State, Community, and Filial Piety
Authorities in the Changyuan region in central China are considering granting social promotions to civil servants based on criteria favoring parental love, the Xinhua news agency announced on Saturday. Half a thousand family members, friends, colleagues and neighbors will be specially questioned by investigators who will be interested in the behavior of all civil servants. Family values and everyone’s habits in terms of alcohol consumption and gambling practices will be particularly closely studied. The conclusions of these surveys will serve as a basis for possible promotions at work. “Our staff must respect the traditional Chinese values of filial piety and family responsibility which are the pillar of a successful career,” explains the head of the local Communist Party, Liu Sen, quoted by the agency. Chinese authorities fear a erosion of moral values among younger generations eager to benefit from the benefits of the extraordinary economic boom of recent years. (Reuters 2007)
Filial piety is a value known to be important in intergenerational relationships in Asian societies. Our publications have shown a relatively large erosion of these values in favor of a hedonistic individualism of the Western type. The fears of the “Chinese authorities”, which have been the subject of stupid comments in the West, are therefore perhaps not unfounded.
The question is to what extent it is up to the state to restructure society, whether in China or elsewhere. In our countries, the manipulation of taxation and the judicial system in order to influence this or that parameter is the daily bread of politicians and jurists who are so many apprentice sorcerers. These ill-informed and often irrelevant attempts cover the dangerous illusion that it would be possible to direct, in a voluntary manner, the complex evolution of society. They exploit the feelings of dismay, insecurity or injustice of the population to justify the existence of the State, the extension of its powers, or the designation of one of its leaders who strives to appear more reassuring or more dynamic.
These endemic tendencies towards state control pose not only a problem of efficiency, but also a problem of democracy. In a democratic system, in fact, the State is under the control of society, and not the opposite. This assumes that the latter is robust. This is only possible on the condition that economic inequalities are limited, that the social body is homogeneous on an ethnocultural level, and that it has a sufficient level of education.
Increased social cohesion results in a reduction in symptoms of social pathology (such as high rates of depression, suicide, crime) as well as greater civic engagement.
