A peculiar ceremony involving thousands of young people and their parents recently took place in Taipei in the presence of the city mayor: Young people, in a symbolic gesture, washed the feet of their parents. This public ritual — the fifth in five years — is aimed at reinforcing a person’s commitment to one of the core values of traditional Chinese culture: filial piety, that is, children respecting their parents.
It is worth noting that the term “children” here refers to sons and daughters of any age. Thus, filial piety refers to a child’s life-long commitment to their parents, including adult “children.”
Organizers of such events claim that filial devotion, or treating parents with love and respect, leads not only to a more harmonious society, but also contributes to the formation of individuals with a stronger sense of morality.
They regard filial piety as a moral imperative, obliging the young as it favors the old. It is a demand requiring adherence in the name of tradition.
However, the whole concept of filial piety is highly problematic.
One might first wonder how “love and respect” can be demanded. Can you sensibly demand that your children love you? Either they do or they do not, depending on how their parents treat them. Love, just like respect, must be earned and they require freedom to be authentically granted or denied.
Evidently, certain behaviors do not deserve respect or love. Commanding them, therefore, is a perversion of the meaning of those terms.
However, a closer look reveals what “love and respect” really mean in this context: obedience. This can be commanded, but it also reveals that a society that insists on those demands regulating its intergenerational discourse is not well.
Those demands are symptoms of a disease, not the cure.
One might also wonder why social virtues stemming from times when one’s world ended at village borders and when anyone you met during your lifetime was either friend or foe, is still attractive to so many people.
One might further wonder about the naivete of the organizers’ claim with regard to a harmonious society: If all children love their parents, they say, then there would be fewer social conflicts. This is not a great insight. It is like saying that if all follow the same social rules, then there would be more social harmony. Yes, of course it would be so, in “brave new” Taiwan. However, the problem is that people tick in different ways.
Eventually, one might also wonder why what is apparently common sense and usual practice — children loving their parents — requires such grand symbolic gestures. All this noise obviously indicates, too, that something is wrong with this commanding value, despite its propagation for more than 2,000 years.
However, maybe something is wrong because of its longevity: what has worked yesterday, does not necessarily work today. Life is changing and with, the paradigms of “good” behavior.
The most misguiding claim those traditionalists make is that filial piety promotes moral behavior. The opposite is the case. Like harmony, it is a deeply immoral concept in today’s world.
A modern moral concept is based on freedom and equality of individuals: Each individual should respect a person’s choice to live a life according to one’s own ideas, with the sole reservation that one’s choice must not restrict another person’s freedom to choose.
Respect here, though, has just a formal meaning: It covers the right of a person to choose, but not necessarily an appreciation of the chosen. We might disagree with one’s choice, but we have no right to deny a person’s freedom to choose.
The concept of individual freedom is the main moral ingredient also of modern human rights as encoded in its various instruments.
All cultures should guarantee this freedom, or at least strive to strengthen individual capabilities to exercise it, according to Indian philosopher Amartya Sen.
Respecting this freedom must be mutual: My freedom is as important as is yours. We have no moral right to impose our ways on others. Your freedom is the limit of my freedom, and vice versa. There is no better formula of respecting human dignity.
The idea of filial piety does not share this respect because it does not respect freedom. It is biased in favor of a certain group — the parents — for no convincing reasons. It confuses respect with appreciation. It is unfair, and by culturally cementing this unfairness it becomes immoral.
The profiteers of such an ill-conceived morality are usually the representatives of tradition: the elderly, the conservative, the closed-minded, the authoritarians, the harmonizers, the intolerant — filial piety privileges them, no matter whether they are right or wrong. They are given lifelong permission to impose their personal, often egotistical interests on the young in the name of culture.
Filial piety is an utterly selfish concept. It demands love and respect toward those who propagate the concept; it is the opposite of moral behavior.
It also disrespects those who happen to disagree with certain ways of life and their values. It is parochial and intolerant.
Contrarily, a moral education is interested in one’s children growing up and then growing out of their family as soon as possible, turning them from dependents into partners with their own genuine life designs. This enables the exercise of freedom necessary to establishing family ties on the basis of love and respect.
Young people confined by filial piety are not granted the freedom to live their own lives. They are told to live the lives of their parents — as if all parents in Taiwan were angel-like beings, flawless and cosmopolitan, considerate and all-knowing, pure and innocent.
I have been told dozens of stories of parents, especially fathers, misusing their children in the name of filial piety in the most selfish way. Labeling it as “the foundation of all virtues” [Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲)] is victimizing those people for a second time, this time morally devaluing critical voices against the injustices they had to endure. We can do better.
It is somehow stunning to see that some young people are still cooperating in the propagation of values which are genuinely directed against their own interests.
Maybe it is because those foot-washing ceremonies have been regularly preceded by other washing ceremonies.
However, this time, the young are the recipients of that service and their brains are being washed.
Herbert Hanreich is an assistant professor at I-Shou University in Kaohsiung.
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