The old world is dying. Can a new one be born?

A Dialogue Across Civilisations: The Polis and the People
Author: Tan Wah-Piow
Publisher: Gerakbudaya

Book review by Lim Mah Hui

When Wah-Piow first asked me to be a panellist at his book launch in Penang, I hesitated – I wasn’t sure I was up to the task.

He assured me it was a slim volume of about 20,000 words that I could breeze through in a day. Right and wrong.

Right, you can peruse the book in a few hours.

But wrong – you need to read, reread, contemplate and try to imagine, as the author does, in order to digest it. Even then, I am not sure I have understood everything he says.

It is written in the form of a play – a set of imagined dialogues and debates between three sets of thinkers: Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato and Aristotle), Chinese thinkers (Confucius, Hu Shih, Lu Hsun) and more modern-day activists and revolutionaries (Marx, Gramsci, Mao, Zhen).

The dialogues centre on eternal questions of justice, law, virtue, power, democracy, autocracy, rituals, and individual rights versus collective rights and responsibilities.

We are living in turbulent times, witnessing – fortunately or unfortunately – the decline of an old order and the birth pangs of a new one.

The words of Antonio Gramsci, written about 90 years ago during the interwar period, ring true today. “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

What are these old and new orders?

The curtain of Western civilisation and power – associated with violent colonial wars and rule, which held sway globally for over three centuries (some call it an aberration in the broad sweep of world history) – is drawing to a close.

US hegemony and unilateralism since the end of World War Two has also begun cracking under the weight of its overreach – some 800 military bases worldwide, by one widely cited estimate – and its own contradictions.

Some call this a Thucydides moment, named after the Greek historian who observed the violent wars between a hegemonic Sparta challenged by a rising Athens.

Such periods in history are often marked by conflict, as between Britain and its allies against Germany and its partners in the World War One.

The tensions today

The hostilities today between the US and the West on one side, and China and the Global South on the other – though the membership is not so neatly aligned – amount to more than a clash of political and economic power.

While I do not subscribe to Huntington’s thesis of an intrinsic and inevitable clash of civilisations, today’s conflicts include significant differences in values and worldview.

The way Western powers have stood solidly behind Israel’s actions against Palestinians, the hypocritical and blatantly unequal application of the “rule of law” as between Western and non-Western nations, and the hysteria over the rise of China, a non-Western power – all of these reveal a strong underlying current of racism.

Against this backdrop, Wah-Piow’s book, which promotes dialogue across civilisations, is timely and a welcome antidote to the clash-of-civilisations narrative.

The book begins with a trenchant conversation between Socrates, Aristotle and Plato examining the decay of democracy and the rise of plutocracy, offering a sharp explanation for the rise of right-wing populism in America.

Can democracy function when the people are unequal beyond remedy? When politics is no longer the rule of reason but the rule of wealth? When freedom is pursued without restraint? And when people hunger not for wisdom but for belonging?

Under such conditions, those excluded from the fruits of the common good will listen to demagogues and charlatans who promise to restore what they have lost. Populism feeds on that hunger.

Here, the tyranny of the market, the tyranny of elites and the tyranny of the masses are all on full display.

We are fed the narrative that the world is locked in an existential fight between democracy and autocracy – between the rule of law and the law of the jungle – where Western civilisation represents the former and the Global Majority the latter. We are told that history moves in one direction, and that all societies progress towards becoming Western-style liberal democracies.

Yet China, with a 4,000-year history, does not seem to conform to this model. Hence it is denigrated as autocratic.

In Chinese philosophy, order is maintained by a single ruler, based on hierarchical relationships between ruler and ruled, harmony, virtue (ren) and rites (li).

A virtuous and benevolent ruler retains his mandate. But when a ruler loses virtue, forsakes his subjects and hunger stalks the land, peasants revolt and heaven withdraws its mandate. That is the cycle of change and renewal.

China’s achievements and limits

In recent decades, China has eradicated absolute poverty. Its adult literacy rate stands at around 97%. Women enjoy economic independence. Street homelessness is negligible. Crime rates are low, with cities generally safe. Entrepreneurial spirit, private enterprise and competition are encouraged.

But market excesses are controlled, the power of capital is curbed and the state retains ultimate control over the economy. Individual liberties are, no doubt, restricted and subordinated to collective interests.

I am not suggesting China is a model to copy. Far from it – partly because China’s conditions cannot be replicated elsewhere.

China has a vision but not a blueprint. It experiments as it develops, feeling its way across the stream stone by stone. It neither claims nor urges other nations to follow its path.

While there is no need to reinvent the wheel, each society should critically study, adopt and adapt what best suits its local conditions.

Wah-Piow’s book challenges us to interrogate the concepts of democracy and autocracy more deeply.

Is democracy only about individual liberties – the right to vote, to free speech – without the right to basic necessities such as food, shelter, education and healthcare? Is it possible to speak of democracy and justice when a handful of oligarchs own more wealth than half of society?

The Swiss-Italian geopolitical and financial analyst Angelo Giuliano has observed pointedly:

In America, the oligarchs do not fight the president – they fund him.

They do not hide. They sit in the front row. They donate, they lobby, they dine in the White House. Then they return to their corporations and write policy like their own personal diary.

The revolving door never stops spinning. Regulators become executives. Generals become board members. Senators become lobbyists. It is not corruption – it is the system. It is not a scandal – it is the design.

It is called democracy.

In China, business exists to serve the nation, not capture it. Wealth is permitted. Empire is not.

A Chinese businessman does not sit beside the president at dinner and whisper policy into his ear. He does not fund political campaigns. There are no campaigns to fund. He does not own television networks to shape public opinion. He does not place his sons in ministries and his daughters on central bank boards.

Money and power breathe the same air, but they do not sleep in the same bed. The Party watches. The law watches. The people watch.

It is called authoritarianism.

In the last scene of the book, Mao presses Aristotle: “You call our system an autocracy because the Communist Party leads. But tell me – didn’t your friend Socrates say that the captain of a ship should not be chosen by the shouting of the crowd? That command should be entrusted to those who actually know how to steer? Well, in China, the Party is the captain. The people judge us by whether we bring them safely to shore, not by how we perform in a five-yearly popularity contest.”

In ancient Greece, democracy was meant for male citizens only – women and enslaved people were excluded, and democracy was built on the exploitation of enslaved labour. In the colonial West, democracy was also limited to colonisers, its economy built on the exploitation of colonies.

In Scene 5, the conversation between Marx and Confucius revolves around idealism versus materialism. Are ideas shaped by economic structure – different soil, different fruits – or the reverse? Is the good life shaped by moral virtue or just institutions?

It ends with Confucius saying: “Perhaps we seek the same end – harmony through justice. But we differ in method. You begin with structure; I begin with the heart.”

How do you keep a ruler virtuous when power is concentrated in his hands? Can virtue and reason coexist with power? Can law and institutions curb power?

What happens when the law itself is unjust and oppressive? Do we obey such laws? Must change necessarily be violent, entailing untold human suffering? Do we choose revolution or reform?

These are the questions Wah-Piow bids us to ponder.

I invite you to buy the book, sit back, relax and enjoy the dialogue between great thinkers of West and East. It provides plenty of food for thought.

Dr Lim Mah Hui, an economist and retired international banker, is a Penang-based activist.

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