Eric's Beijing Diary

Beijing is concerned about the impression foreigners in other countries have of Chinese people. There is a general understanding in China that tourists from China have earned a negative reputation for themselves because of habits such as spitting and cutting in line. So the idea is to increase education in these areas. Interesting idea, but, although I am an educator by profession, I do not believe that education is the cure for all behavioral ills. Let me try to give an illustration from the animal kingdom:

When I was in college, we had a small farm on the north side of town. We had a horse, a Welsh pony, a couple of calves, some sheep, ducks and chickens, and a cat and dog. The first one that comes to mind is the horse. Her name was Ginger. As a horse, Ginger wasn't too bad, I guess, but she had an obstinate personality. I know where she got it, too, because the Appaloosa stud she came from was as ornery as the day is long. He is the only horse I ever knew who always entered the barn butt-end first, ready to kick anyone who tried to stop him. Ginger definitely took after her dad. She wasn't anything like her mother. Queen was a retired barrel racer with an excellent disposition. So Ginger had a high standard to live up to, and she didn't come close. It wasn't all bad, because she actually turned out to be a pretty good brood mare. Her colts had personalities more akin to their grandma than to their grandpa. Funny how that kind of thing skips a generation.

Ginger created a problem, because she chased the calves mercilessly. This made me angry, so I locked her in the barn. In the evening, I would let her out to graze and put the calves in the barn. Now in human terms, I would tend to view her behavior as obnoxious, mean spirited, and evil. But animals are not moral beings. They are not guided by conscience or moral reason. They are driven by instinct. Dogs have proven that animals are capable of sensing when they have done something their master doesn't approve of. When we describe a dog's countenance during these times, we use words like "guilty." But dogs don't feel guilt. They don't lie awake at night fretting over their sins. Their "guilt" is merely a clever understanding that their is an undesirable consequence for what they have done. This is because dogs are very social animals, and they care deeply about their relationship with the person they have identified as their master.

I won't say much about the ducks, because they spent most of the time swimming around and looking pretty. Nothing wrong with that, and their natural beauty might be considered a sort of virtue. Still, I am reminded of Tolstoy's words: "It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness." I have to agree. But even though the ducks didn't contribute much, because we didn't eat duck eggs, and we didn't eat ducks, there was a run-off stream going through the property, so keeping them was very cheap. They basically took care of themselves. The chickens I would tend to place on a higher moral plane, because they contributed something every day. Well, except for the turken. He was a gift from Joe across the street. A turken is a cross between a turkey and a chicken. He didn't contribute anything, but we let him live--I guess because he was such a supreme example of pure, innocent ugliness.

I don't even want to talk about the sheep. The were so stupid, I couldn't stand to look at them. Being a Bible reader, I always felt a little guilty for hating sheep, but I did. When I tried to herd them into the barn, they would sense very quickly where I wanted them to go and run in every other direction but that one. Sheep are really impossible to herd. Sheep have to be led, and they have to be led by someone they know really well. You can more or less herd cows even if they don't know you very well. But you can't do that with sheep. You can chase sheep, of course, but you can't really herd them. You have to lead them. And they won't follow you unless they are very sure you are not going to hurt them. So what can we say about attitudes like fear and trust? Sheep manifest both vividly, yet sheep are not moral beings.

Welsh ponies are supposed to be stubborn, and I guess maybe we would have noticed that trait in Bolger, except for the fact that he was so easy-going compared to Ginger that he didn't seem to be that bad. Bolger wasn't actually born in Wales, but he was in the womb when his mother boarded the ship to go to America. Bolger had one main problem. He was extremely susceptible to foundering. Foundering is a situation where the hoof becomes inflamed, making it hard for a horse to walk. Although foundering looks like a foot disease, it is actually a gastro-intestinal problem affecting the feet, that comes from eating too much rich grass. To prevent foundering, Welsh ponies have to be kept off rich grass, which is very hard to do in Oregon in the winter, when the grass is very green. We could never quite get it right, and Bolger eventually died. Simply put, we were not competent to be raising purebreds. I always felt bad about Bolger.

Thumbelina was a lady of extraordinary nobility and bearing. If I had to rate the animals on character, I think she would get the trophy. Mind you, this is coming from someone who never really cared for cats. I have always felt that cats were pretty stuck-up compared to dogs. But again, I am applying moral descriptions to amoral behavior. Animals are not moral. If Thumbelina were human, I don't think she would be viewed highly, because she had lots of kittens lots of times, and judging by the looks of them, she was none too particular. I guess the reason I rate her so highly, is because she was such an excellent mouser. And she was a barn cat, not a house cat. She didn't just sit around and get fat. She was a worker. And when she didn't have mice to chase, she would practice. I would see her working out in the barn as if she had a mouse in her paws. She was very good. Because of her, we never had a problem with mice. We did have opossums, though, and they were bigger than Thumbelina. I couldn't expect her to take care of them. But I had a way of dealing with them. I used to sleep on the hide-a-bed by the patio window in the family room. In the middle of the night I would hear the cat food dish rattling. I would turn on the porch light and see a big, fat opossum eating the cat food. The opossum didn't seem to mind at all when I turned on the light, but when I ever so carefully slid the patio door open so that I could shoot it with John's .22, the opossum would amble off under the bush that adjoined the patio. This aggravated me to no end, but try as I would, I could never manage to open the patio door without alerting the opossum. I finally thought of a way to deal with the problem. I went to the bathroom on the end of the house, and opened the small bathroom window. The opossum didn't notice this, and kept on eating. This gave me time to draw a bead on him, and the opossum was history.

Shep was a German Shepherd, but a very unusual one. Shep was epileptic. Sudden loud noises, or trauma would cause her to have seizures. Because of this, she wasn't much of a dog fighter, and she was a very fearful animal as a pup. When she saw a stranger, she would put her tail between her legs and back up. It was embarrassing. But Shep had a mild, pleasant personality. Her closest friend on the farm was Thumbelina. I remember when Thumbelina brought her kittens up from the barn for the first time. We knew she had had kittens, of course, but we had no idea where she had put them. But one day, she came walking up toward the house, with her kittens following close behind. Shep saw them and became very excited and started wagging her tail. Thumbelina immediately arched her back to let Shep know that she should keep her distance. Shep backed off right away. It was a little tense, but they got acquainted pretty quickly. Shep was always kind to Thumbelina's kittens. Watching her play with them was interesting. She could have swallowed them with one bite, but she never hurt them. When she was laying in the sun on the back porch, the kittens used to climb up and sleep in the fur of her neck. I have often wondered how things might have been different if we had not allowed the guy at the kennel in Minnesota to pawn off a defective pup on us. We would have had a more normal dog, to be sure. But perhaps it would not have been a richer experience. Because of her disability, Shep had a depth of character not seen in more "normal" dogs. But do animals have character? Character is a moral quality, and animals are not moral beings. Yet they behave in ways that we often describe in moral terms. Because of this, they can teach us a lot about what constitutes moral understanding and conduct. Animals remind us that behaviors that may look moral, can actually have very different causes.

Foreigners (like me) are prone to attribute such problems as corruption or rude behavior in China to the fact that a whole nation of people has been told from their earliest days that there is no God. If people are told that there is no Almighty to whom they are ultimately accountable, are we not encouraging them to think they can do whatever they please as long as they don't get caught? What else will restrain them if they do not believe in an all powerful God to whom they must someday answer?

But are the neat orderly lines one is more likely to see in Japan an indication that the Japanese people have a more highly developed moral conscience? Try to tell someone in China that Japanese people live on a higher moral plane because they don't cut in line. My point is that there are other factors beside moral conscience that influence people to act in certain ways. China is an extraordinarily diverse culture. There are many different kinds of people in this country from a wide variety of backgrounds. A survey by China Daily shows quite clearly that most people in China do not believe that cutting in line is appropriate. Interesting to note that the percentage of people who think it is not appropriate is significantly larger than the percentage of people who actually refrain from doing it. My point is that the social acceptability of a given behaviour often has more impact on whether or not people engage in it than beliefs about the "rightness" or "wrongness" of that behaviour. This is perhaps because most people are more concerned about what their peers think than about what God thinks. Japan, being a very homogeneous culture, tends to develop social norms that are quite strict, and complied with by the average member of society for reasons more to do with peer pressure than conscience. China, being an extraordinarily diverse culture, both in terms of the kinds of people in society, and levels of socioeconomic status, tends to be less uniform. I don't want to take that point too far. China is a culture, after all, not just a bunch of people in the same place. There certainly are cultural norms in this country. But they tend not to follow quite the same level of uniformity that you would see in Japan or even in America.