The Human Calling: Three Thousand Years of Eastern and Western Philosophical History

Preface

As someone who grew up in an atheistic society, I had a long, winding and difficult road to faith.

I was born in the spring of 1956 in a poor mountain village in the southwest of China. It was a small village in the middle of the mountains, 30 kilometers from the county, 300 kilometers from the provincial capital, and 3,000 kilometers from Beijing.

When I was three years old, I lived through the infamous Great Leap Forward launched by Mao Zedong, and my mother and I were forced to go up to the mountains as part of the country’s drive to make industrial amounts of steel, as part of an effort for China to catch up with Britain and surpass the United States. Trees were cut down and food rotted because no one harvested it, thus ushering in the Great Famine and the era of People’s Commune Canteens. Therefore, the first and deepest memories of my childhood are of the long hours of daylight during which I suffered from hunger, the horrible rotting corpses of outsiders who died of starvation beyond the village limits whose remains went uncollected, and the big tree stumps the trees left all over the mountains after being cut down.

The people who survived the famine were still half-starved, and it became very common to eat wild vegetation and leaves. In 1962, I started attending a rural elementary school, and my life gradually improved as Chairman Mao Zedong faded from political prominence and Chairman Liu Shaoqi started to run a more pragmatic and sensible regime.

However, in the fall of 1966, when I was in the fifth grade, the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong suddenly broke out. I watched curiously as gang after gang of high school students from Beijing and Shanghai started wearing green uniforms and red five-pointed star hats, singing patriotic red songs and shouting slogans, running amok, painting slogans and pasting big-character posters denouncing and persecuting people all over the streets.

The phenomenon of denouncing and struggling against authority figures confused and horrified me. This included everyone from the State Chairman Liu Shaoqi, to the local cadres, to the grassroots leaders, and I knew that these elders, who were being beaten, were good people. Next, they were paraded through the streets and humiliated, and schools were completely suspended for the sake of Revolution.

For the next three years, I witnessed mass struggle sessions in front of hundreds of people with thorns, sticks, and gun barrels being used as weapons to beat the so-called class enemies to a bloody pulp, and saw the horror and bloodshed of people being killed and then beheaded and gutted. As a teenager, fear and doubt were the most apt descriptors for my mindset at the time. So I fell in love with reading, because the world in books was orderly and beautiful and gave me an escape from the violence and chaos of reality.

In 1969, I returned to middle school, where the junior and senior high school years were shortened from six to four years by the Revolution, and I avoided the Revolution by studying day and night with great hunger and thirst for knowledge.

Although my grades were the best in the school, when I graduated from high school in 1973 I was required to go back to my hometown to participate in revolutionary activities. The universities was partially closed and only those earnest revolutionaries who handed in blank papers during the exams were allowed to study a syllabus consisting of Mao’s theory of continuing revolution. So, denied the chance to attend university, I returned to my hometown and worked as a youth production leader and village teacher.

In September 1976, after Mao’s death and Deng Xiaoping’s ascendancy, I heard that the college entrance examinations would resume in November 1977. I took the examinations in December, enabling me to enter university. In an academic career that ranged from an undergraduate to a Master’s degree, from philosophy to economics, and from Yunnan to Shanghai, I spent seven years of my life finally slaking the thirst for knowledge that had made me addicted to acquiring knowledge.

In 1984, I was selected by Research Center for Rural Development (RCRD), the most famous rural reform think tank in China at that time, because of an article I had published. As a result, I would get to participate in China’s rural reform research and draft reform documents and become a disciple of Mr. Du Runsheng, the father of China’s rural reform, which was no small feat. I believed that China could follow the model of both economic and political reform that successful modernizing countries in East Asia had taken, so as to complete the transformation of China into a modern state.

The Tiananmen Square incident in 1989 crushed my dreams of systemic reform. Deng Xiaoping refused to reform the political system, refused to reconcile with the peaceful protestors, and set the precedent of using the military to suppress the peaceful protest movement of unarmed students. I was disciplined for sympathizing with the students. Disappointed, I quit the government and went into business as a private entrepreneur. So I tried to find a way to save my country and myself through industry.

In 1999, when my businesses were first starting to bear fruit, China successfully negotiated its accession to the WTO. Under the condition that stateowned enterprises would be drastically reduced in number to achieve a full market economy, China was allowed to become a member of the WTO, and calls for the reform of non-profit social organizations, for international integration, and even political reform, resurfaced. At that time, my hope for reforming China into a modern country, which had nearly sputtered out, was revived.

I accepted an invitation from the State Council’s Poverty Alleviation Office to become the CEO of the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation, a government-organized NGO or GONGO, but I insisted on keeping to the status of a volunteer only and worked to reform it into a fully independent civil society organization. The subsequent seventeen years of perseverance in this field convinced me that the awakening of civic consciousness through economic marketization and social marketization reforms might pave the way for future political reforms in China to allow a free market in politics as well and enable China to follow the path taken by other modernizing East Asian countries.

Under my leadership, the CFPA became the most influential NGO in China, increasing annual fundraising revenue by 40 times, and founded CFPA Microfinance (CD Finance), which has also grown into the most influential social enterprise in China by providing loans and training services to 500,000 rural women. I was also involved in promoting a network to increase transparency in the philanthropic sector as the second chairman of the Foundation Center Network for the Philanthropic Sector. As a result, I received the Global Philanthropy Alliance’s Alga Award in 2014, which is given to only one recipient each year.

However, the Chinese government has not fulfilled the commitments it made when it ascended to the WTO. This can be seen in the post-2009 growth of state-owned enterprises instead of their decline, and their monstrous ballooning after 2012, so that today, state-owned enterprises dominate almost every sector. As a result, the fields in which the international community may invest on a level playing field have shrunk significantly. Criticism that intellectual property and technological knowhow has been exchanged for access to the Chinese market in epidemic proportions has also been leveled as a result.

Internally, state owned enterprises and their relentless rent-seeking behavior have revealed unprecedented corruption. The collusion going on between capital controlled by top Chinese political families and the capital from Wall Street has expanded grotesquely, creating billionaires at a dizzying pace and scale throughout Wall Street on a level of an enormous scam.

Narrow-minded nationalism and arrogant globalism emerged simultaneously and out of the blue, making everyone both arrogant and manic in their greed. All sorts of unprecedented business and capital scams continue to bamboozle the people, and social, moral, and ethical standards are in serious decline.

However, instead of encouraging market competition and the development of social organizations to restrain the social disorder caused by this abnormal expansion of public power, the government continued down the path of expanding its power and squashing freedom of speech for both individuals and social organizations. As a result, the state and the legal system have become tools for seeking profits, and the outlook for socially-conscious enterprises and ethical social governance has deteriorated dramatically. As a result, people are losing their sense of security and dignity.

Once again, I was disillusioned in my pursuit of my ideals in life, in the ideas of social reform and political change. I was also subjected to many personal injustices. I had a feeling that a storm was coming. Unwilling to fight and waste my life where I could do no more good, I quickly spent two years selling all my private companies, resigning from my position as Executive Chairman of the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation, and retiring to Maryland at the end of 2015 in order to dedicate my time to pondering the meaning of life and to answer the millennia-old questions that have always plagued me.

Since then, I have spent almost four wonderful years in my cozy study in the woods of Bethesda, Maryland, where reading, thinking, and writing are the chief activities during the day, an ideal arrangement for me at this stage of my life.

Meanwhile, although the world has been caught up in the utopian ideal of diverse and inclusive globalization, although new technologies are changing how humans live every day, most people are just blindly worshipping human abilities and achievements. However, their pride and worship of human beings is no different from the worship of fire by primitive people. In the face of atomized individualism, every person living today faces the threats of being turned into a passive being, of being turned into a cog in a machine, or of being reduced to the bestial, every day. At the same time, endless desires, pressure, violence, and insecurity loom like dark clouds in the sky. Where should one go? What kind of life is really worth living? Is there any other option for human life aside from the modern grind of forced busyness, manipulation by online advertisements, and hatred and violence generated and directed by those who form public opinion? Can we find a way to make human life return to its former graceful and dignified pace, make it encourage inquiring, independent thinking, peaceful communication, mutual respect and philosophical exchange, and connection to the divine source of the human calling? These are the questions that I set out to answer.

In asking and answering these questions, I pondered the differences between the philosophies of the First Axial Age in the East and the West. Why did monotheism and the belief in a personal God appear in Jewish history? Why was Christ born and sacrificed on the cross 2000 years ago, and why was a systematic Christian faith defended by two major integrations with the revered philosophical thinking of ancient Greece? Why did charitable and philanthropic organizations develop in Christian civilizations? What was the significance of philosophy found in Christian scripture, the Renaissance and the Reformation for the development of modernity? What are the connections and conflicts between science and Christianity? How did the civilization we call modern emerge, and what are the roots of the world’s current problems? Why did China, like Japan, go through a historical break in its transition to a modern state, in which the government and people were both prideful and arrogant, thus making them enemies of universal modern civilization? I have read a lot of historical documents on these questions, and I have sorted them out and analyzed them. Combined with my life practice and experience living in both the East and West for sixty years, I have tried to locate these arguments along the spatial and temporal axis of human history.

I discovered a deep thread of logic in the evolution of human civilization: that the thinking about the visible world as opposed to the invisible world split Eastern and Western philosophies into two completely different branches of thought from the very beginning and formed two completely different belief systems. No matter how much one tries to seek common ground in the course of subsequent history, one cannot eliminate these fundamental differences. Today’s scholars’ attempts to confuse and smooth out the superficial layers in the context of globalization and pluralism are not fulfilling the utopian conception of globalization that humanity expects and are creating an unprecedented crisis in our beliefs as the human race.

What is even more amazing is that in the process of reading, thinking, discerning, and writing, my own beliefs crossed the gulf of atheism from my mother culture, Confucianism and Taoism, and further crossed the gulf between polytheism and monotheism bridged by Buddha under the eternal light of Brahman. The divine light of the one and only personal God of our universe shone through the fog of the institutions, thoughts, and words created by finite man and pierced through my spirit.

This light exposed how foolish I had been trying to reason about the invisible world based on purely materialist Eastern worldviews, to the absurdity of my past search for the absolute truth of God in the relativity of Eastern sages’ philosophies. It also cut through the mire of muddled Eastern thinking about the material world which obscured and neglected the spiritual world. My new faith shattered my unreasonable expectation to find absolute truth in the Eastern sages who preached that morality was relative. It also cut off the path to the materialistic gods of the new, moneyed East.

I cried tears of joy and, with great passion as well as full rationality, embraced the true faith I had been searching for for decades. Although I have not yet performed the formal rituals of conversion, I have been completely converted in my soul and have helped a dozen people who were struggling between atheism and faith in God to clear the final doubts on their way to faith. Furthermore, all the injustice, resentment, aggression, hatred, and pride that had accumulated in my heart over the decades of my life disappeared in a flash and melted into the infinite and unchanging grace of God’s love and forgiveness.

I now fully realize that I am a sinner, and that Christ is the true Savior, and that there is no other savior than him. All man-made gods are finite things and cannot save us. If they call themselves saviors, they are hypocrites and chief deceivers. Without God, man would still have to resort to making his own gods, whilst bumbling about in the dark like blind men. When one is at a low point of life or when one is weak, one participates in placing others in the place of God, whereas when one is successful or powerful, one’s pride and forgetfulness leads one to set oneself up as a god. Such a life, deprived of the divine illumination of God regarding our human calling, without a logically consistent and firm direction, is always spent in either slavery or servitude. So how is it possible to have true equal rights alongside one’s fellow men, let alone find the path to equality and justice? How can one truly understand the spirit of love and forgiveness based on God’s divine justice?

This book is therefore an account of the long and difficult journey a Chinese atheist took to find God.

The book is divided into 13 chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 are about the human perspective. They show how the conflicting and intertwined histories of human ability and human calling defined the history of civilizations in both the East and West. Man in his societies achieved amazing things in terms of human ability through the two tools of writing and organization, enabling him to create community. However, the fragility and vulnerability of the individual means that the search for the human calling happened at the same time in the areas of human relationship and spirituality. Without this, the individual would be objectified and lose their unique meaning of life.

Chapters 3 and 4 compare the ancient Greek philosophy of the West and the pre-Qin philosophy of the East on the question of human calling and find that Western civilization began from the pursuit of the invisible truth and through inductive reasoning discovered that God represents the highest order of truth. This laid the foundation for the natural sciences, social sciences, and Christianity. Eastern civilization and philosophy, on the other hand, started by only recognizing visible matter only, emphasizing the public order of society and the role of the individual, which led to the triumph of top-down authoritarian legalism and systems.

Chapter 5 compares the history of suffering in Jewish history, which highlights the dichotomy between God and the universe and man, emphasizes God’s creation of man and his election of Israel to become an example of human calling, and establishes God’s covenantal law with man and man’s sacred covenant relationship to God.

Chapters 6, 7, and 8 trace the path taken by ancient Rome from a republic to an imperial power and how it made use of ancient Greek ideals and philosophy, which led to an alliance of more than fifty nation-states to introduce a political system with a representative body involved in creating law for that society, such that Roman law is still the basis for modern law today.

The prosperity of the Roman Empire paved the way for the Messianic coming of Jesus, the Son of God, and the divine revelation of the true human calling in human history through the birth, crucifixion, resurrection, the transformation of the disciples into apostles, and the birth of the new covenant of love and forgiveness between God and man. The first fusion of ancient Greek philosophy with the Gospel of Christ and the history of the spread of the Gospel, in turn, gave birth to charities and philanthropic organizations.

Chapter 9 takes us back to the Vedic philosophy of Eastern India, which contemplated dharma and the reincarnation of an impersonal god, Brahman, and the one triune god, to answer the various questions of human calling: Why did Buddha create his Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path? Why was Buddha expelled from his homeland when he was a compassionate and exemplary person? And, where is Buddha’s ultimate nirvana?

Chapter 10 returns to the Eastern Chinese Empire, where the Confucian and Legalist alliances, through political machinations and discourse, defeated the Taoists and gained a monopoly over the creation of man-made gods from the time of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty. After five hundred years of failure in creating gods that would be worshipped by that civilization, Buddhism saw a resurgence and became the ruling philosophy of the Tang Dynasty, answering questions of human calling during a golden age of China. After the chaos of the late Tang Dynasty and the Ten Kingdoms of the Five Dynasties, Confucianism made a comeback and spread through the civil service system of the Song Dynasty, leading to the joint creation of gods. From then on, Taoism was exiled, Buddhism was secularized, and Chinese and Eastern civilization was stereotyped as Confucian. Materialism ruled the day.

Chapters 11 and 12 discuss the second great axial age of mankind in the absence of the West-dominated East, the spread of the Christian faith, and the second integration of Greek philosophy and Christian apologetics. They touch on how natural theology and scholasticism led to the rise of universities and scientific associations, how the Renaissance and Reformation promoted a new era of reconciliation between human and divine reason, and how this led to the rise of the three major market systems which are the pinnacle of the reconciliation of human ability and human calling.

Chapter 13 reveals the great dilemma facing man in today’s world, where waves of secularization, the cult of technology, extreme liberalism, and the call for universal welfare are eroding and destroying the rights to equality that are human rights, based on the dignity of Man being God’s creation. Without these rights, the cornerstone of modern society’s equity and justice would be destroyed. Today, we face a third great axial age in which we consider questions of human calling, and it foreshadows our dilemma of whether to take a great leap of faith or doom ourselves to face the end of human civilization. Can America keep its place as the torch of modern civilization if it abandons its faith in God?

For those familiar with Christian civilization, you may begin with the chapters on Eastern philosophy and beliefs. Readers familiar with Eastern philosophy may begin with the chapter on the transformation of the Hebrew faith to the Christian faith through the Roman Empire. Readers who are pained by the present may also read the last three chapters that touch on the crisis facing human civilization today, and then return to the previous chapters to find correspondences and resonances in the comparative search between East and West. This book is not an empirical work but an attempt to compare the philosophical history of East and West in order to put together the bigger picture.

I am grateful to Pastor Qiu Lin, who has been working tirelessly in the Chinese countryside for sixteen years as part of the Bethel Series to train pastors, for his foreword to this book. Thank you to Ms. Judy Yi Zhou and her team for their hard work and dedication in translating this book from Chinese to English. Thank you to Mr. David Hancock and the team at Morgan James Publishing for their recognition and careful planning of this book. Thank you to my wife Angela He for her long term encouragement and patience as the first person to listen to this book word by word. Thank you to my beloved son, Stanley He, for his extensive work in coordinating publication, distribution, and marketing. It was your inspiration and concerted effort that made the English version of this book possible. I would like to take this opportunity to say that words alone cannot thank you enough for the help you’ve given me in the publication of this book. I love you all.

He Daofeng

Bethesda, Maryland, 4th July 2021

CHAPTER 1:

Human: traits, nature and public conflict

SECTION 1: THE VULNERABILITY OF BEING HUMAN

We know through empirical research and written records that humans are neither the first nor the only creatures to have ruled the earth. Before Man, the earth was populated by prehistoric beasts and pre-modern wildlife. And, before those, by bacteria and viruses. Compared to these much stronger animals and pervasive microorganisms, the physical vulnerabilities that come with being human might seem nearly insurmountable and, consequently, our current dominance statistically unlikely.

Human vulnerability extends beyond our lack of natural defenses, such as thick fur, sharp teeth, claws, a faster gait, and superior climbing ability: we also suffer from low birth rates, long pregnancies, and lengthy infant care requirements. In fact, it takes a single human nearly two decades to go from embryo to independent living. During this process, the probability of injury or even death is high: Life is truly risky for humans.

Of course, we do have certain unique advantages over other species. We walk upright and have large brains. Starting 80,000–100,000 years ago, East African Homo sapiens migrate to other parts of the world. As they multiply, they gradually replace Neanderthals. The brain size of an adult Homo sapiens begins to range from about 1,250–1,400 cubic centimeters, reaching as high as 2,000 cubic centimeters in some cases—equivalent to four to six times that of anthropoids, the primates with the largest brains. The human head, which accounts for less than 5 percent of body weight, consumes about 20 percent of a human’s energy. This advantage not only allows people to walk, run, and climb completely upright, but also to become the type of intelligent animal that takes action based on thinking and reflection, instead of solely relying on conditioned reflexes and instinct.¹ But this advantage is not necessarily enough for individual human beings to overcome their natural impediments in relation to other species.

What was it, then, that enabled us to thrive? Was it God? A God that is external to man, who created and orchestrated humanity and nature according to God’s reason and laws? This is the central question that humankind has pondered and debated throughout history. Based on their differing conclusions, people have built wildly diverse cultural communities, national governance, and belief systems.

This book examines these systems of belief and governance from all over the world as evidenced in our written histories. With this in mind, it seeks to illustrate how God intended us to live, and how we can best care for one another in this precarious world.

SECTION 2: THE DILEMMA OF FREE WILL

Because of our physical vulnerabilities, people choose to live in groups. Over time, this has led to many distinct methods of communal life. Of course, living in groups is not a characteristic unique to humans, but for us, our communal lifestyles have been both directly responsible for many of our problems and necessary for our attempts to resolve them. Such a lifestyle has certainly been a factor in humanity’s extraordinary collective evolution and creation of civilization.

Social life places individuals into interconnected relationships. From the beginning, this interconnectedness has been like two sides of a coin created by God: completely opposite, yet intrinsically interdependent. On one side, our connectedness makes us more formidable against outside threats, strengthens cooperation among individuals, and boosts an individual’s confidence and sense of belonging to the community. These connections enhance people’s ability to deal with external reality.

On the flip side of the coin, being in close relation to other people also carries increased individual risks. Though other people may be part of an individual’s community, they remain necessarily distinct from him or her. This phenomenon means that the individual cannot but experience other people as others and part of the outside world. While the outside world may treat an individual well, guaranteeing their safety and providing them with opportunities, it could also treat them poorly, even seizing what they own, love, or are. This risk of the other is therefore a shared experience among individuals in a group. Our sense of communal belonging juxtaposed alongside the shared distrust of the other illustrates the two aspects of individuals living in a community: on one side is beauty, on the other, darkness. So it has been from the beginning, and so it will always be. Our attempts to ponder and articulate these problems are one of the main things that separates humans from animals.

People tend to draw upon their spiritual nature in an attempt to resolve these dilemmas. Yet where does humanity’s spiritual nature come from? From God’s creation? From evolution? From outer space? Humans’ spiritual nature and unique behavioral pattern of thought, action, and reflection may be due to physiological factors such as ability to walk upright, brain size, and body chemistry that allow for our brains to consume a higher percentage of energy; or it could be that God created humanity and endowed them with a spiritual nature. This is a lengthy discussion that might not yield any meaningful results—it’s easier to simply choose one to believe in.

Temporarily setting aside the origins debate, we can recognize that people think before they act and reflect on their actions, which means they have the ability to learn and innovate. How do we explain our learning ability? Some learning is imitating, repeating, or reproducing. People can emulate the behaviors of others or those of different species and reproduce them. But we can go beyond that as well. Our ability to reflect helps us be more selective in what we learn next. Over time, we optimize our communal behavior patterns and achieve a sense of direction and progress.

How do we define innovative ability? To innovate is to discover, not imitate or emulate; it is to invent, not repeat or reproduce. An innovation is not just something new to an individual person, but it also must be new on a group scale, to people across different groups. Through living in communities, our learning and innovative abilities continue to improve. This constant upgrade of our collective human ability is a new mechanism that further widens the fundamental differences between people and animals.

Although many scientific experiments have sought to show that other animals have the ability to learn, thus far the results only prove that these specific individual animals are exhibiting learned behavior, or conditioned reflexive action. The internal organization and division of labor of bees and ants, for example, results from a group conditional reflex that assigns a role for each individual. The individual only takes actions that fall within their assigned role, which is designed to fulfill necessary tasks for the group. Take a drone, which only survives for 90 days in order to carry out its role in a group of bees: once it completes its mating task, it dies, and it does so without the free will or individual thinking about choices that humans enjoy. Animal behavior patterns are fundamentally different from those of humans, and it’s impossible for them to obtain the freedoms and abilities to learn and innovate in a sustained way like humans do in communal life.²

The individual free will of humans flows from our spirituality. Whether this spirituality came from God’s creation of mankind or through societal evolution has always been a subject of theological and philosophical debate. The majority of people in the world believe that God is the original source of human spirituality, and therefore free will. Many others believe the source is evolution, resulting from adaptation to the environment. Both positions are equally difficult to falsify or verify. But the inherent spirituality of our free will is fundamental to our humanity.

Free will is a prerequisite not only for thinking before acting, but also for reflecting after acting. Given our history and culture of communal living, there can be no understanding of true individual freedom that doesn’t take into account how each person’s actions might impact others. It is conditioned upon the particular ethics and legal order of a given community. Still, individual freedom must also be fundamentally centered around the self. Otherwise, it’s no longer an exercise of free will by its subject and becomes nothing more than the enslavement of some people by others—true freedom goes up in smoke and collapses into a rubble of lies.

Therefore, an individual subject that is empowered with free will and a self-oriented free will that is empowered by an individual subject are the two most basic starting points and end goals of all discussions of human issues. But how to foster individual free will while maintaining public order and governance in human communities? That’s a puzzle that remains difficult to solve.

SECTION 3: THE ETERNAL CONFLICT BETWEEN HUMAN ABILITY AND HUMAN DUTY

Ever since people entered community living, each bringing their own free will and unique behavior patterns, the group vs. individual paradox has existed. The synergy and conflict between the individual and the group shows the two sides of the coin God created. One advantage of community life is immediately apparent: individuals living in groups are surrounded by others, and so increase their safety and security. When individuals connect through community organizations, they increase their ability to cope with nature and the outside world, and the group’s ability to compete with other species for resources improves as well.

Once people see the value of acting together and being in an organization, their vision for and dependence on the organization increase. Humans have cultivated common habits by living in groups. We share true and imagined stories. We gain a common source of emotions, especially when we must respond to crises caused by outside threats. Experiences like hunting together, handling attacks, and surviving natural disasters enhance a sense of pride in and belonging to a group.

Community organization is only possible because of human passion. Passionate individuals form groups, learn and innovate, study and create, imagine and converse, dance and sing. As our community grows larger, we become more capable. The more able the community is to conquer nature and respond to external attacks, the more fully individual passions can be inspired and mobilized. Such communities are more exciting and garner individual pride.

Communal connection is mankind’s first great invention—it allows us to exponentially expand our abilities through group organization.³ It truly has been one of our most important steps in becoming a competitive species on earth.

But then there’s the other side of the coin: the conflict of community life. Even as people collectively feel safer in groups, as individuals, they can feel more insecure. As groups expand, the connections between individuals inevitably loosen. Unfamiliarity between individuals increases. When clashes of free will occur, people take the skills they honed in conflict with external challenges and apply them to internal conflict instead. This sharply increases individuals’ insecurity. At the same time, the fight for external resources between communities is often violent. In times of group conflict, each individual’s free will is further threatened and sacrificed, as the collective interest of the group prevails. While individuals who join groups may no longer be isolated and helpless, unfortunately, this new crisis emerges.

Yet, the crisis of rising inter-community conflicts does not seem to temper our enthusiasm for communal societies. Instead, it fuels the further expansion of community organizations, because people believe that larger organizations equal greater power. Increasingly large community organizations create the need to constrain the exercise of individual free will in the name of the greater good. This may be because of real needs of the group as a whole, or because a few leaders of the group want to impose their will on the rest.

This issue is a constant source of debate, even today, in human communities. Because access to key information is not equal among people, the free will of the few may be built on the organized enslavement of the many. This is the darkest aspect of human community life. Sometimes it’s necessary, but most of the time it’s tragically absurd. Often, the imposition of the leaders’ free will over the rest ignites people’s fury and distress. They deplore injustice and cry out, they revolt and fight, and they even sacrifice their lives.

How can the opposing dynamics of individual free will and organized oppression in human communities be reconciled? How can human beings maximize individual free will while fully integrating into a group and so winning the competition for survival among earth’s species? Community issues have become a historic problem of human group dynamics that all of us must face.

The positive side of human free will includes both subjective freedom and objective freedom, which means that each person is free to imagine, speak, and act, as well as enjoy the result of his own actions. It also means that people can freely associate and compete with one another in their imagination, conversation, and actions. But in order to enjoy this freedom, there are other considerations. The first is whether an individual subject is healthy, conscious, and can basically survive. The second is the time and technological situation in which the person lives, which affect how they can imagine, speak, act, and enjoy the results of their actions. So human freedom immediately comes into tension with another problem, that of human ability. That is, to what extent can one individual be free during a certain time in human evolution?

If, for example, a person lands on a deserted island like Robinson Crusoe, he will only encounter the natural outside world. His free will is limited by his technology. For example, he can use branches to build a shelter. He can use sources of fresh water on the island. He can pick wild fruit to eat. He can sharpen wood into a spear for fishing and self-defense. He can make marks on wood every day to record human time. He can draw flying birds or imaginary cities in the sand or on rock walls, and so on. These abilities are the best expression of his free will.⁴

But when he returns to society, he will not only encounter the problem of the natural outside world, but also the one comprised of many others. Now we must face the inherent problem implied by the negative side of human free will. Is his freedom limited when he returns to society? When an individual exerts their free will, does it hurt or hinder the freedom of others?

First, in physical space when a person possesses an object or occupies a location, others are necessarily excluded from possessing or occupying it. So the exercise of human free will can bring about physical conflicts between people. Second, imagination, speech, and other means of empowering human free will are also exclusive to each individual. Community life gives rise to subjective conflicts over things like personal reputation, or an individual’s actions may directly hinder the freedom of others in objective conflicts like theft or looting. Ultimately, people’s actions may create subjective conflicts that directly harm or even kill others.

Under all of these problems actually lies a larger, hidden question. In humans’ unique social life, how can they create a communal public order with the required constraints? And how should individual duty be in play so that one can imagine and act in ways that preserve one’s own freedom while respecting that of others? How can human duty and human ability work together to create proper attitudes and behaviors and build a dynamic, communal society with respect for both individual free will and public order? Such a society is desirable for all of us who share a spiritual nature.

SECTION 4: THE SACRED ANSWER IN LIFE’S UPS AND DOWNS

Ever since the dawn of mankind, our natural special characteristics and free will have driven us to resolve the opposing fundamental dilemmas of human ability and human duty. Human ability is largely about the freedom and achievements of humans as individual personalities. Human duty is largely about the definitions and limits of people as public personalities in groups and creates the boundaries of individual freedom and public spaces. Only by building these common boundaries to regulate the excesses of individual freedom is true freedom possible. And in turn, only with the clearly defined and measured freedom individuals obtain in groups can people construct stable expectations and hopes, which make such a communal life worth living. The process of solving these two conflicting issues defines the history of human civilization, with its criss-crossing history of wins and losses in the competition between species, communities, and individuals vs. communities.

Over the history of human civilization, faith and public welfare, as part of our human duty, have created public spaces and regulated individual freedom. Their origins, development, and the future hope they promise are all interwoven into our history of civilization. They are worthy of further thought and exploration.

Anyone’s subjective or objective freedom is played out in a specific historical space, limited by the technical means available and common rules for public spaces. It’s very hard to imagine transcending this temporally defined freedom. But if everyone’s actions were limited by a particular time’s technology and rules, human freedom would be static; human ability would also be static. Then the fate of mankind would be like other species, limited to natural cycles. But human history is not like this.

Human history is full of individual breakouts and group fluctuations. There are always great pioneers who harness extraordinary thought and action to defy the limits of their time’s technology and norms, thereby upgrading freedom and updating its rules. But what is the source of this extraordinary thought and action? Where does it gain legitimacy? How are pioneers from different communities able to think and act ahead of their time and often affect the course of history? More specifically, what is the great driving, directional force deeply rooted within the great pioneers’ thoughts and actions, and why is it there?

These questions are fundamentally about how humans should live, and they are for all of us, not just the pioneers. The flow of time seems to go on infinitely, but the time we have on Earth is limited. How do we resolve our sense of displacement in this immensity and lead a life of meaning? How do we make sense of and feel satisfied with the time we are given? As the pioneers searched for answers, they found that it is through empathy, the golden rule of getting along in a community, and unshakable confidence and courage in the face of life’s ups and downs. This is how we can firmly, bravely, and sacredly face life.

This search in life, guided by a kind of sacred expectation, to achieve self-discipline, self-motivation, and self-affirmation goes beyond duty and ability both. This is our human calling.

Throughout our history, as the size of our communities has expanded, their complexity and the resulting alienation among people have increased. With advancements in technology and changes in the ways people communicate, human calling often includes unwritten community law and becomes an enforceable prescription for individual behavior in a community. People who violate such rules are strongly condemned and publicly repressed. This shows the ethical and moral aspect of human calling, or human duty. It embodies the public enforcement of individual behavior in a community situated in a specific time and place, with the hope that everyone responds to ethical pressure by correcting their behavior to live in harmony with the public. But this kind of public morality of human duty cannot inspire the passionate imagination of each individual, so it can’t bestow individual motivation and determination.

As strong communities like nation-states have emerged, the self-regulation contained in our human calling has also been partially converted into national statutes in order to further restrain individual behavior, forming human requirement. Human requirement is mandated rules the state places on the individual. Failure to comply with such rules can have serious consequences for people, including loss of personal freedom and one’s life. Although throughout history, each society inevitably controls people with ethical, moral, and legal rules, the human duty decided by the public and the human requirement mandated by the state cannot stand in for the passionate imagination and divine reason that drive us towards self-discipline, self-motivation, and self-affirmation. Nor can they account for the great sages who lead us through the fog of history. They can never completely replace our human calling.

Human calling can only be found in people’s voluntary public spirit and the spiritual realm of faith. Only there is mankind’s inexhaustible spiritual source found. Extraordinary thinkers in human history have helped spur great movements that have tried to define and understand our human calling.

The rest of this book will group the great thoughts that have shaped human history into three major historical stages. The first great human reflection on the source of our human calling is the Axial Age. The second, spanning from the 12th to the 19th centuries, considers whether people can attain complete individual rationality in the orderly world created by God. The third is found in the pan-liberal society of the twentieth century and onward, reflecting on where humanity should go.

Although in our current day, humanity has reached unprecedented peaks in empirical science and material achievements, human calling is still an issue. Our technological developments of human ability haven’t made it any easier to resolve. If anything, modern humanity is trapped in a tougher position. Humanity stands on the edge of a precipice. If we do not turn back to God, this could be our end.

CHAPTER 2:

Question: cracking human ability in nature

SECTION 1: DEFINING HUMANITY

According to the latest archaeological research using quantum technology, Lucy⁵, the earliest human to walk upright, appeared in Ethiopia about 3.18 million years ago. From the perspective of brain capacity (that is, thinking ability), Lucy is far behind modern humans. Her brain capacity was roughly 400–500 cubic centimeters, which is much closer to that of other primates. The modern man (Homo s. sapiens) generally has a total brain capacity between 900 and 1,450 cubic centimeters. Prehistoric counterparts of the modern man with similar brain capacities have been discovered as far back as 80,000–100,000 years ago.

These counterparts belong to both the Homo sapiens species in East Africa and Homo s. neanderthalensis in Europe. In fact, according to the Out of Africa hypothesis, almost all modern humans are descendants of the East African Homo s. sapiens who emigrated from that region approximately 80,000 years ago. These early ancestors of humans slowly dispersed across the globe, adapting all the while to new external conditions. Cutting-edge genetic testing detects genetic markers among all modern humans that indicate a direct descent from those Homo sapiens⁶. The 650,000-year-old remains of the famous Homo erectus Peking Man, the 600,000-year-old remains of Yuanmou Man, and other Homo erectus went completely extinct in the prehistoric ages. They have no modern descendants. Even European Homo s. neanderthalensis, or Neanderthals, whose material remains are found at a number of archaeological sites, went extinct 30,000 years ago. As such, the progression from prehistoric to modern man is hardly straightforward.

These facts add necessary complexity to Darwin’s theory of human evolution as a simplistic linear progression from ape to upright man. After all, though more than 300 million hominid fossils have been documented and studied thus far, not a single one is a half-walking, half-crawling missing link between the ape and the modern man. Moreover, none have a brain capacity that falls between Homo sapiens and Homo erectus.

With evidence like writing and cave paintings, we can piece together the progress of Homo sapiens, but we cannot prove apes are our ancestors without this missing link.⁷ Based on existing relics and written records of Homo sapiens’ thinking and understanding regarding themselves and the outside world, what we refer to as humans are a specific Earth-bound species with written records. Man’s verifiable and species-specific civilization has experienced three major historical movements: animism, metaphysics, and positivism. Today, we must be careful when attempting to use the positivism of the third movement to confirm the nature of prehistoric civilizations and term it evidential science.⁸ Before human civilization possessed forms of writing, it was hard to depict their reality accurately. From our modern vantage point, we can only piece together prehistoric images and analyze them in comparison to existing primitive tribes. This book attempts to combine philosophical and theological perspectives over the course of human history to build on previous analysis of the evolution of the civilization. By observing history, we’ll consider what it can teach us about solving the core problems we face today.

SECTION 2: THE INHERENT DRIVE TO VIOLENCE

Human societal interaction with other species first occurs in hunter-gatherer societies. Gatherer societies forage for their livelihoods in a presumably idyllic lifestyle, much like the Garden of Eden. Since foraging is a relatively peaceful and safe activity where the individual poses little to no threat to outsiders, gatherer societies wouldn’t need a centrally organized, authoritative power to define and bolster the group’s strength. The need for strength in numbers and power wouldn’t even come into consideration for such a peaceful people. Gatherer societies are by nature more egalitarian, and differences between individuals are mostly indistinguishable.

But hunting adds a very different element. Life in a hunter society is characterized by violence and danger. Hunter societies reframe the relationship between humans and the outside world as a competitive blood sport. In order to emerge victorious over the outside world, humans need to work together to hone a superior strength. This means creating offensive and defensive weapons and organizing themselves to function as a group for strength in numbers. Due to their need for strength, hunter societies require members to be loyal to the group. They also need individual members to lead and mobilize the collective, especially those who are warrior-like, brave, and self-sacrificing in favor of the group’s greater good. In turn, these individuals’ sacrifices are memorialized by the group and inspire others to follow in their path. In this kind of hunter society, many individuals shine, and their free will is fully stimulated and realized.

The violent, dangerous, yet glorified community thus becomes a powerful imaginative force that captures the minds of individuals. It inspires the invention of axes, knives, and hammers made from stones; traps; earthworks; bows and arrows; fire; and other offensive and defensive tools and techniques. The threat of danger both draws out individuals’ strength and courage and creates a cohesion within the group. For instance, the act of killing a lion, elephant, or tiger requires the sacrifice of community members and perhaps even leaders. People’s love, lust, joy, grief, fear, and anger are fully mobilized in this imagined community as they together process the emotions this violence and victory evoke. Individual and group creativity find expression in communal songs, ceremonies, and dancing. This community where blood sport is both necessary and celebrated motivates individuals to improve their abilities to predict and prevent danger, as well as to plan and organize the group. As some individuals rise in the ranks through skill and free will, differences among individuals become increasingly stark.⁹

It could even be said that communal living in hunter societies fully actualizes humans’ free will and human ability. Through organizational innovations, their communal life creates and stimulates their imaginative powers, learning ability, and technological innovation. It fosters their ability to predict and plan for changes in the external world outside their communities, and it cultivates their sense of belonging to a community. It awakens their ability to express emotions and literary and artistic creativity. In this sense, hunter societies are the most magnificent expression of individual free will in a community. Organizational innovation during this period creates a safer environment where a sense of belonging and self-confidence can flourish. People not only gain a deeper understanding of their own abilities, but human ability as a whole also grows. The maturation of human ability happens in four major areas: organization, technological innovation, creative expression, and reflection on the human condition.

The first, organization, has to do with defining specific roles, creating new ways for members to relate to one another, and deciding how to draw upon these members to fill those roles. Establishing an individual’s family relationships through the mother’s line is a natural choice, since paternity in pre-modern times could be contested. The interpersonal connections required in hunting, especially big-game hunting, provide a different set of specific roles to define, as well as guidelines for selecting participants. Excluding women, the elderly, and children from dangerous hunting activities is one example of an organizational innovation. It involves drawing upon past experiences, modeling possible outcomes, and arriving at specific decisions in the present. The result is roles like hunters, trappers, warriors, and caretakers, and decisions like who will rescue and support potential casualties, how to divide the spoils within the community, and how to reward merit. Through taking part in a community, humans develop the ability to build and use public organizations. While these earliest organizational methods seem simplistic today, they actually contain the essential components of modern organizations. Kinship, a unique human invention, is the functional tissue of the tribal clan and the earliest public organization that connects individual free wills¹⁰.

Public organizations promote technological innovation by appealing to individuals’ sense of status within the community.¹¹ That is, technological innovations result from an individual’s attempts to imitate, improve, and transform existing technology. Technological innovations are not limited to our modern inventions of internet and machines. Indeed, some of the earliest inventions were knives, bows, fire, and cooking methods. Each invention surprises and benefits the community before being copied and replicated by other communities. While this process occurs, its inventor enjoys the admiration of his community and an elevated social status. Each invention opens up a new imaginary space for individual free will. Each incremental technological advancement plays an important role in the cultivation of human ability.

Public organizations also facilitate emotional expression between people. Emotional expression is a manifestation of each individual’s free will. Appreciation, anger, sorrow, joy, worry, fear, and love need channels to be expressed.¹² Such displays include paintings of hunts on cave walls. The victory of the hunt is celebrated with a collective bonfire