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As an American Fulbright lecturer living in Beijing, I am regularly confronted with “lost in translation” ethical conversations. At a recent lunch with United States Embassy officers and local Chinese intellectuals, we had a complete cultural breakdown over red envelopes.

My students in Beijing and Shanghai all know John Dewey’s name, but most of my Chicago undergrads back home do not.

Chinese people regularly give red envelopes, or hongbao, filled with money as gifts for weddings, births, New Year celebrations and so on. The red color is thought to be good luck. It is very common for a Chinese family to give hongbao to a surgeon who is about to perform a procedure on a family member. Everyone knows to do this, and everyone does it to the extent that they are able. The Americans in our group thought this practice was unethical bribery, because it sought to bias the doctor in one’s favor. The Chinese people at the table replied, “Of course it biases the doctor. That’s why we do it.” Not only were they mystified by the censure, but the Chinese were prompted to ask if the Americans had any children — for every parent surely uses any means necessary to protect loved ones.



When one embassy officer (working his best “hearts-and-minds diplomacy”) suggested that the Chinese switch the giving of hongbao to after the successful operation, rather than before, the Chinese were struck dumb with astonishment. Of course, you have to give the hongbao beforehand because it motivates the doctor. The gift tells the doctor: (a) to take special care with our child (b) we respect your surgical skills/education and “give face” accordingly (c) we are devoted to our child, will hold you responsible and have the means to do so. The fact that not everyone can afford to influence their doctor with hongbao is not grounds for withholding it, since we’re trying to protect my child here and now. The parent, according to the Chinese, should never weigh the child’s well-being against something so arcane as an abstract principle.

This simple confusion exposes tectonic ethical differences between the two cultures. Many Americans see patronage like hongbao as intrinsic corruption. Sure, it starts simple, they suggest, but it scales up to corrupt party members taking bribes and absconding with great wealth. The Chinese on the other hand recognize that hongbao exchange is good manners and important social grooming (guanxi), and has nothing to do with graft, which they also condemn as selfish. Most Westerners cannot understand the pragmatic ethics of the Chinese, dismissing any preferential system as unethical because it fails to respect every citizen equally.

This chasm is especially notable since the only official philosophy America ever produced goes by that very name — pragmatism. It is centered in the ideas of a small group of late 19th- and early 20th-century thinkers that includes John Dewey, William James and Charles Sanders Peirce (whom James acknowledged as pragmatism’s philosophical founder). American pragmatism’s influence in both academic and intellectual life was significant but not long-lived. As analytic philosophy gained footholds in the American university system, the influence of pragmatism faded, though it was revived and revised when it was taken up again by philosophers, Richard Rorty foremost among them, in the post-Cold War era.

In a 1906 lecture, “What Pragmatism Means,” James said that the pragmatic method sought to “interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences.” I would argue that at this moment, that method seems more Chinese than American.

Most Americans are familiar with Beijing’s pragmatism when it comes to foreign policy. Uninterested in moral debates with other nations, China takes the position that its policies are “just business,” and trades with saints and tyrants alike. The United States, at least publicly, looks down its nose at this seeming lack of principle, but it is my view that we fail to understand the deeper pragmatic ethic in Chinese culture.

These days, it seems that pragmatism is more commonly embraced by Chinese intellectuals than by Americans. In China, enthusiasm for Dewey’s philosophy in particular is growing rapidly, while back home interest in it languishes. The dean of my school in Beijing Foreign Studies University, Professor Sun Youzhong, explained that an extensive new translation of Dewey’s voluminous works is underway at East China Normal University in Shanghai, and these will include many lectures that Dewey gave when he lived in China from 1919 to 1921. There have also been recent conferences on Dewey’s philosophy in Beijing and Shanghai, and my own undergraduate students all know his name, while most of my Chicago undergrads back home do not. If such evidence is anecdotal at best, there is some statistical indication that interest in American pragmatism is withering in its own soil: American graduate programs that offer the opportunity to specialize in our homegrown philosophy make up only around 10 percent of degree-granting philosophy departments.

Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series.

The overarching theme of Dewey’s philosophy, and that of William James before him, is that an experimental approach to life — one that tests ideas in the realm of action — should guide us in all domains, including religion, politics, ethics, art and, of course, science. Dewey argued against sclerotic ideology, absolutism and essentialism. Too many of us are overconfident about our opinions and tend to view them as gems of certainty, outshining those of other people, cultures and eras. To all this confident certainty, pragmatists pointed out that truth is fallible and we can’t be entirely sure when we’ve arrived at it. William James, in his “Will to Believe,” says, “the faith that truth exists, and that our minds can find it, may be held in two ways. The absolutists in this matter say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can know when we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think that although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when. To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another. One may hold to the first being possible without the second.”

Our ethical claims, like everything else, need to be treated as hypotheses that we test in the social realm. Morality does not fall from the sky as eternal truth. We try out notions of the good in the realm of social interaction, and we validate ones that work for us (like sharing) and eliminate ones that don’t (slavery). Dewey, in his essay “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy,” says ethics is not about utopian idealism, but needful matters like how to “improve our education, ameliorate our manners, advance our politics.” Pragmatism, heavily influenced by Darwin, holds that even ethics is an evolving adaptive response of Homo sapiens’ social life.

The current renaissance of Dewey and pragmatism in China stresses the secular ethics dimension as a way to remind a growing wealthy class of the common good. Chinese people have been atheists for thousands of years, and pragmatism is very congenial with the deeply secular Confucian ethic. When I asked my Beijing students recently to explain Chinese pragmatism to me, I expected them to cite Deng Xiaoping’s famous dismissal of economic ideology: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice.” But they went all the way back to Confucius and reminded me that when he was asked how we should best serve the ghosts and spirits, Confucius replied that we should first figure out how to serve human beings. Only after we solve the problems of the here and now should we worry about the supernatural realm.

Now, we’re in a position to consider Chinese and American ethical differences from a pragmatist perspective, and also see why we’d do well to revitalize our own national philosophy. The earlier example of filial piety and hongbao reveal the pragmatic nature of Chinese ethics, but it is not merely expedient or convenient (there is nothing convenient about filial piety). The social grooming of guanxi is not selfishness, but reciprocity. Americans dismiss it as “bribery” but it places reciprocal bonds on people that benefit the group and its members. It becomes a problem only when the grooming is unreciprocated or excessive. It is wrong by degrees, not intrinsically or absolutely wrong.

By contrast American ethics (and foreign policy) is still too religious in its perspective, and even our democratic traditions are asserted with dogmatic gusto. As it’s been pointed out many times, someone who thinks he has God on his side is capable of almost anything. Of course, we’ve seen lately that atheists can be just as dogmatic, and China herself proved this in the Mao era. But China is very different now, and aligns more with the pragmatic insight that dogmatism (whether religious or atheist) is the bigger problem.

Given that insight, our own pragmatist tradition should give us a well-needed dose of humility.

Stephen T. Asma is professor of philosophy and fellow of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture at Columbia College Chicago. His most recent book is “Against Fairness.”