The concept of Li (Confucian)

One of the problems that I think we face in America today is we don't seem to have a collected sense of what morality means. Some claim they get their morality from the Bible; but when they try to apply it to say today's government, they are left claiming there should be little government because I do not think they can figure out how to apply something like the Sermon on the Mount. Or they seek to vote for someone who claims they have a direct pipeline to God which means they themselves do not have to figure out how to apply say Leviticus 20:9 (and many more like it) to today's laws or regulations.

When I was reading one of the books I have recently been sorting, I came across the word 'li' which I then had to go looking to see what the heck it meant as I thought I understood Oriental teachings at least on a rudimentary level but had never heard this word. Which meant I didn't understand as much as I had thought.

Wikipedia had this to say in a general sense about li in [Li (Confucian)]. Here is what particularly attracted me to thinking of what it means for us today:

"Confucius envisioned proper government being guided by the principles of li. Since Confucian ideals proposed the perfectibility of all human beings (through the practices of li) as well as propriety being its own reward, government prescribed punishment was not seen as being necessary. Confucius stressed the importance of the rites as fundamental to proper governmental leadership. In his writings, Confucius regarded feudal lords in China that adopted the Chinese rites as being just rulers of the Central States. Contrarily, feudal lords that did not adopt these rites were considered barbarians, not worthy of being considered Chinese or part of the Central States. (Spring and Autumn Annals)."

I believe our founders had this idea in mind with their attempt to found a country with this kind of potential goodness. In the Preamble to the Constitution, they laid out some goals:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

The ones who wrote the Constitution were a learned bunch. They laid out a basic structure but also left room for growth and change. Whether they knew the word li, it seems to me that they were striving toward that concept in how government should work.

For us all now, instead of taking the view that government fails and can never be trusted, as is pretty much the view of the tea party, what if we thought of government as something that should serve a purpose and people needed to be trained how that would be achieved?  Of course, this is the ideal. It's like Plato or any other philosophical concept but without the ideal, can we do anything?

Li and Confucian

"Just as li is the outward expression of the superior man, jen (goodness, humaneness, love) is the inner ideal. Confucius taught that men should love one another and practice respect and courtesy. If li and jen were operative in a person, the end product would be the Confucian goal: the superior man. Confucius believed in the natural goodness or at least the natural perfectibility of man. He stressed government by virtue (Te) and the arts of peace (Wen)." 

 What I like about this word li is I think we need something simple rather than a whole set of complex laws, as some would claim say the Bible offers in the Old Testament but where many of them have no application to today (like whether to eat shellfish or have cloth blended of weaves). It has enabled forgetting the meaning behind the laws and frankly it is what Jesus attempted to teach but whose teachings seem to have been discarded by many today who claim to be followers. He reduced it to a simple commandment where it applies to human interaction-- love others as you love yourself. They call that empathy.

The assumption of some today is that man is inherently evil and has to be schooled to be anything else. If we instead assumed man was inherently good; but it's human experiences which change that, we might have a better way to look at fixing what so many believe is broken. I do not believe that babies are born the same. They are born with inherent traits, but then experience takes those and begins them on the road to where they will end up.

The concept of li is very applicable to government and what it should be here to accomplish. The idea that we don't need government is ridiculous for anyone who lives in a community of people. The idea that local government is superior to federal is equally foolish.

Government needs to have a purpose defined; but in the end, it's run by human beings who often have on set of standards by which to judge any of what they do. They are operating on one need after another but too often with no overlying sense of purpose. What if we just thought of government as li, and when it is not, we would demand change? What if we expected it to work; and when it did not, we redirected it to the higher standard which we knew we had the right to demand.

This would take training and getting away from partisanship to a moral set of standards that worked to make things function smoothly. Someone just saying we need tax cuts would not work unless they could explain how that helped the whole. Taxes aren't evil as you'd think some would suggest today. They are necessary to pay for services. Too many today see government as some evil entity separate from us and only there to hurt them. Plenty of politicians have played that game even as they ran for an office to put themselves in government also.

I believe we need li thinking in our daily lives, in our businesses and we should expect it from our government. But we are becoming told instead to expect nothing from government so instead we give up on it.  Today it seems to be the slick ad or quip that leads people to vote for this or that person. We don't have that inner balance and therefore cannot recognize it in someone we are electing to higher office.

For anyone who is familiar with the concept of li, I'd like to hear a more concise definition than I was able to find online. The author who had used it was not using it in terms of government but more in the sense of another word I like very much-- the Navajo word hozho which means harmony, beauty, balance, tranquility, equilibrium, rightness, centeredness, truth, clarity of action, and thought. It sounds like it would mean what above is discussed as jen. 

On a personal level, we need this sense of balance, and I also think we need it as part of our government where the rituals and its form serves to help it function on a higher level. Without it, we are where we are today, and we have people yelling out that when someone is hurt without insurance-- let them die, cheering at the idea of executions, and booing that someone wants to be able to live true to who they are. Are we the kind of people I don't think many of us would like very much? We can turn this thing around. We can reach toward our highest ideals, not stoop to our lowest. I really believe we can, and we start with us.