The founders would be very happy to read
what a contemporary writer’s following statement, “America's best hope is to adopt a more
Confucian lifestyle: (1) more focused on education, (2) more respectful of old
people, (3) better able to subordinate private needs to public goods,
(4) more responsible to the needs of family, (5) more polite in our daily
lives, and (6) more hardworking.” (What Can Americans Learn from Confucianism? A Whiteheadian Appreciation of the Confucian Lifestyle.)
The United States has developed from a small nation composed of the 13 colonies
into the world power since 1776. Indeed, over the 240 years, situation changed a
lot. Many things disappeared or lost in the history. However, the efforts
improving American virtues through Confucian moral philosophy has remained the
same as the founders’ in the founding era. The virtues Jay McDaniel listed are mainly what the founders hoped and requested the new Americans to possess.
Jay has also noticed that, “The
likelihood that Americans will be learning from Confucianism increases every
day. … As Hillary Clinton observes in a recent article in Foreign Affairs:
"It is becoming increasingly clear that the world's strategic and economic
center of gravity will be the Asia-Pacific, from the Indian subcontinent to
western shores of the Americas.”
No comments:
Post a Comment