Every now and then, I get a craving for a philosophical discussion as I do with a Big Mac or KFC meal. So I have been bingeing in the past few months on this excellent but well-hidden podcast called Ideas Matter run by Louis Devine and his best childhood friend Alex from Down Under.

The podcast

Devine recounted in his podcast a story about how Confucius once offered opposite advice to two different pupils. When asked, he explained that everyone was different and what was virtuous for one person might not be virtuous for another.

“[Confucianism] is, instead of being a sort of abstract one, a relational one. You’d have to pay much more close attention to the local specifics, the particulars of who you’re talking about and when and where,” he said.

“How does this cultivation of Confucian virtues scale out? Confucianism doesn’t take the individual as the basic social unit, yet the cultivation of these virtues happens on an individual level but it doesn’t seem like that would be the end.

“Where does it go from there, say from a public policy perspective? It’s not about encouraging individuals to do the right things which is what we do here in the West, it’s more about creating the environments where individuals can do the right thing.

“Again, what is good for a certain country to do cannot be abstractly determined. It has to be very sensitive to their history, their culture, their language, their current institutional setting. You can’t just come down on high and go, ‘Well you must become a liberal democracy’ … like wholesale [adoption].

“It’s not really that surprising because liberalism when you unpack it is really just bound up with a lot of ways of viewing the world that are quite odd if you’re not a Westerner.”

If you wonder how right Devine is, consider this singular passage from Thomas Friedman of The New York Times – a typical Western liberal commentator – who wrote it after the fall of the Soviet Union.

“Unfortunately, this Golden Straitjacket [of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism] is pretty much ‘one-size fits all’. It is not always pretty or gentle or comfortable. But it’s here and it’s the only model on the rack this historical season.”

And you wonder why many people around the world are not exactly enamoured of Western liberal democracy? If Friedrich Nietzsche were alive, he would no doubt call it liberalism’s will to power in the guise of spreading freedom. It’s the same with President Joe Biden’s binary distinction between democracy and authoritarianism; one reason it never gained traction.

So I asked Devine to unpack liberalism for me in this interview. His reply was most interesting.

The interview

“Let’s face it, there is a lot of liberal chauvinism – the idea that unless a state is liberal in some sense, then it’s insufficient and inferior. The reason liberals think that is the end of history, as it places at its centre human freedom,” he said.

“Human freedom is the end goal, but it is a particular type of freedom. It’s a freedom to pursue your own good in your way.

“That’s really what is known as negative freedom, that is simply an absence of external interference or control over an individual. As long as an individual has no interference and how they plan and order their life, then they can be considered free.

“That theory is insufficient. The major error it makes is that it conflates freedom and choice. It assumes that if individuals have a large range of choices, they are free.

“It doesn’t pay enough attention to how you actually create the conditions in which people can exercise their choice meaningfully. And I think that is an area in which Confucianism is superior.”

So is there Confucian theory of freedom?

“There is such a theory, and in some ways, it’s more desirable than the liberal theory,” he said.

“It doesn’t understand people as first and foremost isolated individuals but that they exist in a social context and having their identities constituted and defined by the social roles and relationships they hold in society.

“You are not free if you are free from these roles. It sees freedom as something first and foremost contextual. It focuses on cultivating people to obtain virtue.

“To sum up, in Confucianism, you cultivate virtue such as you can follow the Way or the Dao. You become virtuous and you learn to desire what is good and virtuous spontaneously.”

That’s very different from the traditional Western notion of rationality, which sets up a constant battle with your desire.

“A lot of Western philosophy sees freedom in a very rational sense,” he said, “This Platonic sense in which you want to attain mastery over your desire. So there is this constant struggle between your reason and your desire – to subdue your desire.”

By contrast, Confucianism is about disciplining yourself to achieve virtue so there isn’t this constant battle.

In light of his view, I conclude the interview by asking him a ridiculously broad and unfair question – to predict whether the future belongs to China or the West?

“I don’t think it belongs to either. But it’s obvious that Western hegemony is on the decline. People in the West can stop viewing the rise of China through such a scared lens. The future will belong to both civilisations and traditions. We can learn from each other. There is a lot that Chinese philosophy has to say.”