A Two-Tier Society Theory's Perspective on the New Economy Movement and its Humanistic Narrative (Part 1)

Li Yousheng (2015/06/30)

Abstract: Dividing human society into a natural, primordial society and a man-made, secondary society reveals that Chinese civilization began in the primordial society, while Western civilization began in the secondary society. The escalating history of wars throughout five thousand years of civilization and the multi-party democratic systems of Western countries both reflect the conflicts arising from various man-made directions within the secondary society. This paper analyzes and comments on the American New Economic Movement and its humanistic narrative from the unique perspective of this two-tiered society theory, showcasing the differences between Eastern and Western traditional philosophies and the primordial society perspective found in secondary school literature and science. The author uses personal experience and observations to demonstrate the cost of sacrificing human happiness for economic growth. In the face of a global ecological crisis, the American New Economic Movement represents a natural tendency for the world to return to the natural humanity of the primordial society, and also provides a new opportunity for the integration of Eastern and Western cultures to help humanity overcome its predicament: humanity can return to a more equal and friendly lifestyle within communities, leaving the higher levels of society to non-human mechanisms: competition for capital, competition for happiness (religion), competition for democratic votes, etc., which may in the future be balanced by computer mechanisms.

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When I returned to China to visit my relatives, I occasionally went to an internet cafe to use the internet service. Among the hundred or so people, I was almost the only one searching for information online, while the rest were playing video games. In line with this, it is said that domestic TV programs are mainly for entertainment, while foreign ones are mainly for commentary. Since ancient Greece, the West has used public discourse circles similar to today’s TV commentary and online text to construct classes and corresponding class struggles to promote historical progress. Marx and Engels’ theory of the Asiatic mode of production believes that the self-sufficiency of rural Asia and the integration of handicrafts and agriculture are the main basis for the stagnation of Eastern despotism and society. Liang Shuming said: “From the Warring States period to the late Qing Dynasty, classes were transformed into professions to replace the rule of peace.” [1]

In modernization, China learned from the West; in postmodernism, the West seeks inspiration from Chinese civilization. In recent years, I have also seen an increasing number of people playing video games online in local libraries in Canada. After humanity moved away from the two world wars and the Cold War era, world culture has shown a trend of moving closer to Chinese Taoist thought: to break free from the enslavement of material wealth and enjoy instant gratification. Coincidentally, in the current era of global economic globalization, the American New Economy Movement emphasizes community and economic democracy, which also moves closer to Lao Tzu’s ideal of a small country with few people. I am grateful to Professor You Xiaojian for sending me “New Economy: Social Innovation Based on Community Building and Economic Democracy” (PDF electronic version), which he co-edited with Wen Tiejun, as well as several related articles. Reading them has broadened my horizons. [2-5]

You Xiaojian also asked me to write a commentary based on my observations in Canada, and I would like to take this opportunity to express my own thoughts. In today’s world, where Western metaphysics, which emphasizes logical thinking, is nearing its philosophical end, returning to the leisurely mindset of Taoism, temporarily departing from the argumentative paradigm of contemporary academic writing, and returning to the natural social interaction of ancient, primordial societies—interspersed with personal experiences and emotions—can offer scholars a change of pace, which is not unreasonable.

I. Starting with Aristophanes’ comedy “Lystrida”

In 2003, after the failed anti-war movement sweeping across the United States and the world, and as the first shot of the US-led invasion of Iraq was fired, I was in Canada watching a performance specifically held to protest this war of aggression. The performance paused, and everyone stood for five minutes of silence as a protest against the US-led invasion of Iraq. The play being performed was Aristophanes’ (c. 448-380 BC) absurdist comedy, *Lystrida*. In ancient Greece, the city-states of Athens and Sparta had a nearly thirty-year civil war. Lystrida, an Athenian woman, rallied all the women of Athens to participate in an anti-war movement, forcing their husbands to cease hostilities with Sparta and seek peace. She threatened to abstain from sexual relations with their husbands if the war didn’t end, resulting in Athenian men each carrying a huge, cardboard-carved erect penis onto the stage. Even today, more than two thousand years later, China’s sexual openness has not reached the point where men are allowed to carry such enormous penises on stage. The comedy *Lystrida* vividly illustrates the differences between Eastern and Western cultures and the cost of freedom and democracy: seven years after Aristophanes’ absurd comedy was performed in Athens, Athens was defeated and surrendered to Sparta. Legend has it that the Spartans originally intended to kill all the surrendered Athenian men, but were captivated by the talent displayed in Aristophanes’ comedy and spared their lives. In other words, in a humanistic and theoretical sense, the defeated defeated the victors on the battlefield.

If Athens, a civilized and democratic society, could not militarily defeat the warlike and aristocratic Sparta, then more than two thousand years later, civilized and democratic Europe could not defeat the autocratic Hitler, needing the help of the United States and the entire world to turn the tide. Similarly, America’s civilized democracy could not withstand the machinations of Wall Street financial oligarchs and the ensuing financial crisis, which led to the so-called New Economic Movement.

The New Economy Movement in the United States began in the mid-to-late 1990s. Some scholars and the public opposed the dominance of corporations and the wave of globalization. Especially after the global economic crisis of 2008, the New Economy Movement began to spread throughout the United States. The book “New Economy: Social Innovation Based on Community Building and Economic Democracy” compiled by Wen Tiejun and You Xiaojian (2015) provides a comprehensive introduction to this movement from humanistic narratives to social practices and economic operations. [1] Here I will only analyze and comment on this social movement and the relevant works of You Xiaojian, Ju Xi, and Qian Hong from the special perspective of the two-level social theory based on my personal reading of this book. [3, 4, 5] However, since I have not received systematic humanities training, I cannot delve into philosophical theories, let alone provide expert criticism to the three. Here I will temporarily call the traditional Chinese philosophy they expounded “Chinese humanities and sciences”, because I have a feeling: although we have different languages and perspectives, we are foreseeing the same trend in the development of the world: a return to the human nature of the original society.

Many years ago, I proposed the concept of different social levels: the genetically encoded original society and the artificial secondary society. The former is a natural society, based on emotional aesthetics as the foundation of social order, while the latter is built around human goals, so its social order is usually rational. Western civilization began with secondary society, while Chinese civilization began with a superpower-like original society, and only fully entered secondary society during the Warring States period. [6, 7] Compared with the natural people of the original society, the people of secondary society are mostly artificial people, products of modern society and culture. Theoretically, secondary society has countless possible forms, but because the five thousand years of human civilization history is a history of escalating war [8], under the pressure of war, the so-called modern world dominated by European civilization and with material pursuit as the main goal was formed. Due to the mediation of the United Nations and the end of the Cold War, the world that was temporarily away from the threat of war showed a natural tendency to return to the original society, and also allowed different secondary societies to coexist, thus giving rise to various postmodern trends. The American New Economy Movement represents this tendency in the economic field: pluralistic coexistence and a certain degree of return to the original society. Both Yu Xiaojian and Ju Xi tend to use traditional Chinese culture and philosophy to integrate this change in American society, that is, both the East and the West should return to the original social ideals of Chinese civilization.

Eckald’s research on the relationship between the frequency of wars, the size of empires, and the level of civilization found that the entire world has been in a spiral of continuous ascent over five thousand years of civilization, with all three increasing and decreasing simultaneously. Eckald found that in the process of all examples of civilizations rising in a spiral, not only did civilization, empire, and war rise simultaneously, but it also led to the expansion of social inequality, manifested in slavery, the caste system, class differentiation, and social hierarchy. This also conforms to the Marxist view that class struggle drives history forward. [8] Although China is also part of the spiral of simultaneous growth of war, empire, and civilization as described by Eckald, it is not typical: to some extent, Chinese history condenses the five thousand years of Western war escalation into the Warring States period, and there were relatively stable periods of two thousand years before and after the Warring States period, which is directly related to the emphasis on liberal arts and sciences in secondary schools by You Xiaojian, Ju Xi, and Qian Hong. [9]

The culture of wealth accumulation is also part of the civilization of war, because war, empire, and civilization all require the support of wealth. Without money, nothing can be accomplished. The end of the Cold War did not dampen the culture of wealth accumulation in the slightest. In today’s world, only two things are growing at breakneck speed, constantly soaring into the sky: the accumulation of human wealth and knowledge, both doubling every one or two decades. Many multinational corporations are larger than a medium-sized country; the replacement of nations by these corporations is a result of economic warfare replacing armed warfare. The New Economy Movement in the United States demonstrates a desire to break free from this global economic war dominated by multinational corporations and return to the equality and amicability of primal societies.

Looking back at the anti-war movement of women in Athens, ancient Greece, from the perspective of polarization theory and the modern world dominated by contemporary European civilization, it is precisely because women, compared to men, Chinese, compared to Westerners, and the lower classes of communities on which the American New Economy movement was based, were less corrupted by modern civilization and closer to the natural state of being in a natural society than Wall Street financial oligarchs and multinational corporation CEOs. Similarly, after the Cold War, humanity emerged from the shadow of two world wars and moved away from the threat of world war, which facilitated the full manifestation of human nature, rather than merely serving the purposes of war and wealth accumulation.

II. Differences between Canada and the United States from My Personal Observations

I worked at the University of Chicago for three years in the late 1980s before moving to Canada, a country often described as semi-socialist. To my knowledge, Canada was the second Western country, after France, to establish diplomatic relations with China. Culturally, Canada is far closer to China than the United States. Here, I use my personal experience and observations to demonstrate the problem of extreme capitalism unique to the United States, a concentrated manifestation of the inhumanity and unmanipulable nature of a man-made secondary society.

In Chicago, I witnessed a phenomenon absent in Canada: vast tracts of privately owned homes abandoned and overgrown with weeds reaching over a meter high. Homeless and destitute people living there inevitably attracted crime. The government advertised for these homes, offering them for one dollar each. Chinese students at the University of Chicago even discussed collectively purchasing a plot of land, but the plan remained unresolved. In my over twenty years in Canada, the only similar case I heard was of the Canadian government allowing people to cut down trees in its national forests, each tree costing one Canadian dollar. I believe the difference between the US and Canadian governments selling off goods for a dollar reflects the difference between capitalist freedom and social welfare: the former leads to overproduction and corresponding class conflict; the latter, under the tide of capitalism, faces a relative lack of productive capacity.

I’ve lived in Canada for over twenty years and have never seen an abandoned residential area like Chicago’s; I’ve only occasionally seen abandoned commercial buildings. In the late 1990s, two large department stores closed and relocated in my city’s downtown area. Afterwards, I heard about years of public opinion and efforts to revitalize the downtown area, and even heard about American city officials coming to share their experiences. I feel that compared to the US government, the Canadian government is more like the Chinese government: it manages more affairs, has more power, maintains a distance from the ideals of American-style liberal democracy, and is more pragmatic.

I was burglarized twice while in Chicago. Once, someone broke into my house in broad daylight and was caught red-handed by the police. The police told me that the thief had been in jail multiple times and, having been out for a while, wanted to go back home for a period. Conditions in prison are, of course, better than abandoned homes that have been neglected for years, and there’s a guarantee of three meals a day. Later, during the Cultural Revolution, I worked in Guizhou. Some of the local buses were in dire straits: broken doors and windows were propped up with cardboard and wooden sticks. I remarked to the passenger next to me, “This looks like wartime.” Many buses in Chicago were like that, but no one used cardboard and wooden sticks to prop them up.

Back then, wealthy families in Chicago would buy new cars and leave their old ones unused, giving them away on the street. The wage gap between China and the US was still significant, and Chinese students at the University of Chicago often bought these cars for a hundred dollars and drove them around. I once asked them curiously how they learned to drive, and they said, “Why learn to drive? Just buy one and drive it around the parking lot a couple of times.” In my more than twenty years in Canada, I’ve never heard of anything like this, but I often see used cars for sale for three to five hundred dollars. I learned that someone would pay fifty dollars to tow my own unusable car away for scrap. As for driving, I constantly hear Chinese people complaining that Canadian driver’s license regulations are too strict, with some failing the road test after years of attempts.

When I first arrived in Canada, a stockbroker told me, “The US has over a thousand banks, and those banks could go bankrupt. Canada only has three or five large banks, which won’t go bankrupt, so your stocks are absolutely safe.” More than a decade later, this statement proved true. When the collapse of US banks triggered the global financial crisis in 2008, the Canadian government immediately announced in the newspapers: “We have corresponding federal laws that prohibit our banks from doing that, so similar problems will not occur here.”

Based on my experience working in hospitals in the UK, US, and Canada, Americans are the most hardworking, Canadians are the least hardworking, and the British are in the middle. This aligns with the notion that Canada is a semi-socialist country.

III. The Costs of Capitalist Globalization as Seen Through American Social Problems

I spent my childhood in a rural area of Hebei. Locals who had been forced into labor by the Japanese army and later escaped back to Japan said that the Japanese people suffered terribly during World War II. They lacked soap and matches, and food was rationed; people had to queue for long periods every day to receive a small amount of food. This person also said that Chinese laborers received more food rations than Japanese citizens. This was the price Japan paid for occupying most of Asia. In the last century, the suicide rate in North America nearly doubled; this was the price of Western dominance and the globalization of capitalism. The former is material; the latter is spiritual. The British, during the Opium War, said they merely wanted to open the Chinese market and trade with the Chinese, illustrating the inherent global tension within capitalism itself.

According to Gus Speth [10], the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) comprises twenty democratic countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, the Nordic countries, Canada, and others. These countries are called developed countries, while China, India, and others are called developing countries. In other words, the whole world is moving forward along the capitalist development path pioneered by European civilization. The United States is the flagship of this capitalist world, responsible for leading the way. If Europe follows the United States in participating in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and keeps complaining, Canada is silently following the United States, hence the saying that Canada is the fifty-first state of the United States.

If the United States, as a leading power, uses Marxist class struggle to guide its development, then Canada’s thriving labor unions seek short-term gains while maintaining a facade of peace. If the former’s society is frequently turbulent, the latter revels in absorbing the aftermath of such turmoil. Besides the aforementioned movement against the US invasion of Iraq, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which swept the world in 2011, saw seven or eight people in my Canadian city camping in a downtown park, calling themselves “Occupy Wall Street.” I visited them, chatted, and took photos together. Later, I was invited to write a short article, “Occupy Wall Street Opens a New World,” which circulated online.

Canada rarely sees the kind of massive, American-style street protests involving tens of thousands of people. These protests are mostly about different social directions. The only similar street movement I’ve seen in Canada was a call for Quebec not to secede, a call to maintain the status quo and avoid social division. Most of the union strikes I’ve personally witnessed in Canada consisted of seven or eight people taking turns holding signs and occasionally circling the streets; this was enough to achieve their desired results at the negotiating table.

According to Marx and Engels, if the class differentiation and struggle in Europe propelled history forward, while Asia stagnated by concealing class differences through administrative arrangements, then the United States led the European tradition, and Canada was more like the Asian model. According to Gus Speth [10], among the twenty countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States has the highest GDP growth rate and economic competitiveness, but also has problems that other countries do not have. These problems are the price the United States pays for pioneering and leading the capitalist world, and are also a concentrated manifestation of the problems brought about by the global capitalistization. Among these twenty developed countries, the social problems that the United States stands out from the rest are:

• The highest poverty rate, whether among the general population or children;

• The highest level of income inequality;

• Highest obesity rate;

• Highest murder rate;

• The prison with the highest total number and highest average number of inmates;

• Highest carbon dioxide emissions and highest per capita water consumption;

In terms of both total expenditure and its share of GDP, military spending is the highest.

• Largest international arms sales;

• The highest per capita consumption of antidepressants;

• Highest infant mortality rate;

• The highest percentage of GDP is spent on nutrition and healthcare because it is expensive and represents the highest percentage of the population without access to healthcare.

My experience living in both the US and Canada has shown me their completely different attitudes towards life: Americans are overconfident, with a savior complex, so they are particularly friendly to foreigners visiting the US, but tend to be bossy once they leave. Canadians, on the other hand, are the opposite; they prefer to focus on their own little corner of the world. They even advocate against buying Chinese goods and have resorted to street violence to protest the G8 summit held in Canada.

In chimpanzee societies, male chimpanzees are responsible for pioneering the forest, hunting prey for monkeys, and sharing the spoils. Secondary societies represent humanity’s exploration at a new level. In the process of global modernization, Europe and the United States played this pioneering role. Their experiences will serve as a reference for humanity in building various secondary societies, but they are not the only type, much less the best.