are defined by the effort to overcome or
constrain the influence of Christianity. Morality has not only proven itself to
be destructive – the corruption of the Church is far more noxious and more
difficult to remedy than the corruption of kings - but also generates an erroneous way
of viewing the world as such. Power, not faith or virtue, is what runs the
world and what constitutes the appropriate object of analysis for political theory. This account of
modernity as the repudiation of faith is not without its critics – the Asia
Times columnist Spengler bitingly observes that the separation of church and
state was not accomplished by “the masses rallying in public squares waving
little books of quotations from Chairman Hobbes,” while Giambattista Vico
argues that Hobbes’ idea of secular peace derives from Christianity itself. It
is hard to deny that Christianity, especially Christian morality, has played an
immensely influential role in the formation of secular liberal society, even
as faith has waned in much of the West and is now waning in the US as well.
But the categorical rejection of virtue does not appear to
be constitutive of Korean modernity, as it has been of Western modernity. It
would seem that the idea of a social existence without reference to the authoritative
power of virtue is properly unthinkable within a Confucian horizon. Whether
this incapacity leaves a culture vulnerable to some nasty surprises as modernity
unfolds, or if it protects a society from the antinomianism excesses of liberal
individualism, is the vital question. As John Gray puts it in an essay on
George Santayana, liberalism has become “a political religion of man-worship
which had lost the humility, and indeed the skepticism [regarding human powers],
that informs the historic Western religions” (Gray’s Anatomy, 75). Liberalism, in its hubris and obliviousness to the conditions of social unanimity under which human beings have lived for millennia, has become its own worst enemy. In Pastreich’s talk, it is the Joseon ideal of
objectivity that emerges as an antidote to the loss of historical consciousness
and the anxious self-assertion that is endemic to modernity in its late stages.
The commitment to objectivity is inseparable from good governance, as well as
good art and good science, for they all require the readiness to subject one’s
thoughts and actions to a higher and necessarily external standard, regardless of whether this standard arises in response to the slaughter-bench of history, the caprices
of nature, or the providence of God. The rejection of harsh standards might be
a sought-after luxury in affluent societies, for it pays out in the wages of
self-justification. But under conditions of privation and danger, it can only
mean the death and destruction of what one holds dear.
Reference:
John Gray, "Santayana's Alternative," Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings. London: Penguin, 2009.
