Rooted Cosmopolitanism

Reality, Necessity, and Helpful Ways from Confucianism, Buddhism to All Humanity

The Earth is our Home, there will be no other.

Xunzi  (298-238 b. c. e) is not a terribly popular Confucian philosopher. Often contrasted with Menzi (Mencius), also a scholar of the Han dynastic period, Xunzi’s unabashedly grim view of the original nature of humanity, coupled with his supposed influence on the radically authoritarian Chin dynasty have not made for his legacy being feted through the centuries. Only relatively recently is his brand of realistic Confucian thought being positively reappraised in China and among Confucians worldwide.

A cursory inspection of one of his key ideas may reveal a prescience that is a pre-scientific awareness of the relationship between the world and humanity, scarcely evidenced elsewhere in ancient thought.

Briefly -

Xunzi observes that the cycles of nature, the observable patterns of the physical universe (which in keeping with his intellectual context he designates as being the activities of Heaven) do not take account of the form of the people’s government (as in, they do not respond directly to the morality or justice of the political setup). They do however very much respond to the concrete effects of the actions and products of the people.  Therefore for the benefit of life, the activities of the people must be in sympathy with nature, or at least be founded on awareness of this brute fact. In other words, planning – even central planning – is highly recommended.

In 2024 of course, in terms of our understanding of this relationship, we can go further (though, interestingly, not as much as would overly surprise one such as Xunzi)

The entire biomass of Earth’s surface is inextricably connected and any part of it contains the effects of its interdependency with the whole. Apart from the Earth, the solar system is populated by lifeless rocks and gaseous spheres. Venus, coincidentally, may once have had an atmosphere like Earth’s. Now it is about as close to a hellscape as anything observable in nature. Even if it were possible for a biological, carbon based entity such as a human being to travel the incredible distance between the Earth and another potentially life supporting planet (which is so far beyond possibility it is simply fiction),  what would arrive there would have the entire history of life on Earth encoded within it. If we destroy the possibility for life on Earth, we're not going to be able to escape anywhere else in any sustainable state.

Any development, political, social, cultural etc is of necessity in the context of such biological inextricability as a primordial tie. Like all such ties, however, this can either be enabling or negatively limiting.

The modern Confucian philosopher Tu Weiming has developed a concept of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’. This appears to me to be the only honest, authentic attitude to be aspired to by modern, post-information age people. This does not entail the abandonment of tradition, only it takes tradition as the actual cultural conditions right now, which would include what is often derided as cosmopolitanism. What is often presented as ‘traditional’ by contrast is an abstract- sometimes stereotypical simulacrum. For instance, my actual cultural conditions are that I grew up in an anglophone population in a city in western Europe at the end of the 20^th century, where among other things we wore denim, consumed Hollywood movies and American and British pop music. For me to pretend my profoundest early experiences, and to put it in Weiming’s terms, my primordial ties are anything different would be inauthentic, and just plain lies.

Rooted cosmopolitanism understands us (all) to be rooted already in the ‘primordial ties' of family, society, culture etc. They are givens; the conditions of our emergence as people. But it recognises our outward orientation from these ‘enabling constraints’ in ever-increasingly wide circles of reciprocal relationship.

Briefly:

I serve my family by being a good member of the society, I serve my society by looking towards it’s position in the international situation, I serve humanity by recognising it’s dependency on other life, I serve life by recognising it’s dependency on Earth, on nature. Only by becoming a good citizen, can I do my family justice, only by transcending nationalism can I be truly patriotic, only by transcending humano-centrism can I be a good human, only by transcending the view of sentient life can I really take care of life.

Ultimately the view leads to an embrace of existence itself, what Tu calls “anthropocosmism”.

The world today is in a state of tremendous turbulence.

Here is where these Buddhist teachings may help us all with dealing effectively with the upswell of anxiety in these times of huge social and international change and disruption. The ‘misconception’ component of human suffering includes a fundamental (as in, we have it deep in our ‘nature’, it being provisionally necessary and an expedient evolutionary trait) ignorance. The ignorance is not clearly ‘seeing’ that we are not actually separate from the world;

there is no real ontological duality between our body/mind complex and it’s environment. That is to say, what we see, what we sense, what we desire, what we fear – all of it – is not actually another ‘being’ from us. The way we think which structures the world, including through our language, into subjective and objective fields and components, which arranges our perceptions into discrete objects and supposes ourselves as independent subjects is, even on a very surface level, leaky and incoherent if pursued too far.

The world which includes ‘ourselves’ is a flux of perpetual change. Not random by any means, but with patterns, regularities and dynamics so intricate and complicated, so interrelated , interdependent, and interpenetrating, that we could never, given a hundred million years of life, understand their great ‘weave’ in the way we understand most immediate and relative things in our experience.

Even the scientific process begins with a (necessary) assumption of the duality of subject and object, observer and observed, matter and function, particular and universal, all of which in the reality of the reality of existence are abstractions from experience. Experience of reality which is ultimately non-dual.

This may sound like a hopeless situation. I’m supposed to be bringing concepts to help with anxiety and fear, aren’t I? And here I’m saying that it’s so incredibly complicated that we can never get a handle on it!

But here is the basis for liberation;

What it means is that all our views, all our assumptions, with all the immense significance we put into the appearances of our life experiences, all the narratives and movements and thus all the fears and pains (yes, even physical pain is monumentally exacerbated by misconception of the fluid, essenceless, and thus dreamlike nature of reality)  are empty of all but the most immediate and relative significance we put into them. They are empty of any real, substantial subjective OR objective basis.

It doesn’t mean reality doesn’t exist. It means that what reality is, from which we are inextricable, is prior to all our differentiating perceptions and assumptions, prior to all the beliefs in our selves as independent subjects with independent individual essences, prior to all the narratives of clashes and histories of conflict and enmity, and litanies of fears and grievances.

In fact, reality (and if you want to say it this way, it is correct) and our true being, true ‘self’ is unaffected by the upheavals and uncertainties of change. We ARE the flux. At our deepest base, we are the great unfolding and changing dialectic of universal existence. In fact, more than that; we are the eternal and changeless that appears as the dynamic flux. Reality is this flux. We are reality. When we are aware of reality, it is Reality that becomes aware of Itself. And since itself this wonderful appearance/continuum of the creative change of relative things, in itself it is changeless. That we are.

At root, there is nothing to fear. That is my understanding of the teaching which I hope will be of some help to you!