The Ancient Chinese Super State of Primary Societies: Taoist Philosophy for the 21st Century

The Ancient Chinese Super State of Primary Societies

Taoist Philosophy for the 21st Century

The Second Edition

You-Sheng Li

The Ancient Chinese Super State of Primary Societies:

Taoist Philosophy for the 21st Century

Copyright © 2024 by You-Sheng Li

ISBN: 978-1962497473(e)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher and/or the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

The views expressed in this book are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Contents

Preface and Key Terms Including a List of Chinese Dynasties

1 Taoist Philosophy for the 21st Century

2 Life, Culture, and Religion

3 Evidence that Chinese People Lived Essentially in Primary Society Until the Warring States Period (476-221 BC)

4 The Vulnerability of Primary Society in Front of Secondary Society

5 Julian Jaynes’ Theory of the Bicameral Mind and Different Pathways Leading to Subjective Consciousness in Human History

6 Serenity: The Lives my Mother and Grandmother Lived

7 A Comparison of Confucius with Socrates

8 The Cave Men

9 The Five Zone Territory and Early literature: Chinese vs West

10 Writing Invented for Different Purposes

11 Where is God?

12 Confucius and Jesus: Humanism Took Different Pathways in Chinese and Western History

Appendix 1. The Movie Hero and Chinese Taoist Philosophy

Appendix 2. Taoism and Mao Zedong

Appendix 3. A Comparison of Confucius with Plato and Aristotle in Political Philosophy

Preface and Key Terms Including a List of Chinese Dynasties

Unlike any other major civilizations, Chinese civilization started with a super state in their isolated world, and this super state functioned as police to keep peace among tribes and vassal states just as the United Nations does in today’s world. If all human societies are divided into genetically coded primary society and man-made secondary society, this relatively peaceful environment allowed the Chinese people to still live in primary society until the Warring States Period (476-221 BC). Chinese Taoist philosophy or Taoism summarizes the lifestyle of those who lived in the ancient primary society. Taoism sees the world and interprets human experience from the basis of human nature and self enjoyment while modern secondary society is goal-oriented.

The twelve essays (or chapters) in this book provide a further reading along the same line of thought of my previous book A New Interpretation of Chinese Taoist philosophy, which explains this ancient Taoist wisdom in modern terms. Although the two books can each be read alone, it is recommended that the reader read A New Interpretation of Chinese Taoist philosophy first, since it is an introduction to this newly interpreted theory.

Again those essays pursue high originality and academic value, but the author has made every effort to accommodate general readers and their reading interest. In line with the lifestyle of primary society, the author tries to convey information, insights along with emotional experience and images. The author drew the illustrations himself, and he also talks about his own life experience. The four long academic essays, Nos. 3, 5, 7, and 10, all start with a summary, and present detailed data to outline the different pathway Chinese civilization took in comparison with the West while the other essays serve as a much lighter reading to bridge the gap between the Taoist ideology and modern daily life of ordinary people. The first essay gives a more general view to serve as an introduction. The Appendix includes the revised versions of three previous essays of the same titles that are included in the previous book but they are now almost twice as long.

Key Terms:

Ancient Super State: An ancient state that became by far the largest state of the known world to its people. It usually became the major politically stabilizing force and functioned as police to keep peace among local powers. In ancient China, such a super state had no vision of secondary society and had no need to construct one. This super state of primary societies hatched the first Chinese philosophy, Taoism, and deeply influenced Confucianism.

Primary Society and Secondary Society: Primary society is genetically coded society, and secondary society is any society that is created by man or human culture. Although there is no real primary society for us to examine, it is not difficult to outline the features of a primary society through its definition and by the study of animal societies and human society before civilization.

In primary society, human nature and instinct are enough to keep the society harmonious and functional. Primary society is the basic social organization of men immediately above families, and the ideal number of people in a primary society is believed to be around 150. Members are linked together emotionally and psychologically, and thus they are a whole at the subconscious level, since they interacted with each other face-to-face. Bands and tribes are regarded as primary societies, which were headed by headmen. Those headmen had no power to force their will on others, and their leadership was based on persuasion and consensus. The culture of primary society has no power to modify human nature. Secondary society is created by man, and so it has an ideology and a corresponding social structure to support the ideology. As a creation by man, it has limitless possible types while primary society, dictated by genetics, has only one type. Social stratification and institutionalized violence such as police and army are often necessary to keep a secondary society stable in its present type and restrain its members from seeking other types of society.

Spare Time: Here we define spare time as time left after one’s basic biological needs such as food and water are fulfilled. Spare time is essential for the development and advancement of human culture and civilization. If culture is defined as how to spend spare time, and it is found that there is no law to guide humans on how to spend their spare time. As a result, culture plus social power can organize a society to do the most absurd thing for ages even though it goes against the basic human nature. Human nature is essentially peaceful and self-contained but has a wide range of peripheral potentials. A goal-oriented secondary society tends to force its members to explore their peripheral potentials.

Taoism: Taoism is a philosophy, a religion, and a way of life. As a philosophy, it was first founded by Lao Tzu (?604-484 BC) and Chuang Tzu (?369-286 BC). It emphasizes the natural way and advocates pristine simplicity. It developed into an organized religion during the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 AD). Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism were the three major religions or ideologies in Chinese history.

Chinese Dynasties: The first three dynasties, Hsia, Shang, Chou, were confederations of independent states with a super state functioning as police. The subsequent dynasties were empires with a centralized government supervising provinces and counties. The economic basis of both types of dynasties was the same: small-scale peasant economy of self-sufficiency. The government was run on the tax collected from the peasants. Dating of Chinese history was considered to be approximate before 841 BC.

Yangshao (Revere-Beauty) Culture 5000-2400 BC

Longshan (Dragon-Hills) Culture 2600-1900 BC

Yellow Emperor (legendary)

Yao

Shun

Yu

Hsia 2200-1766 BC

Shang 1766-1122 BC

Chou 1122-256 BC

Spring and Autumn Period 770-476 BC

Warring States Period 476-221 BC

Qin 221-207 BC

Han 206 BC-220 AD

Jin 265-420

North/South 420-589

Sui 581-618

Tang 618-907

Song 960-1279

Yuan 1271-1368

Ming 1368-1644

Qing 1644-1911

1

Taoist Philosophy for the 21st Century

During the Warring States Periods (476-221 BC), the vast area along the Yangtze River valley was the territory of State Chu, which was lagging behind other states in social reform. It was the ideal environment to cultivate Taoist ideology, since the favorable climate allowed an idle lifE there.

Once a man lost his bow but was reluctant to find it back, saying, A man of State Chu lost his bow but another man of State Chu got it. Why do I have to bother myself looking for it?

Confucius heard this and said, It is okay if the words ‘State Chu’ are omitted. Confucianism embraces all humanity. Lao Tzu heard this and said, It is okay if the word ‘man’ is omitted too. Taoism embraces both man and nature. (Adapted from Lu’s Spring and Autumn Annals: The Public is Highly Valued) [1]

When people meet unexpectedly far from their hometown, they say, It is a small world. People also say, our world has shrunk to a village, a global village. Modern communication technology has brought people closer than ever before, especially since the end of the Cold War. Airway services allow us to reach any corner of the earth within the same day, and modern communication enables us to talk to our friends face-to-face in spite of the fact that they are on the other side of the planet. We are facing a new world that humans have never faced before. Do you think we need a new way of life? Many scholars say YES, and they predict that different cultures will replace nations to compete with each other on the upcoming stage of this new world.

Yes, we have entered a new era, and we need a new way of life. What is this new lifestyle we are going to adapt to? Although there is no simple answer, I believe that the ancient wisdom of Chinese Taoist philosophy provides a good choice. At least, it is worthwhile to learn a little bit more about this ancient way of life. Taoist philosophy emphasizes the value of naturalness and simplicity, which are well complementary to the Western philosophy of materialism. Some emerging trends indicate that the world is coming closer to Taoist ideology. I will, however, tell you the lobefin fish story first to show our position in the bio-evolutionary world.

(1) Lobefin Fish and Human Self-Transcendence

When I was in school, we were taught that what distinguished humans from animals was, humans had consciousness and animals did not. Animals were unable to think and unaware of what they were doing. Now, we all know that animals can think too, and they know well what they are doing. They make c hoices in their lives just as we do in our lives. They also have creative thinking. The captive gorilla Koko mastered over a thousand words of American Sign Language and was able to link them up in statements of up to eight words in a creative way. It happened in a laboratory setting. In the wild, animals show creative thinking too.

In the African jungle, Jane Goodall first observed that chimpanzees carefully stripped leaves off a tree twig to make a stick and then used it to fish out termites from their holes. A similar type of tool making was observed in other apes too, even in some birds. A particular type of tool making is usually limited to certain groups and is not observed in other groups of the same species of animals. It was apparently invented and learned.

Scientists have been able to observe the actual process by which behavioral innovations spread from individual to individual and became part of a troop’s culture independently of genetic transmission. This happened at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University in Japan in the 1960s. They dropped sweet potatoes on a beach to attract monkeys for observation. One day, a young female began to wash sand off the potato by plunging it into a small brook that ran through the beach. This washing technique spread throughout the group and gradually replaced the former habit of rubbing the sand off by hand. Nine years later, 80 to 90 percent of those monkeys were washing their potatoes, ether in the brook or in the sea.

A few animals such as apes and dolphins are even self-conscious, and they can recognize their own images in a mirror. Then the question is why humans are able to build secondary society while animals are not. The answer is humans have the ability of self-transcendence: They are continuously looking for something higher than themselves and their real life. This eventually lets them create new worlds for themselves. Under certain circumstances, animals may be able to use language in a creative way like Gorilla Koko did. However, they use language just as other tools to enrich their lives. Humans use language to create totally new worlds such as in many novels, especially science fictions. Each novel literally represents a new world created by humans. Our secondary society is also one of those worlds created by humans. But this one is a real one, created not by one person but by numerous people over thousands of years.

Here I will show you that animals have the ability of self-transcendence too: the lobefin fish story. The long bio-evolutionary course was stagnant for most time but punctuated by short phases of rapid changes, which were triggered either by environmental change or by major favorable mutations including recombination and expressive alteration of genes. The transition from aquatic animals or water animals to land animals (terrestrial animals) combines the two triggering factors: Mutation led animals to a new environment, which triggered more mutations.

From water to land, there were several critical changes animals had to acquire such as limbs to support body weight, lungs to breathe, a neck to turn the head. Those changes could not take place overnight but could not last forever ether, as it was an extra burden to those animals that carried those preliminary changes. Lobefin fish carry those changes and serve as a living fossil to illustrate how animals moved from sea to land in ancient time.

Lobefin fish (coelancath, Figure 1) first appeared some 400 million years ago and once flourished in shallow seas all over the world but vanished about 70 million years ago. On 23 December 1938, a fisherman caught an unusual fish along the east coast of South Africa. The local museum was informed, and a scientist came to examine the specimen. Without any doubt, this was a lobefin fish, which was thought to be extinct at that time. When I studied zoology in university in the 1960s, a total of three or five lobefins had been caught, and there was only a sentence trailing at the end to mention it in the textbook. Divers have now observed them in massive numbers in the deep sea, and a new species was found in Indonesian seas in 1997. Those living fossil fish live in sea caves and only come out to feed themselves at night but still avoid moonlight

Some lobefin fish, such as the Australian lungfish, have primitive lungs in addition to gills. Their fins have a muscular root base with bones and are able to turn in different directions. In comparison with other fish, lobefin fish have little advantage, since they have to nourish and support those extra parts that are only useful under special circumstances. On land, they may survive a little longer than other fish but will eventually die as well. Apparently, they are still aquatic animals. There is a long evolutionary way to go before they become a real land animal.

In history, lobefin fish did not climb onto land themselves but were trapped in enclosed water, which dried out later. They were forced to land by environmental changes. Under such circumstances, most lobefin fish died off except for few with further mutations. The chance for those few may be in the range of one in a million.

How was the life when lobefin fish first moved onto land? The following shall apply:

Theyareforceduntolandbycircumstances.

Theyhaveahardtime,sincetheyarenotfullylandanimalsyet.

Theirfutureisuncertain,andtheyareinaphaseofrapid change.

Theirevolutionarypathwaysleadingtomammals,reptiles,birds,or amphibians are determined by nature and chance, not by themselves.

Oncelobefinfishbecomefullylandanimals,theirlivesareascomfortableas those of any fish in the sea.

All of the above except 5) also apply to humans when they moved from primary society to secondary society, which is exactly like lobefin fish moving from water onto land. Humans first formed secondary society because of population expansion, either the general density exceeded the limit or too many people crowded in one place. Secondary society is apparently not the suitable social environment for humans, so that scientists have recently found that civilization triggered rapid genetic changes in human, and judged from the variation of the size of our brain, our brains are still in the rapid phase of genetic evolution.

Both moves, man’s from primary society to secondary society and fish’s move from sea onto land, are major steps in their evolutionary process, leading to new directions and opening to new dimensions. Dr. Shubin and his colleagues discovered a fossil fish on the Ellesmere Island in northern Canada after six years of searching. They persisted for so long because the rocks they were looking at in these areas were deposited some 375 million years ago when lobefin fish lived and were in the process of moving onto land. The fossil fish they found had gills and lungs, the neck to turn, and strong lobefins. Dr. Shubin and his colleague studied a living but ancient fish known as the paddlefish. They found that those thoroughly fishy fish were turning on control genes known as hox genes, in a manner characteristic of the four-limbed land animals. They believe major steps in evolution like the transition from water to land are not necessarily set off by genetic mutations inside the genes but by the right ecological situation or habitat, since the appearance of four limbs are critical if animals move from water onto land. Nevertheless, such transition needs numerous generations to accomplish, and meanwhile those half-fish and half-land animals had to struggle in their unfamiliar environment to survive.

We can easily list out numerous evidences indicating that we are having a hard time, which forces us to adapt to rapid change, genetically and culturally. One of the obvious is that we are doing a lot against human nature. We are born resistant to killing other human beings, but such killing is not only institutionalized in our society but also often accelerates into massive scales such as in the two world wars. Nearly a hundred millions died in the Second World War alone. It makes us happy and healthy if we live in a friendly atmosphere, but our society encourages the opposite, competition.

Humans have been on earth for two or three million years, and our species, the Homo Sapiens, appeared some two hundred thousand years ago while our secondary society has a history of only five or six thousand years. During such a short period, the genetic change, though took place, was very limited. We adapt to our secondary society largely by cultural modification and by switching on the survival kit, running on our peripheral potentials. It is no wonder why suicide rates doubled in the twenty century in North America in spite of dramatic improvement in living conditions.

We face nature in primary society, while we face ourselves, competitors and enemies, in secondary society. Unlike the lobefin fish that first move onto land faced environmental challenges from nature, we face challenges from ourselves. As modern technology has brought us so close that we literally live in one village, why cannot we live for a peaceful and meaningful life as villagers did five thousand years ago in primary society? We do not need to go through all the painful genetic changes to become a fully secondary society animal before we can allow us to be as comfortable as those living in primary society.

(2) The Civilization of War and its Ending

The phrase tragedy of the commons originally describes medieval villagers sharing the same pasture ground. Suppose the size of their pasture allowed some fifty villagers each to raise 10 sheep. If one villager raised 11 sheep to increase his income, everyone would soon find out and follow suit, and the pasture would eventually be ruined by over exploitation.

Wars, violent conflicts among different states, start and spread pretty much in the same way, but much faster along an upward spiral.

Only when survival was at risk in prehistoric times, might humans wage a battle on their neighbors, so-called small scale raids, which were driven mostly by hunger. When a conflict could not be solved by other means in primitive society, they performed ritual fighting to settle the dispute. A ritual battle permits the display of courage and the expression of emotion while resulting in relatively few wounds and rarely deaths. Since violence is not part of our nature but one of our peripheral potentials, hunger and unsolvable conflicts were only triggering factors which might and might not end in violence. In ancient primary society, such fighting or battles happened as isolated cases with self-limiting power residing in human nature. They might have been going on for millions of years but their scale remained the same.

However, such violence is not the war we are talking about here. War is a way to access social advantage, get the upper-hand in the conflict-solving process. Such war is in a situation similar to the tragedy of the commons. When a state comes into an advantageous position after waging wars on its neighbors, all the remaining states, whether their original culture is peace-loving or warrior-like, are getting ready for war to protect themselves. War soon breaks out everywhere. Those peace-loving states are the first ones to be engulfed by others, since they are lagging behind in a world of warring culture. When all the states are balanced to the same military level, another state benefits itself by waging a war on its neighbors by militarizing to a new level. Other states soon raise their military level too. The scale of war becomes larger and larger. Meanwhile, other factors such as state size, new technology and so forth come into play as well. In the tragedy of the commons, what is ruined is the pasture ground. It is the peace of life that is ruined in a world of war culture. Our life is enjoyable only when there is peace. Everyone has to fight for his survival during a war.

Like the tragedy of the commons, such wars that happen in secondary society are only limited by the exhaustion of resources. Human nature is no longer a limiting factor.

Anthropologists define civilizations as those cultural traditions that have state structure, monumental buildings, and written records. Those are all hallmarks of secondary society. People who live in primary society have no need to build large monumental constructions though they may have the ability. Equally, nothing prevents primitive people from inventing the writing system, but it is not a useful tool in a primary society.

Human civilizations first appeared five or six thousand years ago in the Middle East, and later in India, China, Europe, and in Americas. There are numerous evidences indicating that more peaceful cultures existed before or in the early years of human civilizations in many places in Asia, Europe, and northern Africa. Here I quote from two authors to support this view, since controversy still exists regarding this issue:

… for millennia – a span of time many times longer than 5,000 years conventionally counted as history – prehistoric societies worshipped the Goddess of nature and spirituality, our great Mother, the giver of life and creator of all. But even more fascinating is that these ancient societies were structured very much like the more peaceful and just society we are now trying to construct.... Contrary to what we have been taught of the Neolithic or first agrarian civilizations as male dominated and highly violent, these were generally peaceful societies in which both women and men lived in harmony with one another and nature. [2]

What was the force which transformed such peaceful cultures into our civilization of war? According to James DeMeo, the second author I quote here,