China, Dixie, and Life in the Middle

After an initial foray into the similarities between China and the South (https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/china-and-dixie-approaching-friendship-between-two-tellurocracies), Prof Alexander Dugin has opened fresh ground for us to plow with regard to this subject.  We will now put our hand to the plow and see what further ties we can find between the two peoples and their cultures.

The Middle Logos

Prof Dugin writes of China,

The Chinese Logos unfolds exclusively and absolutely in the middle sphere, in the intermediary world which is conceived as the main and only one. Neither Heaven and Yang nor Water and Yin, that is to say neither the Apollonian heights nor the Cybelean depths acquire autonomous ontologies or a particular Logos. There are no extremes, there is only the center between, which constitutes them over the course of a subtle dialectical game. The gods, people, the elements, Empires, rites, animals, luminaries, cycles, and lands all represent the unfolding of the middle Logos and are but traces of the dynamic, rhythmic pulsation of the Center always situated equally in the middle between two poles which are void of autonomous being and which intersect one another by virtue of great harmony.

--‘The Noology of the Ancient Chinese Tradition’, https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/noology-ancient-chinese-tradition

One sees this same emphasis on The Middle in Southern thought and life.  The late Prof Thomas Landess of Georgia spells it out in his essay on Southern religious life, in which he notes that it is neither the Father nor the Holy Ghost Who is most important in Southern Christianity but the incarnate Son of God, Who lived with us in the world as one of us.  This results in characteristics that distinguish the South from the other cultural regions surrounding her in the (unnecessary) American union.  He says:

Southerners have a sense of place in a way that sets them apart from other Americans.  New Englanders, Easterners, even Midwesterners have always believed in abstract America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, with liberty and justice for all.  Southerners have been more inclined to love its rocks and rills, its woods and templed hills, and more accurately, certain rocks and woods, the ones they see and move among and know are real.  Abstractions, however pretty, are to most Southerners no more than vague and inaccurate rumors of the truth, a questionable report on the nature of God the Father.

 . . . 

 . . . It is God the Son who represents the family in the councils of the land.  God the Father remains at home, brooding over the headlines in His newspaper, which tell of the perennial failures of mankind. He knows in His infinite wisdom that almost nothing can be done, but He sends the Son anyway, as a testimony to His good will and His agreeable nature.

The Son goes to the town council, or the state legislature, or the United States Senate knowing that he will be crucified.  He is particularly well versed on crucifixions as the result of the War [the War of Northern Aggression-W.G.], which He knows was no Armageddon but one of the many just causes in history that are defeated by superior forces and confused logic.

 . . . Southerners have been relatively immune to the tyranny of ideas in an age characterized by the emergence of one ideology after another.  . . . 

In some measure this reluctance to join the larger movements of the age results from the fact that Southerners do not believe they have to join anything in order to have a sense of belonging, to derive some personal satisfaction from an emotional identification with a larger group of their own kind.  They belong, after all, to the family, which has the advantage over “the Folk,” or “the Proletariat,” or “the Party” in that the family is composed of flesh-and-blood people, whom you know well and who know you and who, because they are so complicated, defy ideological classification.

 . . . 

Of course, such a recognition is not always pleasant and heart-warming, it can be a warning and an anathema.  . . .  In being members of the same tribe or clan we share with one another the secret of our own depravity, our certain knowledge of what it was that the Son died to save us from.

 . . . In one sense the power of Southern fiction lies in the very fact that it is not about the South but merely takes place there.  Thus it has a fine particularity that gives flesh and bone to its universal soul.  In that respect it is analogous to the created order itself.  We delight in its accidental variety and are spiritually moved by its substantial revelation of the Divine.  As it is with great literature, so it is with people.  . . . 

To boil the matter down to an essential proposition, the best of Southern literature is characterized by its ontological orthodoxy.  For the most part Southern writers believe somehow, some way, in the Incarnation and in all that such a miraculous event implies. The flesh—the concrete particulars of time and place—are therefore important, good, and hence sacred.  . . .

--‘A Note on the Origin of Southern Ways’, Why the South Will Survive, Univ. of Georgia Press, 1981, pgs. 162-6

Since everything does unfurl within the Middle in the South and China, a great deal of importance is placed on external behavior (rather than inner holiness) and the gentleman and the lady (rather than the saint) become the ideals that men and women strive towards.  Prof Landess explains about the Southern attitude:

Preachers speak of Him [the Lord Jesus Christ-W.G.] as if He were a close friend, someone known to every member of the congregation as the incarnation of the way they all should behave and never quite do.

Because of this familiar Presence (at times too easily familiar), Southerners have always paid some corporate attention to ethics, exemplary behavior as a mode of serving and worshipping God.  Perhaps the best example of such an attitude is to be found in Robert E. Lee’s famous statement, “Duty is the sublimest word in the English language.”  . . .  His sentiments are echoed in the letters of countless ordinary citizens as well as in those of public figures and are by no mean narrowly sectarian.

Thus, a “good Christian” is someone who behaves well, and the phrase is still more likely to be used in the South than elsewhere in the nation.  Indeed the attention to personal conduct that characterizes the South has considerably strengthened communal feeling over the years, though in ways that make many people uncomfortable.  Typically, one is always under scrutiny in Southern towns and cities.  Virtue is measured in terms of objective behavior as well as in properly orthodox sentiment, and vice is noted as well, though not in the same way that it was noted in seventeenth-century Salem [a town in Puritan New England-W.G.].  God the Son, after all, does not persecute witches.

--Ibid, p. 162

Prof Richard Weaver adds,

To take over his task [i.e., the philosophic doctor of the Middle Ages-W.G.], the dawning modernism chose the gentleman.  There was logic in this choice, for the gentleman is a secularized expression of the same thing.  Rulers any group must have; and, after repudiating the sanction of religion, the age turned to the product of a training which would approximate religion in breadth and depth.  . . . 

 . . . The American South not only cherished the ideal [of the gentleman-W.G.] but had given it an infusion of fresh strength, partly through its social organization but largely through its education in rhetoric and law.

--Ideas Have Consequences, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2013 [1948], pgs. 50, 51

Confucius gives us the Chinese equivalents to these thoughts:

The Master said:  ‘The noble man takes the Right as his foundation principle, reduces it to practice with all courtesy, carries it out with modesty, and renders it perfect with sincerity.  Such is the noble man.’

--The Analects, Thomas Crofts edr., Dover Publications, 1995, Book XV, Ch. XVII, p. 94

Tzŭ Chang asked Confucius the meaning of virtue, to which Confucius replied:  ‘To be able everywhere one goes to carry five things into practice constitutes Virtue.’ On begging to know what they were, he was told:  ‘They are courtesy, magnanimity, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness.  With courtesy you will avoid insult, with magnanimity you will win all, with sincerity men will trust you, with earnestness you will have success, and with kindness you will be well fitted to command others.’

--Ibid., Book XVII, Ch. VI, p. 106

Herbert Fingarette, commenting on Confucius’s teachings, writes,

 . . . for Confucius, the spiritual is public, “outer”—but not in the sense that it is embodied in gods or nonhuman powers.

The text does reveal that he on at least three occasions vaguely alluded to the “inside,” but on the other hand he constantly talked, in elaborated terms, of conduct, comportment and the rules of conduct.  . . .  Success, the positive characterization of moral development, is always a matter of objective comportment—of the reciprocal good faith and respect expressed specifically and concretely in li.  

 . . . 

The virtues that Confucius stresses are indeed all “dynamic” and social.  For example, shu(mutuality in human relations), chung(loyalty) and hsin(good trust toward others)—all inherently involve a dynamic relation to other persons.  On the other hand, such “static” and “inner” virtues as purity or innocence play no role in the Analects.  

 . . . He was not impressed with the possibilities of metaphysical speculation and “theology,” as we know.  But he was deeply concerned with man’s life on earth.  . . .  he saw that the dignity peculiar to man and the power associated with this dignity could be characterized in terms of holy rite, of ceremony.  For ceremony is a conventionalized practice in which are emphasized intrinsic harmony, beauty and sacredness.  

--Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, Waveland Press, 1998 [1972], pgs. 46, 55, 62-3

Manners, duty, moral perfection:  All of this is one side of life in the Middle Logos, which China and the South share with one another.  Let us look now at a couple of other dimensions.

Sleep and Dreams

Prof Dugin notes the importance of dream to Chinese culture:

If we correlate the peculiarity of the ontological zone of Dionysus in the Chinese tradition with the three states of consciousness of Indian philosophy, we can note that the intermediary, middle world corresponds to the realm of dreams. Above this world Hinduism places the world of the pure spirit (Svarga, Heaven, and kāraṇa-śarira, the “causal body”) and below it the images of corporeal forms (Bhur, Earth, and shthūla-śarira, the “gross body”).[6] On the basis of this model, the proposition can be made with regards to the existential peculiarity acting as the dominant of Chinese culture that Chinese culture is the culture of dreams, the field of the middle world in which Dasein resides in a state of intense rhythmic uncertainty or “subtle suspension” whose structure is organized along the rhythm of Yin-Yang. The “Yellow Dasein” is not merely sleeping, but excludes the very possibility of awakening. Awakening is conceived not as an alternative to sleep, but as a transition to another dream, just as winter transitions into spring. 

Chinese thought rejects any exclusivity: slumber is not abolished by reality, but reality is included in slumber on equal grounds. Zhuangzi’s butterfly metaphor dreamed by Zhou thus acquires further meaning. If earlier we used the metaphor of sleep to describe transformation, then now this metaphor of transformation can be employed to describe the ontology of the dream. Transformation is a synonym for dreaming, and the dream is the common denominator of both sleeping consciousness and waking consciousness. . . . 

--‘Noology’

Prof Weaver saw something like this at work in the South:

The Southerner, to sum up the contrast, has tended to live in the finite, balanced, and proportional world which Classical man conceived. In Cicero and Horace he has found congenial counsellors about human life. The idea of stasis is not abhorrent to him, because it affords a ground for the identity of things. Life is not simply a linear progression, but a drama, with rise and fall. Happiness may exist as much in contemplation as in activity. Experience alone is not good; it has to be accompanied by the human commentary. From this, I believe, has come the South’s great fertility in myth and anecdote. It is not so much a sleeping South as a dreaming one, and out of dreams come creations that affect the imagination.

--‘The South and the American Union’, https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/the-south-and-the-american-union/

A great sociologist of the 19^thhundred year Alexis de Tocqueville also caught sight of this tendency toward sleep and dreams in Southern life.  He writes,

In the southern states the most pressing needs of man are always satisfied.  Thus the American of the South is not preoccupied with the material needs of life; someone else takes charge of thinking of them for him.  Free on this point, his imagination is directed toward other greater objects, less exactly defined.  The American of the South loves greatness, luxury, glory, noise, pleasures, above all else idleness; nothing constrains him to make efforts in order to live, and as he has no necessary work, he falls asleep and does not even undertake anything useful.

--Democracy in America, Mansfield and Winthrop editors and translators, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000, Vol. One, Part Two, Ch. Ten, p. 360

Dragons

The image of the dragon likewise looms large over both peoples.  Prof Dugin writes of China:

In the Chinese tradition, the figure of the Dragon (Lun 龍) plays a major metaphysical role. The Chinese theory of the five elements professes strictly correspondences to two types of animals: ordinary (the pig, dog, sheep, chicken, and cow) and sacred-mythological (the Black Turtle or Snake, the Yellow Dragon, the Red Phoenix, the Yellow Unicorn, and the White Tiger). If the ordinary animals are situated on the external border of the circle or square of the calendar-map, then the sacred animals belong to the realm beyond this border. Insofar as Chinese metaphysics does not allow transcendence in any form, this “beyondness” of the sacred animals is nevertheless included within the system of the Chinese worldview on the grounds that, while being outside the world, dragons and phoenixes are maximally distant from the Center, but still within the border. As a rule, the structure of the sacred combines within itself both the extremely distant and the extremely close, the extremely big and the extremely small.[8] Therefore, what is furthest from the Center still reveals its presence in the Center itself, albeit in its hidden dimension. This is what makes the Center sacred. 

 . . . 

If we turn to the ontology of dreams discussed above, we can determine the status of the Dragon in the Chinese picture of being. This status is supreme in all senses. The Dragon Lun is supremely “real”: it is a reliable, necessary, and evidential being and existence precisely by virtue of its embodiment of the quintessence of dreams: it is because it is a dream, and insofar as it is the most pure and full dream, it stands closest of all to the Tao, to the secret code of the ontological rhythm of Yin-Yang. 

--‘Noology’

For the South, the dragon appears in her ancient past – in the pre-Christian, Old English epic Beowulfand in the Orthodox Christian Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It was also associated with the Royal House of Wessex, whose culture forms one of the main pillars of the South’s own culture, and with other peoples from the Irish and British Islands who form a part of Dixie:

https://wearetheenglish.com/the-white-dragon-42-w.asp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wessex

https://celticlife.com/the-celtic-dragon/

https://www.blackdrago.com/fame_africa.htm

But it also appears in her recent literary works, such as the Wheel of Timeseries written by the Southerner Robert Jordan of South Carolina (born James Oliver Rigney, Jr):

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/let-the-south-ride-again-on-the-winds-of-time/

There is quite a bit of kinship between China and the South.  If only they would throw off the alien ideologies that are killing the deep traditions they hold in common:  Puritan/Yankee messianism and materialism in the South, and communist materialism and millennialism in China.  Then what a friendship could blossom between the two!