Confucius or Confusion?

Confucius by Wu Daozi (680-740)

Does wisdom come with age? It’s often said that the Chinese, for example, respect the elderly and revere age in a way that is foreign to Americans who treat age as a burden. The Buddhist cultures of countries like Thailand and Cambodia also venerate the dead in a way that is anathema to Western Culture for which “carpe diem” is the most popular shibboleth. Westerners live it up like there’s no tomorrow while if you go to a Buddhist temple in say Vietnam you will find cardboard boxes which once housed appliances being offered up on pyres, so that the dead will be taken care of in the afterlife. But all that being said, it’s hard to feel there's much to venerate in age. The brain declines and the calmness one may read into an aging face is not so much the result of an overarching wisdom, as a loss of brain cells. Any serenity you might detect is the result of resignation, or worse dementia. As Jaques says  As You Like It, “Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is Second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." If you turn to CNN, during those hours that attract an older demographic of retirees, you will find advertisements for daily Cialis which is prescribed for both ED and BPH (benign prostatic hyperplasia). The drug treats accidents and makes it possible to have an erection in a case one accidentally feel desire. It’s a hardly a celebration of anything. The same is true of using drugs that deal with aging appearance. If you take Botox and have the wrinkles and removed, the theory is you will feel and then act younger. However, the outside/in approach often has questionable results. How many women do you know who have had their faces done, their breasts lifted, their cellulite removed, vaginoplasties and rhinoplasties have seen a concomitant reformation of sensibility? Confucius or confusion? Medical science can achieve ever greater feats of longevity. But is the lust for life really such an admirable thing or is it just another form of gluttony? Certain people overstay their welcomes and other suffer with chronic diseases that are living deaths. Is the idea of prolonging a life to the point where a half sensate creature is a burden who uses up their own resources on medical care and taxes those of their children really such a great thing? One thing is certain, youth is too often wasted on the young.

Confucius Say

“Confucius say” was a favorite way that Charlie Chan would introduce his aphoristic solutions to crime. In an op-ed piece in The Times (“A Confucian Constitution For China,” NYT, 7/10/12), Jiang Qing who is identified as founder of the Yan-ming Confucian Academy and Daniel A. Bell who is editing his forthcoming book, A Confucian Constitutional Order: How China’s Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future offer the Charlie Chan approach to politics. Qing and Bell essentially suggest that the pressure on China to democratize is misguided. They argue that “the will of the majority may not be moral” and that “when there is a clash between the short-term interests of the populace and the long-term interests of mankind, as is the case with global warming, the people’s short-term interests become the political priority.” Surely these points about democracy are not limited to China and their  argument is in line with thinkers like the British philosopher Derek Parfit who tries to bridge the gap between Hume and Kant in his book On W hat Matters. Qing and Bell propose "a tricameral legislature" composed of a House of Exemplary Persons, a House of the Nation and a House of the People. The House of the Nation and the House of the People, sound a little like the Senate and the House of Representatives. The House of Exemplary Persons, which smacks of divine right, is where the problem lies. It’s nice to think that we could all agree on what is right, but when it relies on giving authority to any one religious group or order, no matter how benign that order might be, we are back to the very reasons why the founding fathers insisted on the separation of church and state.