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Confucianism and the Family
WALTER H. SLOTE 8 GEORGE A. DEVOS, 1998 Albany, State University of New York Press xiv + 390 pp.
Confucianism and the Family is a very useful addition to the fast-growing field of family studies. While the essays are mostly anthropological or historical in orientation, philosophers will not fail to find much that is of interest. With few exceptions, the essays are highly critical of the traditional Confucian family structure and the intellectual tradition from which it emerged, namely Confucianism. In what follows, instead of reviewing the essays one by one, I shall treat the whole as a critique of Confucianism and the Confucian family and shall say something in response to it.
The picture of the traditional Confucian family painted by the majority of the authors in this collection is not an appealing one, not just to the modern mind that subscribes to equality and personal liberty, but to most of the participants themselves. Numerous social and psychological problems are sheeted home to the attempt by contemporary Asian families to maintain the Confucian family structure. The victims are said to be not just the children and the wives, but the fathers and the husbands as well. The indictment is so severe that one wonders how the Confucian family has survived for so long and why East Asia does not follow Communist China in denouncing it, along with Confucianism, for its terrible effects on the family, among other things. Indeed, one wonders why, despite the efforts of the Communist regime, traces of the Confucian family structure can still be found in many parts of China itself.
For one author, the traditional Confucian family format reinforces the `hierarchical social structure' designed to entrench the authority of those in power, that of the husband and the father in the family context (p. 39). The claim that the `father was the ultimate disciplinarian' is supported with the example of `an elderly father ordering his fifty-year-old son to lie on the floor, arms outstretched, and beating him with a switch' (p. 41). In applying disciplinary actions, the Confucian father is `forced [to withhold] affection' (ibid.) and suffers the resulting emotional consequences. The same author observes that the `men were frequently abusive and demeaning toward their...