How Can Chinese Values Contribute to the Human Future?

In the agitated years of the 1960s and 1970s, the time of the Vietnam war, student protests and terrorist bombings, Needham borrowed time when he could from his all-consuming SCC (Science and Civilisation in China) project to prophesy about the human future. In various talks he gave what he hoped would be helpful advice on how the world might benefit from Chinese science and values. He asked: “what clues can we get about the help which the Chinese tradition and contemporary China could perhaps give for the ethos and operation of the World Cooperative Commonwealth of the future?”²⁴ This seemed the right time. Needham detected an avid new interest in China, a new “Chinoiserie” period.

In his “History and Human Values” paper of 1976, Needham was not only quietly promoting the achievements of the communist revolution in China and his own magnum opus. He was also penning a philippic against the fashionable “counter-culture” movement of the time, a movement associated with people like Theodore Roszak (The Making of a Counter-Culture, 1968). This movement expressed the widespread alienation of youth from the prevailing establishments of the west and especially the science that had produced evils such as nuclear weapons. Needham of course sympathised with much of this, as we have seen, but he had a strong residual faith in science as a component of the highest civilisation. Science had been an epic story of mankind, but its control had to be ethical and political. Mere psychological distaste for science and dehumanising technology, or a retreat to nature or a romantic past, was not enough.

Needham had obviously studied with care, and appreciated the strengths of thinkers such as Roszak and Victor Weisskopf. Their attack on the scientific world-view as a cerebral and ego-centric mode of consciousness, “completely heartless in its activity”, certainly rang a bell with him. The real meaning behind the anti-science movement, he speculated, was the conviction that science should not be taken as the only valid form of human experience. Many philosophers, and especially the poet William Blake with his hatred of “single-vision”, had already made the point. As Weisskopf himself admitted: “There is a scientific way to understand every phenomenon, but this does not exclude the existence of human experience that remains outside science… the nature of most human problems is such that universally valid answers do not exist, because there is more than one aspect to each of them”. Needham continued this line of thought by arguing: “the only way forward is the existentialist realization that the forms of experience, which have a habit of contradicting each other flatly, are all basically inadequate ways of apprehending reality, and can only be synthesized within the individual life as lived” (p.12). Confucianism, Buddhism and Christianity understood this. He cited Julian of Norwich, who declared in 1373: “By reason alone we cannot advance, but only if there is also insight and love”. Needham worried that this lesson had been lost in the modern scientifically-based world-view, with its belief “that it is quite proper for the results of science to be applied in a rapacious technology often at the service of private capitalist profit”. So widespread had such callous and insensitive values become that they seemed “quite beyond the power of traditional codes of religion and ethics to modify”(p.13).

Needham made some prescient warnings about the dark potentialities of future science. Developing science and technology could threaten not only world peace – through nuclear weapons, chemical and biological warfare – but also human individuality and freedom. Even in 1976 he could visualise the perils of genetic engineering, cloning, designer babies and other forms of a “new eugenics”, gene manipulation, organ transplants, euthanasia, artificial intelligence, robotics, state or private control of reproduction, visions of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or H. G. Wells’s Dr Moreau coming alive. Humanity needed constant vigilance and ethical control over such science. It could be good for mankind, but who could ensure that powerful vested interests, such as arms or pharmaceutical manufacturers would respect ethics?

It was here that Needham proposed China as an ethical model. Having elaborately analysed Eastern philosophies and religions over many years, he saw possible answers to western dilemmas, answers that were embedded in a great culture that was over two thousand years old. Chinese philosophers had always considered justice and righteousness as arising directly out of what in the west was called “the inner light”:

“If the world is searching for an ethics firmly based on the nature of man, a humanist ethic which could justify resistance to every dehumanizing invention of social control, an ethic in the light of which mankind could judge dispassionately what the best course to take will be in the face of the multitude of alarming options raised by the ever-growing powers the natural science give us, then let it listen to the sages of Confucianism and Mohism, the philosophers of Taoism and Legalism…what matters is their underlying faith in the basic goodness of human nature, free from all transcendental elements and capable of leading to a more perfect organization of human society” (p.22).

Needham also thought that the Chinese respect for nature was eminently relevant to a western world intent on destroying natural resources. He blamed the western idea of “feudal or imperialistic domination” of nature as arising from the Hebrew/Christian tradition, the tradition of the People of the Book. Compare that with the Chinese philosophy: “for the Chinese the natural world was not something hostile or evil, which had to be perpetually subdued by will-power and brute force, but something much more like the greatest of all living organisms, the governing principles of which had to be understood so that life could be lived in harmony with it”. This might be called an “organic naturalism”. Humanity was central, but not the centre for which the universe was created. Man’s function was to act in conjunction with, not in disregard of, “the spontaneous and interrelated processes of the natural world” (pp 31-32).

Chinese culture acted in accordance with the principle of Ying and Yang, balancing a masculine dominating attitude with a more patient and caring feminine attitude. Chinese tradition warned against the depletion of natural resources, for instance against deforestation (although it had undoubtedly occurred), against over-fishing or water wastage. Their great water engineering feats of the past were in accordance with nature as far as possible: “For example, if water was wanted at 50 feet above the level of a river, it was much better to take it off by a derivative lateral canal some miles upstream and follow the contours, rather than laboriously lift it by water-raising machinery at the spot… it was a profoundly right instinct that to use Nature it was necessary to go along with her” (p.32).²⁵

The Man Who Loved China thus characteristically ended one of his later commentaries on the human future and religion by commending the Chinese example. It could make an outstanding contribution for the future guidance of the human world. In a final word to Christians he said: “Nothing that I have been saying denies the ‘Everlasting Gospel’ of the two great commandments; but it is time that Christians realized that some of their highest values may be coming back to them from cultures and peoples far outside Christendom” (p.35).