Stirred by the Fang Yaohan incident, I wrote three articles in a row, which is already quite enough to have gotten my money’s worth. Since Han Han has also announced that he is stopping writing and not talking about it anymore, I may as well stop here too. So this article continues from the earlier piece “The Kingly Way”; everyone can skip the previous three articles, and we can continue talking about “morality.”
We say that the kingly way is the path to supreme goodness, and supreme goodness is nothing other than “the best life.” But in the traditional sense, for a ruler, the kingly way merely provides one of the most classic, or most general, forms. In reality, however, the life people pursue is often specific: not merely “being a good person,” but for a given person, the path of life often points toward a more delimited direction—for example, “being a good teacher,” “being a good scholar,” “being a good soldier,” “being a good doctor,” and so on.
This is what is called—“professional ethics.”
It should be noted that whenever I speak of morality, I am not speaking within the categories of utilitarianism or normative ethics. Morality, so-called, absolutely does not mean observing some set of minimum rules—dao means road; de means ascent. Put simply, morality is about “the path upward”; in other words, the question of morality is the question of “how to pursue excellence.” A king displays excellence and teaches people to follow after it; that is the kingly way. And professional ethics, simply put, is how to pursue excellence within some specific undertaking.
The path of ascent has no end; to transcend the ordinary and become a sage, to stop at the realm of supreme goodness—this is always conceivable. But the key to morality still lies in the road one walks. For instance, the saying goes that a soldier who does not want to be a general is not a good soldier, and “general” is precisely one direction of the soldier’s way. To confer upon the best soldiers the status of general is a fitting reward for the soldier’s “goodness,” but this does not mean that a soldier who has no opportunity to be promoted to general is necessarily bad, nor does it mean that anyone who is promoted to general is necessarily a good soldier. The soldier’s path “upward” only appears to coincide with the process of advancement in rank under certain systems and conditions; the soldier’s “goodness” lies in qualities such as bravery, steadfastness, decisiveness, and so on—those人格 qualities that an ideal soldier ought to possess. Historically, many good soldiers who served as ideal examples ultimately obtained the rank of general. But if a cowardly craven were to obtain the rank of general through bribery, then no matter how you look at it, he could not be called a good soldier.
Thus, “dao” often simultaneously contains some kind of “fa” (law or norm). Each specific trade or profession will have corresponding rituals, customs, rules, and constraints. These “laws” sketch the contours and boundaries of the path of ascent, so that the height or lowness of virtue can, as far as possible, correspond to the status and position externally bestowed upon one.
But mainstream modern ethics has fundamentally misplaced the question of “morality,” understanding morality as merely a question of rules, while forgetting that the point of making rules is ultimately to climb upward. In addition, modern people tend to understand a profession as a kind of commercial contract relationship. For example, if I choose the profession of doctor, that means I earn my livelihood by “being a doctor,” and so I must follow the rules of doctors in order to receive the corresponding compensation. Thus “professional ethics” seems to become merely a condition for obtaining “reward.”
I already discussed in an earlier article that “money” should fundamentally not be an appropriate pursuit at all; it is only the precondition for pursuit, the precondition that ensures we can transcend animal pursuits and “be human.” What we pursue is “being a good person,” but people are concrete and richly varied, so then: “what kind of good person” should one be? The meaning of “profession” lies here. For a “free person,” a “profession” is his path of ascent, by no means merely a way to make money.
In other words, the premise of “professional ethics” is that this profession has its own intrinsic path of ascent, or that the profession itself already contains “goodness.” A true profession should be an undertaking still worth aspiring to even when your urgent need to make a living has been removed.
Of course, if you ask a person now: if you weren’t paid, would you still be willing to be a doctor? Most likely the answer would be no. But that is because, after all, we do need money. We might ask it this way instead: suppose that no matter what you do, you receive the same amount of money—would you still be willing to be a doctor? If, at that point, one still answers yes, then one is aspiring toward the “good” contained in “doctor” as a truly worthy profession, not as a means of making a living. Although many people, perhaps, would rather do nothing at all and idle away their days at home eating and waiting to die when they no longer need to worry about making a living, those who pursue excellence would still choose some undertaking as their path upward; this is not something hard to imagine. The fat-and-sated aristocrats of ancient Greece still went off to be philosophers, orators, athletes, heavy infantrymen… In the Nordic countries of modern times, which are famous for extremely high social welfare, people still are not always willing to be idle and do nothing. And for our part, we might recall our childhood occupational ideals: when we ask a child, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” they rarely think in terms of job stability or remuneration. They want to be police officers, doctors, athletes, scientists—not because those jobs are especially secure or well paid, but because police officers are cool, doctors are cool, athletes are impressive, scientists are amazing… A profession is good not because it makes money, but because it is good in itself—this is not some lofty, hard-to-understand way of thinking, but the simplest and most straightforward way of thinking. Unfortunately, adults often forget it.
Thus, there are some professions that are fake; the most typical example is the worker on a modern assembly line, and this is why Marx found alienation in the worker. The worker as a profession seems to exist only for the sake of selling one’s labor power in exchange for compensation, and what should originally have been the most human kind of professional life (that is, the way of being human) becomes a purely painful thing; instead, animal life such as eating, drinking, and sleeping becomes the goal of pursuit. This is a total inversion. Originally, to be human meant to create some outstanding undertaking after one had eaten and drunk one’s fill. But now, “being human” has become going home to eat and drink after finishing exhausting business. This inversion is precisely because the mechanical and monotonous activity of the “worker” really does make it difficult to manifest an intrinsic goodness. People may aspire to be a police officer, doctor, firefighter, or even a farmer—but who would aspire to be a miner who does nothing but shovel coal back and forth all day, or an assembly-line worker who keeps tightening screws endlessly?
What is called “liberation” is precisely the rescue of people from these slave-like forms of life, and the capitalist method does not work. The capitalist solution is to raise workers’ wages, and once wages are raised to the point that they are satisfied, society will be stable. But this cannot change the alienated essence of the worker; on the contrary, it intensifies this alienation. That is to say, as workers’ compensation increases, the goodness of the profession itself appears ever less, and the inversion of the path of “being human” becomes ever more obvious.
There are two methods of liberation. One is to eventually abolish these alienated professions. This requires a tremendous increase in productive forces—for example, large-scale mechanization and automation may one day completely replace assembly-line workers. But that is, after all, a matter for a distant communism. The practical stopgap in the present is what is called socialism (of course, I mean only the distinctive version as I understand it). Socialism attempts to ease the problem of alienation through changes in the mode of production. I said in an earlier article that this conception tries to weaken the role of money and replace it with “social relations” to guide people’s pursuits: going to work in a factory is not merely for the sake of earning money, but is a form of participation in social activity. In other words, we are actually trying to expand the dimension of the “worker,” broadening this path so that “tightening screws” is only one link in a series of social activities in which one participates in the identity of a worker. In this way, although that link itself remains dull, flavorless, and unworthy of aspiration, the worker’s achievements obtain new honor through the dimension extended into the community, which makes even the dullest link meaningful. For example, running back and forth repeatedly is undoubtedly a very boring activity, but if we organize various running competitions, where excellence is measured and the most outstanding runner is contested, then the originally dull running back and forth becomes a training link necessary on the path to ultimate victory on the field. In this way, its meaning changes. In a society with no competition at all, it would be hard to imagine someone making a lifelong profession of running around in place all day, but once the profession of “runner” is redefined through a special social organization such as a sports meet, “runner” naturally becomes a path one can aspire to. The case of workers is similar: if all that so-called workers do is keep tightening those two screws over and over, then who would aspire to such a way of life? But if the role of “worker” is redefined through some reconfigured social organizational structure, then it may also be possible for workers to obtain their own excellence.
Only at the end do I come to mention the “maid café” in the title. In fact, the initial idea for this article came to me more than half a year ago, when it seemed that a maid café had opened in Changsha. Although it was by no means the first one in China, it stirred up quite a bit of controversy; some people said it was moral decay and a regression of civilization, and I wanted to talk about the question of “morality.” But at the time I felt that saying it all would take too long, and in the end I got lazy and did not write it. Now, however, because I had previously written Right-wing Socialism and The Kingly Way after being triggered by other factors, it has naturally come together to continue discussing “professional ethics.” But because those two articles came before, and for the sake of narrative sequence, this original point of departure has instead been placed at the very end:
In my view, it is Japan’s “maid” culture that truly gives the profession of “waitstaff” professional ethics. Of course, in China too there are waiters and waitresses who are honored as model workers and admired by people, but look at what those model-waiter deeds are?—hard work without complaint, not fearing hardship or exhaustion, always thinking of the customer… But what is the difference between these qualities and praising a “good” slave? The “goodness” of a good slave is not the goodness of ascent, but the evaluation of its efficiency when one regards the slave as a tool. And if I am not compelled by the pressure of making a living, would I freely choose this profession? The existence of such free choice is the premise for whether a profession is “in accordance with dao.”
People like to talk about “equality,” as if the relationship between “maid” and “master” signifies an inequality between persons, and thus a slave-like culture. But merely talking about equality cannot reach “goodness.” If the profession of waitstaff can only ever be regarded “equally,” then it is a profession without dao, seeming to be nothing more than a reluctant contract, selling one’s service in exchange for compensation. But if we do not consider compensation, would anyone be attracted to this profession? Would you think being a waiter or waitress is cool, stylish, beautiful? “Maid” culture does accomplish this. Some people say that opening a maid café and applying to work as a maid are both purely profit-seeking, but that is not the case. We find that most of those owners and maids are anime enthusiasts. Perhaps the income from being a maid is much higher than that of an ordinary waiter or waitress, but you should note that many of them are college students; they are indeed aspiring to this profession.
Of course, this aspiration arises from the “poisoning” of Japanese anime culture. But this culture is precisely shaping an image of excellence for service providers—elegant etiquette, lovely clothing, proper bearing, abundant knowledge, sharp reactions, and delicate emotions—Japanese anime has created an enviable image for maids and butlers. When you look at them, you just feel they are truly “good,” without needing to evaluate them only as tools for fulfilling a service contract. As for selling one’s attractiveness, that is indeed included within a maid’s excellence, just as the excellence of the ancient Greeks included masculine athletic beauty; feminine sex appeal can of course become a kind of morality as well. In particular, professional ethics, unlike general morality, contains more pronounced specificity. For example, physical robustness is an element of the soldier’s way; a person born missing arms or legs can hardly become a “good soldier.” And a woman who looks like a car accident scene can hardly become a good maid—there is nothing surprising about that.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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