Tai Ji Men’s spiritual teachings may prove more effective than UN statements in securing peace. Provided one condition is observed.
by Marco Respinti*
*Conclusions of the webinar “Tai Ji Men: Affirming the Core Value of Tolerance,” co-organized by CESNUR and Human Rights Without Frontiers on November 16, 2023, International Day for Tolerance.
An article already published in Bitter Winter on November 22nd, 2023.
Today, the United Nations asks us to revere the value of tolerance. As it is our custom, we do it by reflecting on what tolerance means in the “Tai Ji Men case.” Let me then begin by considering how vast and grand is the goal that inspired the creation of the United Nations in 1945: securing lasting peace among the nations, by smoothing conflicts and making mutual understanding easier. It enshrines the ideal unification of all humankind and immediately calls Tai Ji Men in, since universal peace through mutual understanding is the high ideal of the movement led by Dr. Hong Tao-Tze. He also promotes this ideal though his Federation of World Peace and Love (FOWPAL). It is then safe to say that the UN and Tai Ji Men ultimately share the same objective.
Of course, the proximate cause that brought the UN project forth was the unprecedented catastrophe of two world wars. Human beings had already known devastating conflicts, but nothing comparable in terms of devastation and human toll. Yet, the foundation of the UN had also a remote cause. It lied in the cultural milieu of the philosophical progeny of the Enlightenment. It had a recognizable intellectual antecedent in the reflections penned by German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in his 1795 book “Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf,” known in English as “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” which was aptly discussed in a previous webinar of these series on the “Tai Ji Men case.”
Kant’s proposal may be similarly read as a reaction to another cataclysm: the French Revolution (1789–1799), whose human, social, and cultural costs can be hardly underestimated. They continue to be analyzed by historians and experts, from René Sédillot (1906–1999)’s 1986 book “Le coût de la Révolution française,” or “The Cost of the French Revolution,” to the studies authored by Jean Dumont (1923–2001), to the 2008 “Le Livre noir de la Révolution française,” or “The Black Book of French Revolution,” a collection of essays by some of the best scholars of the subject.
But when Kant published his book on perpetual peace, the French Revolution was just half-way. Several incidents of lasting consequences were yet to happen. Chiefly among them were the attempt to export the Revolution outside France by military means, the establishment of new universal legal criteria, an agreement between the Catholic Church and France that had long-lasting cultural consequences, and the birth of the modern state (more precisely, the end of its long period of gestation.) All this transformed the 1789 Revolution in France into a European and soon international event, with enduring and long-term effects.
One may guess that Kant had already enough of the “disgusting spectacle of revolutionary France,” to borrow a definition from an article of denunciation to his countrymen that Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804), one of the United States Founding Fathers, published in the New York magazine “The Stand” on April 7, 1798. In fact, the Terror was just over. Sometimes we fail to appreciate the horrific profundity of this term, “Terror,” whose political use was precisely inaugurated by the French Revolution. It is the idea of controlling the lives of people by instilling in them a daily measure of fear and a constant terror of terror itself—literally, a hellish condition.
Now, the UN was founded because the cup of human sufferance was full to the brim. Allow me again to draw a parallel with Tai Ji Men. Deriving its spiritual tone from ancient teachings rooted in Chinese culture, the compassionate attitude of Tai Ji Men toward human beings and all living entities is one that suffers when it sees people suffer. It acts for their relief both spiritually and, when possible, materially, as it is testified by the numerous volunteer activities of Tai Ji Men dizi in situation of crises, including earthquakes and other natural disasters.
The source of the noble intent of both the UN and Tai Ji Men can be summarized in a word that surely belongs to Kant and the Kantian vocabulary and has a distinguished history in modern Western philosophical tradition: tolerance.
Tolerance is difficult to define. It is easier to say what it is not: it is not the world of conflicts, unrest, violence, discrimination, and death that humankind often lives in. It is a paradox that Kant, a critic of the French Revolution, was at the same time one of the chief exponents of the Enlightenment philosophy from which the Revolution and its violent Jacobin wing claimed they drew inspiration. This paradox sparkled and continues to nourish the debate on how much the Enlightenment philosophy truly influenced the French Revolution.
I leave the topic to other reflections. For the sake of today’s argument, I just note that, to caution that kind intentions are not enough, it is not necessary to go to the unpolite extreme of saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. My point is that, as the UN’s goals are noble, their implementation has often been and remains poor.
The UN has been and is weak in moments and places when strength was and is needed. Several of its resolutions remain just on paper. Signs of serious ideological bias multiply. Its upheld notion of human rights is so undefined to let tyrants free to roam. Its upheld notion of human dignity is so vague to allow nasty abuses. It ignores many people, at the extent that a counterpoint organization, the Unrepresented Nations & Peoples Organization (UNPO), was conceived in the late 1980s by exiled leaders of people living under communist oppression to be formally established in Brussels, Belgium, in 1991. Totalitarian regimes are condoned by the UN, even permitted to paralyze its security council through their veto powers. In one word, the main institution in the world promoting tolerance often tolerates evil.
I had the opportunity in previous Tai Ji Men events to address the philosophical and semantical flaws of the word “tolerance,” defining it as “the fashionable sentiment of admitting to society those that we loathe.” But I want to be clear. Intentions and possible shortcomings in realization must always be considered separately. We owe this fundamental charity to human heart. This does not automatically mean that all intentions are good, but it leads us all to cultivate a far nobler concept than mere toleration: respect.
On this UN day of observance dedicated to tolerance, we conclude with more questions than answers. Taiwan is not part of the UN, and this is more a problem than a solution. However, it is not a good reason for the UN to say that what happens in Taiwan is not its business. It would be tantamount to affirm that toleration only works intermittently. It is here that the parallel citizens’ diplomacy of Tai Ji Men has something precious to say. Perhaps Tai Ji Men’s global effort to build true respect among people, rooted in the feeling of suffering when we see people suffer, may prove better in securing peace than the UN’s current concept of tolerance, which was remotely inspired and more recently born out of the disgusting spectacle of human horrors.
This may be true, and Tai Ji Men’s efforts may succeed, under one condition. The Taiwanese government must immediately adopt a political solution for the Tai Ji Men case, after all levels of Taiwanese justice repeatedly ruled that Tai Ji Men is not guilty of any crime. This would be real respect—and also genuine tolerance, if you want to say so.