Some thoughts on a day that is so overcast and smoggy in Tianjin that it’s difficult to see the TV tower two miles away:

1. I don’t know or care a great deal about traditional Chinese medicine, but it is interesting to see what role it plays in its home culture. It doesn’t seem to really be an object of cult fetish or ideological allegiance like in the States: most people I’ve asked about it use both Chinese and Western medicine rather than philosophisizing about which one is superior, and invariably give the same almost rote answer about the differences between the two. Western medicine is seen as a quick fix to most problems, but associated with often nasty side effects, whereas Chinese medicine is seen as slowly fixing problems without deletrious side effects. I’m rather skeptical of the claims made about most tribal medicines, and suspicious of the presence of a placebo effect, especially in the West, where the people that use them often see them as infallible miracle cures, but this response seems too widespread to attribute it simply to superstition. If I might possibly hazard an ignorant speculation, I would guess that it may have something to do with different views of the bodily system, namely that in Chinese medicine health seems to be largely regarded as an interplay of different parts of the body, and hence medicine is focused on improving the functioning and interaction of the organic systems, but may not quickly or directly address the immediate problem, whereas Western medicine seems more fixated on the role of pathogens and negative aspects of the environment, so that health or sickness result from a war between the host body and intruders. Medicine is hence often a matter of destroying those invaders, which not surprisingly also not infrequently injures the body. As for whether there are any parallels to the social and political Weltanshauung of China vs. the West, I leave to someone else to say.

2. I agree with Stephan Prothero that sin (along with theology and sectarianism) seems to have become greatly downgraded in contemporary American religion (a subject which I believe Alan Wolfe, another professor of religion in the Boston area, deals with at much greater length in The Transformation of American Religion, though I haven’t yet read it). I’m not so sure as Prothero that this is such a bad thing, but then again I’m not a Christian. The idea that one’s actions are always morally under the purvew of some sleepless all-powerful mind is I admit a useful one, though I would hope that one’s own conscience would be sufficient for that. The concept of sin may regulate the actions of individuals beyond the reach of the law, but it also seems to me to arise from the need to rationalize suffering, and in an age where suffering (at least of the immediate physical kind) is at an all-time low, that is not nearly as compelling of a motive as in byegone eras. Whether it is still better to have a notion of sin and a vengeful God is disputable, but I live in China right now, where the very existence of religion for the greater mass of the population is itself debateable, and you can well believe that here, pace Dostoyevsky, certainly not everything is permitted.

3. Far be it from me to discourage the rehabilitation of humanism in philosophy, but Michel Foucault in his early “anti-humanistic” phase (discussed here) has a point in holding that the very liberal notions of human and social rights, according to a common theory the very foundation of “freedom,” could themselves exert a severely constraining force on individuals in a society, and thus in another sense entail a great loss of freedom, although I agree that the “maw of biopower [the co-opting societal norms and controls] as described by Foucault seems so inescapable and totalizing that one is at a loss as to how one might combat it. After all, how can we ensure that a given instance of transgression is not merely a ruse on the part of biopower to further ensnare us?” But it’s true that the forms of constraint imposed by an ever-expanding conception of individual or group “rights” is often a manifestation of horizontal power or a network of power rather than purely a function of simple hierarchical domination. And I have felt for a long time that it all depends on how one defines freedom. There are at least two different fundamental types when speaking in a socio-political context: the freedom to not be imposed upon by others and the freedom to do what one wants to do regardless of the wishes of anyone else. Many restrictions upon the field of action open to us have been imposed in our society in the name of freeing its members from being imposed upon by others. This brutal dilemma almost inevitably ensues when one views people as passive objects of the workings of their environment, rather than upholding a social morality where individuals voluntarily restrict their own actions in accord with righteous conduct.

p.s. I’m planning to apply for grad. school in comparative literature, so the post title is my attempt to practice up on academic-humanities-paper-title-writing.