Culture and History in the Land Without Ghosts: an Engagement With the Thought of Wang Huning

Huning's jarring portrait of 'Homo Americanus' remains uncomfortably accurate.

Intermission by Edward Hopper

In Part I of this series, I voiced my qualified agreement with the position regularly made by the American scholar Jeffrey Sachs, that it is not China’s ambition to ‘go abroad in search of monsters to destroy,’ nor to overthrow faraway governments. I would, moreover, agree with the historical point recently made by Professor Sachs that for hundreds of years, China, despite being the dominant Asian power, maintained peace with its neighbors with exceptionally rare exceptions. This long period of the so-called ‘Confucian peace’ cannot, however, necessarily be mechanically extrapolated into the future. At any rate, before doing so, we need to dig deeper into what China is today.

It is, indeed, with that aim in mind that we are examining the thought of China’s preeminent political philosopher, Wang Huning, by means of a review of his famous political travelogue America against America. Wang enters sympathetically into American realities, and does not hesitate to express appreciation for what he sees as its strong points, but neither does he hesitate to take note of what he sees as its glaring weak points.

Wang observes, for example, that American society is highly technological, and that its physical and economic space is dominated by what he calls the ‘four C’s’: cars; (phone) calls; computers; and credit cards. Wang’s tone is mainly one of admiration here, albeit tinged with a note of criticism. All these technical innovations demonstrate to him a dynamic and interconnected society, a society whose management is rational, and one in which symbolic communication has a certain ease of transmission that cannot be taken for granted in the rest of the world.

And yet Wang observes with alarm the impositions on social life and the merging of public and private that these technologies have on intimate relationships. That matters of love and family and friendship should be decided long-distance over the phone is clearly something he isn’t comfortable with. He also remarks on other side effects of this reliance on technology: pollution, lack of security, ease of fraud and theft and—noteworthily—the ease of surveillance and the erosion of personal and civil liberties.

Wang, further, takes note of the dynamism of the commodified economy of the United States. He can see that the development and allocation of housing and transit infrastructure are driven by the profit motive, and not by a public-spirited social concern. At the same time, he also sees how capitalism encourages public displays of sexual content as a commodity; here capitalism corrupts, acts as a force of social dissolution. His go-to examples are the ‘gentlemen’s clubs,’ ‘peep-shows’ and X-rated films on New York’s 42^nd Street. And yet he notes that the personal habits of many Americans, in practice, are marked by sexual conservatism.

Wang also talks at length about American rural culture. He pays particular attention to the Anabaptist Amish communities in Iowa and their rejection of all this high technology that he’s just described. Wang clearly admires the Amish for their self-sufficiency, their sense of communal cohesion, their preservation of education and cultural knowledge in German, their preservation of traditional musical and craft forms, and their deeply held religious faith. He appreciates the profound sense of peace that he encounters while visiting among them. But he is also intrigued by the question of how and why American society allows such communities to exist outside the mainstream. He concludes that, in the treatment of (certain) religious and cultural minorities in particular, there is a decisive advantage of which America’s federalist legal structure and laisser-faire attitude to lifestyle choices can safely boast, by contrast with more controlling and conformist legal régimes.

In his discussion of the fate of modern American farmers, Wang does not make mention of the ‘go big or get out’ ultimatum issued by U.S Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz to American farmers in the nineteen seventies -- but he capably describes the results. The Chinese expectation of small-scale, labor-intensive, high-input farm plots is completely demolished by his contact with the realities of the modern American agricultural landscape. The few farmers still left in the countryside are industrialists tasked with running what are essentially factories, entirely dependent on technologies like combines, tractors, conveyor belts, electrified barns, and automated processing. Yet farming remains an ill-remunerated occupation with few physical or social amenities, leading to a continued ‘flight from the countryside’ among the younger generation. Wang observes that food sovereignty continues to be an issue for countries with high populations, and that America (blessed with an expansive geography and abundant natural wealth) has not yet grappled with the hard problems of scarcity still extant in Europe and Asia.

Spirit of America

Drawing on such thinkers such as Tocqueville, Commager and Huntington, Wang Huning goes on to consider the spirit of America. Of particular interest for him are the themes of freedom, equality, individualism, democracy and the rule of law; nor does he fail to note how these forces are often in implicit or explicit tension with each other. He notes, for example, the emergence of the unshackled-capitalist, free-enterprise ‘conservative’ strain of American thinking embodied by the post-1909 Republican Party; but he also notes how this is counterbalanced by the constrained-capitalist, regulatory, contractarian ‘social liberal’ strain represented by the post-1933 Democratic Party. The ascendancy of Reagan’s Republican Party in late-eighties America leads him to conclude that, at the time of his writing at any rate, American society values economic freedom over equality.

Wang stresses American political thought’s continuing debt to James Harrington, John Locke, and Montesquieu. He is struck by the ease with which a new society was established in America on such European principles, and he contrasts this with the cultural, economic and social difficulties (including sheer inertia!) which attended the English, French, Russian and Chinese Revolutions. Which perhaps adds, from his perspective, to the irony that European elites still treat their American ‘progeny’ with a degree of condescension, consider them ‘hicks.’

The creation of a democratic society based on certain habits of behavior—the town hall meetings of New England which subject the substance of government to public scrutiny and debate—was much more easily accomplished in the American environment. Wang Huning recounts his visit to a town hall meeting in Belmont, Massachusetts, and notes with evident appreciation the way in which everything from the total budget to the line items was subjected to an orderly set of rules and placed in the open for a general hearing.

Yet Wang also notes that such openness has hard limits. At its inception, American democracy was by conscious design not open to indigenous people or blacks. The model was that of the Roman Republic in which Roman citizens were the only ones who could enjoy civil liberty or political empowerment. Such a design cannot be made to last, however, and it had to be progressively opened to participation by previously disempowered groups or suffer its own self-destruction.

Again drawing primarily on Huntington and another political scientist, the late Ted Lowi (1931-2017), Wang posits that the present American state is in fact not the original state envisioned by the Founders, but is instead the ‘Third’ (per Lowi) or even ‘Fourth’ (per Huntington) such Republic. Huntington posits a Revolutionary, a Jeffersonian, a Lincolnian and a Civil Rights-era division; while Lowi posits a Revolutionary-Republican, a Keynesian, and a Judicial-Democratic division of the Republics. Wang is agnostic on which historical schema he prefers. What interests him is how the great themes of the American founding have played out to create a peculiar homo americanus.

Homo Americanus

Although Wang does not use the term homo americanus himself, it is clear that he is attempting to sketch the contours of the mainstream ‘American soul’ as it has been shaped by its values of freedom, individualism, equality, democracy and the expectation of an impartial legal system. He identifies several traits of the ‘American man’ who emerges from these values and who has been shaped by America’s evolving political institutions.

Internationalism. America is an immigrant society and tends to be far less insular and guarded on its edges than most other world societies. There is, as we can see in the present day from certain elements of the Trump coalition, a concerted effort to define the American nationality in explicitly ethnic terms. But Wang would doubtless have us observe that the very effort betrays the difficulty of the proposition. America has long prided itself on drawing in all manner of talent, ingenuity and human capital from abroad—there is a reason why the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island still loom large in the American imagination! Yet Wang speaks specifically of the concept of international education and the institution of student exchanges as being key to American academic life. He also pays considerable attention to the internationalization of American pop culture and its use of ‘soft power’ as a cultural export. (It is easy to see where the Chinese government picked up this concept!)

Neophilia. Wang notes the following tension: although American people are personally much more conservative and traditional in their average habits than their culture (and sixties counterculture!) permit them to be, there is one notable exception. Americans have a distinct and prominent love of the new, and of technological innovation in particular. Wang’s account of American traditionalism here is actually quite admiring in tone. Even though he at times waxes critical of America’s ‘great power vanity’ and insistence on being at the top of the heap, he clearly approves of how America has managed to maintain a certain degree of ‘conservative’ value-continuity in such a way that it is neither overwhelmed by nor at odds with the level of technological innovation it produces.

Demystification. Although he does not cite Fei Xiaotong directly, Wang Huning echoes the godfather of Chinese sociology’s observation that Americans have no belief in, or respect for, ghosts. Instead, Americans seem to be very good at conjuring up silver-screen fantasies. Dr Fei, during his stay in the United States in the nineteen fifties, was particularly interested in the cultus of comic-book superheroes (Superman, Batman, Spiderman et al.) as representing the closest counterpart to China’s belief in ghosts. What is instead striking to Wang is the omnipresence of ‘movie magic’ in Reagan’s and Bush Sr.’s America: E.T., Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Wang attributes to Americans a certain hostility to mystery. He does not delve deeply into why this is the case but speaks somewhat tantalizingly about America’s history of pioneering and ‘discovery,’ America’s wealth of natural resources, and the individualistic economic materialism to which its culture tends to default.

Whatever the rationale for it, Wang observes that Americans tend to dislike the unexplained and unexplainable, and enjoy being able to expose ‘the man behind the curtain’ (to quote The Wizard of Oz—a distinctly American fairy-tale!). Americans tend to treat human beings as either rational or ‘hackable’; and they are hostile to the idea that there might be limits to human ingenuity or ability to solve intractable problems—whether political, social or environmental. This same devaluation of any sense of mystique extends also to Americans’ treatment of sex and relationships.

Sacralisation. Wang immediately problematizes this theme of demystification by exploring American culture’s capacity for sacralization. Yet the sacral impulse in American culture is of a distinctly secular and civic kind. Here, Wang comes very close to channeling C.S. Lewis: Americans invest this-worldly public institutions and figures with sublime and transcendental import. The military, the space program, political parties, key political figures (Wang mentions Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Kennedy), sports teams, pop stars like Madonna and Michael Jackson (or, to use current-day examples, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift), fictional characters like Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, and even entire consumer brands like Disney are regularly imbued with nearly liturgical reverence and emotional investment. Lewis suggested that American culture latched onto such sacramentalism due to its rejection of monarchy (and it is clear that Lewis viewed the monarchical option as healthier). Wang makes the more modest case that any such sacralization is necessary for the maintenance of a civil religion and core values.

Contempt for limits. Hand-in-hand with Americans’ tendency towards demystification, is a belief which Wang expresses through a quote from the American historian Henry Steele Commager: ‘the American belief that nothing is impossible and that we will not rest until we have won it all.’ Wang considers the American space program the archetypal expression of this belief: even the force of gravity will not constrain an American from planting his feet on the moon. Wang sees this trait as a key driver of America’s technological progress on all fronts, from the space shuttle to consumer appliances. Yet—and here he shows a Marxist glimmer—he sees in such a reliance on technology a degree of alienation at work: people who rely on technologies to ‘solve’ the ‘problems’ posed by nature end up becoming dependent on the technology, which results in a class structure similar to slavery or serfdom. Here his critique comes very close to that made in a Marxist framework by Saitō Kōhei, and in a non-Marxist context by Wendell Berry and E.F. Schumacher.

Sexual liberation. Wang notes two separate tendencies in the American treatment of sexuality. The first is the religious imposition of limits on sex, a tradition inherited from Europe, along with the sublimation of sexual urges into an eros directed toward the divine. And the second is the drive, which Wang links to the post-WWII economy, to demystify everything about the gender difference. This spirit of sexual permissiveness, Wang claims, is the most intriguing, tempting and bewildering aspect of American culture from the perspective of someone from an East Asian culture. In postwar America, cohabitation, sex education for minors, prostitution, pornography and homosexuality became increasingly tolerated. In particular, a huge leap was taken in the 1960s as a result of a concerted push in the direction of demystification by the counterculture. Wang speaks of American society being driven by both ‘fear of carnal pleasure’ and ‘pursuit of carnal pleasure,’ creating an antipodean environment where the best can exist (a tight-knit family with bonds of mutual affection between the married couple) and also the worst (the commercialization of sex, exploitation of minors, clinical and impersonal pursuit of orgasms, etc.). Wang, taking specific aim at Marcuse here, sees the demystification of sex as a total dead end: there is no political revelation to be gained in the total ‘anatomical’ exposure and flattening of the human body into a commercial product. All such demystification does, in Wang’s view, is shift the burden of balancing sexual pursuits and managing social duties from the family onto the government and society at large—and this is by no means an improvement.

Isolation. Here, Wang anticipates Robert Putnam’s thesis, put forward in Bowling Alone seven years later. Wang is already observing—not as a trend, but as a ‘snapshot’—the tendency of Americans toward solitude. The dissolution of community and family bonds which began with the 1960s counterculture and accelerated by way of the Reagan revolution in economics, led to the phenomenon of children choosing to live in different towns than their parents, parents choosing to more easily divorce, and voluntary non-family associations tending to dissolve and disperse. When seeking out the cause, Wang does not immediately jump to the Marxist conclusion that the capitalist economy is the sole and ultimate cause—rather, he spends time first parsing these attitudes through the filters of individualist values, psychology and over-reliance on technological ‘fixes’ for human problems. His conclusion is ultimately ambiguous. He sees a certain degree of individualism as irreducibly ingrained in American culture, regardless of its economic structure or degree of technological advance.

His Big Picture Conclusions

Wang sums up these traits of American culture by referring to it as a religion of the future. Most world religions are in fact future-oriented in the sense that they have teleological and eschatological expectations. But the American civil religion militates even against its own homegrown philosophical traditions (for example pragmatism) with the entirely faith-based expectation that the future will be brighter and better. Europeans have expectations for their children, who are sorted into Gymnasium or Realschule from an early age on the basis of standardized test scores. Americans have aspirations—hopes, dreams, ambitions—for their children, which may be one reason why we still baulk at the idea of sending our own children to vocational school even as we recognize the necessity of vocational schooling.

There are European fans of Star Trek, of course, but only Gene Roddenberry—a red-white-and-blue American down to his bones—could have produced such a work as Star Trek. Futurism—a fervent faith in the goodness and material advancement of a future world as Wang Huning readily recognized — is part and parcel of the American idea.

I stress again that the use of homo americanus is my own, not Wang’s. Wang would not think to use such a phrase. This is because, in his general attitude, ‘people are always people’—sociology is always a matter of drawing contrasts, but Wang emphasizes the need for an overall orientation of comparison as well. Americans, Japanese and Chinese people will always share certain basic needs, desires, physiology and psychology, and he cautions his readers against absolutizing or reifying any kind of observed national or racial differences over-against such biological universals.

Wang, in my own estimation, does a remarkable job of eschewing caricature. His general themes are always allied to particular observations, and the fact that he engages with both rural and urban, religious and secular, academic and lay, culture and counterculture, shows that he is approaching his subject in a serious and often sympathetic fashion. Even so, his diagnoses of such features of America as its clinical attitude to sex and its propensity to loneliness are cutting, even harsh in their ultimate import.