Dan Snow's History Hit - Chinese Philosophy

Episode Date: August 14, 2020

Michael Puett is Professor of Chinese History at Harvard and has lectured widely at the world's leading universities. His course in Chinese philosophy is among the most popular at Harvard and in 2013 he was awarded a Harvard College Professorship for excellence in undergraduate teaching. In this pod we explored the remarkable challenges and achievements of Chinese philosophy.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dantanose History. It's that day of the week again. It's that day where we go back into the archives and we dig out an absolutely belting episode of history that you won't have heard because you're all new to this. And for those of you who have heard it was a long time ago, if the internet has addled your memory like it's addled mine, then this will be a fresh surprise to you. Like goldfish going, okay, enough metaphor. So this is a wonderful episode of the podcast that I recorded years ago with Professor Michael Puett. He's a professor of Chinese history at Harvard and he started this course on Chinese philosophy. He thought no one would turn up. It turned out to be the most, there were people

standing in the corridors, there were people sitting in the aisles, pre-Covid utopia, a prelapsarian time when sweaty bodies could pile into a room together or to listen to a brilliant lecturer help change their lives, change their outlook on things. And he helped to change my outlook on life as well. I hope this podcast perhaps does that for you as well. So it's Michael Poort talking about Chinese philosophy and how it differs to the philosophical tradition that many of us were brought up in the West.

We've got a big, huge bumper episode of history coming out tomorrow to mark V-J Day, the end of the Second World War in Asia, an arguably more important anniversary than V-E Day, hugely significant, with long-lasting repercussions in North Korea, China, of course, and all over Asia-Pacific. If you want to go and listen to all these back episodes of the podcast or watch some of the documentaries we produce, please do so at history hit tv it's like netflix for history we've never had more documentaries up there we're acquiring more all the time we're making new documentaries we're having planning sessions about the autumn which are quite fun i'm looking for an 11th century

boat to cross the english channel in if anyone can help with that let me know and it's all going really well so please go and use the code pod11, P-O-D-1, and you get a month for free. And you get one month for just one pound, euro, or dollar. But in the meantime, everyone, enjoy Professor Pooit. Michael, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's a true pleasure to be here. It's an honor to have you on the podcast. Your course has been this runaway phenomenon at Harvard. All these young kids who think they're going to work at Goldman Sachs and be big, successful finances, and yet they all want to study ancient Chinese philosophy. Why is that?

I think this is a generation that has been raised with basically a worldview. They have been told the key for them is to look within, find themselves, find their true selves, be sincere and authentic to who they are. And once they found themselves, then choose a career based upon who they are, their strengths, their weaknesses that they should love and embrace and try to fit themselves into the world. And this is part of a much larger vision that we've had that we generally call neoliberalism, that as long as we're each being unique individuals and striving for ourselves, the world will work out well. And this is a generation raised in this ideology. And I think they are not a happy generation. They are feeling the world is not quite working out as they had been told it was. They feel that this ideology they've been

told is not quite working. And I think they are desperately trying to rethink things. Those 18th century philosophers, those Enlightenment philosophers, they ruined it for everyone. They really did. Very sad. Now, Mike, does that reflect a personal journey you want? You, growing up, were you exposed to Chinese philosophy? Or was this an academic journey you went on as you became a student and did postgraduate work in China? Kind of similar to my students. So I was part of the 89 generation. So I was part of the generation that sort of was the beginning part of what we've come to know so well.

So I was part of the generation that was told, well, the Berlin Wall has fallen. It's the end of history. We figured everything out. And now just focus on yourself because the big questions are over. And I, very early on, became rather unhappy with what I was being told. And so I began looking at other possibilities, trying to look at history, trying to rethink our position in the world. And in that search, I began hitting things like, in this case, China, which I found both historically fascinating, I found the philosophical ideas fascinating. And really, it's led me to rethink a lot of what I've was at least being taught about world history, about how to think about the self, etc.

And it just turns out, luckily, that you were riding a wave that would turn out to be the hottest topic in the first couple of decades of the 21st century, because suddenly everyone's talking about China, but you were there earlier. So you were kind of mooching about before it was fashionable. Amazingly so, because it is true, When I started turning to this, no one was thinking about China. Then, of course, Japan was a big area of interest, but China not even remotely. So it was actually tough to even learn the language. There weren't many people talking about China. But I found it fascinating.

And I'm not surprised that the world is finding it fascinating too now. Your book, which is related to the courses that have been so extraordinarily successful at Harvard, is about these ancient Chinese philosophers. Who are these people? Basically, they are people around the first sort of half of the first millennium BCE. So this is a period across Eurasia, not just in China, but across Eurasia, a period of radicalurasia, not just in China, but across Eurasia, a period of radical political social transformation. So it's sort of the breakdown of the old Bronze Age

kingdoms that had dominated Eurasia for the previous two millennia. And in the midst of the breakdown of these, you get the emergence of social mobility for the first significant time in Eurasia for a very long time. This brings down all the old religions and a huge plethora of new philosophical and religious movements begin emerging. So in Greece, of course, this is when the Horfix, the Pythagoreans, Plato, Aristotle are working in India. It's the rise of Jainism, the Buddha. And in China, it's figures like Confucius and Laozi,

part of that same just general shift in Eurasian history when everything is suddenly up for grabs. It's so remarkable, isn't it, why we see the emergence of these big sort of unitary empires from the Mediterranean basin right to the South China Sea in this period. It's so bizarre. Is that a technological thing or is that an ideas-led, cultural thing? Kind of both. I mean, we like to think we live in a globalized age. And unlike us, back before, where these traditional societies, where every society kept to its own little niche area, not at all. What we're learning now is that Eurasia has always been connected. Technologies, ideas have always been spreading across. And you get these parallel developments over and over again. So in the case at hand, the emergence of these tremendous new philosophical and religious

movements, the emergence, as you mentioned, of the huge empires, all of these happen at roughly the same time across Eurasia. Were these philosophers working for monarchs or leaders, or were they interested in individuals living a good life? Both. So basically, these are people who, they're usually people who are striving, at least being taught to strive to gain bureaucratic positions and work on behalf of these new states that were being created. But of course, a lot of the philosophers were not happy with the world they were living in. So they were very well educated, very well trained, but they're the dissatisfied group. And they're not happy about the kinds of states that are being created. And that leads them to try to rethink everything. So rethink how you should

build states, the nature of society, how humans should actually be trying to develop themselves. So it's this period again in China, but elsewhere too, where sort of everything is suddenly up for grabs. And their impact within China and on subsequent Chinese history is, of course, enormous. Whereas perhaps in the West, the impact of Plato and Aristotle because of political upheavals are sort of lost and patchy and misunderstood. In China, is there more continuity through to the early medieval period and beyond? There is. So for all sorts of fascinating reasons, the early states that are developed in China are incredibly successful. So there's a strong development on building centralized states focused on public infrastructure that led to these

surprisingly powerful states for lengthy periods of time. The result of which, getting back to your question, is that these ideas became part and parcel of what these states were trying to develop. Critiques of the state were also building upon these same ideas. And you do see a continuity there that is striking in world history. We're going to come to your suggestions to live a better life in a second because we need to get down to practical brass tacks there. But I'm still interested in whether the contemporary society in the East, am I just being racist, orientalist here? The certain traits that we ascribe to the East, perhaps less rampant individualism, order, you know, ostentatious politeness. And so are they as a result of these different

philosophical traditions, the ones that we develop in the West? Or am I just completely making it up about my sort of vision of modern China? Oh, no, no, I know exactly where your vision is coming from. And it is accurate. But the intriguing thing is, I would say China is an extremely individualistic society, highly individualistic. But precisely because of some of these ideas we're talking about, there is a strong pushback as well, a sense that if this goes too far, it can take society into dangerous directions.

So along with the intense individualism right now in modern China, there's equally a very strong pushback, very much based upon a lot of these earlier ideas. How does the philosophy of these Chinese scholars, working around about the same time as the scholars of Miletus or in Athens, how does it differ from their worldview? Well, it is. or in Athens, how does it differ from their worldview? Big question. It is. And intriguingly, if we could forget what happened later and simply read a lot of the ideas from Greece along with the ideas from China, they're not as different as you would think.

I mean, a lot of Greek philosophy is very Chinese. It's really concerned with how you build relationships, how you live your daily life, how from the way you live your daily life, you sort of think how the state should operate. The reason now,

in retrospect, they seem so radically different is the few ideas in Greece that kind of take off. They are few and far between in Greece, but they're the ones that went out.

So this idea that, for example, there's a realm of truth outside of the mundane reality of our everyday lives. These are the ideas that become so influential later in the tradition. And these were a few ideas you see there in Greece. They were not dominant by any means at the time. And do you see Chinese philosophers as interested in, for want of a better word, physics, looking at the kind of atomic nature of the universe and sort of beginning to invent science in the way that you do with the Greek scholars? You do. But one thing that's fascinating about early Chinese thought is the focus tends very strongly to be on ethics and how we live in the world. So there's intense speculation about the

nature of the cosmos, but it's usually from the point of view of humans. In other words, if we understand the cosmos in this way, how would that affect the way we as human beings currently act? So ethics is seen as directly interrelated with cosmological speculation. That's brilliant. Let's think about advice. If we're trying to live a better life, and we're seeking the advice of these Chinese philosophers. What advice can they give us? Sure. One of the ideas that becomes very powerful in China is that we as human beings are really messy. We're messy bunches of energies and faculties and desires. And the way we interact with other human beings, other messes, is we're constantly pulling out different responses.

So, you know, I'll yell at someone, it makes someone angry. In this way of thinking, yelling at someone draws out an energy of anger. And the further argument, and there are tons of psychological experiments, by the way, that would say this is a very accurate portrayal of what we're like as humans, that what happens from a very young age is we fall into kind of patterns and ruts in these reactions. And so that person yells at me. It draws out my energy of anger. Someone else will do something that will emotionally remind me of that.

It draws out that same anger. And what happens is what we tend to think of as our personality or our true essential self. I just am someone who has a bad temper, for example. From this point of view, no, I am someone who has fallen into a pattern of responding in certain ways to the world. The reason this is important is if these are just patterns, the last thing you want to do is love yourself and embrace yourself for who you are. What you want to do, and I'll use some of their terminology, is break the self, overcome the self, overcome these patterns. And so they would say, think of your life as one of training yourself to be a better human being, not loving yourself and embracing yourself for who you currently are.

I think that's very interesting. I mean, to what extent is this exciting and important to you? Because it seems to have been validated, if that's the right word, by modern science, by psychology, by psychotherapy. Would it be as interesting and example, you walk through a museum and you see an Egyptian mummy. That's fascinating. But we don't really learn a lot from the Egyptian mummy, right? And I think this would be the case here, too. If they had some bizarre view of human psychology, that would be intriguing. But in this particular case,

since the view of human psychology seems to really be onto something, it makes it all the more powerful. Then perhaps it's a set of ideas that could really challenge some of our assumptions. Maybe our view of the self is a way of thinking about the self, certainly has certain strengths, but maybe it has dangers too. And perhaps some of these other ideas could really challenge us. I was very interested in that last sentence you said about train yourself

because I think it was Aristotle. I read when I was doing my A-levels, which is a high school leaving certificate here, and it said, if you want to be something, pretend you're it for a long time, and then you'll be it. And that strikes me as perhaps as similar as ancient Chelsea. And I've lived like that. I mean, I wanted to be brave. And now I think I'm quite brave, but I don't think I was innately brave. I was very scared of things when I was a teenager. You know, it's like that terrible thing about standing in the power pose that people now say you must do. But it kind of works,

doesn't it? Absolutely. And here's a perfect example of Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, who's very, in a sense, Chinese. I mean, they're onto something very similar. And as you said, it's all about practice. It's not about, again, loving yourself and embracing yourself for who you are, looking within and finding yourself. It's about changing yourself. And indeed, very much like Aristotle in China, they would say, you're not brave at birth or unbrave at birth. You become a certain type of person. And if you want to become brave, you pretend you're brave and you act as if you're brave. And then you slowly train yourself to become brave. It's very funny because I was talking to someone about meditation the other day, and I did find myself thinking, why sit around all day waiting for thoughts to come to you?

Why not try and be the thing you want to be? Precisely. And they would say that's absolutely the case. What we are as human beings is based entirely on what we become, either passively in a very dangerous way or through active training, in which case we're training ourselves to be things we thought we never could be. But it's all about training and practice. Now, what else do the students lap up? Oh, many things. So just one other example that's fascinating is they will emphasize, a lot of these philosophers, Laudz is the key figure here, that a lot of our ideas about

leadership are actually very dangerous. So we think of leadership as training yourself to be the strongest figure in the room, dominating the room. Well, if everything is relational and everything are based upon messy selves interacting with each other, if you attempt to dominate someone or control someone, you might succeed for a brief period of time, but it will always simply breed resentment, and that will always outdo you in the long run. And so they will emphasize, no, no, no, things like leadership come down to sensing those around you, sensing the ways things you're doing are affecting others, and then training yourself to actually be able to work with

others effectively. And going back to your earlier question question too, it's all about training and practice. Why did the scholars of the end of the first millennium BCE, both in the train and in China and in between, why did they come up with these quite simple and effective philosophies in a way that seems to have been obscured to later, perhaps more technologically enriched societies? Yes. I think we've gone through a kind of odd period when we have decided that the individual already is the beginning and end of everything. And so as long as the individual is, again, simply looking within, as long as you build an economic and political order based upon each individual being able to do what is best for their own interests. Once you build a society that way, again, this sounds

wonderful. It sounds great and liberatory. It's a perfect example of what we tend to think of as a good modern society. The truth of the matter is, if you look historically, that's a potentially very dangerous way to think. I mean, what you're doing to, ironically, as we're telling people, this is how you liberate yourself, what you're really saying is don't focus on the ways that first individually you can really train yourself to be a better person. And it equally means economically and politically

we're building an entire set of ideologies based upon a very restrictive possibility of what humans can become. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of

history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Do you think that's got to do with the big monotheistic religions, perhaps Christianity, the idea that the light of God is within each one of us and therefore we're all creating the image of God and therefore, do you think that's important? And that's something that those scholars, well, it's something that wouldn't have been part of those scholars' milieu. Very much so. And one particular variation of that is very historically significant.

So when you get the push saying things like rituals are bad, it's all about a sincere belief in some higher truth, when that much more recently gets shifted into the internal self. So forget rituals, forget practice, forget training. Forget tradition. Exactly. Simply look within and sincerely believe in the truth, but now it's the true self that you're supposed to believe in. Again, the danger is, as liberatory as that sounds, we're restricting ourselves.

It means we are, or in fact, everything we ever could be is already there as long as we are sincere and authentic to this thing, this one single thing that we claim to be our true self. So, if Confucius and the Chinese philosophers were in the modern world, what would the ancient Chinese scholars make of the modern world? What is the first thing that would be the cult of the individual? Or is it dispensing with customary traditional knowledge of our forefathers? It's been amassed at great, great sweat and energy and exhaustion, and the jettisoning all that. What would they find fascinating or disturbing about the modern world? Yes, I suspect if we could take them and just sort of pluck them into contemporary life and say, do an anthropological analysis of us, I think what they would say is,

here are all of these people that seem to love to claim they're liberated individuals deciding for themselves how to live their lives and isn't this wonderful? And then they would say, but look anthropologically at what they do. What they do, like all humans, they would say, is they are simply these passive creatures in the world that are sort of immediately responding to their surroundings, which define what they become. They harden themselves into these ruts and patterns, again, like all human beings. But weirdly, they stay there because then they keep telling themselves they should love these patterns and embrace these patterns.

And meanwhile, they have this ideology of how free and liberated they are, not realizing that actually they're trapping themselves into one very restricted vision of the single unique self. So I think they would say, we're typical, we're like all human beings, there's nothing unusual or modern about us in our own way of thinking, we're very typical. But what's chilling is we have an ideology that doesn't even allow us to see how passive we really tend to be in the world. Okay, well, that's interesting, because if we're saying that modern individuals have got this love of self that comes from the great liberal ideas of the 17th, 18th centuries,

and that then the Chinese philosophers would reject that or caution us against that. So hang on, but those liberal ideas didn't exist in 1000 BC. So what sort of dominant cultural norms were the Chinese philosophers reacting against? Great question. And intriguingly, ideas not unlike our own. That's what's so intriguing about it. Absolutely. So again, we tend to think of these as modern ideas. Actually, these ideas have been around a long, long time. The whole idea of sincerely and authentically believing in who you really are, those arose in China too. And in fact, a lot of the ideas we've been discussing arose as a self-conscious reaction against such ideas. So you get, for example,

religious movements roughly the same time in China as the ideas we've been talking about that say, well, let's transform the world by creating a sincere belief in the self, in a perfect totalizing world in which each human can do what is best for them in terms of their own interests, you know, prototypically modern ideas that we would mistakenly call as such. Well, a lot of these ideas we're arguing from China that we've been discussing, no, no, this is potentially dangerous and restrictive. So, intriguingly, there's nothing modern about our so-called modern ideas. They've been around a long time, as have other ideas,

and it's part of the dangerous pattern that we've fallen into in our thinking of calling these ideas modern and other ideas as so-called traditional. No, no. There have been ideas about how you build better worlds throughout world history, and we'd be better off if we actually thought maybe some of them are ones we could learn from. thought maybe some of them are ones we could learn from. In terms of decision-making, because this is one we hear a lot about, again, perhaps post-enlightenment, which is you've got these two different centers of power within your body. You've got your head and your heart. And we're rational animals, and we should be thinking rationally, but often we get betrayed

by our heart or our genitals or our stomach when we're hungry or our legs that are tired from walking. The Chinese would caution against that, wouldn't they? Indeed. And as you said, that is really the model we tend to use. So we have our head where we'll rationally try to make decisions. And then sometimes we'll say, well, after you've gone through all the rational decision making, go with your gut. And so you're either going with your mind or going with your gut. And indeed, in China, you actually see similar ideas arising.

And a lot of the philosophers that we're talking about here actively rejected both. And they said, well, no, the danger, first of all, of what we mistakenly call a rational decision-making process, what that really involves is me trying to rationally think through the future and how I will fit into that future, say if I'm making a career decision, something like that, which is unlikely to be in any manner, shape, or form an accurate portrayal of the messy world that really exists out there. It's a messy, capricious world. And if I go with my gut, I'm probably going with my worst untrained patterns and ruts. patterns, and ruts. So in both cases, it's dangerous. What you're trying to do is train yourself to sort of sense the messiness of the world, accept that the world is capricious, but then what you're trying to do is set trajectories in motion. So going back to the example of a career, if I decide who I am and what would be a good career for me based upon who I am, I'm very unlikely to make a good decision. If, on the contrary,

I am training myself to develop different sides of myself, working with a very complex world out there, I'm setting the trajectories in motion that will open up possibilities that I probably couldn't imagine right now, but that will someday mean I'm much more likely to work in ways that would lead to a great career. It's a very different way of thinking of a decision-making process. And yet, I think much more accurate in terms of what we are really like as humans, and frankly, what the outside world is really like as well. What I'm enjoying so much about the discussion is that we're talking about ancient Chinese philosophy, but we're talking about mental health and decisions and the

contemporary and of course, the future. And as a historian, I love that. It must be so exciting for you at a time when the liberal arts is in decline in the US and now in Britain as well, but worryingly in the US, it must be so exciting for you to be able to take discussions like this out to kids who are never expecting to find solace and stimulation in history, philosophy, and help them to see the world and help them to understand these are tools that are going to improve their lives today and going forward. Very much so. The world we're living in is very much, again, the post-89 world where we think we've answered the big questions. And it means that things like the field of economics and politics are assuming one vision

of the self. So we're assuming the rational decision-making individual choosing for him or herself what is in their best interests and we develop our economic theories accordingly. But yes, what I find so exciting about the humanities is it's in the humanities that really looks at things like history and culture that can say, you know, that is a way of thinking about the individual. That is a way of building out an economic vision. That's a way that may have strengths, but it

has certain dangers. If you look historically, once that idea sort of takes over and you get the rise of neoliberalism, it creates a certain type of world. Critiques against it are going to create other types of worlds, some of which we may find even more dangerous. And so what you gain by looking at history, looking at culture, is you begin to see, well, what happens if we define the self a certain way, define the state a certain way? What are the historical implications of when that's been done? So it's happened repeatedly. And what are the historical implications of doing it in different ways? And suddenly, to students, a world that seemed kind of lacking in alternatives,

where they've been told there's a vision of the self and a way to run an economy. Suddenly, they realized, no, there are a plethora of different ways with each its own dangers, but potentials that they could work with. And suddenly, by taking culture and history seriously, the world is suddenly open again with possibilities, because you see, it's a complex world. It has long been a complex world and we haven't figured things out, but we have a ton of resources we could be using to rethink everything. And it really strikes me that you're linking the world with people's individual experience as well. So the present is, history teaches us the present is neither inevitable or permanent. And actually that's true of our individual lives, the decisions we make about our partners or our education. And it's true of the neoliberal world order.

Absolutely. I mean, up until two years ago, you would really have thought, well, neoliberalism is it. We may not enjoy neoliberalism, but we've, again, we've gotten the only system that really seems to work. Well, now, obviously, in those next two years, we've seen radical rejections against the neoliberal world. But yet, some of those reactions may seem like this is also potentially extremely dangerous. So suddenly, the world, again, is open for possibilities. But of course, that was equally true two years ago. We were just blinded, and it was true since 89. We've been thinking, there are no alternatives. We figured out the big questions. No, we really have not figured out the big questions. And all of that is still part of a constant project. I mean,

we are creating the worlds that we're living in. And if we're doing it passively and just accepting, say, a neoliberal world, we're going to do a very poor job of it if we realize there are real alternatives out there, some of which are extremely dangerous, but some of which have real possibilities, then we're much more actively engaged in hopefully creating better worlds. And let's hope so. You were involved in studying China since before it was fashionable. Now that everyone's desperate for information about China, and Bill Gates is tweeting out lists of books to read about China. In short, what are some of the key things that we need to understand about China's past and perhaps about China's vision of its own past?

Yes. So a very typical misreading of what's going on in China runs along the following lines. So China used to be a traditional society. It had this overly strong state that prevented the rise of things like capitalism. And then in the 20th century, it's been a very tumultuous century. But now finally at the beginning of the 21st century, they're faced with a basic dilemma. Did they finally once and for all get rid of this old traditional state that still controls things, in which case they would become part of the good modern world? Or will they continue to be held back by a traditional state? A typical way of phrasing it. Now, the truth of the matter is that the current state you see in China is very much a product of the 20th century.

If you look at earlier Chinese history, you see an incredible debate about how you build a state, how you run an economy. You have 2,000 years of building very successful states and at times building extraordinarily successful economies. Certainly, it's a view that pushes against our vision of neoliberalism. It was based upon the idea that you intentionally try to create a state as divorced as possible from the market. So you actually support the market. But the state, the idea is you want to divorce it. So you want to have a state that runs public infrastructure, focuses on education, focuses on the legal system, and then is not controlled by the market, as opposed to, say, a neoliberal

vision, which would say, no, no, no, you actually want the government to be as, we like to say, responsive to the market as possible, but meaning you privatize everything, you basically allow market leaders to run the government. It's a radically different vision of how you run a state. Now, the reason I'm mentioning all of this is right now, this is suddenly back up to debate again in China. So do you actually go back to some of the work that was done before and try to again create a successful state that would not be a privatized state? It would be a strong state, but it would be a state focused on public education, public infrastructure, running a legal system. It would be a state that perhaps could deal with things like climate

change because it wouldn't be controlled by lobbying interests for whom it would be against the immediate interest that support for green technology might go through. Might it be a state that could actually then deal with things like radical social and economic inequality, because it wouldn't be too controlled by a very, very tiny elite? That's part of what's going on right now in China. And it's important to note for all of the problems, there is at least a vision of the state there coming from the earlier period that could easily win out and could become a very significant force in the world to come. And this would be an anti-neoliberal vision. And it could be one that would be seen as very powerful. And it is likely if we're not

even taking this seriously, not even seeing what's going on, that we're missing what is actually potentially a very powerful vision that could play a significant role in the world to come in the very near future. How interesting, because most critiques of the Chinese state that I read, of course, are determined to talk about it in terms of a European or North American 20th century model, which is a sort of crony socialist model. Precisely. How fascinating. Precisely. And to be sure, that's still a part of it.

I mean, that part of what you're seeing in China right now is a continuation of 20th century developments. But part of the critique of that is to say, well, let's not turn to the American model of neoliberalism. Let's return to earlier visions of the state, which turned out to be extraordinarily successful. And the argument is maybe, if anything, they could be more powerful right now, perhaps even being able to do things that, to stick with that example, America can't do because America can no longer be a world leader in things like dealing with social and economic inequality, dealing with things like climate change, because it's too controlled by lobbying interests, which would be a natural outcome of a neoliberal vision. As an American, that's a sad sentence to hear, but looks to be true at the moment. Last question, right. So you went as a young man to China, you explored these ancient philosophies. How has it changed your life as an individual? How could it change the lives of the readers of this excellent book?

It certainly changed my life dramatically. Again, I was part of that 89 generation, part of that generation that was told the big questions had been answered. Neoliberalism is the final answer. And now just learn to live within this world that we have created that's leading to, we were told, great prosperity and great liberation. And part of what has been so powerful about learning about Chinese history, reading these texts, is again, the world has suddenly opened a possibility again. You begin to realize how complex the world history has been, how we are still very much a part of that. We are not creating some modern break from a traditional order. We're part of a very complex world history that is still being written. And certainly, from my understanding of the big economic and political questions of the

day, down to even questions about how I should live my everyday life, suddenly you have a world of possibilities. And I think that's part of what you gain by really taking these ideas, taking culture, taking history seriously. Brilliant. You've convinced me. I'm going to take out the piano. I've always said I'm not musical, but that's nonsense. I'm in a rut. Absolutely. Michael, thank you so much. Your book is The Path, What Chinese Philosophers Can Tell Us About the Good Life. I urge everybody to read it.

Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Hi everyone, it's me Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps basically boost up the chart, which is good. And then more people listen, which is nice. So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you don't buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favor. Thanks. you