China Insight - March/April 2008

Edited by Tony Lambert, OMF Director for China Research

China: The Big Picture — Part 2

In our previous issue we saw how China had often been in the forefront of cultural development compared to many other countries. However, we also saw that the failure of China to capitalize upon the amazing international sea voyages of the eunuch Zheng He in the 15th century can be taken as the symbolic point when the Western powers seized the technological and political advantage.

It is easy to forget that for most of human recorded history, the flow of technological innovation has been from East to West, and not the other way round. The Chinese are credited with an astonishing array of inventions. Paper, block-printing, gunpowder, the compass, silk and the art of tea are those best known in the West. However, as Dr. Joseph Needham has shown in his magisterial, many-volumed work, Science and Civilization in China, these are only the tip of the iceberg.

The technological brilliance and advanced civilization of ancient China speaks for itself. However, one is forced to ask the question: why did the Industrial Revolution and the birth of the modern, scientific world take place in Western Europe and not in China? The answer, I believe, has to be in the difference in worldviews and in core religious beliefs and assumptions.

It seems quite clear that the scientific method and the Industrial Revolution took off in Christian Europe, particularly the "Protestant North" (Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany) rather than the "Catholic South" (France, Italy, Spain). We are looking at overall trends, so, of course, there were many noted French scientists, and also Italian (Galileo, for one!). However, the religious core-values of Reformation Protestantism— the priesthood of all believers, and the right of all Christians to approach God directly without the mediation of priests or the church—were an incentive to individual enquiry and scientific curiosity. The struggles of Galileo with the Catholic church and the Inquisition (although things were not as clear cut as some atheists have since made out in their tiresome anti-Christian polemic) are a reminder that counter-Reformation Catholic Europe was often not a conducive environment to the scientific quest. By the 19th century, Spain and Portugal, who had launched the great age of exploration three centuries earlier (Columbus, Vasco da Gama etc.), had fallen well behind Britain and Germany, and the Papal States were a byword for poverty and corruption.

Such authors as Hooykaas in his Religion and the Rise of Modern Science(1) have shown, furthermore, how Protestantism, particularly Puritanism, was the seed-bed from which science developed in England. Most of the members of the Royal Society founded in the mid-17th century were committed Christians. Indeed, 62% of the members in 1663 were of Puritan origin. Isaac Newton was not only the scientific genius who wrote the Principia Mathematica and discovered the law of gravity, but the devout believer who wrote detailed biblical commentaries on Daniel and Revelation.

The chemist, Robert Boyle, also wrote theological works. The school of thought of "the Warfare between Christian theology and Science" developed by late-Victorian atheists, and, belatedly, publicized by Richard Dawkins today, is shown to have hardly any historical justification whatsoever. The roots of the scientific method and the subsequent Industrial Revolution are planted firmly in the rich soil of biblical Christianity.

Belief in an ordered, God-created universe and in a benign, rational God who was not capricious, allowed the devout Christian scientist to “think God’s thoughts after him” (to quote, I believe, the astronomer Kepler). Christian belief in progress leading up to the final end of history was in stark contrast to the classical Greek and Roman view of the world which was cyclical, under the control of amoral, even immoral gods. As Shakespeare said: “as flies to wanton boys so are we to the gods—they kill us for their sport.” Although the Greeks were great mathematicians and invented a steam engine and sophisticated navigational devices (one was fished out of the Aegean some years ago), their world-view did not encourage the pursuit of science. The Greek and Roman reliance on large numbers of slaves meant new inventions were regarded more as toys rather than needed labor-saving devices.

All this is very relevant to our consideration of the conundrum about why Chinese civilization did not discover and develop the scientific method. In fact, there are elements in all the three major Chinese religions and philosophies which hindered the development of science.

Philosophical Daoism had its strong points, but over the centuries largely degenerated into superstition, magic, alchemy and the quest for immortality. Daoism encouraged world-flight and unity with nature, rather than its use or conquest. The famous story in Zhuangzi where the writer awakes from dreaming he was a butterfly and muses whether he is now a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming he is a man, catches the mocking Daoist attitude to the world of passing phenomena. If the world is illusion, then all dissolves into the mist, like the edges of a Chinese landscape painting. This does not encourage an attitude of scientific enquiry.

Buddhism is even more world-negating, and most schools hold the world to be illusion, and the human self to be a bundle of ephemeral appetites and desires. Escape from the present world is a necessity to achieve enlightenment. The Chinese, being a practical people in many ways, at first found Buddhism very hard to stomach, with its harsh denial of family values (the highest path to nirvana being monkhood). However, over the centuries, Buddhism was eventually assimilated and has had a profound influence on the masses, and many scholars and even emperors. It has bred a certain fatalism and passivity in the face of suffering very different from the positive Christian urge to overcome human suffering in the name of Christ. If all that exists is ordained by the iron law of karma (yinguo), then efforts to dissect reality and change it and improve it through scientific invention are ultimately absurd. It is not coincidental that those countries such as Tibet and Mongolia, where Lama Buddhism held sway and monasticism swallowed up a large proportion of the male population, were backwaters riddled with disease and poverty (as confirmed by numerous travelers).

Buddhism has no doctrine of the creation of the universe by a good God—in fact, original Buddhism was rather agnostic on the whole subject of God or gods—and no belief in progress. There is just the unending cycle of birth, death and rebirth from which very few, it would seem, can escape. If the material world is illusory and evil and a source of constant temptation to feed one’s false desires, then all this creates a mindset unlikely to embark on scientific enquiry.

Confucianism, in contrast, is much more “this-worldly.” Confucius was most concerned to regulate relationships within the family and society. He was by no means an atheist, revering “heaven" (Tian) and the ancient Chinese religion handed down by the kings of Zhou. However, his focus was on how to create a harmonious society in the chaotic times when China disintegrated into many warring states. For more than a thousand years later, during the Song dynasty, Confucianism took an even more humanistic route. At first sight, Confucianism seems much more conducive to scientific enquiry than either Buddhism or Daoism, but certain of its teachings and attitudes also impeded the development of the scientific method.

First, Confucianism harked back to a mythical "golden age" of the Sage Kings. This ultimately led to a deadening and ossified conservatism which reached the height of its decadence, sadly just when the Western powers came knocking on China’s door in the 19th century. A civil service which had passed exams in the “bagu” (eight-part essay) was trained to disdain all innovation and was mired in stereotyped thinking. China was thus ill-prepared to learn from the West. If the failure of Zheng He’s voyages in mid-15th century Ming China marked the beginning of China’s decline, the squandering, by the Empress Dowager, of money earmarked for the modernization of China’s navy on the famous stone pleasure boat in the Summer Palace, at the close of the 19th century, symbolized the final, catastrophic failure of the Confucian Imperial order to come to terms with the modern, scientific world.

Confucianism, while practical in some ways, also disdained the merchant classes and practical experimentation. Manual work was for the peasants, and banking and money-making were despised. The rise of the middle-classes, of mercantilism and of capitalism, which provided the economic support for first the Renaissance in Italy and then the rise of science in England, was severely retarded in China.(2) Hooykaas in his book points out the importance of the biblical teaching on work and on callings as sanctifying getting one’s fingers dirty in hard work and practical experimentation. This was anathema to refined Chinese scholars, no doubt adept at composing poetry and painting, but—with few exceptions—not experimenting in rice fields with water wheels or otherwise engaging in direct scientific observation and experimentation. But biblical attitudes on the ultimate meaningfulness of all human labor paved the way for the agricultural and industrial revolutions in England and Northern Europe as gentlemen farmers experimented with seeds and livestock in the fields, and, later, as their sons and grandsons built potteries, mines, ironworks and steam engines. Early Victorian England produced Brunel, the brilliant engineer and a host of other inventors and scientists. One cannot imagine late Qing China doing anything remotely similar. One world-view was dynamic, forward-looking, experimental and scientific. The other was conservative, traditional, backward-looking and superstitious.

Much more could be said about this important topic, and time permitting, I may return to it in more detail. Certainly, it is of great interest to many Chinese intellectuals as they candidly look at the failings in ancient and modern Chinese civilization and want to understand the roots of Western science and culture as well as seeking a firm, moral foundation for modern, 21st century China. Many of them are finding, as this author believes, that this quest takes them inescapably back to biblical Christianity.

NOTES

1. Hooykaas’ book originally published by Eerdman’s and the Scottish Academic press in 1972 has been translated and published in Mainland China. It is a very useful book to give to Chinese scholars who are scientists.
2. But not altogether. China invented paper money, and later the Shanxi bankers were famous in setting up their network in many places. But we are looking at the broad picture.

Copyright 2008 OMF International