He said, “Whatever.”
Hamm, the man with easy charm who looks so good in a suit, was never Mr. Perfect. I seriously doubt he’s a monster either. He’s a former frat boy who seems to have done some dark deeds. And if he never deserved a pedestal, he doesn’t deserve to be judged by who he was at his worst either.
Testimony showed the colleague was later found to have harassed another female employee. The tattered condition of the Confucians’ footwear reflected the limitations of Confucius’s enthusiasm for free enterprise. The great sage may have preferred a small, efficient state, but that doesn’t mean he was in favor of unfettered private commerce. Confucius had an inherent distrust of the pursuit of wealth, and this attitude became infused into later Confucians and their views of business and businessmen. Although Confucius did not preach asceticism (like his Hindu counterparts in India), he did see nobility in poverty, or at least the stoic acceptance of poverty. The true gentleman, in Confucius’s eyes, did not desire riches. “The gentleman seeks neither a full belly nor a comfortable home,” he said. Even those men who sincerely tried to act in a benevolent fashion could not be trusted if they also coveted luxury. “There is no point in seeking the views of a gentleman who, though he sets his heart on the Way, is ashamed of poor food and poor clothes,” the sage said.
That suspicion stemmed from his belief that the profit motive ran counter to morality. By seeking riches, man was drawn away from virtue. “The gentleman understands what is moral,” Confucius said. “The small man understands what is profitable.” This isn’t to say that Confucius was against financial success entirely. He implied that amassing great wealth is fine—as long as one attains it while engaged in strictly virtuous behavior. “Wealth and high station are what men desire but unless I got them in the right way I would not remain in them,” he said. “Poverty and low station are what men dislike, but even if I did not get them in the right way, I would not try to escape from them.” In Confucian thought, wealth would come to those who were virtuous and wise. A good king could bring prosperity to himself and his entire kingdom if he followed the Way. “Virtue is the root; wealth is the result,” The Great Learning asserts. In economics as well as politics, Confucius believed that moral power was stronger than physical force.
For the most part, though, Confucians thought that China’s elite did not earn their riches honorably. The Confucians tended to disapprove of commerce in general, seeing finance and trading, which they considered “secondary” economic activities, as inherently corrupting and ultimately dangerous for a country’s overall well-being. Rather than actually adding to production, merchants, they believed, merely bought and sold what others made through sweat and toil, skimming off unwarranted profits in the process. Confucians preferred economic policies that favored the farmers, whom they portrayed as honest laborers engaged in the “primary” activity of producing real goods. “When the secondary is practiced, the people grow decadent, but when the primary is practiced they are simple and sincere,” the Confucians told the state’s officials in their 81 bc debate. “When the people are sincere then there will be sufficient wealth and goods, but when they become extravagant then famine and cold will follow.”
The Confucian bias against commerce became enshrined in the concept of the “four occupations.” Merchants, parasitic and profit-crazed, rested on the bottom of the hierarchy, below scholar-officials, who were at the top; farmers, those paragons of honest labor, took the second rung; and artisans, the third group, supported themselves with their own skills. Those who sought wealth were seen as enemies of the greater good; by the Confucians’ reckoning, the super-rich won their fortunes on the backs of the common folk. That led to a belief among Confucians that the state had a responsibility to promote economic equality and to regulate free enterprise to prevent abuses.
In his critical memorial to Emperor Wu, Dong Zhongshu blamed the economic ills of the day on the concentration of wealth in the hands of a powerful and greedy few. “The rich bought up great connecting tracts of ground, and the poor were left without enough land to stick the point of an awl into,” he complained. “How could the common people escape oppression?” That’s why he, and many other Confucians after him, pressed for measures to improve income equality. Dong preferred a landownership system that equalized the size of plots across the populace, in that way ensuring that each farming family could sustain itself and would not be exploited by large landlords. He did not get heard on this point, and Confucians reiterated this recommendation for centuries to come.
The Confucians may not have won every argument, but they still held great sway over Chinese economic policy. For centuries, the civil servants who managed the economy had been indoctrinated with the sage’s ideas through the examination system, and inevitably, these ideas filtered into government decision making. The result was what Columbia University professor Madeleine Zelin calls “a Confucian political economy.” Despite their inability to break Emperor Wu’s monopolies, the Confucian preference for a free economy generally prevailed throughout most of China’s history. In the imperial age, China was a predominantly private market economy. Land was bought and sold freely, and traders and artisans usually were allowed to go about their business. Confucius’s hand was felt most heavily in the government’s tax and expenditure practices. The bureaucracy, for the most part, shied away from imposing heavy duties on the people. That created its own problems—a perpetually underfunded yet expansive state—but the Confucian principle remained preeminent.
I came to writing about money by accident. After graduating from Trinity College, I went into a PhD program at the University of Chicago to study with the greatest Irish historian of his generation. With his training and mentorship, I thought I was going to become a famous historian, though I would focus on transatlantic immigration. Looking back, I cringe. I knew nothing about fame, the academic job market, or the role of historians in America today. A few weeks into the program, I wised up and realized my aspiration would, at best, land me at a small college somewhere I wouldn’t want to live after spending my twenties in one library or another. I knew then that I didn’t have the love for my subject to pursue it regardless of the outcome. If someone had told me I could return to my alma mater and be a professor there, I would have kept at it. But that would never have happened. By the latter half of the 1990s, historians of the Irish diaspora were not in great demand. So after getting my master’s degree, I moved to New York, where most of my friends from college lived.