Where rationality meets sincerity

and why this matters

As noted last time, a useful, quick definition of sincerity is ‘the disposition not to mislead’; and, ‘Chinese thought, including but not only the Confucian brand, was in love with sincerity very far back, way further back than Shakespeare.’

How does sincerity relate to rationality? They are both cardinal virtues in many cultures as well as China. How can they provide X and Y axes the Chinese ethical and political world?

‘Making one’s heart sincere was never something that an individual could undertake in a spirit of utilitarian calculation.’ 

—Charlotte Furth, The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China

Value rationality rules

Here’s an immediate answer: the classical ‘Han stairway to Heaven’ imposes a norm, or style: opt for utilitarian calculation, and you forfeit any claim to be sincere. Max Weber drew a line between instrumental and value rationality, so it seems China’s Confucian elite could only allow themselves value rationality.

There’s nothing (or not much) uniquely Chinese about such stylising. The idea of aristocracy generally imposes codes of ethics amounting to bans on the ‘spirit of utilitarian calculation’. Princess Diana was above mercantile grubbiness: that’s what made her a princess.

Yet aristocratic values explain a vanishingly small segment of modern life, in China as elsewhere. Neoliberal youth know their prospects revolve around creating instrumental value for others, getting this recognised and living happily ever after. Utilitarian calculation, a.k.a. greed, is good.

Social credit

There’s a lot more to explore in the dimension of ‘value rationality’. PRC thinkers have written and continue to write reams on it. But the recent onset of ‘social credit’ in Beijing’s domestic policy is capable of serious global impact. It is an arena where rationality and sincerity, like Matthew Arnold’s ‘ignorant armies’, clash by night.

The explicit aim of social credit’s tech gadgetry (above all algorithms) is to make people more ‘honest’. The usual Chinese expression for ‘honest’ is chengxin 诚信. The first character, cheng, ‘sincerity’ should be ringing a loud bell by now.

The modern word is just common or garden ‘honesty’, sometimes with the broader connotation of ‘integrity’ (but not as broad as that what that word conveys in ‘Integrity Commission’: in Chinese ‘anti-corruption’ would occur somewhere to nail this down).

But translation is a spaghetti junction. Above all for this topic, there are few one-to-one equivalents; everything is many-to-many. Another English term that gets translated into Chinese with chengxin is ‘trustworthy’ . This is because xin, the second character, generally means ‘trust’ (but also ‘faith’, ‘believe’,. ‘credit’…). Has the transcendental ‘stairway to Heaven’ of the Warring States era been kicked aside? Is the transcendental, the absolute, utterly ruled out? We shall see.

Please read my translation of some telling background on this topic (it’s from 2017, but not to my knowledge outdated by events, or translated before). I’ve left chengxin untranslated; you can substitute many of the equivalents mentioned just now. Pay attention, if you will, to shīxìnzhě 失信者, ‘the untrustworthy’. What is to be done with them?