The myth of progress

The faustian project

The dominant idea of Western civilization, progress, is rooted in the book of Genesis. With the fall of man, history becomes a chain of causes and effects whose ultimate goal is the progressive reconciliation with the original divinity of human nature. Christianity by setting time on moving has offered meaning to life and suffering, man is no longer a twist of dice, but an indispensable moment of a universal project. But postponing the meaning of life to the afterlife, together with the insuperable obstacle of the original sin, made impossible the fulfilment of the theory of perfectibility of Enlightenment origins. Saint Simon, Herbert Spencer, and Auguste Comte all came with utopian visions assuming the inevitable advancement toward a desirable destination: biological, physical, and social elements alike. To overcome the impasse Faust thought better of dealing with the devil. The details of his story are familiar and need not be recounted here. In Marshal Berman’s reconstruction, Faust becomes a symbol of modernity and the scientific irresponsibility that comes with it. Berman places Goethe’s hero in historical perspective, the decades 1962 “one of the most turbulent and revolutionary eras in the history of the world,” (39) to Berman an epoch that goes from medieval material conditions to post-industrial revolution desires. But Faust, creator and destructor of modernity, is not looking for material possessions, power, or money. Mephistopheles has offered endless capitalist opportunities and Faust has turned them down. What he is seeking is a socialist utopia, a living space for the future of mankind. He wants to move the world and remake it, reshape its physical and moral code, he wants to win land from the sea, build new towns and industries, bridges, green forests, and canals. With this reading, Faust stands as self-development, economic development, the whole spectacle of modernity: perpetual production, construction, and inevitable destruction. Yet the socialist utopia of public happiness clashes with his narcissistic will to power, the human too human arrogance of power. The whole world has been renewed, an extremely old Faust walks contemplating his creation, but he is not satisfied with it. There still is a small piece of ground, an old couple works the land, they have a little cottage with a garden full of linden trees. There is a chapel also with a little bell. Reminder of the old society, the pre-modern world, they stand as an obstacle to the progress he invented: “The cottage and the linden grounds Are not mine, nor that mouldy church. And if I’d rest there from the heat, Their shadows would fill me with fear, Thorns in my eyes, thorns in my feet” (11,155–61). In his restless arrogance Faust does not feel a lack of achievement, but the terror of being scrutinized and condemned for his deeds. This is how the sweet perfume of the linden becomes the smell of a tomb. It is his soul to have perished. The sound of the Church bells is reason for rage for he knows his guilt. He needs that little remaining space to disappear so to blind his consciousness and at last make room for his ultimate plan, a Babel-like tower from which to gaze into the infinite: “There I would build, better to see, A scaffolding from tree to tree, And thus a vision might be won Of all the things that I have done” (ibid. 11,243–45). Needless to say, his modernity comes at a price. The old couple and their little cottage are violently washed away, the lindens are part of the past, human suffering and death pile on the wasteland of his imagination. At midnight Faust stands alone on his balcony contemplating the ruin of history and the unfinished tragedy of modernization. Has the project of modernity come to an end? The issue is aroused when Faust becomes Oedipus, a man blind all along. The project of modernity from the very start has always had fierce critics and that is because alike in Faust the promise of the future is accompanied by the threat to destroy everything we are.

The natural laws of Copernicus (1473–1543), Galileo (1564–1642), and Newton (1642–1726) announced a new era: scientific principles govern not only the universe but human history as well. Sometime later Positivist Materialism renewed trust in man by glorifying the fruits of his reasoning: progress. Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) understood history as interplay between epochs of construction or prosperity and epochs of, more or less violent, revolution or criticism. When in 1859 Charles Darwin (1809–1882) published On the Origin of Species the Biblical myth of man’s creation was attacked by the hypothesis of transformism or evolution of life. But can evolution be applied to society? That was the argument of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) who interpreted Darwinism in key of Social Darwinism, ergo extending the theory from biology to society and ethics. Based on the assumption that the laws of evolution involve an increase in happiness, it follows that our environment tends to move towards perfection: “Nature in its infinite complexity is ever-growing to a new development. It would be strange if, in this universal mutation, man alone were unchangeable, and it is not true” (qtd. Bury 193). Evil, imperfection, and deficiency all depend on the non-adaptation of the social organism to its environment; ignorance, and prejudice are the roots of injury rather than innate disabilities. Hence, as man learns to dominate nature, to mold society, fallacy tends to disappear. Indeed, the growth of universal human reason is what the historian J.B. Bury in his book The Idea of Progress (2010) called the ‘Theory of Perfectibility.’ On the whole, the post-Enlightenment utopian belief that behind the survival of the fittest there is a necessary move toward the greatest harmony: “The ultimate development of ideal man is logically certain-as certain as any conclusion in which we place the most implicit faith; for instance, that we all must die” (ibid.). As scientists greatly improved their ability to understand nature’s power, they also believed that within a few years they would be able to describe the universe with irrefutable precision. The methods of modern science would have unlocked the mystery of nature reducing it to a set of underlying rational structures. For some, the spread of material prosperity in the industrialized West is the sign that a golden age has come. For others, the doctrine of perfectibility has encountered obvious difficulties due to the fact that the progressive movement toward harmony cannot reconcile with the violence of history. Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844–1900) nihilism and sense of disaster are well known, the West is not progress but decadence. Before him, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1712–1778) view is somewhat darker: as we moved from a primitive state to more complex societies we lose in terms of happiness and morality. Inequality was introduced the moment someone enclosed a piece of land and declared it his, greed and envy were invented the moment the others believed it true. Civilization, thus modernity, had deprived man of his original freedom while enlarging the Pandora’s box of possibilities, “our souls are corrupted as our sciences and arts advance to perfection” (qtd. Bury 103). Yet dissoluteness is not a product of modernity but the heritage of being humans: “the evils due to our vain curiosity are as old as the world” (ibid.). Karl Marx (1970) converted the utopian thinking of the Enlightenment into a materialistic science with political force. The engine of history is the struggle between classes, and the struggle has in the universal commodification between objects and labour power the last step before the collapse of the world-capitalist system. Modernity is fated to melt its creations in a perpetual wave of desire and revolution for “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober sense the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men” (Communist Manifesto, 35). Powerful visual images fill the apocalyptical visions of the 20th century. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) foresaw the loss of the aura of the work of art. In the age of mechanical reproduction, coupling with the invention of photography and films, art loses authenticity and uniqueness while the artist becomes a tool for political aims. If the essential value of art is jeopardized, it is Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) to bring to life the maelstrom of ambiguities that affects the aesthetics of modernity. What is art? What us the role of the artist? Can we make art out of a non-art? Under the new condition of production art as well becomes commodity exchange, not displayed because it is art, but becomes art because it is displayed. With aesthetic anarchism at hand, Paul Feyerabend comes back to mind: Anything goes.

Georg Simmel (1950) more coldly theorized an impersonal, blasé society, where punctuality, calculability, exactness replace instinct, impulses which otherwise were human traits required by pre-modern communities. The sociological conflict between the ‘hypertrophy of the objective culture’ versus the ‘atrophy of subjective culture’ is the postmodern condition of modernity: the systematic, hyper-technological society we have created changes faster than our incapacity for comprehension. As the 20th century opens, the struggle modern man is called to face is against the indifferent metropolis, the fear of anonymity, the inevitable process of homogenization that turns the individual into a faceless crowd: “The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life” (409). Being unique then, becomes the modern battle against a cultural realm that tends toward alienation. Further, the burden of freedom, the effects of overstimulation, and the growing importance of monetary value sounded as a warning also in Max Weber (2005–1920) who predicted how the spirit of capitalism was bound to destroy its Protestant foundational ethic since materialism corrupted the original asceticism of the fathers. The technical and economic condition of production defines people’s lives so that external goods, mundane passions become dominant to the extent to imprison humans into the unbreakable imaginary of an iron cage. “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved” (124). The iron cage shapes a dehumanized society with one set of rules and laws we must adhere to. Consequently, individuality is infected by an invisible process of depersonalization, autonomy is affected by a bureaucratic instrumental structure. Somewhere along the line, Theodor W. Adorno & Horkheimer (1972) write another epitaph for the project of the Enlightenment arguing that the logic behind the Enlightenment rationality is in fact a deceiving process of domination where the culture industry, the realm of entertainment industry, creates standardized goods so to elicit the same response from everyone. By having the same expectations, control, dependency, and mental atrophy are achieved. By creating a correct reaction, the masses, are reduced at last into passivity, and the individual is belittled to the level of abstraction: “The individual is an illusion not merely because of the standardization of the means of production. He is tolerated only so long as his complete identification with the generality is unquestioned” (18).

A parallel line of debate is whether progress depends entirely on human will. René Descartes (1596–1650), with the axioms of the supremacy of reason and the immutability of the laws of nature, had God replaced by science, the reign of Providence overthrown by the reign of science. Ernest Renan in The Future of Science (1849) in the best tradition of the 19th century Positivism offers a declaration of faith in science “because the true world which science reveals to us is much superior to the fantastic world created by the imagination” (qtd. Roland N. Stromberg 26). Indeed, it was the scientific method to reveal not simply the intellectual mistake of a closed universe, but an infinity impossible to glimpse even with our imagination. However, with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) the dialectic necessity to refer to an external Will brings the idea of progress to lapse back into the notion of Providence, in Hegelian terms a ‘cunning of reason.’ Seemingly, History is driven by outstanding human beings such as Socrates, Cesar, and Napoleon ‘a world soul on horseback,’ and they mold history according to their interests and whims. However, History is a telos with some unknown purpose or design (historicism). Thus, Socrates, Cesar, and Napoleon become historical-providential tools used by the Spirit to move toward the realization of progress, reason, and human freedom. They never act in their own interest alone but always in the general interest of history’s all-encompassing trend. In this vein, progress, from being a mere social dynamic, becomes part of the very nature of things: the ‘Absolute.’ A century later, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and Albert Camus (1913–1960) with their atheist humanism by rejecting the role of Providence restored man in the centre of the universe even if without an infinite plan. Life, events do not occur because of any logical or historical necessity but out of free will. We exist before our essence, thus stressing the beauty and yet the heaviness of the human condition, the burden of loneliness which is altogether freedom and duty of universal responsibility.

The second half of the 20th century looked back. After Auschwitz and Hiroshima cheering progress is a matter of bad taste. Not for the first time to look forward is to walk backward, and like Jeremiah crying “Cursed be the man who has faith in man,” Western masses fell back upon the ruins of their own hubris. In Max Horkheimer’s evaluation (2002) “man has lost his power to conceive a world different from that in which he lives” (278). But if we cannot move forward then it is the end of history. For the political theorist Francis Fukuyama (1952) the end of history arrives in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The collapse of Soviet-style Communism is the culmination of the historical process which has in Western liberal democracies and market capitalism the final form of human history. The prophecy was not correct. Freedom of conscience, political competition, rule of law are far from being embraced on a large scale meaning that more than an end of history, what we are facing is Martin Jacques’s (1945) definition of ‘contested modernity.’ For the first time since the industrial revolution, modernization is distinct from Westernization and it is provoking neither the Westernization of non-Western societies nor the coming-of-age of a universal civilization. Being modern, developed, civilized is no more a monopoly of the West, but an experience of competing modernities. Even though the Western package is flourishing in the midst of different civilizations, it would be naïve and somewhat parochial to assume that non-Westerners will become westernized by acquiring Western brands. Precisely, Samuel Huntington’s (1927–2008) insight is revealing:

The argument now that the spread of pop culture and consumer goods around the world represents the triumph of Western civilization trivializes Western culture. The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that non-Westerners may bite into the latter has no implications for their accepting the former (43)

In the view of the American political scientist, modernization and Westernization are then two distinct phenomena. But has history ended? History, in the age of globalization, the Magna Mac Huntington refers to, has in Jean Baudrillard’s (1997) analysis its vanishing point. To him, unlike Fukuyama and similar to Jean-François Lyotard’s (1924–1998) disbelief in metanarratives, the end of the cold war is not to be considered an ideological victory as it is the disappearance of utopian visions, the desegregation of great ideologies-illusions. In this sense, the end of history is the collapse of the historical progress:

The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. […] Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin (263). ¹

In Illusion of the End (1994), the French leading theorist of postmodernity, pinpoints the definition of ‘hyper-history,’ the complex nature of time, based on which society is backward rather than moving forward. Rather than approaching the end of history we are engaged in a process of historical obliteration, history has changed into an immense flashback. Indeed, Baudrillard concludes: “Deep down, one cannot even speak of the end of history here since history will not have time to catch up with its own end. Its effects are accelerating, but its meaning is slowing inexorably (…)” (4). The same gloomy intellectual atmosphere, the same nostalgic mode prevails in Fredric Jameson’s (1998) speculation. The end of history, in the postmodernity he dismantles, becomes a space wholly occupied by the market proliferation, and a time, the age of late capitalism (or the third stage of capitalism) ² where the market has reached its limits so that the Marxist prophecy of universal commodification is finally achieved. The ‘punishment’ for our incapacity to think historically, lies in “the failure of the new” (7). “The blockage of the historical imagination” (91), is, within the aesthetic production, the artist’s incapacity to create new styles, alternative combinations, innovative techniques, and contents. Consequently, the imprisonment in the past, forces postmodernism to reproduce rather than create. Similarly, in terms of economic expansion, the significant role played by late capitalism on the world stage, the collapse of Communism in East Europe, the threat of planetary ecological disaster make it difficult for this generation to imagine additional conquest, economic conquest, conquest of nature. The Promethean-Faustian civilization has reached the limits of its development. Being the new no longer new is another way to say that we live in a chronic condition of stasis. The pluralism of postmodernity has created a complex set of activities in which everything is in definition, but it changes in a static world, illustrated by Leonard Meyer (1967) as a “fluctuating and dynamic steady-state” (98). Essentially, while the past five-six centuries were characterized by Kuhnian paradigmatic changes, our epoch goes through a history suddenly no more hierarchically articulated into epochs, movements, and the likes. Equally, the evolution of visual arts has reached a cultural impasse in which alterations happen without cumulative development but a coexistence of styles:

Insofar as an active, conscious search for new techniques, new forms and materials, and new modes of sensibility (such as have marked our time) precludes the gradual accumulation of changes capable of producing a trend or a series of connected mutations, it tends to create a steady-state, though perhaps one that is both vigorous and variegated (102)

But an art that does not construct becomes an anti-art. The shocking aesthetic of modernism turned into a predictable artistic stasis that is as well the failure of our time to create convincing hierarchies of values. To darken the scenery some more, Jameson has to think that our lack of Faustian creativity comes with a second feature. That is our impotence to politically, socially, and economically delink from the systematicity of our world, as if we were all encaged in an Orwellian society no one can secede from. Considerably affine is the argument of the molecular biologist Gunther Stent (1969) who, following the discovery of the DNA, conjectures on the same dimension of exhaustion:

And here we can perceive an internal contradiction of progress. Progress depends on the exertion of Faustian Man, whose motivational mainspring is the idea of the will to power. But when progress has proceeded far enough to provide an ambiance of economic security for Everyman, the resulting social ethos works against the transmission of the will to power in child rearing, and hence aborts the development of Faustian Man (87)

Hence, Stent emphasizes that social evolution, as much as economic development, so much as art and science are self-limiting, and progress has stopped in its tracks. The arguments sound logical but not conform to reality. If man was a rational animal Jameson and Stent would be correct. The end of history might as well be the most valid interpretative key to decode our age. T.S. Eliot (2014–1965) put it beautifully: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” (Gerontion). But human beings do not act as Henry James’s (1811–1882) characters, always morally constant, attached to the ideal-type they represent; instead, humanity is molded on the carcass of the Underground Man. Morally inconstant, performing not always out of profit and personal interest, but independent whims, wanting, caprice, fancy, perhaps madness. We take risks larger than the possible advantages because “man is so partial to systems and abstract conclusions that he is ready intentionally to distort the truth, to turn blind eye and a deaf ear, only so to justify his logic” (Notes from Underground 21). Ergo, it seems to me Huntington’s theory on the clash of civilization is more convincing:

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. […]. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future (323)

History does not end then, nor does the Promethean need for knowledge. The revival of religious fundamentalism, la revanche de Dieu as Gilles Kepel labelled it, the return of Russia, the Sinicization of Asia, the alleged decline of the West, the possible conflict between forced interactions and the uncompromising cultural differences, this is the new path of history. And to identify the other so to coexist together is the new act of creation. Faust’s construction is unfinished, striving in the path of creation, being ceaselessly bent toward further realization, it is the essence of his existence. T. S. Eliot wrote in a passage “when a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once and for all and cannot be achieved again” (119). On the level of society, transcendence is replaced by consumerism, ‘God is dead’ and heaven lies in a supermarket. This fin-de-siècle pessimism is the postmodern challenge the West is called to fight back. Gunther Stent wants us to believe that as a result of artistic evolution, some no well specified cultural Darwinism, the artist has set himself virtually free from any canons governing creative expressions. Consequently, the act of creation becomes a moment of random disorder incapable of adding meaningful statements. Dramatists of the absurd such as Beckett and Ionesco, Pop Music, experimental composers, the music of John Cage, Alain Robbe Grillet’s and James G. Ballard’s novels are some of the most quoted examples of exhaustion, anti-art, and anti-literature. However, it is useful to remember that from the 19th century’s perspective, Realism was already anti-aesthetic. It took half a century before people grew accustomed to the daily occurrences of common characters in Austen, or the repulsive truth in Zola, the melancholy shades of misery of the lowest classes in Balzac, and the dying surrounding of starving children in Dickens. So was Modernism for the 20th century, shocking, repulsive, dissonant, provocative before being established in the academy and becoming commercially successful. Jurgen Habermas (1929) should be our reference: the project of the Enlightenment has not failed, simply it has not been fulfilled yet. We move forward, together with postmodernity, outside modernity, beyond modernity however ignoring the destination. What we find might as well be undesirable, but it is still fascinating thinking about us having gone beyond modernity, the ultimate triumph of human reason.

Why did Zheng He not go eastwards?

While for the West belief in progress is an act of faith, so was not for China. Beyond the Himalayas, in the Far East, Montesquieu (2007) believed “there reigns still a spirit of servitude which has never left it; and in all the histories of that land, one cannot find trace of a single feature which marks out the free sprit” (XVII, 3). To Montesquieu, China was the very antithesis of an enlightened society, instead subject to despotism, ruled not by laws but customs and manners, ergo devoid of ethical content:

The authority of the prince is limitless, he combines both secular and ecclesiastical power…The welfare and the lives of his subjects are always at the disposition of the sovereign, exposed as they are to the caprice and the whims and the utterly unlimited will of the tyrant (124)

What was significant about China was not the illusion of stability fostered by the appearance of order, but its immobility, its moral paralysis due a politics of isolationism which, until the 19th century, believed the country to be the center of the globe. In reality, China suffered an endless number of imperial divisions, shaken by internal usurpers when not invaded by foreign ‘barbarians.’ Hence, due to endemic disorder and instability, China developed an anti-Faustian philosophy that realizes itself, not so much in the individual will to power, as in the accommodating gospel of Confucianism and Socialism where identities are grounded in class memberships, and civilization turns toward egalitarianism. Culturally and geographically produced by numerous ethnic groups and historically divergent lands, since the legendary Xia dynasty China had to deal with an endemic disorder, a melting of races, languages and cultures that had to be kept together for the sake of unity. The Tang Dynasty (7^th-10^th centuries) in the 7th century went to conquer a portion of Mongolia from the Turks adding within the borders Turks, Uighurs, Persians, Arabs, and Hindus. How to keep together Southern China and Inner Mongolia? How the Song Dynasty (960–1279) could cohabitate with Mongols? Stability is the key to decode Chinese essence. Chinese philosophy is an ethical system focusing on the need to achieve harmony between the ruler and the citizens. Social-political equilibrium is the goal of a civilization that projects itself into eternity. Law, in imperial China, was chiefly penal, it functioned vertically from the state to the individual, weighted on the side of the State. Within the broad view of Confucian philosophy, the imperial code aimed to preserve the social order based on hierarchical relationships rather than protect the individual who could otherwise be detained, arrested, presumed guilty until when proven innocent. Ergo, a son who struck his father could be decapitated, but a parent who beat his son to death would receive only 40 blows as punishment. Legal, moral, and political systems shaped a civilization concerned about enduring rather than developing and duration is often synonymous with repetition. The millenarian ancestral worship, the status of the family system, organized kinship and rituals, the dynastic political apparatus, the extremely complex bureaucratic area, the everlasting mandate of the Party members, are all attempts to maintain China as it is. The imperial examination was an example of this direction; it was not tested the ability to innovate from the side of the candidates, but their ability to memorize Confucian classics. By so doing China succeeded in establishing a static bureaucracy, where conservatism shaped the soul of a civilization. Here, the idea of progress depends, therefore, upon an assurance of permanence and stability that only the state could guarantee.

In the 15th century, China virtually ruled over the whole East Asia through a tributary system. Representative statement is from the historian William A. Callahan who refers to ancient China as “one civilization, many systems” (88). Different degrees of dependency but with one common thread: the acceptance of Chinese institutional superiority. With the formidable navy the Ming dynasty (2004) possessed, the other half of the world was within grasp. Surprisingly, China did not want it. It appears that from Chinese perspective, the ‘barbarian’ West had not appeal to China. Seemingly, the belief that the Chinese was superior to the other civilizations, as the ancient Greek and Roman did once, froze China in time. However, such an explanation, I must say commonly accepted, would be a serious historical misjudgment. The case of Zheng He provides a frame of reference.

One of the most suggestive questions when engaging with China is the reason for Chinese geographical unity, if not cultural, in light of its size. After the unification (6th century AD) China has been immune to fragmentation; heavily conquered by the Mongols in the 13th century, and Manchu in the 17th, but it has never broken up into separate states as otherwise happened in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Waves of invaders were actually absorbed by the Chinese society in which laws were manners and manners were principle of morality. The indivisible character of private and public matters made it virtually impossible for the conquerors to produce any change save the annihilation of the entire population. And because nothing could penetrate the teaching of millennia, the conquered changed the conquerors. The historian Mark Elvin (1973) introduces an additional element: “The Chinese must on the whole have managed to keep one step ahead of their neighbors in the relevant technical skills, military, economic and organizational” (20). Not just resilience then, but some sort of superiority. Consequently, outnumbered by Han Chinese and outshined by the superiority of their institutions, the invaders were absorbed into Chinese culture. When Marco Polo (1254–1324), a resident of Venice, visited China in the 13th century, the era of the Song, Europe was plunged into the high-middle age, the time of the Crusades. China was a reference in terms of productivity, farming, water transport system, and commercialization with an economic growth that Europe would have met some six centuries later. Hangzhou had roughly a population of one million making China the most urbanized society in Asia if not the whole world. Marco Polo was impressed: “It has 12 principal gates and at each of these gates are cities larger than Venice and Padua” (qtd. Levathes 26). Amazed by the size of China’s Grand Canal compared to the little canals in Venice, which was the best Europe could offer, the number of the ships, the capacity of the Yangzi River, Marco Polo commented so:

The multitude of vessels that invest this great river is so great that no one who should read or hear would believe it. The quantity of merchandise carried up and down is past all belief. In fact it is so big, that it seems to be a sea rather than a river (qtd. Ferguson 35)

Nanjing, in Ming China, was probably the largest city in the world; when in 1420 the Forbidden City was completed, Beijing arguably became the cultural center of the world’s most advanced civilization, by 15th century standard a metropolis with 700.000 inhabitants. Paris (200.000) and London (50.000) in comparison were little towns. As late as 1776 Adam Smith (2007) in Wealth of Nations refers to China as “one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in world” (105). China seemed to one of the leaders of the Enlightenment, Voltaire (1990), everything Europe was not: a country free of religious repression and political violence instead ruled by religious tolerance, meritocratic class of scholars, and an enlightened Platonian-like philosopher-monarch. Thus, he has to write in 1764: “One need not be obsessed with the merits of the Chinese, to recognize. . . that their empire is in truth the best that the world has ever seen” (qtd. Derk Bodde, 2005, 6). Voltaire admired the Empire’s longevity “the oldest of the entire world, the best governed doubtless because it was the longest lasting,” (903–4), because longevity seemed to suggest good governance. The German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1994), concluded that the Chinese were not simply great technicians but an example of morality and practical philosophy for they understood the art of government and human cultivation. Surely more advanced than Europe in understanding the precepts of civil life: “scarcely anyone offends another by the smallest word in common conversation. And they barely show evidence of hatred, wrath, or excitement” (46–47).

As China became progressively commercialized, an industrial revolution, that is production on large scale did not happen, but certainly China was the first to produce an industrious revolution. The British sinologist Joseph Needham’s (1900–1995) monumental work Science and Civilization in China (1954) is a celebration of Chinese achievements. While the text is open to attack on many fronts, from his Marxist premises to his equation of science and technology, it remains “perhaps the greatest single act of historical synthesis and intercultural communication ever attempted by one man” (qtd. Finlay 265). ³ Needham gives evidence of the Chinese industrious mind through the documentation of inventions that originated in China long before being introduced in the West. Besides the over-quoted, gunpowder, compass, paper and printing, acupuncture is dated back to the Paleolithic period, silk was already in use in the fourth millennium BC, the first furnace for iron and steel smelting was not built in England but in China during the Zhou dynasty (1046 BC-256 BC). At the time of the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) mechanical clocks were in use to illustrate astronomical phenomena such as planetary movements and eclipses; wheelbarrows used to carry military weapons, injured and dead soldiers from the battlefield. Porcelain was perfected during the Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD) and then exported to the Middle East and Europe; the compass, already used for the practice of Geomancy as early as the Qin Dynasty (221 BC-207 BC), will change between the 9th to 11th century (Song Dynasty) into a tool for navigation. Meanwhile, the West, at the time of the Ming dynasty, must have appeared as a province of Asia. Europe was miserably ravaged by the Black Death (bubonic plague), typhus, and smallpox; North America was a misruled wilderness, the legendary empires of Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas about to be slaughtered by ruthless Spanish conquistadores. In the absence of deadly epidemics, violence was pervasive: France and England were permanently at war, the Dutch-Portuguese War in the 17th century was contemporary to the Netherlands-Spain conflict, the Anglo-Dutch War, the Anglo-Spanish War, and the English Civil War (1642–1651). Most importantly of all, the Reformation had brought down the unity of the Catholic world and produced one of the most ferocious clashes in European history. The 30 Years’ War (1618–1648) concluded with the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) which changed forever the cognitive map of Europe. When it was finally over a third of the population of central Europe was dead. ⁴ The economic historian Niall Ferguson put the concept into numbers:

European states, which were at war on average more than two-thirds of the time between 1550 and 1650. In all the years from 1500 to 1799, Spain was at war with foreign enemies 81% of the time, England 53% and France 52% (46)

Due to its endemic conflict no industry, no art, no science, and no society was ever possible, Thomas Hobbes (2011) with reason did not hesitate to describe Western man in his state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan, i. xiii. 9). But then history has its turning points. In the eighteenth-century European enthusiasm for China died away. The rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment owns much to the humanism of the Renaissance which had triggered the shift in religious thoughts (Protestant) and destroyed dogmatic certainties. But it had also prepared the ground for the Scientific Revolution. The technology that spread from it gave the West the lead. Newtonian laws of motion granted the West science for accurate artillery, the knowledge of ballistics, for instance the ability to calculate the trajectory of a projectile or the impact of air resistance. From Bacon (1561–1626) to Descartes (1596–1650), from Galileo (1564–1642) to Locke (1632–1704), the intellectual innovation that followed gave start not just to the industrial revolution but to modern human and natural sciences, all those academic disciplines -moral philosophy, economics, sociology, anthropology-that today still explain how we live. The universe was finally opened and modernity appeared. Even Voltaire, one of the panegyrists of China, had to accept that:

Their respect for their ancient masters prescribed for them certain boundaries beyond which they dared not pass…The Chinese, who have remained for two thousand years within the terms which they had first attained, have remained mediocre in the sciences (231)

The question is why China failed to produce its industrial revolution when it was about to grasp it. Adam Smith, who never visited China, suggests an economic paradigm, as to say China neglected foreign commerce thus missed the advantages of international trade:

It seems, however, to have been long stationary. Marco Polo, who visited it more than five hundred years ago, describes its cultivation, industry, and populousness, almost in the same terms in which they are described by travellers in the present times (105)

My interest here is not on the advantages of foreign trade in terms of market expansion, the task would be out of my range of knowledge, but on the Chinese endemic condition of stationariness. The most famous sailor in Chinese history Zheng He (1371–1435) was a court eunuch whose loyalty to the Ming emperor Zhu Di, later known as Yongle (literally ‘lasting joy’), and his ability as a commander, earned him the emperor’s favours and the daring task to explore the ocean. On a stele erected in the harbor of Changle in Fujian, the emperor’s wish was clearly stated: “Go to their countries and confer presents on them, so as to transform them by displaying our power while treating distant peoples with kindness” (qtd. Dreyer 195). The description of Zheng He’s fleet, the Treasure Fleet, so called for the giant treasure carried inside, is impressive. Hundreds of vessels -some more than 400 feet long-five times larger than the Santa Maria (62 feet in length) the largest of the three ships used by Columbus in 1492 to cross the Atlantic Ocean in history’s most important voyage. Archaeological and physical evidence make Zheng He’s ships bigger than anything built by the West navy until WWI, surely the largest wooden sailing ships ever seen. Between 1405 and 1433, 80 years before Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and landed in East Africa, Zheng He sailed westwards to reach Malindi: seven epic voyages with written records took him from China to South East Asia, from the Indian Ocean to the East coast of Africa. ⁵ Officially, these journeys were made to dismiss rumours regarding the missing emperor, Yongle’s older brother Yunwen and legitimate heir, who allegedly escaped into voluntary exile the moment Yongle usurped the throne. In fact, the real motifs were others. The first expedition in 1405 AD involved a fleet with more than three hundred ships of various sizes, thousands of men, 302 military officers, 27,000 soldiers, 190 civil officials 180 of whom were medical doctors, and an affecting cargo of silk, ceremonial robes, and porcelain works. ⁶ The glory of the empire was monumental. The size of his expedition, the historian Edward Dreyer suggests, went far beyond the scope. ⁷ Niall Ferguson notes that before his final voyage with a fleet of 61 ships, the admiral Zhang He was ordered “to [carry] coloured silks … [and] buy hempsilk.” His officers were also instructed to “buy porcelain, iron cauldrons, gifts and ammunition, paper, oil, wax, etc.” (41). The historian Louise Levathes similarly writes:

Rather, the treasure ships were appointed for luxury. There were grand cabins for the imperial envoys, and the windowed halls and antechambers were festooned with balconies and railings. The ships’ holds were filled with expensive silks and porcelains for trade with foreign countries. The ships’ bodies were brightly carved and painted, their prows adorned with carved animal heads and glaring dragon eyes and their sterns with dragon and phoenix patterns or eagle and ball designs that symbolized auspiciousness. The bottoms of the vessels were whitewashed, and near the red waterline was a sun-and-moon frieze (59).

It seems evident that neither the Chinese emperor nor Zheng He, were concerned with developing international trade, as Smith would have advised three centuries later. They were going to assert Chinese presence in a display of power, wealth, and technological superiority. It was not progress what the Chinese man was hunting, but pride. Needham acknowledges that the reasons for the Ming voyages were “primary ceremonial” (489) as they were part of “a navy paying friendly visits to foreign ports” (514). The lack of imperialist motivation is marked by Edward Dreyer who clearly states that there was nothing in China resembling a Navy Department:

There was no vested interest to argue the case for sea power or for a blue water strategy, nor did China exercise what later naval theorists would call “control of the seas” even during the period of Zheng He’s voyages (170)

That is saying that Yongle was not Faust nor Zheng He was not an explorer. To consider Zheng He as a Columbus manqué is to ignore the Ming’s choice to sail westward. He did not want to discover new routes and this is why he did not go eastward. Instead, he was a diplomat, a politician thus he went always westward following existing trade routes already well known to the Chinese. The ambition was not military or political, which was the aim of Western conquest. ⁸ Involved there was no economic competition, which was the purpose of the European spice race in the age of exploration. Nor China was moved by religious fervor for at stake there was not a clash of civilizations. China was well satisfied with its lot, the benefit of the maritime expedition is not to be found in external advantages but endemic in the Chinese logic of dominance which was bringing distant states within the ambit of the Ming tributary system. The visual symbol is the Great Wall: after having reached satisfactory geographical limits, the Chinese emperors called a halt. Unlike the post-Westphalia order based on territorial expansion, Chinese hegemonic project has been placed on absorption, assimilation, acknowledgment of Chinese suzerainty, protection, and alliance. Rather plainly, that of the dragon throne with its neighbor states was a policy of non-interference in exchange for a mutual belief in Chinese cultural superiority. This is possibly the reason why the waves of invasions, which had plundered China since the 13th century, had not led to any substantial change in Chinese society. Montesquieu saw in the indivisible characteristics of Chinese laws, religion, manners, and customs the cause for the Sinicization of ‘the others.’ But this account would not explain Chinese stability while all the great empires of Europe failed to do so. What Montesquieu and Chinese detractors neglect to mention is that Chinese apparent immobility cannot be read in light of a nation-state. Due to its size and longevity, China is to be equaled to a civilization-state. In this light, it is not an immobile empire that we observe, but a lasting one. John K. Fairbank some 50 years ago had already prophetically read the socio-political dynamics of East Asian countries: “If its belief in Chinese superiority persists, it seems likely that the country will seek its future role by looking closely at its own history” (62). Ergo Zheng He cannot be put on pair with Vasco da Gama, Matteo Ricci or even Marco Polo. He was not a missionary, his burning flame was not greed nor ambition, not military power nor curiosity, but the pure expression of Chinese design of governance. The fact that the expeditions were not repeated is perhaps the most convincing proof that Zheng He’s mission, to a larger degree the Ming dynasty’s purpose, was neither colonial nor exploratory but somewhat Confucian. “Indulgent treatment of men from a distance” (Source Book in Chinese Philosophy 409) while spreading the prestige and authority of the Chinese empire outside the empire. As the emperor Yongle died, the records of Zheng He’s journeys were destroyed, the maritime expeditions were banned, banned the construction of seagoing ships, banned private trade abroad, disobedient merchants and seamen were killed. As Smith later understood, Chinese isolation led to losing the advantages of Foreign Commerce, but the results were more dramatic in terms of historical consequences as China missed the main happenings of modernity, namely the discovery of America and the industrial revolution. The reasons behind a so drastic decision are disparate and topic for historians. Pierre Chaunu (1979) laments “the stark impossibility of knowing the reasons for the Chinese expansion or for the collective abandoning of the enterprise at the peak of success” (228).

The Ming empire had fiscal and political controversy, climatic changes brought various unforeseeable phenomena such as demographic drop, famine, epidemic, and perhaps internal rebellions. I suggest that we should move the attention to the very essence of Chinese philosophy: Confucianism.

Confucius belongs to an era of violent warfare, the Warring State Period (475–221 BC), a moment of Chinese history where fragmented states were at a constant war among them for some four hundred years until the establishment of the Qin Empire (221 BC). Harmony leads to stability, this is the binomial alliance to decode China. Confucianism is an ethics of moral order in worldly affair, a philosophy of social organization where a man who rectifies himself can rule his family, bring order to the State, and peace to the world. On one side, framing responsible relationships between the ruler and the citizens plays out as the main factor to ensure political solidity, on the other side recognizing filial piety, loyalty to the family and for extension to the State, would meanwhile consolidate the social net of the whole society. More ascetic and surely more detached, Daoism is a reaction to Confucian worldliness: mysticism replaces the net of social relationships, individual life, and transcendental spirit overtakes the sage’s emphasis on the right government. In reaction to the violence of the Warring State Period, Daoism understands life as ‘wu-wei’ literally non-action, inactivity. By following Nature, which is not to take actions contrary to the course of Nature, man’s nature is fulfilled. If we adjust the spell from philosophy to sociology, Daoism represented the ideological justification for a socio-economic conservative system. Indeed, in historical terms, the transition from a dynasty to another one, or from an ideology, such as Confucianism, to another one, such as Communism, meant the preservation of the system. Of course, emphasis on harmony inhibited discovery. On the domestic ground, China did not believe in putting one province against the other for it would have led to instability rather than cultural-economic development. On the contrary, Europe found within competition the key to success. On the international stage, Confucius strongly opposed China’s entering into trade relations with foreign countries grounded on the belief that dealing with foreigners held only hazard for China. Trading items with other countries would be an admission of weakness, a subtle implication that somewhere China is insufficient, thus a loss of prestige. Back in the 15th century, loyal to Confucian distrust of trade and prosperity, China abandoned shipbuilding, beginning de facto the long season of isolationism. “The Confucian ethic […] with its emphasis on the literati class rather than the merchants, that the knowledge was not passed on or released (such as maps) to other navigators who might have continued the scope of overseas adventures” (Barbara B. Peterson, 1994).

In addition to this, there is a second aspect that brought the disappearance of the Treasure Fleet. Arguably more practical and less philosophical, essentially the empire was more concerned about defending the vast land of China, ergo the building of the Great Wall, than exploring new lands. The failure of military expeditions against the Mongols in the North and the growing pressure of campaigning against the Mongols might have forced the Ming dynasty to increase attention and expenditure on the northern border rather than on the seas. If we consider Europe less ready penetrable to foreign invasion than China, then better geographical security might have been a reason for European desire to expand elsewhere and Chinese reticence. However, I would discuss the argument more in Faustian terms and less in geographical. The fall of Constantinople (1453) did not prevent European states to find alternative routes. Two centuries later, when the Ottoman army was advancing into Eastern Europe to finally arrive at the gates of Wien in 1683, as it had already done in 1529, no European monarch suspended the maritime explorations for the sake of a threatening enemy. Robert Finlay reminds us that “while Columbus eventually won a sponsor among Europe’s rival monarchs for his voyage of discovery, Zheng He was summoned home from his exploration by commands from a monolithic empire” (298). It did not occur to the Ming that links to other lands, however unknown, might act as alternative source of power, and that was not for lack of forethought. Surely, they well knew that communication and trade were not a crime. The answer is to be found in the soul of a civilization where the maintenance of the present social order, the conservation of the status quo, has always been of prime consideration. The anti-Faustian attitude is entangled with the Chinese intellectual isolationism and cultural xenophobia, the belief of a civilization far superior to the barbarian, the nomadic cultures outside the Wall, and the all of non-Chinese at large. After all, this is the meaning of the Earl Macartney Mission to the Chinese court in 1793. The first British delegation led by the experienced diplomat Lord George McCartney who, under the orders of King George III, sailed to China with the aim to impress the Chinese emperor Qianlong and consequently extending the Sino-British trade market. His cargo, containing the most advanced technology the West could offer back then, telescopes, clocks, glass lens, failed to win China’s hubris chiefly because the Macartney mission was not perceived (and indeed it was not) as a tribute delegation. During the 18th century, the Qing dynasty faced severe pressure from Western power to open new points of entry for foreign trade. The Qianlong emperor was not just unmoved but he also refused to meet the British delegation, which was early dismissed. Macartney was somewhat granted an audience but what he found instead of the emperor was an imperial edict, placed on the empty Dragon Throne, addressed to King George III and explaining that China required nothing from other countries:

Swaying the wide world, I have but one aim in view, namely, to maintain a perfect governance and to fulfill the duties of the State: strange and costly objects do not interest me. If I have commanded that the tribute offerings sent by you, O King, are to be accepted, this was solely in consideration for the spirit which prompted you to dispatch them from afar. Our dynasty's majestic virtue has penetrated unto every country under Heaven, and Kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures (331)

China’s failure to recognize the potentiality behind the early fruits of the industrial revolution has usually been attributed to over-confidence. Correct, but incomplete. Such an analysis would work for the fate of the Macartney mission and the Qing dynasty, but it would not be fitting for Zheng He and the Ming dynasty. It is plausible to recur to philosophy in order to explain history.

Concluding remarks

What I am suggesting here is not a history of virtues and vices but that we are facing two very specific socio-philosophical systems: Imperial Confucianism on one side and European Enlightenment on the other. Hence, the attempt to resist the progress of human knowledge was in Chinese perspective the attempt to preserve a civilization from the artificiality of modernity. Because of this historical inevitability, the fault line between Western and Chinese civilization is the different conceptualization of the idea of progress. Infinite discovery, infinite knowledge is the space occupied by the Western Fustian man. The devouring fire of progress, to be reached at all cost, brings down borders so to create a universal civilization with Western features. Throughout history that was the civilizing mission of Rome and the British Empire, but such was also the Spanish attempt to convert the Americas, the pseudo-redeeming mission of colonialism, the anti-Semitic ideology of the German Reich, and today’s American war on terror. China, on the other hand, from the very start has been diffident toward Western dynamism and Faustian limitlessness. Chinese stubborn attachment to its own customs and traditions discouraged from seeing that the world was moving forward. But to believe with Anthony Pagden (2013) that “the Chinese had made the mistake of supposing that there could be an end to human history, and that they were it” would not be correct (314). By theorizing on stability, statics or harmony depending on the side of the ambiguity we choose, before the changes coming from nature and man’s intelligence, China seems to have always been aware of the all-consuming doom threatening heritage and identity. One of the most important scholars of Chinese culture, Li Zehou (2010), observes that in five thousand years, Great Wall aside, China has not left behind physical evidence of human power. Because Daoism comes with an ontological contrast between the eternity of nature and the transience of men, China developed a specific attitude towards monuments which is a psychological disposition not to cling to physical objects. By Zehou’s account that is because “Chinese art lacks the artificial, material demonstration of human resistance to or conquest of nature” (96). Instead, what we have is nature’s self-revival, man’s submission to it and at last the promise of unity. ⁹ Therefore, if history is an elusive concept, the retreat into domestic borders was not a denial of the Enlightenment rationalism but a refusal of the rationalism the Faustian Man is representative of: self-realization through the Nietzschean will to power. Quite the contrary, Chinese self and sense of history is an anti-Faustian gospel of unity, a sense of belonging, a socialist call two millennia before Socialism was invented. As history moves on, nowdays China maintains the same sense of ambiguity toward the outside influence. Truly, the Open-Door Policy is more an economic phenomenon than it is a cultural intercourse. ¹⁰ Despite its ambiguities, we should look at the Chinese future with optimism, after all, Chinese postmodernity is not the end of modernity but the beginning of it.

In the end, the difference between Western and Chinese lines of reasoning is evident. We are not necessarily called to choose, nor the choice should be reduced to a dichotomy. Freedom might not be the ultimate goal of humanity, nor is equality. It would be intellectually obscene to arrange people into a single scheme, as it is narrowly totalitarian to set uniform goals for a ‘universal man.’ And it is surely a call for cultural racism to evaluate the achievements of a civilization based on the all-encompassing scheme drawn elsewhere. From a singular (particular) perspective, converging on the idea of progress is its situational nature. That is to say, progress is always a partial achievement. But if we observe it sub specie aeternitatis, then both Western and Chinese approaches point to the conclusion that humanity is a whole, that human history is a unity. And if history has to be a cumulative process, then progress’ ultimate goal must be the survival of the species.