An Evolutionary Perspective On Divergence And Concordance In Mencius And Xunzi

Famously,the pronouncements of the Ruist sage Confucius on human nature and the Heavenly Way were not to be heard.After Ruism’s eight-way factional split,Mencius and Xunzi both inherited the way of Confucius in their own respectively unique fashions.From the pronouncements on human nature and the Heavenly Way that these two did indeed make,it’s clear that they each represented two importantly distinct modes of carrying forward the Confucian way;indeed,representing two poles on the spectrum of Ruist thought,which was a human-centred tradition of delighted engagement with the present world,and had no need for recourse to an anthropomorphic Creator.As reflected in Yan Fu’s rendering of the word “evolution”(yanhua)in his translation of Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics,evolution in the natural world is,of course,not unidirectionally progressive.Evolution explains the fundamental principles governing “the great life-generating virtue of Heaven and Earth”;it explains how the process happens by which “the interaction of Heaven and Earth forms and generates the myriad things” without requiring the involvement of an anthropomorphic Creator;indeed,it explains the origins of human nature.Given the foregoing,it would seem that evolutionary theory would be highly compatible with the tradition of Ruist thought represented by Mencius and Xunzi,and it seems perplexing that even after the passage of more than a century,there is a paucity of comparative studies of Ruism and evolutionary theory,and certainly no attempt at a careful and systematic synthesis.There are two plausible reasons for this: firstly,partly due to the misleading translation of Evolution and Ethics and partly due to the specific historical exigencies and demands of the late Qing and early Republic period in which it was received,the descriptive was often conflated with the normative,resulting in a warped form of evolutionary theory becoming weaponised and put to the task of “demolishing old Kong’s [Confucius’ ] establishment”;secondly,from the seventies onwards sociobiology became fashionable,and rooted as it was in evolutionary theory,its early incarnation overemphasised the bestial and biological facets of human nature,which seemed to some to tarnish the human-centred ideals which Ruists cherished.However,in the past thirty or forty years,even the gene-selectionist camp represented by Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene have made a point of emphasising the importance of culture and education;multilevel selection theorists emphasise even more the prosociality inherent in human biological nature,as do cultural evolutionary theorists,who moreover view cultural traits as legitimate targets of evolution by Darwinian selection.These three can all help act as a corrective to early sociobiology.Cultural evolution also has striking similarities to Li Zehou’s ‘theory of anthropo-historical ontology’,according to which the difference between humans and other animals is our ‘cultural psychology’,by which humans ‘created ourselves’.Temporarily ignoring the influence of culture and assessing the similarities and differences between Mencius and Xunzi from the standpoint of(biological)natural selection,we notice that the underlying similarities shared by Mencius and Xunzi are also shared and supported by both of the two major evolutionary models-gene-selection and multilevel selection.However,the former’s description of human nature is closer to the Xunzian view of human nature as ‘odious’,whereas the latter is relatively closer to the Mencian view of human nature as ‘good’.The divergence of Mencian and Xunzian views on the goodness or odiousness of human nature is very conspicuous,but there is another divergence between them which is even more important: Mencius is a moral internalist,whereas Xunzi is a moral externalist.Moral internalism and/or externalism is a major point of difference between the Neo-Ruist camps of Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi as against Lu Jiuyuan and Wang Yangming,between Zen Buddhist sects advocating gradual as against sudden enlightenment,and even between Catholicism and Protestantism.The reason why such debates over moral motivation prove so historically intractable is that tendencies toward Mencian-style internalism and/or Xunzian-style externalism are genetically heritable,and such tendencies are relatively uniformly distributed across a range of populations worldwide.This may be due to an improvement in group functionality and competitiveness resulting from the coexistence of both types in a single group.Xunzi was a moral externalist who strongly valued cultural tradition and what he called fenyi,a package of inherited cultural practices.He knew fenyi was effective at constraining internecine struggle,he knew the possession of fenyi divided humanity from the animals,and knew it to be the fundamental reason for effective human group functioning.As for the origins of the fenyi package,Xunzi proffered that “the former kings hated chaos,and so they established fenyi”.This is an answer found to be dissatisfying by contemporary academia.A cultural evolutionary reading of the Xunzi treats fenyi –including marriage rituals and the whole canon of Ruist rituals – as a type of ‘cultural technology’ shaped by the operation of cultural selection upon competing cultural traits.This undercuts the need for any specific individual to purposively ‘establish’ the tradition:it is created through collective participation in cultural processes.In the absence of an anthropomorphic morally-concerned High God,this package of cultural technology helps reinforce the natural prosociality of members of a group.Mencius was a moral internalist who took human-heartedness,righteousness,ritual deference and wisdom to be innate affordances,believing that “the tangible outcome of human-heartedness is service to one’s elders”.However,on the basis of the biological evolutionary mechanisms of kin selection and reciprocal altruism alone,an innate disposition to filial piety seems unlikely to form – this will require the salutary influence of culture in order to cultivate.Kin selection does little,then,as an affirmation of the Mencian‘Four Sprouts’ idea.However,it is affirmatory of the ideas of ‘love with gradations’ and‘ethical extension’ which Mencius advocated,and casts doubt on the viability of Mohist jian’ai.In brief summary,then,an evolutionary perspective on the thought of Mencius and Xunzi reinforces the notion that Mencius and Xunzi are thinkers whose respective internalist and externalist dispositions represent not just complementary and legitimate but indeed inalienably necessary embodiments of the Confucian way.