Hygiene Note:
False Categories
3 February 2014
After completing the first stage of my work on Analects 13.3, I turned to another passage, signaled by James Legge’s notes as a functional correlative: 12.11. Here is Simon Leys’s translation:
Duke Jing of Qi asked Confucius about government. Confucius replied, “Let the lord be a lord, the subject a subject, the father a father, the son a son.” The Duke said, “Excellent! If indeed the lord is not a lord, the subject not a subject, the father not a father, the son not a son, I could be sure of nothing anymore — not even of my daily food.
This is Confucian conservatism — fundamentalism, really — at its most stringent and least imaginative, and it’s the sort of thing that I’ve got to work around if I am to get anything out of the Analects. To do so, I turn passages such as this one upside down. Let us understand what ought to be expected of lords, subjects, fathers, and sons. Is the hierarchy implicit in this passage still useful? Confucius would argue that, if it was ever useful, it must still be, but on no point do I disagree with the Sage more sharply. Everything changes, over time, including human nature and the constellation of values on which human beings depend in order to make sense of the world. Justice today is not what it was circa 500 BCE. I find hierarchy distinctly useless for our times. I don’t have to worry about how I would answer the Duke of Qi, precisely because we have largely done away with rulers of his kind. We have different, more complicated problems that do not yet yield to elegant formulations.
There was nothing surprising about 12.11, but Simon Leys’s note on the passage was something else altogether. I already knew that Leys, whose real name is Pierre Ryckmans, is a Belgian Catholic of orthodox faith. (Ryckmans has lived since 1970 in Australia.) I should have to re-read all of The Hall of Uselessness, the NYRB collection of his essays that I mentioned last week, to cite the glinting references, but there is something rather handsome in the man’s harmonious blend of Christian piety and grave respect for the heritage of traditional Chinese scholarship, even if his contempt for the mainstream of modern thinking in the West is less appealing. But I was surprised — surprised and horrified — by the reactionary bent of his annotation to 12.11, a part of which follows.
In the Confucian view, the sociopolitical order rests upon a correct definition of each individual’s function, identity, duties, privileges, and responsibilities. It is a teaching that, even today, has lost nothing of its relevance: the moral chaos of our age — with its infantile adults, precociously criminal children, androgynous individuals, homosexual families, despotic leaders, asocial citizens, incestuous fathers, etc — reflects a collective drift into uncertainty and confusion; obligations attached to specific roles, age differentiations, even sexual identity are no longer perceived clearly.
What is “homosexual families” doing in that sentence? That’s not the only problem that I have with the statement, but it certainly the biggest, and nothing less than excision would satisfy me if a new edition of the translation were forthcoming. I doubt that Leys can have known any “homosexual families” well enough to pass judgment, but Leys would argue that that is not the point. He is not reporting on the world but concluding from values. Homosexual families can be no more permissible that incestuous fathers. I’m hugely embarrassed to have spoken so enthusiastically about Leys’s writing without knowing of this dreadful stinkbomb.
Leys was writing in the late Nineties, which was another world so far as same-sex marriage goes. But more than ten years earlier, Kathleen and I submitted affidavits testifying to the good character of a friend who sought to adopt her partner’s natural daughter. We supported what Leys dismisses as “homosexual families” from the first that we heard about it. Because we utterly reject the traditional prohibition of same-sex relationships, we cannot see a reason for preventing same-sex partners from raising children, whether natural or adopted.
As for the other alleged sinners on Leys’s list, I wonder why “incestuous fathers” doesn’t come first. (And I would insist upon mentioning “pederast priests”!) Despotic leaders are nothing new; most people in most places at most times in history have lived under some form of military dictatorship, usually with despotic tendencies. The Communist Party in China, which Leys clearly hates so intensely that he doesn’t seem interested in its mutations, clearly wishes to minimize its own despotic features, however ineffectively. “Androgynous individuals” is a curious entry. There are certainly men and women who play with androgyny, and they make me uncomfortable precisely because they enjoy creating confusion, but I would not call robust women or delicate men “androgynous,” although I suspect that Leys might. I have the good fortune to have been spared acquaintance with any precocious criminals. (I don’t, in fact, know any criminals — but then, I don’t get around much.) This leaves “infantile adults” and “asocial citizens,” two categories that I should prefer to collapse into one. It is precisely in search of guidance for long-term adolescents that I’m combing through the wisdom of Confucius. Perhaps my reply to the Duke of Qi would be this: “Let the child be a child, and the adult an adult.”
***
Stricken as I was by the shame of possibly appearing to endorse Simon Leys’s benighted views on sexuality, I was grateful for the surprise itself, because it left me in no doubt of what I must write about this morning; otherwise, I’d have been at wit’s end. I’d have been tormented by the difficulty of deciding how much of my anxiety to “share.” For I was very anxious indeed. During most January, it was uncertain that my next Remicade infusion, which ought to have taken place this week, would be approved by our health plan, the operation of which has been upset by the surge in new plans mandated by much-needed amendments to our health-care laws (please note what I am not calling this). It appears to have taken a long time to find out whom the hospital ought to contact for approval. Last Wednesday, the request was finally submitted. This morning, approval was granted — I found that out as I was writing about Simon Leys — but, as no appointment can be made without approval, I now face the problem that I foresaw when I began this process about the tenth of last month: the seats are booked! There are only nine, I believe, at the infusion therapy unit, and it is unusual for any of them to be empty for more than twenty minutes. No, the unit is booked for a few weeks, in fact. If there’s a cancellation, I may get to go sooner, but it’s best not to count on that. Rather, I’m going to see what happens to me as I push two weeks beyond the furthest space that there has ever been between infusions.
The normal dosage is an infusion of some hundreds of millilitres of Remicade every eight weeks, making for six infusions a year. For some time now — the tenth anniversary of my receiving these treatments will occur in April — I’ve been getting by on four infusions per year. Expense is not the issue, although it would quickly become one if I were no longer insured. Rather, it’s the possibility that the drug will cease to be effective that guides me. It will take longer for this to happen, the reasoning goes, if I take it less often.
Sometimes, I begin to feel a bit off as much as ten days before the infusion. This seems a small price to pay. I don’t know how I’m really feeling right now, though, because anxiety about the insurance approval has jammed a lot of signals. (There are few things that I fear more than an uncertain bureaucracy.) We shall see how I feel — shan’t we. But I shall feel what I feel. That is not at all what anxiety is about. Anxiety is a state of not knowing what to feel. And when it ends, it vanishes — at least for me. I remember that I was anxious, but I don’t — can’t — remember being anxious. My body refuses to go there. That’s why I don’t like to write about it, even when I’m worried sick about something. One doesn’t like to leave traces of transitory unpleasantness lingering behind. It is a matter of hygiene, not stoicism.
***
Something else distracted me from my appointment worries — the sorrow of losing Philip Seymour Hoffman. I neglected to mention that I watched Charlie Wilson’s War the other day, and was once again hugely entertained by the deadpan exuberance of Hoffman’s impersonation of a disaffected CIA officer. I’ve been hugely entertained by everything the actor did. His films will continue to marvel, but the thought that there won’t be any more of them is oppressive. Philip Seymour Hoffman was, simply, a great artist.