Now, the basic fact about Asian society is not merely that it is agrarian, but that it is agrarian in a very special sense. Unlike agrarian societies in other parts of the world, Asian society depends for its very existence on the preservation of a delicate and difficult balance between land and population, between man and nature. This is because Asia is characterized by very high concentrations of rice-eating population on a limited supply of land suitable to rice culture.
The traditional Asian solution to this problem has been the prodigal expenditure of human labor, the cheapest and most readily available form of power in the circumstances, on highly intensive agriculture, or what is known as "garden farming." This simple economic fact has had far-reaching social and political implications. On the one hand the demands of intensive agriculture, of the desperate back-breaking struggle for a bare subsistence, have given the masses of Asia neither the time nor the ability to participate in government, much less to rule themselves. On the other hand the precarious balance between land and population has demanded a strong, highly centralized omnicompetent state to protect it from the forces, whether natural or human, which continually threaten to upset it. Only such a state could have undertaken the extensive public works necessary to control the water supply while warding off marauding tribes and maintaining in operation the work-cycle of the laboring masses.
Hence the development at the cultural centers of Asia — in China, Japan, Cambodia and Java — of highly centralized bureaucratic empires run by a small specialized class of scholar-officials whose business it was to govern, just as the business of the masses was to labor and to obey. Such was the traditional structure of Asian society: a pyramidial structure of which the Chinese empire offers the most perfect and most ancient example. At the base of the pyramid was the peasantry, its energies fully engaged in the primitive cultivation of land, with little or no time for anything else; above the peasantry was the land-owning gentry; from the land-owning gentry came the scholar-officials who administered the empire; and at the summit of all was the emperor, whose divine function it was to preserve the equilibrium between land and population, man and nature, heaven and earth.
It was a stable society, all the more stable as it developed a religious-philosophical system, Confucianism, which emphasized balance, harmony, the maintenance of the status quo, reverence for authority, conservatism. It was stable but not static. The equilibrium was sometimes disturbed, the harmony broken. Natural calamities — floods, droughts, locusts — destroyed crops. Bad emperors, greedy landlords, grasping officials took more than their share of what the land produced. Then the masses suffered, starved, died. Hungry farmers turned outlaws; barbarians poured in through the unguarded frontier, burning and looting; the sacred work-cycle stopped; there was no one to adjust the earthly calendar with the heavenly — and there was chaos.
But for this, too, the system made provision. Formulated in China, the device for restoring equilibrium to a disturbed society was adopted in varying measures throughout the Far East. When such disasters occurred, the ruler was said to lose the mandate of heaven. Rebellion was then permissible, and the successful rebel by the very fact of his success, received the mandate and founded a new dynasty. Thus, although dynasty succeeded dynasty, the system survived. It survived for almost four millenia until the coming of Western man, who brought, not merely a new dynasty, nor even a new empire, but revolution.
For the spiritual baggage of Europeans who came to make their fortunes in Asia contained material of a highly explosive nature. In the first place, new ideas: Christianity, with its emphasis on the human person, his rights and freedoms, valid even against the state; Western science, with its concept of a universe governed not by capricious gods but by determinable laws, laws which man can formulate and even to some extent utilize; popular government, based on the revolutionary notion that rulers are actually responsible to the ruled. In the second place, new tools: new and better and faster ways of doing things, the highly developed techniques of Western industry; medicine, making possible epidemic control; mass production, mines, factories.
All this built up to a terrific impact which unhinged the age-old cycle of Asian history and rocked the very foundation of Asian society.
In Southeast Asia, colonial regions established by the European powers replaced the native ruling class, changed the economy from one of subsistence to one of export, developed an industrial proletariat of landless laborers, an intellectual proletariat of colonial subordinates, and by stimulating mass migrations created minority problems.
In China, the peak of the Western impact coincided with dynastic decline. It hastened the fall of the Manchu dynasty but prevented the rise of another. The harmony between man and nature was lost, for no one had the mandate of heaven; while warlords, westernized messiahs and ephemeral republics sought in vain for a mandate from the people.
The ancient equilibrium was similarly upset in Japan. The penniless samurai class brought off the most gigantic judo trick in history by riding with the Western impact which brought down the Tokugawa power, capturing that power for themselves, and then by frantic westernization building up more and more power, until they were mighty enough to burn against the West.
And what is the net result of this terrific impact of the Western world on Asian society? Something akin to an atomic explosion. Dark unpredictable forces, knocked out of their ancient orbits in the inert mass of Asia, have set off a chain reaction which is detonating all about us today; or, to lay aside metaphor, a vast social revolution, a process of rapid and violent change in the very structure of society, has developed and will continue to run its chaotic course until some new principle of equilibrium, some fresh social synthesis replaces that by which Asia has lived for centuries.
Our present problem, then, is to find the new synthesis whereby the antithesis of revolution can be resolved. What are the terms of this new problem? It is still basically an economic one, the age-old Asian riddle of how to strike a balance between population and resources, how to harmonize man and nature. But new complicating factors make it vastly more difficult than it ever was to Master K'ung or the architects of the Tokugawa system. Improved medical and public health facilities by Western methods continually increase the rate of population growth and hence the pressure on the land. As a result, industrialization has already become a vital necessity among people who are as yet incapable of it. The plantation economies left by receding colonial empires provide another paradox: that of whole regions unable to produce enough food for themselves because they are geared to the production of an export crop which they can no longer sell.
All this adds up for the Asian masses to just one simple and stark conclusion: less and less work, less and less food, more and more people. We have mentioned that the classic Asian remedy for this was to overthrow the government, for it was precisely the business of government in traditional Asian society to maintain the balance between man and nature. But not the peoples of Asia, influenced by Western ideas, are seeking not merely to replace governments but to control them. These governments, on the other hand, composed as they are of the native aristocracies, landowners, compradores, former employees of the colonial civil service, are not exactly willing to be controlled. Thus the withdrawal of the European powers has left a power vacuum, to fill which a bitter struggle is in progress in almost every country of Asia.
But even more important than this power vacuum is the spiritual vacuum created by the Western impact. Western ideas have acted not merely as explosives but as solvents. They have undermined the traditional beliefs and philosophies of Asia but have not succeeded in proposing any view of life or scale of values acceptable to the majority of Asians. In place of the old faiths, they have substituted merely doubts. This is not to be wondered at since the liberal West, because of its rejection of Christianity, is itself without a faith of its own. Indeed, it no longer has even a consistent rational basis for the rights and freedoms which it professes to defend and teach. With unconscious but suicidal contradiction, it calls upon Asia to accept the inviolability of the human person, the sovereignty of inherent in the people, the sanctity of treaties, the rule of law, and at the same time casts doubts or heaps derision on the Christian faith and the rational philosophy without which these principles cease to be valid or even intelligible. That is why you cannot blame Asian liberals who have learned liberalism from a dechristianized and doubting Europe for refusing to die in defense of liberalisn. Why should they, indeed? Men die for a faith; they will not die for a doubt.
A whirlwind is sweeping over Asia; but the heart of it, like the center of a typhoon, is a vacuum: a power vacuum and a spiritual vacuum. Whoever fills this vacuum rides the whirlwind and becomes master of Asia. And there you have communist strategy in Asia in a nutshell. To ride the whirlwind; to fill the power vacuum with its leadership, the spiritual vacuum with its militant faith, and having thus placed itself at the center of Asia's social revolution, to harness it to its own ends.
Let us note carefully wherein our analysis differs from that of communist propaganda. Communists claim the credit for starting the revolution in Asian society. But the facts are against them. Rizal and Sun Yat-sen raised the standard of that revolution years before communism was born. The communists merely took advantage of a movement they did not begin. Again, they claim that the objectives of Asia's revolution are communist. They are not. These objectives are essentially those of the free world: a fair deal for the workingman and the peasant, popular control of government, peace and order in a free society. What the communists have done is to maneuver the free world, and especially the Western powers, into seeming to be against these objectives in Asia while setting themselves up as their defenders.
And yet the whole irony of the present situation is that so many people take the communists at their own valuation, and propose to fight them on their own grounds. There is nothing the communists would like better. They have striven mightily to identify themselves with the masses of Asia because they know that the masses in movement are irresistible. You cannot stop a social revolution. You may as well try to block a whirlwind.
Yet that is precisely what certain conservative governments in Asia are trying to do today. They are opposing measures of social reform, relying on brute force to preserve existing arrangements, on the grounds that all such measures of reform are communists-inspired and any concession made to the masses is a step nearer to communist domination. They fail to see that by acting thus they are playing right into communist hands. They are proving the communist thesis that all non-communist governments are by that very fact governments against the people. They are convincing the masses, as not even the communists can convince them, that the only hope for social justice lies in class warfare under communist leadership. They are helping communism in the most efficacious manner possible to fill the power vacuum in Asia.
There is only one way to fight the communists, and that is to beat them at their own game. We must go to the masses, as the communists have gone to the masses, and show them, by work and not by words alone, that their hope does not lie with Soviet Russia or Soviet China but with us. It is useless, besides being unjust to try to stop social change in Asia. That is not the issue. The issue is who is to control that change? Who is to direct it? Who is to ride the whirlwind? The communists or the men who are for freedom?
That is the essential problem: a problem of control, a problem of leadership. If we cannot produce leaders as intelligent, as devoted, as selfless, as heroic as communism has been able to produce in Asia, we shall fail.
In order to produce this sort of leadership, liberalism does not suffice. Nothing could be less forceful than the kind of liberalism that is sometimes referred to as a "third force" in Asian affairs. For what does it consist in? It is a set, not so much of principles as of working hypotheses, of provisional conclusions; a tissue of "ifs" and "buts," a "climate of opinion"; not a positive philosophy but a temper of mind, what is called the "rationalist" temper, skeptical, cynical, in mortal fear of the absolute, impatient of discipline, never quite making up its mind; quick to perceive the flaw in everything, slow to perceive the worth of anything, seldom acting with decision, half paralyzed with doubt even while it acts; a feeble force, this, which not only tires easily but, like the ne'er-do-well of the story, is born tired.
And what is this adversary it has to grapple with? What is communism? It is a faith. A climate of opinion is powerless against a faith. You must have a faith to fight a faith, and to conquer a faith you must have a stronger and truer faith. Liberalism then, is not enough. We must have some other rock on which to stand, some other well from which men may draw not doubts but living water; not just hypotheses but the truth.
It is the personal conviction of the present writer that Catholicism is that rock and the source of that living water: that if liberalism is bankrupt today, it is because it has rejected the ancient faith by which it lived. And it is more than personal conviction, it is a tradition in the missionary order to which he belongs that the Catholic Faith is not a Western thing but a human thing, and all the more human because it is divine in origin; that it belongs fully as much to Asia as to Europe; and that properly presented it can be the answer, indeed is the only answer to the deepest aspirations of Asian man.
All this adds up for the Asian masses to just one simple and stark conclusion: less and less work, less and less food, more and more people. We have mentioned that the classic Asian remedy for this was to overthrow the government, for it was precisely the business of government in traditional Asian society to maintain the balance between man and nature. But not the peoples of Asia, influenced by Western ideas, are seeking not merely to replace governments but to control them. These governments, on the other hand, composed as they are of the native aristocracies, landowners, compradores, former employees of the colonial civil service, are not exactly willing to be controlled. Thus the withdrawal of the European powers has left a power vacuum, to fill which a bitter struggle is in progress in almost every country of Asia.
But even more important than this power vacuum is the spiritual vacuum created by the Western impact. Western ideas have acted not merely as explosives but as solvents. They have undermined the traditional beliefs and philosophies of Asia but have not succeeded in proposing any view of life or scale of values acceptable to the majority of Asians. In place of the old faiths, they have substituted merely doubts. This is not to be wondered at since the liberal West, because of its rejection of Christianity, is itself without a faith of its own. Indeed, it no longer has even a consistent rational basis for the rights and freedoms which it professes to defend and teach. With unconscious but suicidal contradiction, it calls upon Asia to accept the inviolability of the human person, the sovereignty of inherent in the people, the sanctity of treaties, the rule of law, and at the same time casts doubts or heaps derision on the Christian faith and the rational philosophy without which these principles cease to be valid or even intelligible. That is why you cannot blame Asian liberals who have learned liberalism from a dechristianized and doubting Europe for refusing to die in defense of liberalisn. Why should they, indeed? Men die for a faith; they will not die for a doubt.
A whirlwind is sweeping over Asia; but the heart of it, like the center of a typhoon, is a vacuum: a power vacuum and a spiritual vacuum. Whoever fills this vacuum rides the whirlwind and becomes master of Asia. And there you have communist strategy in Asia in a nutshell. To ride the whirlwind; to fill the power vacuum with its leadership, the spiritual vacuum with its militant faith, and having thus placed itself at the center of Asia's social revolution, to harness it to its own ends.
Let us note carefully wherein our analysis differs from that of communist propaganda. Communists claim the credit for starting the revolution in Asian society. But the facts are against them. Rizal and Sun Yat-sen raised the standard of that revolution years before communism was born. The communists merely took advantage of a movement they did not begin. Again, they claim that the objectives of Asia's revolution are communist. They are not. These objectives are essentially those of the free world: a fair deal for the workingman and the peasant, popular control of government, peace and order in a free society. What the communists have done is to maneuver the free world, and especially the Western powers, into seeming to be against these objectives in Asia while setting themselves up as their defenders.
And yet the whole irony of the present situation is that so many people take the communists at their own valuation, and propose to fight them on their own grounds. There is nothing the communists would like better. They have striven mightily to identify themselves with the masses of Asia because they know that the masses in movement are irresistible. You cannot stop a social revolution. You may as well try to block a whirlwind.
Yet that is precisely what certain conservative governments in Asia are trying to do today. They are opposing measures of social reform, relying on brute force to preserve existing arrangements, on the grounds that all such measures of reform are communists-inspired and any concession made to the masses is a step nearer to communist domination. They fail to see that by acting thus they are playing right into communist hands. They are proving the communist thesis that all non-communist governments are by that very fact governments against the people. They are convincing the masses, as not even the communists can convince them, that the only hope for social justice lies in class warfare under communist leadership. They are helping communism in the most efficacious manner possible to fill the power vacuum in Asia.
There is only one way to fight the communists, and that is to beat them at their own game. We must go to the masses, as the communists have gone to the masses, and show them, by work and not by words alone, that their hope does not lie with Soviet Russia or Soviet China but with us. It is useless, besides being unjust to try to stop social change in Asia. That is not the issue. The issue is who is to control that change? Who is to direct it? Who is to ride the whirlwind? The communists or the men who are for freedom?
That is the essential problem: a problem of control, a problem of leadership. If we cannot produce leaders as intelligent, as devoted, as selfless, as heroic as communism has been able to produce in Asia, we shall fail.
In order to produce this sort of leadership, liberalism does not suffice. Nothing could be less forceful than the kind of liberalism that is sometimes referred to as a "third force" in Asian affairs. For what does it consist in? It is a set, not so much of principles as of working hypotheses, of provisional conclusions; a tissue of "ifs" and "buts," a "climate of opinion"; not a positive philosophy but a temper of mind, what is called the "rationalist" temper, skeptical, cynical, in mortal fear of the absolute, impatient of discipline, never quite making up its mind; quick to perceive the flaw in everything, slow to perceive the worth of anything, seldom acting with decision, half paralyzed with doubt even while it acts; a feeble force, this, which not only tires easily but, like the ne'er-do-well of the story, is born tired.
And what is this adversary it has to grapple with? What is communism? It is a faith. A climate of opinion is powerless against a faith. You must have a faith to fight a faith, and to conquer a faith you must have a stronger and truer faith. Liberalism then, is not enough. We must have some other rock on which to stand, some other well from which men may draw not doubts but living water; not just hypotheses but the truth.
It is the personal conviction of the present writer that Catholicism is that rock and the source of that living water: that if liberalism is bankrupt today, it is because it has rejected the ancient faith by which it lived. And it is more than personal conviction, it is a tradition in the missionary order to which he belongs that the Catholic Faith is not a Western thing but a human thing, and all the more human because it is divine in origin; that it belongs fully as much to Asia as to Europe; and that properly presented it can be the answer, indeed is the only answer to the deepest aspirations of Asian man.
— Fr. Horacio de la Costa y Villamayor, S.J.
Social Order II|6
St. Louis, June 1952
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| Acrobats by Cesar Legaspi Torrente Oil on masonite. 1955. |
