From: Greg Burch (gregburch@gregburch.net)
Date: Mon Oct 14 2002 - 07:04:11 MDT
> -----Original Message-----
> From: FutureQ
> Sent: Monday, October 14, 2002 2:45 AM
>
> Personally I don't think China is that far from religion.
> Looked at a certain way communism is the twin of Taoism.
> Think about. In Taoism you are born into your lot in life and
> that just as nature is unchangeable. Sound any different than
> the state prescribing one's profession and station? I think
> the chinese so readily accepted communism because to them it
> was little different than what they knew for thousands of years.
>
> They could easily slip back into Taoism if the communist
> state failed as I see coming anyway. Look how quickly the
> Orthodox Russian church gained ground when the USSR fell out
> of favor. Weak people need their crutches either religious or
> governmental. The trouble with Taoism is that it's the
> ultimate luddite religion. The chinese could have developed
> rocketry to the point of world conquest and even perhaps
> taken humanity to space several thousand years ago but they
> didn't because Taoism teaches that nature is unchanging so
> why try? It would be interesting to see how readily or not
> transhumanism takes in China.
There are a number of crucial differences between what one might call
"religion" in traditional China and the phenomena that go by that name
in the West. In traditional China three cultural complexes fit into the
social and cultural space occupied by religion in the West and the
Middle East: Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism. Each are far more
humanistic than any of the "religions of the Book", all have a much more
syncretistic orientation than the totalistic tendencies of the Western
monotheist religions, there is no centralized authority in these
cultural complexes and, most importantly, none are truly theistic in any
meaningful sense. In their pervasive, widespread "low" or "folk" forms,
each become polytheistic: Taoism expresses itself as a kind of local,
naturist animism, Confucianism as "ancestor worship" (really "ancestor
veneration") and Buddhism as mythic spritism. Sinitic polytheism (I use
this term because one sees it throughout East Asia) is singularly "weak"
as religions go -- the metaphysical claims made by folk practitioners
are modest, and the social normative impact of the folk belief systems
is very attenuated (because of the factors mentioned above) when
compared with the totalism of Western monotheistic religions.
Now, the subject you mention -- the fact of China's failure to have a
scientific or industrial revolution, despite being the pinnacle of human
civilization for most of the time since the Neolithic period -- is the
question that attracted me to sinology lo these many eons ago when I
first began studying Chinese language and culture. Suffice it to say
that study of this question is one that has generated many different
answers (See Needham's colossal work, "Science and Civilization in
China", which was explicitly spawned by this question, and the work of
the scholar who is my intellectual godfather in this study, Karl
Wittfogel). A study of Needham, especially, leads one to the conclusion
that the impact of "religious" ideas on the experience of technological
innovation in China was much more an epiphenomenon of underlying
physical and political realities than a cause of the lack of scientific
and technological progress. This conclusion is buttressed by the fact
that there was a vital empirical tradition in China for thousands of
years.
Greg Burch
Vice-President, Extropy Institute
http://www.gregburch.net
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