The years of writing Persisting in the Good: Thomas Aquinas and Early Chinese Ethics exposed me to a bewildering archive of misreadings of Chinese thought. Three patterns of misrecognition gradually became clear to me: treating China as Bygone Same, Incompatible Other, and Idealized Panacea. Having diagnosed their prevalence as mutations of Christian theology in the book, I emerge from this study more curious about what it takes to confront the difficult task of doing justice to human difference.
The three patterns seem to me to be both missteps in the past and stubborn habits in the present when it comes to confronting human difference.
First, we can see human difference as a matter of ascending stations on the same ladder of progress. We treat those different from us as the Bygone Same: my own earlier self, frozen at a lower rung I have already surpassed. Early modern European critiques of Chinese preoccupation with ritual were drenched in supersessionist language. Seen as a polity merely held together by solemnities, the Chinese Empire of early modernity came to provide an example more degenerate than the carnal Israel in its lack of inner spirit.
Hegel would later give this intuition its most systematic formulation. Chinese religion, he argued, required outward conformity at the expense of inward freedom, trapping its people in an external existence. Chinese political institutions, in his telling, collapsed morality into legality: ritual and law displaced conscience, extinguishing freedom itself. China thus occupied an earlier stage of Spirit’s unfolding—still mired in nature, not yet awakened to its own interior depth.
Second, we may see human difference as a sign of fundamental incompatibility. My earliest example comes from the Chinese Rites Controversy, when Dominican and Franciscan missionaries condemned Confucian ancestor veneration as idolatry. The papal decree of 1724 settled the matter decisively, leading to the expulsion of missionaries and halting sustained Sino-European engagement until Europe’s violent return during the Opium Wars. In modern guises, this logic resurfaces in figures as diverse as Jacques Gernet, Max Weber, and Samuel Huntington.
Montesquieu offers a particularly revealing case. In The Spirit of the Laws, he famously proposed three mutually exclusive regimes—republicanism, monarchy, and despotism—each governed by a distinct principle: virtue, honor, or fear. Missionary accounts of China, which described a government animated by all three, threatened to undo his typology. Montesquieu’s solution is to simply place China in the despotic group. Its climate, prone to famine, supposedly produced unrest that necessitated rule by fear.
Third, even in our positive evaluation of human difference, we may treat the other as an idealized panacea: the other exists as a foil to my own concerns; their difference from me is uniquely suited to cure my own malaise. I trace this pattern from early modern Sinophiles such as Voltaire and Leibniz who take Confucianism as the ideal example of Deism (an elixir to Europe’s wars of religion) to influential modern sinologists who deem Daoism to be proposing a mode of non-interventionist action unthinkable in “the West” and a mystical atheism escaped from a crushingly ubiquitous God—generating paradigm.
The third pattern is perhaps the most familiar in our moment of facile, tokenistic, or appropriationist celebration of difference. It is expressed in the breezy call to immerse oneself in corporate- sponsored meditation or yoga programs and then promptly reinsert oneself back into fourteen hours of coding in Silicon Valley with alacrity and gratitude. Deracination—spiritual motions without metaphysics—is the corporation’s new favorite cost-cutting method of inducing compliance, a tool much mightier than the most advanced surveillance system.
The years of writing Persisting in the Good coincided with the intensification of the “New Cold War” discourse. We have entered a new Cold War between China and the U.S., we are told by international relations experts. China’s economic power, its technological catch-up (often by espionage), its regional and global ambitions, its increased military spending, its ideological goal to curb the spread of Western ideas such as representative government are cited to sustain this picture of the world.
Yet the disanalogy between the old Cold War and the new is striking: deep economic interdependence, the absence of proxy wars, the presence of diplomatic channels, and a multipolar world shaped by India, Brazil, Iran, and others alongside China and the United States.
The “New Cold War,” then, is less an empirical description than an ideological construction. During the original Cold War, incompatible “worldviews” were said to underwrite incompatible systems: atheism versus religion, people’s democracy versus liberal democracy, collective justice versus individual rights, a command economy versus free markets, and communalism versus private property. Today, a similar binary is revived: authoritarian, atheistic China versus democratic, Christian America.
I have come to see the current moment as a shifting understanding of China from the Bygone Same to Incompatible Other. U.S. foreign policy towards China since the 1990s presumes China (as the Bygone Same) will inevitably be more like the Euro-American world, democratic and liberal, once the people become rich.
This belief helped China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. Writing in 1998, Henry S. Rowen noted that rich countries are democracies without exception. He declared that Asia would prove no different, despite the claim about the distinctiveness of Asian values. History has been unkind to this confidence—both in the supposed stability of wealthy democracies and in the presumed trajectory of the newly affluent.
A theological subcurrent is at work beneath the empirical claim. George W. Bush was unusually candid on this point. His commitment to spreading liberty, he explained, was not primarily political but theological: Freedom is a gift the Almighty gives to all, a principle that no one can convince him otherwise. Immovable belief, that modern word descended from the old language of faith as trust, breeds immovable foreign policies resistant to negotiation, compromise, or complexity.
Whatever one thinks of Bush’s theology of creation, liberty, and the means of spreading that liberty, his historical claim about Woodrow Wilson is correct.
The Wilsonian liberal internationalism is informed by explicit theology. With the value placed on the human soul, the Bible made both democracy and all progress. History, in this view, unfolds providentially toward freedom, with America occupying a privileged position as its agent. America shall throw the rays of liberty and justice far abroad upon every sea, and even upon the lands which now wallow in darkness and refuse to see the light. The lands awaiting Christianization may linger in darkness, but they will eventually ascend the same peak. The language of the Bygone Same is hard to miss.
Nothing in these grand claims prevents liberty from being stretched in capitalism to near breaking points. Freedom has been defined as noninterference—the freedom of capital (through deregulation), of the consumer (through status-producing choice), and of the oligarch (through unrestricted campaign financing).
Nothing in these theologies bothers to notice the difference between the universal implanting of desire for freedom and its variant cultural elaborations, between the coming of God’s reign with the end of history in Euro-American liberal democracy. None of the historical narratives recalls Christianity’s long, easily reactivated, anti-democratic past.
Once the prospect of bringing China into the fold of liberty recedes from the horizons, the other as Bygone Same quickly elides into the Incompatible Other. No middle position exists between treating the other as a backward glance or an irredeemable enemy.
The rare bipartisan consensus on China as a species apart serves to construct an outsider while ignoring its own democratic decay. By claiming democracy as one’s settled identity, democracy ceases to be an ongoing project which one can forfeit.
It would be a mistake to imagine myself emerging from the study assuming a position of an expert on human difference. Polemics of confident diagnosis often bypass the way the self is implicated in the failings of confronting human difference. What I gained from watching the mistakes of these highly credentialed minds is a kind of epistemic humility, an awareness of the necessary gap between the horizons of human cognition and actual human lives.
Standing between two empires that increasingly embrace authoritarianism, which routinely use their difference to justify domestic repression, it is easy to vacillate between hopeless resignation and romantic self-aggrandizement in terms of what a scholar can do.
Edward Said has been my guide. His critique of Samuel Huntington’s managerial poetics describing Islam—its “bloody borders” and “bulging contours”—helps illuminate the rhetorical work performed by today’s invocations of “oriental despotism.”
More than that, Said has also been my consolation, not only by truth-telling amid the violence in recent years, but also by locating the intellectual’s place in the world.
In his Reith Lectures, Said insists that the intellectual always has a decision to belong on the side “of human beings considered to have subaltern status, minorities, small peoples and states, inferior or lesser cultures and races…weak and unrepresented” (22).
The true intellectual stakes her whole being on “a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made cliches, or the smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do” (23). These easy formulas, ready-made cliches, and smooth confirmations of the powerful, the theologian might add, are unmistakably lethal in the present, but at the same time they are mere gimmicks, parodies, privations of the good whose full scale and power remain unknown to us.
