Michael Springate wrote: > In a response to a comment from Wei, Charles Moyer wrote > > "But I do believe Confucius hit upon something when he said that it was > comparatively easier for one to be rich and not be puffed up than it was for > one to be poor and not feel resentment." > > Charles > > I'd be interested in knowing why you surmise Confucious may have said that (if > indeed, that is how he put it)? > > Could it be that the poor person sees the effect of waste and lost opportunity > very keenly? > > Could it be that the wealthy believe "all is right" more easily than the poor? > [snip] The Confucian Mencius offered an interesting gloss on this. From Ellen Meiksins Wood, *Peasant-Citizen & Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy* (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 149-50: **** Plato would surely concur with Mencius' remarks to the lapsed Confucian, Ch'en Hsiang, when the two were discussing the qualities of rulers: Why then should you think . . . that someone who is carrying on the government of a kingdom has time also to till the soil? The truth is, that some kinds of business are proper to the great and others to the small. Even supposing each man could unite in himself all the various kinds of skill required in every craft, if he had to himself everything he used, this would merely lead to everyone being completely prostrate with fatigue. True indeed is the saying, 'Some work with their minds, others with their bodies. Those who work with their minds rule, while those who work with their bodies are ruled. Those who are ruled produce food; those who rule are fed.' That this is right is universally recognized everywhere under Heaven. If there is a fundamental difference between Mencius and Plato, it certainly does not concern the division between those who work with their minds and those who work with their hands, those who are fed and those who feed them , nor the association of of these divisions with the separation between rulers and ruled. Nor can it be said that these distinctions are less closely related to Plato's theory of knowledge than they are to Mencius' views on the nature of the 'heart' and the senses. The difference seems to lie in the *complementarity* of the 'complementary grades and values' in Mencius' 'dualist hierarchy' as compared to the stark *opposition* of the grades and values in Plato's epistemological and social hierarchies. Perhaps the clue to this difference can be found in Mencius' last sentence. If it seemed self-evident to him that these hierarchical principless were 'universally recognized everywhere under Heaven,' it was far more difficult for Plato to assume such a consensus, or even to proclaim it for rhetorical purposes. In the context of Athenian democracy, which represented an unprecedented challenge to precisely those 'universal' principles, axioms that in the Chinese setting could be taken for granted had to be asserted *against* the prevailing social order and the cultural values that sustained it. . . . Plato's political philosophy illustrates more dramatically than any other masterpiece of Athenian culture the pervasive cultural effects -- whether direct or through the medium of opposition -- of the unique relation between governing and productive functions, personified in the first instance by the peasant-citizen and brought to fruition by the democracy. ******* And on pp. 171-2 (at the end of the book): ****** Plato sought a universal and permanent order underlying the world of experience and flux; he looked for a universal principle of justice and the good to set against the conventions of popular morality; he elaborated a principle of hierarchy to challenge democratic aspirations to equality, and a theory of justice diamentrically opposed to the democratic principle of *dike*; he used the analogy of the practical arts to exclude their practitioners from the specialized 'art' of politics; he hoped to restore the age-old division between rulers and producers, developing a theory of knowledge and a concept of the soul which corresponded to it. Virtually all the philosophical problems he confronted were questions raised by the new social order. Plato was anything but a peasant or craftsman; but it is difficult to imagine his invention of philosophy without the provocation offered by peasant-citizens and all their 'banausic' compatriots, whose very political existence challenged eternal verities, the truths and values 'universally recognized everywhere under Heaven' -- at least, almost everywhere. ****** I don't see how it is worthwhile blaming Pound personally for accepting this "truth" recognized everywhere under heaven. Since the 18th century expressions of it have been more diplomatic, more mealy-mouthed one might say, than were Plato or Mencius, but they were certainly the assumptions of the "Founding Fathers" in Philadelphia. How could slaveowners believe otherwise? Pound has the great virtue of making fully explicit, and with a beauty of language hardly surpassed by any writer in English, those assumptions hidden in the Constitution. To me his title, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, makes perfect sense. Carrol