L

ast week, I picked up a 1999 book by Francis Fukuyama that proved to be serendipitous. I had intended to read it long ago, but who can keep up with his amazing steady output of deep insight into important issues? Perhaps it was the title that kept putting me off -- The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order -- not exactly bedtime reading! His primary concern is cultural decline in the U.S., but his main thesis provides a good framework for thinking about how in God’s providence China might follow in the footsteps of Britain and America in constructing a moral order that can sustain its ongoing economic, social and political development.

Fukuyama’s main thesis is that history is linear and progressive in terms of political and economic/technological progress, while history in the social and moral spheres is cyclical.* And often the rate of technological change exceeds the rate of social adjustment. This calls to mind the concept of “cultural lag,” a reminder that cultural change always comes slowly. It is during such times when culture fails to keep up with technological change that societies run into trouble, or as Fukuyama and others now using economic concepts to study culture and religion would put it -- the supply of social capital fails to match demand.

Social capital is a society’s stock of shared values and habits that promote cooperation. It is the “glue” that holds societies together, preventing fragmentation or atomization and allowing social cohesion. Fukuyama posits that the loss of social capital can be regained through “renorming” or “remoralization” of society through discussion, argument, cultural wars etc. (I find these terms awkward and prefer to use “moral renewal”). The widespread adoption of key virtues leading to trust plays a central role in reconstituting social order.

Moral renewal and reconstruction of a new type of social order, Fukuyama notes, usually involves considerable input from religion, but also requires contributions from the state (public education, legislation), the private sector (training of workers and managers), and grassroots voluntary associations (channels for “social self-organization.”) To be more concrete, think of the rural laborers migrating to the cities during early stages of industrialization, whether in Britain, America or China. They have to become “city people” through learning new values, personal habits and skills to hold a factory job, raise a family and share mutual help with neighbors without a clan or a village to help.

Cycles Of Moral Renewal

For my purposes in this essay, the idea that social and moral change is cyclical fits very well with two thoughts on my mind in the past year:

1. Chinese history is marked by cyclical periods of major social transformation that cause a moral crisis, a search for a new socio-political philosophy and institutions to bring about a new cohesive order. Examples include the fall of the Ming dynasty in the mid-17th century, the decay of the Qing dynasty from 1870-1911, and the collapse of Republicanism by the late 1920s in favor of an authoritarian central party-state under the Nationalists and then the Communists; and finally, the long twilight of Communism since the Cultural Revolution. In each of these periods, there was openness to the Gospel as a source of hope for families and a new ethical system for reordering society.
2. A Chinese Christian friend is convinced there are lessons for China from earlier Christian revivals in the West that led to successful social and political reforms.

The Progressive Era In Britain And America

Social dislocation resulting from migration of rural workers to the industrial centers, and the rapid growth of both the working class and middle class, first emerged in Britain, then America, and eventually affected urban coastal China as well as other industrializing areas of the world. Public concern then spurred moral and social reform movements to address the problems. Renewal of social capital, in Fukuyama’s view, was responsible for the decline of the crime rate in Britain beginning in the 1840s and in urban America in the 1870s, as moral reform efforts took hold.

In Britain, “Victorianism” was a moral movement that deliberately sought to create new social rules and instill virtues in the urban migrant population. Adam Smith noted the virtues of punctuality, prudence, honesty; Ricardo pointed to industriousness, self-discipline, honesty. These are recognizable as the classic “bourgeois” middle-class virtues of Victorian England.

The Second Great Awakening (1800-1830s) sparked movements for Sunday Schools, the YMCA, women’s suffrage, the abolition of slavery and child labor, the temperance movement and prison reform, which together very quickly transformed society. The rural and urban poor became disciplined workers and responsible citizens. For background reading, I recommend a special section on “The Century of Reform” in the issue of Christian History 53 (Vol. XVI: 1), 1997, on William Wilberforce. http://www.ctlibrary.com/ch/1997/issue53

Reform movements that first surfaced in Victorian England spread quickly to post-Civil War Frontier America and grew into a broad international movement called Progressivism (1870-1920) centered on the belief that social progress could be made through the exercise of human will, creativity and technology. This conception, with its emphasis on social activism, reflected multiple strands of thought, including the Puritan concept of God as Providence working out his plans for history through an enlightened, righteous and hard-working public.

A wave of optimism about the future was ushered in by Christian revivals and resulting social reforms and social service agencies in Britain and America. Progressive ideas and activities contributed to Western confidence and boldness in international relations. The British and Americans, both those at home and those living abroad, thought of themselves with pride as the superior mentors of a modernizing Japan and China.

The dynamic idea of progress had no equivalent in Chinese tradition. One source in the West was trends in Protestant theology that inspired believers to seek perfection -- for self and society -- in this life. The new thinking combined with the new wealth of this earlier global era helped to boost the Protestant missionary movement. Foreign Protestants working in China grew from a few dozen in 1840 to 1300 by 1890 and 3500 in 1905. Missionaries gradually adopted the assumptions and language of progress, many portraying Christianity as the most highly developed of religions. Many began to make a case for Christianity in China on the pragmatic grounds of the prosperity and strength that “Christian” nations could achieve, not just on the grounds of its inherent truth or compatibility with Chinese tradition.

Most missionaries were not consciously imperialistic. In fact, they tended to be strong moral critics of economic and military imperialism and helped moderate its impact in many ways. Missionaries worked with Christian leaders in their home countries to conduct the first international social movement, the world-wide abolitionist campaign against slavery and the slave trade. After the American Civil War and the end of slavery, that campaign experience was transferred to other international movements against the coolie trade and the opium trade.

The Golden Age Of Protestantism in Early Modern China

These ideas and models for moral renovation influenced many Chinese. As rapid industrialization began to cause dislocation in Shanghai and other coastal cities and exacerbated rural poverty, mission agencies and American-style voluntary associations responded. Big cities like Shanghai and Tianjin had hundreds of voluntary associations of all kinds, including religious and professional and charitable. The YMCA was the major player in developing the civic sector.

During the Progressive Era, many Chinese came to share an optimistic agenda centered on the vision of making China a strong, modern nation-state through renewal of the Chinese people by education, citizenship, and social reform. There was a growing consensus that the old traditional values were responsible for the collapse of the Confucian order and could not meet the needs of a modernizing China. In the face of rampant corruption, immorality and huge inequities of wealth due to rigid class divisions, there was growing receptivity to Christianity as a comprehensive social-moral philosophy that could help renew public morality and build a new and equitable modern social order.

Protestants became hopeful that the “Christianization” of Chinese culture and society might be received as the solution to China’s problems. The most influential early advocates of such a mindset were the publishers of popular magazines like Timothy Richard. Many Chinese Christians came to share the belief that social progress was part of God’s plan for the world and for China, and that popular moral education was a central channel of God’s blessing.

The optimistic bubble of Progressivism burst due to the chaos under warlord rule in China after 1916 and the tragedies of the first World War from 1914-1918, which greatly undermined confidence in global progress toward a world civilization. Thereafter, educated Chinese were more critical of the Western paradigm. Partly in an effort to distance Christianity from the worst of imperialistic capitalism, the “social gospel” grew strong in YMCA circles in China and elsewhere. Its emphasis on a “social Christianity” rather than spiritual activities may have been more compatible with the culture of the YMCA’s indigenous Chinese leadership. The National Christian Council and the Chinese YMCA, both headquartered in Shanghai, partnered together to sponsor committees and conferences (1927, 1931) to research and debate how to bring moral principles to bear in taming capitalism.

The high tide of Progressivism passed with the failure of liberal constitutional politics in the 1930s and 1940s and the advent of the revolutionary Soviet style party-state, which increasingly exercised control over civil society as well as the economy. In the emergency of internal military conflict, foreign invasion and world war, the moderate long-term reform agenda of “national renewal” gave way to the urgent, immediate need for political-military mobilization for the sake of “national salvation.” Support for a liberal democratic path for China collapsed at a time of polarization and violent conflict.

Moral Renewal In China Today

Beneath the surface, however, the Gospel seeds of salvation, personal character, and public ethics planted in those earlier decades continued to germinate. Over time, they began to bear fruit, a process that continues today. So, we are brought full circle back to my closing comments in my first newsletter of January-February 2007 -- that Chinese Christians, with Overseas Chinese and other Christians involved in China’s current transition to an advanced industrial or “late modern” society can play a central, not peripheral role. They are among the prime agents of modeling and teaching virtues for a new social order. During the next month, I will be writing an essay on this topic for the “Tocqueville Project” of the American Enterprise Institute, and will share those thoughts with you in the future.

*As of 1999, when this book was published, Fukuyama continued with his “end of history” thesis that democratic capitalism, as the best political-economic system, is the logical outcome of historical progress. This has contributed to the widespread assumption that the adoption of market economics by Russia and China will somehow automatically produce democracy (no doubt much more simplistic thinking than Fukuyama’s, with his insights into the cultural aspects of history). This assumption is increasingly being questioned today, 8 years later, given setbacks to Russian democracy and the Chinese Communist Party’s longevity. Are the two countries doomed to autocracy? I plan to come back to this question in an essay next year.

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