Heaven Has No Smell Or Sight, But It Can Still Be Read
In an online class I’m taking, China’s Political and Intellectual Foundations: From Sage Kings to Confucius, we’re learning about how the first dynasties legitimised their rule and what they viewed as the purpose of government. Because government was a new concept, they had to sell people on it.
Our naievete in attributing the problems that afflict us all on the actions of individual jerks, rather than powerful guilds of jerks, allows the putrefaction of government to continue.
It’s especially interesting, as government has gotten such a bad rap for so many years now, while at the same time, we’ve each of us been told we’re a super man, so to speak. So, if there is a problem, blame the person for making a bad choice. Free will!
That this attitude persists, when government decisions like banning smoking from pubs have led to such obvious success, shows how subversive and unrelenting the anti-government/pro-corporation propaganda is. Even with something so mundane as littering, liberal minded people will say, “I don’t blame the makers of that bag of cheetos. I blame the person for having no manners!”
Our naievete in attributing the problems that afflict us all on the actions of individual jerks, rather than powerful guilds of jerks, allows the putrefaction of government to continue.
When I think back to high school, and how we had to read so many existentialist books, it seems that that was the beginning of the indoctrination. For me, anyway. I really was full of crap for so many years, as my friend Beth may remember.
Obsession with our motley assortment of individual rights, where the government is the only enemy as only it can take them away, has made us neglect the health of society as a whole, and the individual rights that a healthy society bestow on us: clean air, access to nature, the ability to do a job you want to do, rather than that you have to do
But, I never understood why people who are against big government are invariably OK with big corporations. There is no logic in trusting one big human organism over another, just because one is called a corporation and one is called a government.
Anyway, learning about the Xia’s creation of government in 2200 BC, so that people could live in order and harmony, made me nostalgic for a time I’ve never really experienced: when people knew how dangerous disharmony and disorder were.
Now, I’m not against free speech — although anyone who sees my FB posts may wish someone were against mine — but the obsession with our motley assortment of individual rights, where the government is the only enemy as only the government can take them away, has made us neglect the health of society as a whole, and the individual rights that a healthy society bestow on us. For example: clean air, access to nature, the ability to do a job you want to do, rather than that you have to do.
The commonality in all these rights, which we’ve lost, is that corporations are the enemy; like a seaside resort magician, they distracted us with their perverted salesmanship of “individual freedoms”, then reached into our pockets and stole all we valued.
What is disheartening is that once you know you’ve been made a fool of, it is very hard to admit it. For most, it means a loss of status, and that is never a good thing. Many people probably will blind themselves to the truth, so as to protect their ego.
Anyway, my original point in writing this was to relay how the Zhou chose to legitimise their takeover from the Shang.
Heaven has no smell or sight, but it can still be read.
The Shang had legitimised their rule through their proficiency at the divination system. (It reminds me a bit of the Catholic church’s hold on power through keeping the bible in Latin, so they’d more literally be the only means a local non-Latin speaking population could communicate with God.)
But, the Zhou couldn’t just throw over both the Shang and their society’s whole belief system. That would lead to chaos and chaos is impossible to govern. Slotting themselves into the system, or rather, at the head of the system, was necessary.
To do that, they had to find a way to discredit the Shang’s divine authority, and then promote their own. They needed to convince people that the gods had taken away the Shang’s ability to divine.
And here is where they were able to make use of the new technology of writing, which till then had been used only for divination: by taking it from its restricted religious usage and applying it to the equally new field of persuasion, they could show that not only did the gods favour them, by their mastery over this technology, but that their rule would also favour the people themselves:
The Zhou wrote that heaven has no smell or sight, but that it can still be read: not through oracle bones, but through the ears and eyes of the populace. If the commoners were not happy with their rule and things went awry, that would be heaven showing the Zhou their mandate was over. Just as it had shown the Shang.
By offering this huge benefit to the populace — that their well-being was the very reason for the Zhou’s existence — they made a change in rule an easy sell. Everyone benefited.
To me, this is such a beautiful thought. Would that we could all adopt it now, in this time of pollution and pandemic. Heaven is showing us that the mandate of the current administrations are over. But, can we still read?
