A History of the World (17 page)

Why were rites so important?

The answer, in one word, is family. Kongzi mentioned the deity very little and may have been agnostic himself. The sincere and proper performance of traditional rituals was a way of achieving self-control and of maintaining social order in a network of family and clan ties. In traditional China the well ordered family (in contrast to the Greek
polis
) was the fundamental unit. It was held together and got its sense of identity through rites for mourning the dead, celebrating festivals, remembering one’s forebears, conducting family meals, honouring local gods, and so on. When one state or clan destroyed another, the victors would try to eradicate the losers’ rites; by doing so they were wiping out their collective memory, traditions and identity. Rites were
what made you who you were; without rites, conducted seriously, you were nothing.

The bonds of extended families spread into the early Chinese mini-states, which functioned almost like well ordered, formal tribes. But in the good society, the bonds (marked and policed by rites) also went further than blood-kinship. The bonds between landowner and peasant, buyer and seller, ruler and ruled, subsidiary state and greater kingdom, spread out beyond the family but were covered by similar traditional acts of ritual. However, in Kongzi’s time this ancient way of being (of knowing who you were, and what your life should be) was being challenged and overthrown by an alternative – the state. It is still too early to talk of an absolutist or totalitarian state, but these rising Chinese states demanded obedience and ruled by fear, through a bureaucracy which had nothing to do with family. It is not ridiculous to detect here faint echoes of the impact of Communist or Fascist states’ hostility to family ties.

In Kongzi’s ideal world, just as the good father exercised authority with kindness, so the good ruler had to be merciful. In the
Analects
we read: ‘The Master said, Govern the people by regulations, keep order amongst them by chastisements, and they will flee from you, and lose all self-respect. Govern them by moral force, keep order among them by ritual, and they will keep their self respect and come to you of their own accord.’
²⁶
Ren
, which means something like ‘virtue’, led to the ‘way’ or
dao
, which can be compared to the Bible’s ‘path of righteousness’. Ritual means treating everyone with respect, and Kongzi’s version of ‘the golden rule’ sounds very much like Christ’s: ‘Deal with the common people as though you were officiating at an important sacrifice. Do not do to others what you would not like done to yourself.’

If this is a conservative or even a reactionary message, as is often said, then Kongzi’s conservatism is a kindly alternative to violent and abusive power; it is the conservatism of a Shakespeare who thinks the world is better when kings behave like kings, fathers are just, and so on. In China, ritual also allows the individual to control himself, even master himself. In one passage in the
Analects
, a follower who has been reminded about the importance of ritual quotes back at Kongzi a poem:

The writer Karen Armstrong elaborates: a gentleman ‘was not born but crafted. He had to work on himself in the same way as a sculptor shaped a rough stone and made it a thing of beauty.’
²⁷
This shows that ‘correct ritual’, which can seem an eerie and meaningless echo of an ancient civilization, is not so different from meditation, prayer or any programme of rigorous self-improvement. It is about mastery and order of the self and of society.

These seemed an urgent matter in Kongzi’s China of warring states, increasing luxury and disorder, where even Lu was disrupted by usurpers, leaving the rightful duke broke and powerless. On the borders, barbarians were waiting. In China itself, a much worse civil war was brewing, which would bring horrors then undreamt-of. Later Chinese thinkers would develop alternative readings. Monzi, for instance, thought Confucian thinking was elitist and argued for a less elaborate, stripped-down system of social justice. But just as Siddhartha was provoked by the turbulence of northern India, and the Jewish prophets were stirred by the experience of war and exile, without the violence and the feuding Kongzi would never have been driven to become a teacher.

The rival state of Qi was worried that, schooled by Kongzi, his master the Duke of Lu was becoming too successful and might invade. So Qi’s ruler sent the duke presents and concubines to corrupt him, and according to legend it worked. The duke revelled in his luxury and failed to perform the proper rites. Furious, Kongzi decided to find a better master to serve. He can be made to sound a rather forbidding character. Whereas the Buddha was turned into a moon-faced, gilded god figure encrusted in scripture, Kongzi would be elevated into an intimidating-looking, court-costumed old wizard with a sinister beard.

But he can hardly be blamed for that. Nor can the real Kongzi be held accountable for the rigidly imposed and humourless doctrine of imperial Confucianism that developed later, and which ruled by outlawing any deviation from tradition, however minor. Kongzi was exalted first into a cult figure and then into a state religion, to be worshipped as a god. But great thinkers are often fated to be known only
in translation. We know Christ only through his disciples. To use the Christian parallel again is not entirely outlandish, either: in Kongzi’s temples other philosophers who picked up his thinking and tested it are arrayed as four evangelists, while the next tier of Confucian thinkers are lined up as twelve apostles. Though the West has nobody quite like Kongzi – a conservative moralist regarded as worthy of worship, yet not quite the founder of a religion – it takes only a little effort to make him seem familiar.

It is noticeable that the worst excesses in Chinese history, the great repressions and slaughters, have come from the anti-Confucian side. They came from the lineage- and clan-crushing Chinese emperors who used terror and savage punishments to build their states, right down to Mao Zedong, whose Communist revolution in the mid-twentieth century attempted to tear up and destroy the powerful and still-persisting Chinese tradition of the family. Confucian sayings were hacked off the walls of villages where they had guided and comforted peasants for centuries. Mao understood that if people no longer knew, never mind honoured, their ancestors – if their identity was stripped away – they would be softer putty in the hands of the state. In his own day, Kongzi understood the wickedness as well as the futility of this.

In life, Kongzi never found his ideal state. He tramped the lanes and roads of ancient China, gathering followers who repeated his stories and arguments, and picking up odd pieces of work but never landing another court position. By the time he died, he good-humouredly regarded himself as a somewhat laughable failure. The
Analects
and other reminiscences paint a vivid picture of Kongzi as a man ready to mock himself, who loved food (but could manage with plain fare) and was proud of his ability to hold his drink. Unlike the great Greek teacher Socrates, his conversations with his followers aimed to get at useful truths rather than to entangle them in their own logic, or display his own argumentative brilliance. Like Socrates, though, he was well served by those followers who spread his ideas across all of thinking, arguing and literate China, at just the time when civil war was forcing men to debate exactly what a good society meant, and how to get it.

Dying Well

Socrates, too, could hold his drink, especially his last drink.

The greatest tragic scene in the story of democracy was written not by a playwright but by a philosopher – though Plato, the pupil of ugly, snub-nosed, infuriating and yet somehow lovable Socrates, had had ambitions to write for the stage. Plato’s account of his master’s death remains awe-inspiring. Socrates had been found guilty, quite narrowly, on charges of corrupting the youth of Athens and failing to respect her gods. Most historians regard them as trumped-up charges and the trial as unfair, even hysterical. It is unclear exactly what ‘corrupting’ meant, except that Socrates was a disdainful enemy of democracy and would never keep his mouth shut. He was a famous figure who had been mocked by the city’s comic poets for years, and whose circle included some of the more sinister aristocrats of the age.

When found guilty, Socrates gently derided the court over the question of his penalty, and this may have encouraged them to sentence him to death rather than exile. But once sentenced, he refused to scurry off and escape, as he could easily have done. The Athenians may have expected him to make it easier for everyone by doing exactly that, but Socrates felt it would expose him to ridicule. He accepted the verdict, telling the court that it was time to be going, ‘I to die and you to live; but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God.’

His followers were with him in prison on the day appointed for the execution, which was to be effected by his taking a drink containing an infusion of hemlock. Hemlock, modern biologists tell us, paralyses the muscle system and eventually causes death by asphyxiation, which cannot be pleasant. Socrates had a bath, said goodbye to his wife and three sons, before sending them away (because he did not want any hysterical grief ). He teased one grieving follower, Crito, for being upset at the thought of burying him – what would be buried, he explained, would not be Socrates, just a body. Socrates was some kind of agnostic. He did not know whether death was the end, oblivion, or whether it was a transition to another world, the Hades of the Greek imagination, peopled with spirits of the dead. But if it was oblivion, there was nothing to be frightened of, since he would not know. If
it was Hades, he said, he would meet some old heroes and talk to them.

It was the day appointed for the execution. Sunset approached, and the jailer arrived to tell him the time had come. Socrates found this man, who was also grieving, to be ‘charming’, and ordered the poison to be brought. Crito pointed out that the sun was still visible on the hills: Socrates could wait a while longer, as so many others had, and enjoy some more life with his friends. Socrates declined. Again, it would make him seem ridiculous in his own eyes. The jailer returned with the poison. Socrates asked whether he could spill some as an offering to the gods to help him on his journey. No, said the man, there was just enough to kill him.

In his
Phaedo
, Plato says Socrates then raised the cup to his lips and ‘quite readily and cheerfully he drank off the poison. And hitherto most of us had been able to control our sorrow; but now when we saw him drinking, and saw too that he had finished the draught, we could no longer forbear, and in spite of myself my own tears were flowing fast.’ Socrates had asked the jailer what would happen, and he had been told to walk around until his legs felt heavy, then to lie down. Socrates did so, and

His final words to Crito were to tell him to sacrifice a cock to the god of healing – for he saw death as a kind of healing – and then he covered his face, fell silent and died.

How should we read this story? The background is, yet again, war. After the heroic defeats of the Persian armies by Athens and Sparta working together, Athens had grown swollen with power. It took a long time, twenty years or so, to mop up the Persian forces still holding Greek towns in Asia. The Athenians had formed an alliance, the Delian League, to help their navy complete the job. Lesser Greek
states contributed ships, and soon, because it was easier, money instead. They slid from being allies of Athens to being subjects of Athens. Athens went from defiant city-state to mini-empire. Her democratic institutions remained, but the old spirit of the city changed. Greater wealth and more incomers meant wider gaps between the classes as well as more citizens who were far removed from the farmer-soldiers of before. The sense of a single community waned.

Her old rival Sparta began to shift uneasily, and eventually, when Athenian power and ambition became too much for commercial rivals such as Corinth, the Greek world went to war with itself. Sparta and her allies dominated the fighting on land; Athens ruled the waves. Year after year, the Spartans would invade and the Athenians would simply retreat behind their awesome long walls, which connected the city to its port in a bone-shaped defensive structure which allowed them to bring in plenty of food by sea, sitting out the besiegers. Peace treaties were agreed, and lapsed, during a long and murderous stalemate. Then Athens made a huge mistake. Egged on by a glamorous soldier, Alcibiades, her people agreed to attack Syracuse, in what is now Sicily, a rich ally of Sparta’s ally Corinth. Greed was part of it, since the capture of Sicily and even eventually Italy would have made Athens so strong she could have hoped to dominate all Greece.

But the attacks proved disastrous. The people of Syracuse, aided by Spartans, beat back two Athenian fleets and trounced the Athenians on land until the once dominant state was virtually bankrupt. The war went on for long enough, even after that. The Spartans made deals with the old common enemy Persia, as a result of which many of the Greek Ionian states, freed during the old wars, went back to the Persians. And after a naval battle in which Athens lost her main source of food and could easily have been starved into submission, Sparta finally won. The walls of Athens were torn down and she became subject to Spartan control. The golden age had sunk, bloodily, into the sea.