Q&A for History of Mankind (24)
Confucius, the man who turned pornography into morals; also: are the Jews and Palestinians essentially the same people?
To check all previous newsletters in the History of Mankind, which is pretty long, you can click here.
This is the twenty-fourth Q&A for History of Mankind. Paying subscribers received an email asking for questions; and those are right below the paywall.
Today we’re doing something a bit out of the ordinary: we’re going to have a quick look at a book I just came across, to discuss people and events I already wrote about in previous A History of Mankind posts. In particular, Confucius and his impact on interpretations about Chinese poetry.
This may sound a little dry, but hear me out here: the thing with Confucius is that he may be the only thinker in history to have convinced people that pornographic material was actually meant as a reflection on moral matters.
This, to me, is mind-boggling. I was a massive fan of 1960s and 1970s classic rock music, and I remember endless discussions about how the lyrics of such and such song might appear opaque and perhaps pointless, but in reality they referred (obliquely) to sex. This was the accepted reading of pretty much every lyric of The Doors, for example (the counterpart of this was the widespread idea that lyrics openly about love referred to yearning for drugs, but that’s another story.)
That’s why I’ve been so shocked reading Paul Rakita Goldin’s 2002 “The Culture of Sex in Ancient China.” What Rakita Goldin convincingly argues is that Confucius achieved the very opposite of what rock’n roll “experts” did decades ago: he talked Chinese readers into accepting that openly pornographic poems had symbolic and moral meanings.
This is a great gauge of Confucius’ influence. As Rakita Goldin writes, Confucius is credited with having imposed such meanings in poems found in the Shijing, the Classic of Poetry, that certainly appear to have had a pretty different intent. In the famous poem “Crafty Youth,” he’s believed to have re-interpreted sexual imagery as metaphors for the relation between a ruler and one or more of his subjects. A separate poem, “Yellow Birds,” about birds criss-crossing each other’s path (possibly to mate) was similarly viewed as a reference to client-lord relationships. Rakita Goldin writes:
“As is well known, Confucius considered the Odes to be one of the most important texts for students to master because of the moral lessons to be gained from it. Consequently, traditional commentators did not feel that one had understood a poem in the Odes until one could elucidate its moral significance—and for poems like ’The Crafty Youth,’ fulfilling that mission requires a liberal dose of creative reading… Commentators dissatisfied with Confucius and his didactic approach to literature hasten to point out that, in distorting the original, he set the tone for centuries of readers who would not reject any reading, however tortured, as long as it illustrated an appropriate moral.”
I myself wrote extensively about Confucius’ influence in several posts, particularly this one:
In the decades after Confucius' death, his followers competed successfully with many other of the Hundred Schools. The history of the spread of Confucian thought in China, indeed, is one of twists and turns, as well as conflicts with other schools.
The legend of Confucius, the always wise and learned sage, was and remains very effective for the spread of Confucianism. The master is traditionally credited with having written or compiled many of the Chinese classic texts including all of the so-called Five Classics, even though modern scholars can't really attribute specific assertions to Confucius himself. Aphorisms concerning his teachings were compiled in the Analects, but only many years after his death.
So, now, we can say that Confucius also managed to change porn into morally uplifting content. Not bad. Not bad at all.
One other thing, before we get to the questions: I recently came across this wonderful website that will let you compare the actual size of modern countries, without the distortions imposed by cartography (that is, fitting “flat” things like countries — within the “round” thing that is the Earth — on a 2D map): The True Size.
Playing around with countries, by overlapping them, you can really compare them in size. I still remember my shock, years ago, when somebody told me that all of modern India is about the same size as Argentina: geography really is wild.
I particularly recommend selecting Iceland, and then dragging it south to see how it compares with other European countries, so you can see how small it really is despite it looking huge in most maps. And then drag Iceland even further south, into Africa, and notice just how incredibly huge Africa is and how ill-served we geography lovers are with maps using the Mercator projection — that is, most maps.
Now for the questions by paying subscribers, about Jews Vs Palestinians, whether African civilizations are underrated and the complex debate over cousin marriage:
Question 1 (by Ilan Brat): Can you settle for once and for all whether Jews and Palestinians are descended from the same people?
A: This may be one of the world’s most complex questions, so I think we should first clarify what “Jews” and “Arabs” are.
Judaism is an ethno-religion, so most people who are Jewish in the 21st century are descended from ancient Jewish people (not all, since conversion is accepted by some branches of Judaism) while Arabization is a much more complex process: lots of people who speak the Arab language and could be deemed to have an Arab culture, particularly along the margins of the Arab world (Iraq, Morocco, Sudan) have little if any genetic contact with the Arabs from Arabia, the people who were often called “Saracens” just before and after the era of Islamic expansion.
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