It was also at the 2024 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival that, right after the previous talk, “Accelerationism Is Not Liberating Enough; Only by Combining It with Web3 Can AI’s Potential Be Released,” I immediately gave another hour-long talk at Open Stage. Of course, I also want to thank Wanxiang for providing the stage. This talk was also something I was even more eager to share with the broader Chinese Web3 community: “The Possibility of the Revival of Chinese Traditional Culture in Web3.”
Are Chinese People Inferior to Westerners?
Most of the people at the Hong Kong Web3 Carnival were Chinese, and more than half of the talks and events were conducted primarily in Chinese. In fact, ever since I entered the field in 2013, Chinese people have always been an important force in the blockchain world. Back then there were Canaan miners and Avalon mining rigs, Bitcoin China, Huobi, and so on; China occupied half the market in Bitcoin mining and exchanges as a whole. Today, although mining and exchanges have been almost completely suppressed, more and more Chinese developers, capital providers, and investors continue to participate in this wave in various forms, refusing to lag behind.
But Chinese players often denigrate themselves: “No one even bothers with a domestic project,” and they insist on getting foreigners to vouch for something that is plainly Chinese, or simply pretend to be foreigners themselves.
The bias against Chinese projects seems somewhat understandable, because Chinese project teams are indeed used to draining the fields, and they have cheated plenty of people. But if you think about it carefully, the West has plenty of “big scammers” too. Back then there was the fat monk of Mt.gox, there was CSW impersonating Satoshi Nakamoto, there was SBF of FTX, who drained even Wall Street itself…… Their field-draining was much harsher than that of Chinese bosses. Among those who ran exchanges, there was Yang Linke before, and Zhao Changpeng after; both were relatively proper and decent. Among those who did forks, Wu Jihan put his money where his mouth was and bet all his assets, which was also more decent than CSW. Even the so-called “Sun the Scammer,” whom people often mock, has actually not committed any great evil; compared with those Western big scammers, he can only feel that he falls short.
Of course, I am not trying to reverse the map and launch a broadside against Westerners. In fact, whether Chinese or Western, there are plenty of field-drainers. This is a phenomenon that the crypto movement as a whole must go through in this early stage.
Blockchain is a wild new continent, an “unclaimed land” in the digital world. History has shown that in the early stages of exploring and developing new continents, chaos runs rampant and theft is everywhere; this is normal. As the saying goes, heroes emerge out of troubled times. If order is established too early without going through a relatively wild phase of competition, then that order is probably just a simple continuation of the old order. To start over, to break the old world and build a new one, chaos is something that must be endured.
And on this unclaimed land, those who can rapidly make their fortune in the early days are often not elegant gentlemen. Many of the pioneers who first opened up territories in the Western Age of Exploration were also misfits, heretics, scoundrels, pirates, criminals, and so on.
A Blockchain Chronicle
Speaking of which, I want to repeat my “new continent chronicle” again. I believe that starting from the discovery of unclaimed land, the development of the new continent can be divided into the following five stages.
1. The exploratory stage
The first stage begins with Columbus and Satoshi Nakamoto. What was remarkable about them was that they discovered a new continent—an abundant unclaimed land. They did not know exactly what this continent could be developed into, but they knew they were trying to break away from the old order and search for a new path.
2. The frontier stage
When people discovered that the new continent was a completely new and wild land, rather than the prosperous East, some may have been disappointed, but others may have been even more excited. Because the new continent was unknown, there were too many uncertainties. So merchants who sought certainty preferred to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and continue the traditional mode of trade. Those who dared to venture to the new continent to open up the frontier were often people who lacked strong resources or backgrounds in the old world. What they valued was not so much the resources of the new continent as the “unclaimed” environment, which made it easier for adventurers to start from scratch.
So in this stage the new continent was chaotic and disorderly, with privateering running rampant, though of course order also began to emerge spontaneously.
In this stage, gold prospectors and exotic goods trade were the mainstream. Adventurers needed to bring wealth back to the old continent to cash out. Miners, coin speculators, and pyramid schemers could easily make money in this period. In short, given that most people were too unfamiliar with and frightened of the new continent, whoever was bolder in this stage could get rich first.
3. The colonial stage
The third is the colonial stage, of course with overlap between these stages. By the frontier stage I mean the initial establishment of order from wilderness, but the pioneers’ worldview and values were still centered on the old world; the economy of the new continent had not yet become a self-contained system, and in the end its wealth still had to be cashed out in the old continent.
But at the same time there was another group of people trying to build homes in the new continent, shifting the center of their lives to the new world. This included people who might spend most of their lives active in the new continent, and the profits they earned could increasingly be realized within the new continent itself. These people were no longer adventurers, but colonizers.
There are two kinds of motives for colonizers. One is driven by commercial interests. After the initial stage had passed, it was no longer so profitable to simply pick up gold or rare treasures in the new continent; more stable and long-term business models had to be established, such as plantations or strongholds, in order to provide stable output. And these strongholds always needed someone to manage them long-term, which required a group of immigrants willing to live in the new continent for an extended period. The values of these people still belonged to the old world; they attached themselves to large institutions such as the East India Company, or to large capital such as Wall Street today, working for them and helping capitalists seize and manage the wealth of the new continent. But their own lives and work had already gradually shifted to the new world, so they also developed the desire to put down roots in the new continent.
Another part of the colonizers was driven by faith. They were often frustrated people from the old continent, trying to escape the corrupt or ossified environment of the old world, and coming to the new world with ideals and beliefs to build a free home.
In the context of the Age of Exploration, the corresponding examples are the Jesuits and the Puritans. Jesuits of the Catholic faith, feeling the threat of Protestantism in the old continent and finding it difficult to open up a new situation there, actively went to the East or the new continent to spread doctrine; Puritans, on the other hand, disliked Catholicism and believed that the reforms of the Church of England were not thorough enough, while Protestants still suffered persecution, so they hoped to go to the new continent to establish an ideal homeland.
In the end, Catholicism achieved considerable success in South America, while the Mayflower, carrying the Puritans, took root in North America.
Corresponding to blockchain history, I think we are now roughly in this colonial stage. On the one hand, the old money of the old continent has begun to establish permanent institutions in the new world, attempting to monopolize the production of wealth in the new world; on the other hand, more and more people dissatisfied with the old continent, carrying all sorts of ideals and beliefs, are devoting themselves to the new continent, trying to build a spiritual homeland in the new world.
4. The revolutionary stage of independence
After that, it should be the revolutionary stage of independence. As the number of colonizers on the new continent increases and the economic system becomes richer, more and more people will no longer be satisfied with being cash machines for the old money of the old continent. They are still willing to trade with the old continent, but they demand to break free from its control. Therefore, they will ultimately establish an independent polity in the new continent under a new system. America’s independence proved that a revolutionary struggle for independence is possible, and progressive. Of course, this revolution is not necessarily bound to succeed. Whether the future of blockchain will remain forever under the order of the old continent, or whether it can successfully form its own independence, is still unresolved at present and requires further effort from us. I hope that “the network state” will definitely replace the “nation-state” and become a new order of independence.
5. Counterattacking the old continent
Once the new order is established, the thriving new world will eventually surpass the old continent and become the leader of world order. On the other hand, the contradictions of the old continent will intensify day by day; the old order will collapse under its own weight, even heading toward a “world war.” Thanks to its spatial and institutional independence, the new world will keep itself out of the war and accelerate its development, eventually turning around to redefine the order of the world and lead global culture and the economy. The old world will eventually, willingly and gladly, send gold to the new world, anchor its currency to the new world, and even align its ideas and institutions with the new world. This is the “Bitcoin standard” era I envision.
Faith
Since we are in this position that is being benchmarked against the “Mayflower,” then what I want to focus on today is what kind of faith we might have.
In my article “The Crypto-Renaissance of Three Greatnesses,” I already treated “faith,” together with thought and power, as one of the three major elements of human society.
It should be noted that faith does not necessarily appeal to religion; religion is only one form that carries faith. The faith I am talking about here is broad in scope. Every person has, to a greater or lesser extent, some faith, and every society or culture must also contain a dimension of faith.
What is faith? In a nutshell, faith is something that provides a transcendent repository of meaning.
The pursuit of “meaning” is a human trait, an expression of “free will”—if one says that your actions arise from free will, it means that you did not act from instinct or blind conformity, but rather from your own weighing and planning. You do what you feel is meaningful; that is the expression of your freedom.
Except that the meaning of play is intrinsic, the meaning of many actions has to appeal to external things: work is for earning money, money is for buying a house, buying a house is for getting married, getting married is for having children, and so on. We keep entrusting our life to the next stretch of life. But everyone’s trust will encounter one desperate limit, namely the finitude of life—an individual life is finite, and so fleeting.
Wanting to live normally without considering any transcendent pursuit at all: perhaps an individual can do that, but human society as a whole cannot be sustained on the premise of completely excluding transcendence. In fact, transcending mortality is an eternal theme of human civilization, and also the driving force behind thought and technology. Scientists may not believe in heaven or the afterlife, but having one’s name attached to some constant is the highest honor most scientists would not refuse. Writers and artists, craftsmen and engineers all hope that their works will endure in the world, and even the most ordinary people often entrust the future to their children.
The pursuit of transcendent meaning is common to human civilization; and the specific way in which transcendence is entrusted to something expresses the differences among human civilizations. Different eras and different cultures have different ways of pursuing it.
So then, in this information age, what can we still have faith in?
The Transcendence of Reality
The transcendence I spoke of above refers to transcending the life of the individual human being, but it does not necessarily require transcending the human group or even the entire real world. However, in Western culture, what provides a transcendent repository of meaning is often itself a transcendent being as well; the latter “transcendence” refers to things that transcend the real world and transcend actual experience. The otherworld, the Last Judgment, the transmigration of souls, the six realms of rebirth… These are the transcendent beings offered by Western and Indian religions in order to satisfy people’s pursuit of transcendent meaning.
But there are also things that carry transcendent aspirations and are themselves real, such as truth, goodness, and beauty, dignity, justice, posthumous fame, and so on.
The line “Life, truly, is precious, but love is more costly still; for freedom’s sake, one may cast both aside,” speaks precisely of two kinds of meaning that transcend individual life: love and freedom. When Mencius said “to give up life to take righteousness,” it was the same. Scientists vying for priority and naming rights, too, are a kind of “posthumous fame.” And the righteous and aspiring among us have also said, “Since from of old, who has not died? Let one’s loyal heart illumine the annals of history”—that is to take the historical record as the bearer of transcendent meaning.
This way of entrusting transcendent aspirations to things in the real world exists in both Eastern and Western societies, but it is more prominent in traditional Chinese culture.
In short, all ways of transcending the finite self of the individual are ways of extending the narrow self to a higher self. In Western religion, this transcendent self is the immortal soul, the essence of my being in the transcendent world. In Chinese culture, the direction of self-transcendence is “from the self to all-under-heaven”; in the final analysis, the real world in which I leave my mark is regarded as the continuation of my individual life.
Oracle Bone Inscriptions — Cultural Traits Embedded in the Literary Tradition
This unique way of entrusting transcendent aspirations is a trait that Chinese civilization displayed right from its roots. The recorded history of Chinese civilization begins with the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty. By then, oracle bone inscriptions were already a relatively mature writing system. The oracle bones preserved at Yinxu in Anyang are a very accidental survival; perhaps before King Pan Geng moved the capital to Yin, divination was done by carving characters on bamboo slips—the origin of oracle bone inscriptions is still not entirely clear. I suspect that earlier writing may have been carved on wood or bamboo slips (and earlier large buildings may also have been wooden), but those materials long since rotted away and vanished, leaving no evidence to investigate. Of course, the predecessors of oracle bone inscriptions may have been influenced by Mesopotamia; but in any case, we can see that from the very beginning of oracle bone inscriptions, the distinctive features of Chinese culture were already fully on display.
Li Zehou called this trait the “witchcraft-historical tradition.” Oracle bone inscriptions served the dual function of witchcraft and history—divination, sacrifice, ritual, and record-keeping.
Thanks to the Zhou dynasty’s correction of the Shang dynasty’s beliefs in ghosts and gods, and later Confucius’s consolidation of that correction (Confucius revered the Zhou rites, and kept ghosts and spirits at a respectful distance), the “witchcraft” aspect of the witchcraft-historical tradition gradually faded and became naturalized, ultimately merging into the “historical” tradition. Confucius’s editorial work on the Spring and Autumn Annals consolidated the status of the historiographers, while Sima Qian inaugurated the orthodox historical tradition that continued all the way to the Ming dynasty.
Sima Qian’s famous phrase “to examine the relations between Heaven and humanity, and to understand the changes of antiquity and the present” — the latter half is the meaning of “history” we are familiar with today, while the former half is precisely the role of “witchcraft.” Chinese culture completed the transformation “from witchcraft to history,” that is, it completed the switch I spoke of earlier from “transcendent transcendence” to “real transcendence.”
In later generations, the status of the historiographer was analogous to that of priests or the papacy in the West. Although in many cases they too would yield to royal power or collude with it in secret, on the whole they maintained a relatively independent stance, forming a crucial force to check royal power. Even someone as formidable as Li Shimin could force his imperial father to abdicate, yet he still could not make the historiographers fully submit. It was not until after the Yuan dynasty, when Huaxia culture fell into ruin and the Ming dynasty failed to restore it completely, that the sanctity and independence of the historiographers were repeatedly trampled upon and finally broken off entirely.
By contrast, the earliest writing in the West originated in the Mesopotamian region, namely cuneiform. The origin of cuneiform is generally believed to lie in fired clay tokens: people at that time used different shapes (spheres, cylinders, tetrahedra, and so on) to represent different things, such as sheep, goats, ten sheep, etc. They used these tokens to record transaction information, then sealed them inside a larger hollow clay sphere for verification in case of disputes. Later, they would carve the shapes of the contents on the outer wall of the clay sphere to make retrieval easier; this system of marks is regarded as the origin of writing.
Sumerian civilization was very precocious, especially in its highly developed commerce and industry, which had already formed all kinds of specialized artisans and even workshops dedicated to centralized production. After cuneiform matured, records of all sorts of commercial activity became abundant. For example, there is a clay tablet that is a 3,750-year-old “complaint letter”; the text on it complains that the copper ore it purchased was short in weight and lacked quantity, and demands compensation.
We can see that if the Mesopotamian region represents the beginning of Western culture, then from the very start it already exhibited traits inclined toward commerce and law, and its literary tradition fully reflects this trait; indeed, many historians of writing even believe that writing must have derived from commercial activity. One scholar says: “Today, most scholars accept the hypothesis that writing originated in bookkeeping, although there is almost no evidence for this in the surviving scripts of ancient Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica. Borrowing the words of one expert on early Sumerian clay tablets, writing was ‘the direct product of urgent needs of economic expansion.’ … But this hypothesis cannot explain how writing was actually created out of a nonliterate state.” (The History of Communication, Andrew Robinson)
What is interesting about the quotation above is that he seems to be expressing a kind of obvious Western-centered bias, namely taking the particular case he is familiar with as universal, and even when there is no other corroboration beyond that case, treating it as a general rule. We will also see later that when defining “religion,” Western scholars likewise take the monotheism of the Hebrew tradition as the universal feature of religion.
Commerce vs. History: Fundamental Differences between Chinese and Western Cultures
To sum up, I think that a focus on history and a focus on commerce are, respectively, distinct traits that manifested at the very roots of Chinese and Western cultures, and that were then crystallized and fixed in their respective written histories. From the cuneiform writing of the Mesopotamian world to the Phoenician and Greek scripts of the Mediterranean region, the West has always leaned toward commercial activity; whereas China, from the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang to the bamboo slips of the pre-Qin period, has always leaned toward the activity of recording history.
Commerce demands contracts, and “contract” gradually became a keyword in Western culture. Not only does the secular legal tradition emphasize contracts; the tradition of faith likewise takes covenant as its core—what are called the Old Testament and the New Testament are both God’s “contracts.”
By contrast, China’s wu-shi tradition requires an unbroken transmission of records, and this culture of emphasizing transmission ultimately formed China’s distinctive religious tradition as well—one centered on “inheritance,” from which ancestor worship and the faith in incense offerings developed.
As we have said, faith provides people with a transcendent repository of meaning, constitutes the scale by which good and bad, right and wrong are measured, and supplies inner as well as public moral restraint.
In Western monotheistic faiths, the real world itself is not something worth clinging to; what is worth pursuing is the “heavenly kingdom” ascended into after the “end of days.” And at the end of days everyone will rise again to receive God’s judgment, and only those found righteous through judgment will qualify to enter heaven.
In the Chinese tradition, however, people have not placed their hopes for “judgment” in the end of days or in God. The judge is worldly: that is, the historian and the record. The Chinese value “judging a person only when the coffin is sealed”; the “judgment” of a person begins when he dies—but not before, because while a person is still alive, a good man may at any moment fall, and a bad man may also reform and become good. So a person’s “final verdict” must be given after death, and the final verdict on a dynasty must likewise be given by the next dynasty; that is why official histories must be compiled by a later generation, and why ordinary people also speak of someone “failing to preserve his good name in old age.”
Where Westerners do good deeds in the hope of going to heaven and attaining eternal life, the highest expectation of doing good for Chinese people is also “immortality,” but what Chinese people value are the “three immortalities”—to establish words, to establish achievements, and to establish virtue. The place where one lives on forever is not heaven, but the history book, the “Ancestral Temple,” the “clan shrine,” and the line of the genealogy and incense offerings.
Of course, ancient people usually did not completely reject transcendent beings; Confucius too said to respect ghosts and spirits while keeping them at a distance. But even for materialists who do not believe in transcendent things at all, “history books” still matter. Even by the twentieth century, when the independence of historiography had already completely vanished, those “to be entered into the record” still retained a certain binding force.
We Cannot Understand Traditional Chinese Belief through a West-Centric View of Religion
Mainstream Western theology and religious studies both take the Judaic–Christian–Islamic line of monotheism as the typical model of religion. In fact, religion of this model is only a special case, because these monotheistic faiths all derive from the Hebrew cultural pattern. It is hard to use such a view of religion to understand Buddhism, which emphasizes “emptiness”; it is no easier to understand the polytheism of Greece and Rome; and it is even harder to understand the traditional Chinese mode of belief.
Many Westerners, including many Chinese people today who have been deeply influenced by Western learning, will think: “Chinese people have no religious faith; they can worship bodhisattvas, Lao Jun, and spirits and monsters all at once.” Chinese religion seems very utilitarian: as long as something works, people can believe in it. Zheng He, for example, was born into a Muslim background, served the court that professed Confucianism, received the initiation of Tibetan Buddhism, and would also worship Mazu before setting sail.
Through my earlier discussion, this should already be quite clear: the reason Chinese people can worship any immortal or bodhisattva at will is not because they are irreverent, but because the object toward which their reverent worship is directed is not any transcendent being at all. For the real transcendent faith of Chinese people is not the immortals and bodhisattvas, but ancestors. You might say that when Chinese people visit temples and see immortals and bodhisattvas, they bow to them casually; but you will never see Chinese people visiting someone else’s ancestral temple and, upon seeing any spirit tablet whatsoever, recognizing it as their own ancestor.
To repeat: Western religion entrusts transcendent needs to transcendent beings (God, the soul, the other shore), whereas in the minds of Chinese people it is precisely the transcendent beings who do not take care of transcendent needs; they only take care of worldly needs, such as many children and much happiness, promotion and wealth, favorable weather and timely rain, and so on. Instead, it is worldly beings (ancestors, incense offerings, history books) that are responsible for providing transcendent needs.
This cultural trait was in fact visible right from the beginning of the West’s entry into China. When missionaries came to China to preach, they were all astonished by the devoutness of Chinese ancestor worship. Some missionaries believed that since Christianity forbids idolatry and does not allow faith in anything other than God, Chinese people, once they accepted Christ, should also stop making offerings to their ancestors. But the missionaries quickly found that preaching in this way met with heavy resistance, so under Matteo Ricci’s compromise, the Jesuits recognized ancestor rites as merely secular ritual rather than an act of supplicatory worship, and only then were they finally able to bring more Chinese people to accept Christianity. But this compromise was not unanimously accepted by the Western churches; for example, the Dominicans always adhered to orthodox Christian norms and opposed Chinese believers’ ancestor worship. In the end the conflict intensified (of course there were other factors as well), Kangxi ultimately issued the order banning the Western religion, and the Roman Curia also established the prohibition on ancestor rites. This was the so-called “Rites Controversy.”
It was not until 1939 that the Vatican finally lifted the prohibition on Chinese people’s offerings to ancestors and Confucius, but it did not think the earlier ban had been mistaken; rather, it explained that in the Kangxi period Chinese ancestor worship was indeed religious worship, but now it had become secularized, and only for that reason could it be accepted.
We can see that saying Confucianism is merely philosophical thought, and ancestor worship is merely secular ritual, is a kind of compromise strategy used by missionaries, and may not reflect the true characteristics of traditional Chinese culture. In my view, the traditional Chinese belief system indeed cannot be made compatible with Western monotheistic belief, but the point of conflict is not the choice between worshiping this god or that god; it is the choice between worshiping people or worshiping gods. Western religion despises the real world and worships transcendent beings; Chinese tradition has always been rooted in the real world, worshiping real ancestors and the transmission of incense offerings.
Relations Between Humans and Gods vs. Relations Among the Kin
The difference between the transcendent and the worldly is also reflected in the organizational forms of Chinese and Western societies. The scale of any civilized society is far beyond Dunbar’s number, so before people have interacted deeply, what is the tacit relation among strangers like? How are interpersonal relations expanded? Different cultures also have different ways of answering these questions.
In the West, the default social relation is built from the top down and from the abstract to the concrete—“all are brothers under God.” That is why monotheistic cultures find it easier to establish abstract contractual relations, and why ideas such as “liberty, equality, fraternity” more readily emerge. Of course, this is the intellectual foundation on which Western culture ultimately moved toward the Enlightenment; Christian culture acted as a catalyst in the rise of both modern science and modern democracy.
When I say “catalyst,” I mean that religious culture provided an important boost to modern civilization, but that, in the final analysis, it was not absolutely indispensable, and once modern civilization had been established, it no longer had to rely on the catalyst. On the other hand, once monotheistic faith itself declines, the social relations built under God may face a new crisis. For originally, people in society were linked to one another through God as intermediary; once God is suspended and set aside, the universal relation among people is severed. Law and contract can of course provide effective constraints so that society does not fall apart, but they do not automatically establish emotional bonds. This is also one backdrop to the increasingly “atomized” nature of contemporary Western society.
In China, the default social relation is built from the bottom up and from the inside out—“honor the elderly in my own family, and extend that honor to the elderly in others’ families.” In other words, my emotional connection with a stranger does not need to invoke God, but rather my own kin. The Chinese logic is not: we are all God’s children, therefore we are brothers; rather: you are like my kin, therefore we can also treat each other with warmth.
This way of establishing universal social ties has some weaknesses. For example, this model makes it hard to establish the belief that everyone is equal, because there is always a difference between the close and the distant. Thus a Chinese person will always like to distinguish and treat strangers differently according to some relation of closeness or remoteness; for example, people with the same surname say that “five hundred years ago we were one family,” as though that made them closer; ties of native place are even more important, and when fellow townsmen meet they can immediately establish a sense of intimacy. When strangers cooperate and live together, each person’s position within the clan and region determines their emotional bond.
It must be admitted that this model does have some inhibitory effect on the formation of a civilized society under law and a contract-based society, but it is not without other advantages; for instance, this kind of social pattern does not need to invoke transcendent beings, nor does it need to invoke consistency in religious belief, and is therefore more easily compatible with a secularized modern society.
The “All-Under-Heaven” View — Plural Coexistence, Ritual and Music in Harmony
This bottom-up, inside-out way of construction produces a community that is not “society” in the Western sense, nor a “nation-state” or the “global” in the modern sense, but rather “all under heaven.”
“The global” is a God’s-eye-view concept. In the article “Replacing the God’s-Eye View: Latour’s Gaia Vision in Environmental Ethics,” I quoted Latour’s critique of the “global perspective.” Latour believed that in the new era, the holism and objectivism of the God’s-eye view, which has run through Western thought since Plato, has increasingly become an obstacle to positive action. Latour endeavored to construct a kind of “non-totalizing connectivity,” seeking, without presupposing a whole or a God’s-eye view, to arouse mutual connection among individuals and among communities, and to inspire cooperation and coexistence.
Latour laboriously replaces “Globe” with concepts such as “earth” and “Gaia”; in fact, the concept of “all under heaven” in the Chinese tradition is the best substitute term.
Latour calls on every actor to begin from itself and, in a circular way, keep returning to itself: “The tiny human mind should not, all at once, leap across to the global scale… Rather, we must close ourselves off, slip down into a great many circles, and gradually, step by step, come to know the place where we live…” Is this not exactly the route Chinese people speak of as “body—family—state—all under Heaven”? Latour goes to great pains to say, “There is only one Gaia, but Gaia is not ‘one’” — if we replace “Gaia” with “all under Heaven,” it becomes easier to understand this sentence.
Latour hopes to break free of the top-down God’s-eye view and rebuild democracy: “If democracy must begin again, it must necessarily start from below.” Historically, the first version of democracy (the democracy of the Greek city-state) was born in the context of Greek polytheism and alphabetic writing; the second version of democracy (modern Euro-American democracy) was born in the context of Christian culture and print technology; Latour seems to be trying to return to Greek mythology to inspire a third version of democracy, but I think the third version of democracy also has a chance to emerge in the context of the revival of Chinese culture and Web3.
Of course I am not the first Chinese scholar to hope to rebuild modern institutions with traditional culture. Contemporary philosopher Zhao Tingyang is a representative figure in this regard; both his The Tianxia System and The Contemporary Relevance of Tianxia are making efforts in this direction.
“All under Heaven” is different from “the state.” The so-called “When all under Heaven prospers or falls, every person bears responsibility” is entirely different from “When the state prospers or falls, every person bears responsibility”; Gu Yanwu and Liang Qichao both explained this very clearly. “All under Heaven” transcends specific “ethnic groups” and “regimes,” and does not belong to any clique of people. The saying “When the Great Way prevails, all under Heaven is for the public” (The Book of Rites), and “All things flourish together without harming one another; the Way runs side by side without contradicting itself” (The Doctrine of the Mean), speaks precisely to the character of “all under Heaven” as a plural publicness. This publicness differs from universality; it does not require everyone to follow the same Way (system, rules).
By the way, “moderation” is also a concept that is often misunderstood. For example, many people mistakenly think that zhongyong means “compromise” or “slick opportunism,” when in fact it is exactly the opposite. The saying “not偏不倚谓之中，不易不移谓之庸” — “not leaning to one side, not biased, is called centered; not changing, not shifting, is called constant” — suggests that rather, “standing apart and going one’s own way,” or “even if I face a thousand men, I will go on,” comes closer to the meaning of “moderation.” “Yong” means “constant”: Heaven’s course has its constancies, but this “constant” is not a single, rigid law (that is the concept in the Western tradition); the norm of the world is diversity and richness.
Besides opposing the God’s-eye view and establishing a plural publicness, Zhao Tingyang also noticed another layer of difference between the concept of “all under Heaven” and monotheistic modes of thought. He said: “Since the concept of all under Heaven promises to turn all externality into internality, it also logically excludes the concept of an irreconcilable mortal enemy, an absolute other, or a spiritual enemy; that is, it excludes the concept of the pagan. This is different from the thought pattern of monotheism.”
This is what is meant by the way of “harmony without sameness.” By contrast, when Western thought seeks to explain why social cooperation is necessary, it always appeals to “sameness,” always trying to find a universal law or a single essence: for instance, the theological tradition appeals to God’s creation and covenant to argue for human unity; Rousseau, Hobbes, and others all appeal to humanity’s “original state” to explain the emergence of the social contract. In Chinese tradition, by contrast, these things were not especially valued. Of course, this culture may have hindered Chinese people from forming a scientific notion of “natural law,” but perhaps it is more favorable for building a world system in which diverse forms can coexist.
Speaking of which, statements like “we are all sons and daughters of Yan and Huang” that pursue “sameness” were actually promoted in the late Qing Dynasty in order to resist Western civilization; they are a certain fusion of Chinese ancestor worship and modern Western notions of the nation. In ancient times, Chinese people did not emphasize sameness and borders nearly so much. Chinese tradition emphasizes the distinction between “Huaxia” and “Yi,” but “Hua” is neither bloodline nor ethnicity; it is a concept of dress. “Hua” originally means splendid clothing, while the etymology of “Yi” is a person carrying a bow and arrows on the back. “Hua/Yi” is similar to the distinction between “civilization/barbarism” in ancient Greece and in modern Western people’s eyes — the difference between a well-dressed respectable person and a barbarian who only knows how to draw a bow and shoot down the great eagle. As long as the barbarians learn ritual propriety, they can also be counted as Chinese. What is now called the Chinese nation is already the result of a great cultural amalgamation.
Of course, ancient Chinese culture also has another side that leans toward “great unification.” The plural, inclusive view of all under Heaven that I described above basically belongs to the sphere of the “Zhou system” and “original Confucianism” (the Four Books and Five Classics); the “Qin system” overturned the “Zhou system,” and Han Confucians bowed in submission to the emperor. After that, Chinese culture was no longer as pure as I described above. But the idea of “all under Heaven” as harmony without sameness has never been severed. If we now want to revive Chinese traditional culture, of course we cannot “remove the essence and keep only the dregs”; rather, we need a two-way movement toward each other. Chinese traditional culture in relation to the network state is similar to Roman culture in relation to the Renaissance, and Christian culture in relation to the Enlightenment: in each case it plays a catalytic and stimulating role. What we need is to carry forward the parts that resonate with our ideal future.
The Faith Crisis of Modern Western Society
The idea of bringing in Eastern traditional wisdom to renew civilization actually has quite a market in Western intellectual circles as well, especially after the First World War. Of course, I do not want to promote some narrative of the East rising while the West declines. In any case, the spirit of science and democracy in Western culture is powerful, and it is something we must humbly learn. What we need is to draw some inspiration and assistance from Chinese traditional culture, not to say that traditional China is superior to modern the West. For example, modern politics is worth learning from ancient Greece for the spirit of democracy, and from ancient Rome for ideas about the rule of law, but in the concrete ways modern people carry these things forward, there is almost nothing the same as the ancient systems.
The development of civilization has always been a process of continuous absorption and fusion. So-called Western culture is itself the result of repeated great fusions: Greek culture and Egyptian culture merged in the Ptolemaic Dynasty, then merged again with Roman culture, while Hebrew monotheistic culture was introduced, then Germanic tribal culture was fused in, and in the late Middle Ages the achievements of the Arabs and the technological accomplishments of the Chinese were absorbed; only then did the Western Renaissance come into being, laying the foundation of modern Western culture. What we need to do next is nothing more than continue to let Western culture and Chinese culture merge, making choices and adjustments in the process of fusion, and pushing forward a new revival.
Of course, respecting Western culture and its achievements does not mean denying the crisis of modernity in Western culture. Here we will first focus on the crisis of faith.
The main source of the crisis of faith is the development of science and technology: modern science denies transcendent beings — of course, in fact science can only support agnosticism rather than atheism, and science and theology still have a chance to remain compatible, but the relation between the two is no longer what it once was, and the statistical fact is also that scientific education weakens religious piety. On the other hand, the development of modern technology also plays a role, because technological development intensifies the allure of this world; the bustling modern life goes beyond the phenomena described in the classics. The Bible’s promise of a good life amounts to no more than a “land flowing with milk and honey,” but for residents of modern developed regions, drinking milk and eating honey every day has long since become tiresome, and the allure of many religious rhetorics naturally is not so strong anymore.
I discussed the related issues in “Transhumanism.” From Nietzsche’s cry that “God is dead,” and the turn toward pursuing the “Übermensch,” to the “transhumanism” popular in the twenty-first century (using technology to achieve human ascent), it is all of a piece; all of it is a response to the modern crisis of faith. The reason is that the transcendence offered by monotheistic culture transcends the real world, but never truly transcends the “small self.” What is eternal is oneself; what is resurrected is oneself; what goes to heaven is oneself. They have never truly found a path to extending oneself through a meaning outside one’s own individual existence. So once they begin to doubt transcendent notions such as soul, judgment, and heaven, and are forced to turn toward the real world, they fall into nihilism.
Under this nihilism, the values that come to dominate, one kind is hedonism — since in any case nothing is eternal and life is short, then enjoy yourself while you can. Another kind is transhumanism — since God does not exist, then let me become a god myself; technology will assist me in ascending and becoming immortal.
In a certain sense, the accelerationism that worships technology is a new form of faith: it no longer discusses questions such as the good and value of society, but instead takes technological progress itself (the raising of energy level) as a sublime and sacred pursuit, and the eternal nature of technological progress also makes this pursuit never cease. It is as if the highest purpose of human civilization were the development of science and technology. In my previous lecture I already said: this is the reversal of ends and means. Technology ought to serve human beings, not the other way around.
The Society of Laborers
Philosophers discovered and criticized this reversal of ends and means in modern culture long ago. In particular, from Marx to the Frankfurt School. Hannah Arendt took this criticism one step further, believing that the reversal of ends and means was only an appearance; the essence was the metamorphosis of “purposeful work” into “the eternal recurrence of labor.” In a labor society, the distinction between means and ends simply disappears. For example, capital is both a means of production and the end of production; or rather, technology is both a means of production and the end of production. Resources (including human resources), capital, technology, information… all kinds of valuable things are neither means nor ends, but a “process” within the eternal recurrence of “labor-consumption.” Human “life” ultimately falls into this cycle as well: recreation is for the sake of better labor, labor is for the sake of better recreation…
In this eternal recurrence, the only important indicator is the “speed” of the operation of the whole society. Resources, investors, scientists, inventors, employees (human resources), information… the way to assess how much value these things have is to see what efficiency they bring to the high-speed operation of the entire society.
As everyone knows, modern people discovered a mode of production that makes highly efficient use of energy: the assembly-line model. “Interchangeable parts” and “standardization” are the key to this model. In order to adapt to this model, resources are standardized, property is standardized, space and time are standardized, people are standardized, and human beings themselves become “interchangeable parts.”
Arendt explained the modern crisis of faith in another way. She believed that Christian culture replaced the “public/private” distinction with the “sacred/secular” distinction, weakening people’s public life. Modern laborer society further replaces “publicness” with “massness” and “generality,” turning the plural, contentious public space into a monotonous, flat “market.” In this market, people’s status becomes their “worth,” and people can only measure one another in monetary terms. Whether it is the Forbes rich list or the human resources market, everyone’s value seems to be a number. All kinds of positive actions by each person merely exchange for increases or decreases in that number, and no more feedback can be seen. Farmers and craftsmen can see the changes their efforts make in the world around them, and they take pride in crops growing vigorously or objects being refined to perfection. But a worker on an assembly line has nothing to be proud of; he can see no changes beyond changes in wages. The high-speed operation of society as a whole and the tedious repetition of individual life are two sides of the same coin.
The “public sphere” is a place that can provide an echo-space for everything each person does. Arendt said: “Our sense of reality depends entirely on appearance, and thus on the existence of a public realm, in which things can emerge from the darkness of concealed being and show themselves…” The key feature of an assembly-line society is the loss of the public sphere: each person is shut into a narrow “workstation” to complete a fixed procedure, and from the outside one can only see whether this one link in a pre-assigned task is operating normally, while one cannot see the individuality and actions of the person inside that link. In a highly efficient assembly line, it makes absolutely no difference whether it is Zhang San or Li Si operating behind a given workstation. Arendt said: “What makes mass society so hard to bear is not the multitude of people it contains, but that the world between human beings has lost the power to bring them together, to relate them and separate them at the same time.”
The Fate of Human Beings in the Information Age
Arendt’s critique focuses on industrial society, so what about the information age—has anything changed? As a prophet of the information age, McLuhan was in fact not optimistic. We may have heard that McLuhan coined the concept of the “global village,” and take this as a prophecy. But this prophecy is not really a happy one. For McLuhan, the global village means “retribalization”: as if global humanity were crammed into a single village, noisy, chaotic, and indistinguishable from one another.
McLuhan’s student Meyrowitz wrote a book called No Sense of Place, translated in Chinese as 《消失的地域》, which I think can be rendered as “Feeling at a Loss,” meaning that you can no longer feel what kind of place you are in. People’s moods and social patterns are always affected by “place”: whether I am in a library or in a bar, in a university classroom or in People’s Square, my mood and behavior are different; likewise, if the same few people meet in different places, the atmosphere is different too. But Meyrowitz points out that electronic media merge and blur all kinds of boundaries, causing the leveling of place, that is, the “disappearance of diversity.” When we communicate by telephone or screen, the place of conversation disappears, and the diversity of space disappears. Meyrowitz’s main case is still the telephone; he had not yet seen the social media of the Web2 era. If he were to experience WeChat group chats, it would probably strengthen his argument. Whether it is an academic group or a family group, the “space” itself is exactly the same, and completely flat and monotonous.
In the Web2 era, the economy of laborers has become an attention economy. In the past, screws and workstations were at least still “solids” and still had some spatial boundaries. But “traffic” has lost individuality even more thoroughly and lost its own position.
Another Value of Information
In the previous speech text I quoted Wiener and 斯蒂格勒 (I have also expanded on them in other talks), pointing out that the basic logic of the information age differs from that of the industrial age, and that it is entirely possible to stimulate a different path. I won’t belabor this here, but I will add a little more.
In the industrial age, society’s main task was “replication,” because industrial products are conserved objects whose total value remains constant. For example, the value of a loaf of bread lies in the fact that it can be eaten: if I eat it alone, I get the whole loaf; if two people split it, each gets only half; if a hundred people all want to eat it, each person can at most get a few crumbs. This is because the value of a loaf of bread in satisfying hunger is fixed.
But Wiener reminds us that not everything’s value is expressed in this way. For example, the value of a work of art lies in the fact that it can be appreciated: if I look at it alone, I see a painting; if two people look at it, each still sees a whole painting; if a hundred people or ten thousand people look at it, each still sees the same painting. And because the public sphere opens up, viewers may resonate with one another and communicate, so that the value each person gains may even be greater.
If all valuable things in the world were expressed in the form of conserved objects, then American-style values would be reasonable, namely that everything is measured by the price used when buying and selling in the market. But the problem is that value in the world is not only of this one kind. Art, knowledge, and emotion cannot be priced in this way.
So in the information age, how should “information” be priced? Is it more like bread or more like a painting?
Obviously, the value of information does not “conserve.” It is much easier to copy a piece of information than to invite a new person to look at a painting. But those who are accustomed to calculating value still find a way to measure it, namely by pricing information according to whether it is “beneficial for improving efficiency or making money.”
For example, the piece of information “the Federal Reserve has decided to raise interest rates”: once I obtain this information first and immediately carry out operations in the financial market, I will probably make a big profit, so this information is very valuable to me. But if two people obtain this information at the same time, we have to compete for the first move, the profit may be split, and if a hundred or ten thousand people obtain this information at the same time, then everyone’s chances are about the same, and the profit each person may gain will be very small. This view of information comes from the era when futures and telegraphs had just emerged. At that time, the financial industry was one of the earliest customers to use the telegraph, because only by obtaining commodity-related information before it became widely disseminated could it be turned into profit.
“Information” priced in this way is forcibly made to be like bread, becoming something that gets thinner the more it is shared.
But Stiegler emphasizes that information is not only calculable; it is also memorizable, and “calculation” is neutral: my calculation and your calculation are equivalent, and calculating with an abacus and calculating with a calculator are also equivalent… But “memory” is individual and differentiated: my memory cannot replace your memory, and the things I cherish cannot be equivalent to things that are high in market value.
There is also a spectrum in the value of memory, from private to public. For example, my grandfather’s relics, the love letters written by my first love—these objects carry my unique memories, so for me they are priceless treasures. But this value lacks publicity; apart from me and a few others, no one would treat them as treasures. However, if these memories become shared memories in the public sphere—for example, the relics of a hero, or the love letters of a famous poet—then they become priceless treasures recognized by the whole community.
But we should note that the publicization of memory does not make the value of these things conserved. The material carriers of relics, love letters, and so on may indeed, because of a consensus of value, circulate in the public market like bread and be priced by the market. But we must always remember that their value is different from the value of a loaf of bread: bread has only calculable commodity value, whereas those souvenirs have, in addition to commodity value, memory value. Their value is not entirely measured by their conserved material carriers. In the final analysis, their value is still shareable; or rather, it is precisely because they are shared that they can become public memory and thus acquire commodity value.
So the question arises: in the information age, to which of these two kinds are open-source code, digital artworks, and other digital objects closer in value? With the help of encryption technology, these digital objects can also be packaged into discrete units of circulation, entering the market like material commodities. But in the final analysis they are still closer to public memory that can be shared without limit, so the sharing economy should replace the commodity economy as the dominant paradigm of the information age.
But Stiegler found that, in fact, the calculable side of information has always received more attention, while various forms of “memory” are instead converted into calculable numbers for evaluation. This has led “acceleration” to become the main theme of the information age. The logic behind accelerationism is this: because the value of information lies in seizing the first opportunity, outdated information is worthless, so the way to pursue value is to keep “innovating,” constantly grasp the latest information, and exploit it before its timeliness expires; and when this information has been fully publicized, immediately create newer information, repeating this cycle over and over in a spiral of acceleration. This model is indeed conducive, for a certain period, to the rapid development of technology, but it also easily causes people to “lose their way.”
The Significance of Blockchain + Chinese Culture
Let me reiterate once again: the reason I have said so much about crises ranging from Western Christian culture to contemporary industrial civilization is not to say that the West is no good. In fact, the reflections and critiques I have cited were themselves made by Westerners. Western civilization, like any great civilizational tradition, has the ability to renew itself continuously. But civilizational renewal needs the aid of some material technologies and spiritual resources. In my view, blockchain technology and Chinese culture can provide a catalytic force for rebuilding civilization in the information age.
Blockchain provides a key force: temporality. In the entire ever-flowing digital world, blockchain constructs an independent and solid temporal scale, and can inscribe immortal “public memory” within it. In addition, decentralization ensures that everyone fully masters the power to dispose of their own digital property and the power to authenticate their digital identity, while token economics and smart contracts are conducive to the autonomy of small communities… These features may all become forces against flattening and monotony.
Chinese traditional culture, meanwhile, can provide a response to blockchain-based Web3 culture, just as ancient Greek culture resonated with printing in the Renaissance. Many of the features of Chinese culture discussed above can find corresponding forms in the Web3 world:
- Ancestral worship: first is first—the spirit of revering the “first” has always remained among Greek-style athletes and scientists, while in Chinese culture it became fixed as ancestor/ancestral-master worship, but it is not actually prominent in the field of modern industrial technology. Great inventors such as Watt (the steam engine), Stephenson (the train), Edison (the light bulb), and Ford (the automobile) were in fact not the “first” in the relevant inventions; they were merely the people who commercialized them most successfully. In the fashion industry of the information age, celebrities have become fast-moving consumer goods, and it is even less possible to speak of who is “first.” But in the field of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin has powerfully revived the culture of “first is first,” precisely because blockchain has brought back historicity.
- Shaman-historiographical tradition: blockchain inscription — from the NFT fever to the inscription fever, players are no longer satisfied with the blockchain merely carrying transaction history (the ledger), and are inscribing more and more bizarre things onto the chain. The information that gets inscribed does not possess computable value because it improves efficiency; rather, it is more about shaping public memory, and even carrying out all kinds of activities that resemble mystical rituals.
- Attending to this world: long-termism — blockchain, especially Bitcoin, has strengthened long-termism
- Kinship associations: GM fam~ — small communities such as NFTs and DAOs, centered around the token economy, have revived “family” culture. Although for the moment Web3 communities still mainly socialize on Web2 platforms, their relatively independent economic systems mean that these little circles are no longer flattened out, but may instead take on a pattern of diverse differences.
- All under Heaven for the common good: open-source culture and public goods — the crypto movement is an extension of hacker culture and the free software movement, and places emphasis on the public.
- The Zhou system and the various states: autonomous worlds — network states, supported by blockchain, will inevitably transcend the nation-states of the industrial era and become a new paradigm of the “imagined community.” In a certain sense, this is the revival of the Greek city-state system and of the pre-Qin Chinese “Zhou system”; the Zhou Son of Heaven is emptied out and suspended, becoming the underlying consensus of Bitcoin.
- Ritual-and-music society: plural identity politics — the ideal of the Web3 world comes close to some kind of ritual-and-music society in which the Great Way is shared and harmony is maintained without uniformity.
Conclusion
Lastly, let me make a little advertisement while I’m at it: in the hope of reviving Chinese culture, I myself have also launched a Web3 DAO organization, which currently uses Chinese-character NFTs as community identity markers. For details, please follow my Twitter @epr510
Chinese characters are the common denominator of Chinese culture, and they also carry many of its depths and distinctive features. Yet for more than a hundred years, Chinese characters have continually faced the impact of the “information age,” and there have always been people who felt that Chinese characters could not adapt to the information age — in fields such as printing, typewriting, telegraphy, input methods, and word processing, new technologies were initially tailored to alphabetic writing systems. In order to help Chinese characters keep up with the information revolution, Chinese people did a great deal of creative work (the Mandarin Revolution, Chinese typewriters, Chinese telegraphy, Chinese retrieval methods, Hanyu Pinyin, computer encoding, input methods, laser typesetting, Chinese office software, and so on…). So much so that even up to the Web2 era, Chinese characters and their culture had always participated as an active force in the tide of the information revolution, not only keeping pace with the world, but also displaying the distinctiveness of Chinese culture.
In the Web3 era, I believe Chinese culture will still be willing to lag behind; we will continue to build a “kingdom of Chinese characters” in the Web3 world, forming an open yet independent cultural community, and contributing to the diversity of the future world.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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