Discourses of modernity are abundant. Many distinguished scholars, with diverse intellectual backgrounds, have engaged in a critical reflection on the fundamental deficiencies of Western modernity. What comes out of these confrontations with the Western tradition of enlightenment and modernity, however, is far from being uniform. On the contrary, the proposed solutions are so divergent that one is liable to end up highly confused. For instance, conflicting philosophical positions with labels such as post-colonialism, de-colonialism, post-modernity, late-modernity, second modernity have been proposed, and are busy contesting each other. Meanwhile, the ideas of multiculturalism, multiple modernities, and post-traditional society has become quite popular among sociologists and historians, sensitizing us to the role of traditions in the process of modernization. Consequently, discourses of modernity have become rich in historical substance, embracing diversity, and interpreting the patterns of mediation between modern and traditional institutions and values. This already implies that modernity in its concrete existence is always historical, and hence cannot be reduced to any unmediated essence. Furthermore, it is of fundamental significance to see how deeply the Western capitalist modernity has been entangled with the historical processes of colonialism, imperialism, and hegemonic use of power over the non-Western third world, particularly what we now call the Global South. This process entailed a systematic exploitation, a brutal suppression as evidenced by slavery institutions, and the dehumanization of the colonized people. There is no doubt that the Western modernity has become hegemonic only by externalizing costs and sacrifices to the peripheries in the world system of stratification. Granted that, however, it is also indisputable that it still carries within itself an unfinished normative endeavor concerning an enlightenment-oriented, moral-ethical, and aesthetic deliberation. Much vigilance is needed when we talk about modernity.
With such complexity in mind, I would like to show – in a straightforward and simple way – why and how the promise and the peril of modernity arise as an overall introduction to this book, and clarify the main goal and direction of the discussion to follow as an East Asian reflection on the paradoxical nature of the Western modernity. The modern paradox holds true not only in the West, but also in the East, where the enthusiasm of catch-up modernization has prevailed. However, how to go beyond the Western hegemony in knowledge production is an acute problem everywhere. Dufoix (2019: 1) sums up the emerging paradigms in this regard with such names as Eurocentrism (Alantas, 2006; Quijano, 2000;); global knowledge production (Connell, et.al. 2017 Keim, et.al, 2014; Ersche, 2014;), post-colonial social sciences (Go, 2013, 2016; Bhambra, 2007; Chambers, 2017; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018) and southern theory (Go, 2016: Connell, 2007, Ascione, 2016). On the other hand, the East and West are caught in global risk society today. Yet, due to their different historical trajectories and the normative forces of cultural traditions, it is possible for East Asia to respond to global risk society in its own creative way, which this book will argue to be distinct from such options as the typical global south perspective or the old-fashioned authoritarian collectivism in Asia or the individual-centered liberal approach as found in the West. In this sense, the book will explore and defend a post-Confucian approach to reflexive modernity. Before that, allow me to pin down the ten points of paradoxical modernity.
1 Ten Points of Paradoxical Modernity
4) Modernity has been synonymous with a specific civilizational form in which science and technology reign supreme. A seemingly boundless faith in science and technology has been a hallmark of the modernist mentality. Science has been exulted not only as the most important means for procuring productivity, but also as the driving force for the liberation of mankind. Science encourages the pursuit of rationality and progress. Yet here too, changes are obvious. Increasingly, there is a widespread disillusionment with the subjugating nature of scientific civilization. Although science has contributed in countless ways to human happiness and welfare, it is high time that science also takes some responsibility for the increasingly numerous misfortunes and disasters befalling mankind, as can be seen from the enormous damage wrought by the wholesale destruction of the environment, as well as the carnage of war spread through the use of weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, the scientific mentality tends to narrow the horizon available for human emancipation by subjugating normative concerns to those of technical management, and in the process delegating the increasingly desperate call of the moral-ethical, emotive, and aesthetic dimensions of human life to second place. Thus, we can no longer subscribe to the myth that science is synonymous with progress and emancipation with a clear conscience.
7) Modernity has meant the transformation of human relationships, freeing them from the bondage of traditional status–based distinctions, and introducing a new and more flexible system of social relationships and contracts, which in turn provide increased social mobility, security, and life-long employment. Social relationships uprooted through the process of transition from tradition to modernity once again attained an element of stability with the spread of the standard ‘social mooring points’ of modern society, such as occupation, class, sexuality, and so on. People were expected to follow a fixed and stable course of life once they take on a regular occupation or enter into the labor market. The stability of expectations and accountability was made possible on this basis. Gradually, however, society is once again becoming more ‘fluid’ with the disappearance of the idée fixé; it has been pointed out that our future lives will seem more ‘nomadic’ as people diversify their knowledge, tastes, and inclinations. People are becoming freer than at any other time in history to enter or leave various jobs as they see fit. Thus, the stability of the infrastructure of life under modernity in terms of occupation and social positioning is significantly decreasing and tends to be replaced by increased uncertainty and fluidity.
8) Modernity entails a sharp distinction between the private and the public on one hand, and between exchange-value and use-value on the other. The market necessitates rational computation and a cold, money-minded calculation of one’s self-interest. The exchange value of a thing is held to be more important than the value of its inherent utility. Everything is reckoned in terms of monetary value, or else calculated in accordance with an index that offers some standard of measurement. For this reason, women, who stereotypically value the emotional and relational aspects of life more than men, have been forcibly relegated to remaining in the private and personal (as opposed to the public) realm in the society.
Here too the times are changing, such that women are now actively resisting the notion of a fundamental division between the private and the public spheres as well as the assumed essential division between the male and the female sex. In the process, they challenge the tendency of phallocentric thinking, which subjugates the human and non-human environment around it and imposes its own mode of instrumental rationality. The various voices representing hitherto repressed feelings and sentiments, desires, and aesthetic experiences are all speaking out, sometimes loudly and aggressively. Modernity characterized by male domination in terms of formal and instrumental rationality faces serious challenges today.
9) Modernity fosters functional specialization and differentiation, as systems theory describes. We can say that modernity was originally marked by the differentiation of the spheres of science, morality, law, and arts, which were once unified by religion. Society has since then evolved in an even more specialized and differentiated fashion (Weber, 1949; 1951). Countless types of professions, functions, industries, organizations, and systems of knowledge have emerged anew. A flood of information is being released and circulated in line with the distinct modes of choice and classification that belong to each category. Along with the process of differentiation, however, new countertrends emerge, calling for re-integration, recombination, and de-differentiation, out of which new syntheses, fusions, hybrids, mutations, and so on are made possible. The fields of genetic engineering, the life sciences, and the information industry are good examples of this new trend, as are the various kinds of destructive restructuring of business corporations. The products of hybridity, mimesis, and fusion can be easily found in the realms of music and the arts, above all.
2 The Main Goal of the Book
Against this backdrop of paradoxical modernity, this book shows a series of analysis aimed at grasping the complexities of risk society as an unintended consequence of rush-to development in East Asia, and the enabling and constraining factors involved in the transformation towards reflexive modernity. The conceptual clarification and the empirical evidence of various dimensions of reflexivity will be offered from different angles in due contexts and timing. Among other things, however, in this preface, I want to emphasize that the concept of reflexivity presupposed in reflexive modernity refers to the capability of looking back over what modernity has done so far, not only with respect to its achievement’s bright aspect, but also its dark aspect – that is, what has been marginalized, ignored, or left aside while modernity constantly keeps itself moving forward.
Here it should be made clear what we are doing in this book. What we want to do is not going back to the colonial experience of exploitation and dependence in the past, though this legacy is still with us. To make it simple, the question we want to ask with the concept of reflexive modernity is not why and how we failed in modernization, but why and how the remarkable success that we have achieved in this regard has, nevertheless, produced such terrible consequences of risk society that we face today. We should note the difference between East Asia and Latin America, for instance. Important for the latter is investigating the dynamics of underdevelopment from the point of view of the Global South. By doing so, as Maia (2019: 7) points out, “they are not only talking about Latin America – they are talking from Latin America to the world.” In other words, they are joining a global debate on modernity. It is true that “the fact that in the last hundred years the critique of colonialism made from several locations of the South has not significantly changed the nature of global division of knowledge production” (Patel, 2019: 11). Granted that, however, the critique of modernity in East Asia today starts from its success, not from its failure. We problematize the Janus-face of modernity as in the West. Despite the remarkable success that we have achieved, why and how modernity had to produce such complex risk society that we face. This challenge implies a competition with the West in terms of a second-modern transformation rather than a simple opposition or negation of modernity as such.
The idea of reflexive modernization has become quite popular in social theory ever since it was first advocated in 1994 by authors like Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck, and Scott Lash. This book is an attempt to extend their basic arguments to East Asia, with the judgment that given the developmental trajectories taken by Japan, South Korea, China, the idea of reflexive modernity is relevant, appealing, and makes sense. Of course, there are significant convergences and divergences between the East and the West, as well as even among Japan, Korea, and China. Nevertheless, one can say that the historical patterns of change from traditional society through modernity on to second modernity can be demonstrated far better in East Asia today than in any other non-Western regions. In this sense, it is fortunate that this book offers dialogue texts with Giddens, Beck, and Lash in the appendix. These texts will help situate this book in the broader context of global discourse on reflexive modernity.
This book attempts to bring out the potential significance of Confucianism for human rights while taking up a post-Confucian perspective along the line of thought of post-traditional (Giddens) or post-conventional (Habermas) orientations. This means that the book represents both a deconstruction – in the sense that it breaks away from traditional orthodox interpretations of Confucianism inclined to support authoritarian, hierarchical social relations – and also a reconstruction– in the sense it intentionally sheds new light on normative traits still meaningful and conducive to participatory and deliberative development – of Confucianism. From this perspective, the book sorts out the key issue of human rights as a modern global norm as the object of careful reinterpretation.
This book argues that the issue of human rights deserves careful attention today because we are living in a global risk society. Individuals and ordinary citizens face increasingly serious risks, anxieties, dangers, and uncertainties as the processes of socio-economic and socio-political polarization intensify more and more. Consequently, individuals have come to be disconnected from social protection, and thus become helpless while communities – like the family and neighborhood to which they belong – are further destabilized. It is in this context that we hear a voice from East Asia, saying that Confucianism has nurtured a normative tradition of respecting human dignity and people-centered politics and thus cannot be satisfied with the brutal reality of risk society negatively affecting the lives of ordinary citizens. From the perspective of Confucianism, individual freedom, as such, is valuable and desirable. However, individual empowerment with no attention to flourishing community as a condition for individual development is a mistake that we should avoid. For this reason, the book explores how a balance between individual freedom and flourishing community can be achieved, conceptually and practically.
The basic framework of a new development defended by this book relies on neither the primacy of the markets nor the state. It doesn’t lead to relativism either. Rather, it presupposes and fosters the role of vibrant civil society in which diverse, bottom-up participatory trends emerge and expand. To repeat, given the paradoxical nature of modernity, it is neither the market nor the state, but civil society backed up by the enlightened public that can serve as the main locus and the engine of a distinctively post-Confucian reflexive modernization. This energy can perhaps be more visible today in South Korea than China and Japan. The people-centered, deliberative, and participatory traits which I call ‘post-Confucian’ have been distinctive in Korea and deeply embedded in citizen movements and politics, particularly the recent candlelight marches in 2017 which was able to impeach the authoritarian government through the peaceful legal procedures.
3 The Order of Presentation
This book is composed of the preface, three parts further subdivided into eleven chapters, the conclusion, and the appendix, which has four interviews. To overview this book, the first part asks where East Asia stands today, and offers theoretical reflections underlying this book’s argument. Here, I want to provide the main conceptual framework together with the key concepts, methodological clarifications, and discursive strategies taken. The second part sets the focus on a post-Confucian approach to human rights in East Asia. This constitutes the book’s main substantive argument. The third part moves on to the question of risk society, examines the Confucian challenge to this unintended consequence of modernity, and explores reflexive modernity as an alternative.
More specifically, the first chapter pays attention to the Asian identity in historical transformation. We will investigate how rapid economic development and the arrival of risk society have set in motion the transformation of the East Asian identity. We will try to support the argument with empirical analysis of citizens’ survey data collected in 2012 from the three largest capital cities of East Asia – Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo. The goal of the second chapter is to clarify what the term ‘Confucianism’ means when we talk about it in this book. This book is determined to defend not the traditional types of Confucianism, which have been rather authoritarian, hierarchical, and patriarchal in their societal functions, but a post-traditional Confucianism, which is reflexive and thus becomes aware of how the traditional types of Confucianism have functioned in relation to power structures in politics, economics, and society. It is important for this book to establish the significance of a post-Confucian orientation by distinguishing it from the main thrust of the Asian Values Debate. The third chapter is like an overture for the second part of the book, and draws attention in a simple way to the post-Confucian contribution to human rights as the main substantive objective of this book. We ask why the post-Confucian trajectory is significant, how it differs from the one-sided emphasis on individual empowerment that is found in the West, as well as the denial of Western conceptions of civil and political rights in the name of Confucian communitarianism that we find in Lee Kuan Yew’s model of authoritarian governance.
The second part, which deals with the relationship between Confucianism and human rights, is composed of five separate chapters. Chapter Four offers an overview of the main issues of human rights in the context of East Asian development. It draws attention to the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of human rights, and provides empirical data to support the salient tendencies examined. Chapter Five represents an important attempt to search for a balance between individual freedom and flourishing community as the key theoretical and practical task post-Confucian reflexive modernity sets before itself. We will explore how we could possibly better situate and understand the Chinese discourses of human rights while keeping a global standard in mind. Chapter Six investigates the Gwangju Democratic Movement in May of 1980 from the perspective of a post-Confucian approach to human rights. It serves as a theoretically informed, concrete, and historical analysis. In particular, we pay attention to the Gwangju citizens’ experience of self-rule as an example of a radical and participatory human rights community, and an expression of the Confucian norm of minben in a progressive way. Chapter Seven extends the discussion to international politics. It explores whether a non-hegemonic yet universal approach to human rights is possible in international politics and, if so, how we can pursue it contra the hegemonic and politicized use of human rights. The Chinese concept of tianxia is examined for this purpose, and we take it as being conceptually possible to explore its cosmopolitan implications for human rights. Finally, Chapter Eight focuses on human rights in North Korea from the perspective of intercultural dialogue. The main argument here is more conceptual and theoretical than empirical. Before we impose certain assumptions upon North Korea, it is argued that we need to take the perspective of intercultural dialogue, because the levels and foci of human rights discourses in North Korea significantly differ from the global standards that we tend to assume to be obvious.
The third part of this book deals with the Confucian challenge to risk society and reflexive modernity. Chapter Nine clarifies the concept of reflexivity presupposed in reflexive modernity and offers some empirical indicators of the different aspects of reflexivity measured by the 2012 data in Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo. Chapter Ten goes back to the Gwangju human rights community experience that was examined in Chapter Six and investigates its significance from the perspective of risk governance and struggles for recognition. Chapter Eleven proposes a research program on global risks with the focus on East Asia, as exemplified by a comparative study that shows the public perception among the citizens of Seoul and Beijing on the likelihood of occurrence and the magnitude of danger involved in 15 items of risk.
The conclusion defends the concept of reflexive sociology and explores its role for reflexive modernity as an overall direction of historical change. An attempt is made to trace back this idea to the middle of the 1960s, when various theoretical innovations took place in many Western countries like Germany, France, and the United States. Given the apparent difficulty of sociology in identifying the agency of historical change today, it is argued that in East Asia it is still possible to identify public citizens as the main actors promoting reflexive modernity. The historical experiences and empirical evidence in support for this claim are then provided.
Finally, the appendix of this book offers the interview texts with the authors of Reflexive Modernization: Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash, and Ulrich Beck. It also includes a dialogue with Tu Weiming, a renowned global scholar of Confucianism.