Cultural connections

In 1842, after a series of military defeats through the course of the First Opium War, the Chinese Qing dynasty signed the Nanjing Treaty with Great Britain, ceding, among other things, the island of Hong Kong to the British. The treaty itself was signed on the HMS Cornwallis, one of the British gunboats sitting in the Yangtze river, ready to bombard Nanjing city. The symbolism was rich: it was thanks to superior military technology, as represented by the Cornwallis, that the British were able to compel the Chinese to sign what came to be known as the first of the ‘unequal treaties’.
Chinese defeat in the Opium Wars (a second war was fought, and won, by the British and the French in 1860) sparked a national crisis. For centuries, the connection between China and Europe had centred around mutually beneficial trade. Indeed, the European taste for Chinese products, including tea, silk, and porcelain, was so popular that China was running a trade surplus – which meant that European silver was flowing into China to buy those products, and not enough was flowing back out. It was a desire to correct this imbalance by forcing the Chinese to buy opium grown in British India that sparked the wars in the first place. While China was no stranger to conflict with its trading partners, these past conflicts ebbed and flowed with victories and defeats. What marked the Opium Wars as different was the utter severity and comprehensiveness of the defeat – in 1860, French and British troops stormed the very heart of the empire, the Forbidden City – with no prospect of a counterbalancing victory in sight.
But as the Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui explains, the crisis engendered by the Opium Wars was not only that China had suffered military defeat, or even that it had lost swathes of territory and prestige. Instead, the crisis ran much deeper, to the core of Chinese civilisation. As Hui puts it, such a crisis forces a culture to re-evaluate its episteme – the aesthetic, social and political framework that conditions what a given society understands to be true or false. Long accustomed to thinking of itself as the Middle Kingdom – literally, the centre of the world, and the source of superior arts of mind and body – the Qing Dynasty was confronted with the disturbing thought that the European episteme might be superior. To prevent full colonisation, would China have to adopt European ways?
The Qing Dynasty’s response was to try to have it both ways. Yes, they would adopt European technology – not only the weapons that had been so devastating in war but the industrial machinery that had built and paid for those weapons. And they would do so as quickly as possible. In a word, they would modernise. But they would not change their thinking or their culture. As the slogan for the modernisation movement put it, “Chinese substance and western function”. Or as a similar movement in Japan put it not long after: “Japanese soul and western knowledge”.
The fundamental problem with such an approach, according to Hui, is that it assumes that technology is a mere tool – something to be mastered. Ironically, this is a rather Cartesian belief, insofar as it keeps intact the mind/body split: namely, the Qing Dynasty believed that it would be possible to separate Chinese thought from the European tools that were to be mastered. To put it another way, the Chinese – along with every other people who have tried to ‘catch up’ to European modernity, tacitly accepted a core tenet of western philosophy: that technology is universal. A tool, on this view, has the same rationality – or function – across time, space, and cultures. A hammer – or a warship – is no different in Queen Victoria’s Britain than in Qing Dynasty China.
It is this seemingly commonsensical position that Hui takes apart in his philosophy of technology. Hui insists that all scientific and technical thinking (or technics), far from being free-floating, emerges from specific, local milieus – including local concepts of cosmology and morality. One example of this is Chinese medicine, which uses the same principles found in Chinese cosmology – such as Yin-Yang, and harmony – to understand the body. Another is Polynesian navigation, the ability to navigate across vast stretches of the Pacific without modern equipment. To look only for the tools that made such endeavours possible would be to miss the point. One must look instead for what Hui calls ‘cosmotechnics’ – the cosmological conditions shaping the way a culture thinks about making things.
A key source for understanding a particular cosmotechnics is to look at mythology. For instance, the central myth about technology for the Ancient Greeks – and therefore the founding myth of western technology – is the story of Prometheus, the Titan who bequeathed fire to humanity by stealing it from the gods. The myth dramatises, in Hui’s words, the “radical separation between the world of the gods and the world of man that was necessary for the development of Greek rationality” – a rationality founded on a series of binaries between gods/humanity, nature/culture, eternal/mortal, permanent/changing, and so on. The idea of the tool that is fundamentally separate to its user belongs to this rationality.
Now compare that to Chinese myths about Shennong, the ‘divine farmer’, god of fire and inventor of agriculture and medicine. In one story, it is said that he risked being poisoned by trying hundreds of plants to discover which were edible and which were not. As Hui explains, unlike Greek mythology, with its Titan rebelling against the gods to raise human beings above animals with the use of fire, “in Chinese mythology there was no such rebellion and no such transcendence granted; this endowment is seen instead as owing to the benevolence of the ancient sages”. In traditional Chinese philosophy, there is no separation between nature and culture, no elevation of humanity above its environment.
Chinese and western technics thus have completely different origins. The failure to recognise that, says Hui, led the Qing Dynasty to an unthinking adoption of western technology. A similar story was repeated around the world as European colonisation and domination spread. The result is a world that is increasingly homogenous in its attitude towards technology.
The spread of digital technologies is a perfect illustration of the loss of what Hui calls technodiversity, for these products have “ontological and epistemological assumptions” baked into them – think of the way social networks “presuppose that society is a collection of social atoms and that human relations can be known and studied via data connectivity”. As these networks become ubiquitous, other, less atomised forms of life are pushed to the margins.
The Qing Dynasty’s response to the Opium Wars reverberates in the present. Hui describes the “ecstasy and hype” that have long replaced traditional reflection on technology in China, “propelling the country into the unknown: all of a sudden, it finds itself as if in the midst of an ocean without being able to see any limit, any destination”. This headlong rush into the abyss is not confined to contemporary China. It is, as Nietzsche argued long ago, the troubling condition of modern humanity. The point of turning to cosmotechnics is precisely to find a way out of this condition – to re-discover the limits and purpose of the things we make.