Astral Codex Ten

Confucian

4 min read

Confucian

Article

Confucian is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 07, 2023 and June 21, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “the culture of Eastern societies, especially within the Confucian cultural circle, emphasizes identity, discipline, etiquette, and blood”; “contradictions between Confucian teachings”. It most often appears alongside Japan, United States, 747.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: June 07, 2023
  • Last seen: June 21, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Assistant Dictator Book Club: America Against America
June 07, 2023 · Original source
It is generally believed that human relationships in American society are simpler and less complex, and people live in society based on their abilities, knowledge, and money, rather than on relationships, family, and other factors, which constitute the biggest difference between Eastern and Western societies, and the culture of Eastern societies, especially within the Confucian cultural circle, emphasizes identity, discipline, etiquette, and blood, while Western culture emphasizes talent, law, profit, and authority. In general, and only in general, this division is acceptable. But it must not be assumed that this is absolutely true of American and Western societies. Just as relationships are not always relied upon in Eastern societies, they are not always [maybe Wang meant to add a "not" here?] relied upon in Western societies.
Your Book Review: Autobiography Of Yukichi Fukuzawa
June 21, 2024 · Original source
Hoping to give his children a proper Confucian education, he sends Fukuzawa’s older siblings to calligraphy classes, only to be shocked to discover that they are also being taught math: “It is abominable,” he recalls his father saying, “that innocent children should be taught to use numbers—the instrument of merchants. There is no telling what the teacher may do next.”
When Fukuzawa was born, Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa shogunate—a hereditary military dictatorship founded in 1603. Under the rule of the shoguns, Japan enjoyed a remarkable two and a half centuries of peace. This was accomplished through a combination of techniques, including a policy of isolationism, the codification of a social hierarchy that granted privileges to the samurai warrior class (particularly those samurai whose ancestors had been allies of the first Tokugawa shogun), and the embrace of a Confucian ideology of duty and subservience.
Indeed, the failure of the shogun to expel the barbarians cast suspicion on every pillar of the Tokugawa regime. Far from protecting Japan, many perceived Japan’s isolationism as contributing to its technological stagnation. Moreover, the contradictions between Confucian teachings, which advocated meritocracy, and the reality of Tokugawa society, in which rank was determined by birth, threatened the intellectual rationale underpinning feudal society. This was particularly true among the samurai, whose relative status was largely determined by the side for which their distant ancestors had fought at the Battle of Sekigahara over 250 years earlier.