The Western Confucian

Omnes Sancti et Sanctæ Coreæ, orate pro nobis.

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Iosue Andreas Sartorius lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, his home of more than a decade, where he lectures English at a science and technology university. Mission creep has transformed an overseas assignment for his alma mater into a foreign entanglement in the Far East now well into its second decade. A Gypsy quadroon, he has also lived in Chile and what was British Malaya, offering perhaps some insights not only into the Confucian but also the Latin and Islamic civilizations as well.

From what he likes to tout as self-imposed exile, he has written for LewRockwell.com, Nolan Chart, OpEdNews.Com, The Seoul Times, Spero News, and Traditional Catholic Reflections & Reports, as well as the sixth chapter of Ron Paul: A Life of Ideas. Contact him at westernconfucian@gmail.com.

Baptised into the Methodism of his maternal grandmother, who had been excommunicated from the Southern Baptist Church, the tenets of Catholicism were first imparted to him by the High Church Lutheranism in which he was raised in the Quaker-founded village of Orchard Park, New York. After having stumbled upon Anglo-Catholicism, he was not long after received into Holy Mother Church on the memorial of Saint Andrew the Apostle, his patron, in 2002, in Korea. This blog's title, a name used by Matteo Ricci, S.J., the great missionary to China, to describe himself, reflects that the blog is written by an unapologetic Westerner happily living in North Kyŏngsang Province, the Confucian heartland of what is often described as the world's most Confucian society.

He sees Confucianism, condemned as "reactionary" during the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as a political philosophy that has many cognates with both American Paleoconservatism and Paleolibertarianism, superficially in its Antimilitarism, but at a deeper level in that its twin pillars, Li (Etiquette) and Jen (Benevolence), posit reverence of tradition, ritual, and antiquity on the one hand and governance by moral example rather than force on the other. Indeed, the Harm Principle is presaged by the Confucian Golden Rule: "Don't do unto others what you would not have them do unto you." Similarly, Taoism, if applied to political-economy, is echoed in its core tenet of Wu-Wei (Non-Action) by Austrian School Economics, while at the same time the Agrarianism of the Tao Te Ching is paralleled by Anti-Federalism, Jeffersonianism, and Distributivism, and its Isolationism by the America First Committee.

Said Confucius, "I transmit but do not innovate; I am truthful in what I say and devoted to antiquity." This blogger's aim is not to create any novelties, but rather to transmit ideas from others, especially those that pay proper homage to antiquity, mostly in the form of annotated links. It should be remembered that this is a weblog, whose raison d'être it is merely to share information; therefore, the presence of a link anywhere on this site should not be construed as an endorsement of the opinions, content, or veracity therein. Fair use rights are claimed and freely offered on all material appearing on these pages.

"The farther you go, the less you know."
─ Lao Tzu

Confucius

"Confucius has had distinguished individual admirers in America but otherwise no perceptible influence on our political thought. We have lost by our failure to attend to him. He sets forth a way of drawing a workable and highly ethical way of life out of things of a kind found in every society: myth and tradition, natural human impulses, and the practicalities of daily life. Since his method relies on moral leadership rather than political power, in times of fundamental political conflict it may be useful more for the ideals it maintains than its immediate practical efficacy. However, it is simple, flexible, and consistent with a reasonable interpretation of our own fundamental traditions. In confused times like our own we would do well to consider it; even if it does no more immediately than add to our stock of ideals, we should remember that ideals are eventually decisive."
─ James Kalb from Confucius Today

Servant of God Matteo Ricci, S.J. (利瑪竇)

"Ricci publicly announced that he had come to China to supplement Confucian belief, and to attack the absurdity of Buddhism. He argued that the Catholic God and the Confucian Lord-on-High were equivalent, and that the Confucian term Heaven, or Providence, was compatible with the Catholic concept of God the Creator. Citing passages from Confucian classics, he demonstrated that the concepts of the soul's immortality and good and evil in Catholicism were analogous to the fundamental teachings of Confucianism."
─ Hahn Moo-Sook in Encounter

Mary, Mother of God

恩寵이 가득하신 마리아여, 기뻐하소서! 主께서 함께 계시니, 女人中에 福되시며 胎中의 아들 예수 또한 福되시도다! 天主의 聖母 마리아여, 이제와 우리 죽을 때에 우리 罪人을 爲하여 빌으소서. 아멘.
─ Ave Maria in Sino-Korean mixed script, my reconstruction

"It was not through the efforts of missionaries that Catholicism spread in Korea. In the beginning it was studied as an academic interest by scholar-officials of the Southerner faction, who had by then lost political power. Disillusioned with the empty, obsolete, and contradictory metaphysics of the day, they developed a profound interest in the Western books brought into Korea by the annual mission to the Peking court. With an insatiable thirst for new knowledge, they marvelled at the newly introduced learning, more logical, scientific, and practical than any they had known. Scientific advancement in mathematics and calendrical computation hitherto unknown to them greatly stimulated and influenced these scholar-officials. They joined forces in a new scholarly trend called Sirhak, or 'practical learning,' which used an empirical approach aimed at 'institutional reform of government' and 'economic enrichment in society.'"
─ Hahn Moo-Sook in Encounter

"In pre-imperial America, conservatives objected to war and empire out of jealous regard for personal liberties, a balanced budget, the free enterprise system, and federalism. These concerns came together under the umbrella of the badly misunderstood America First Committee, the largest popular antiwar organization in U.S. history. The AFC was formed in 1940 to keep the United States out of a second European war that many Americans feared would be a repeat of the first. Numbering eight hundred thousand members who ranged from populist to patrician, from Main Street Republican to prairie socialist, America First embodied and acted upon George Washington's Farewell Address counsel to pursue a foreign policy of neutrality."
─ Bill Kauffman in Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism

"Libertarian isolationism draws its adherents from both the left and the right. According to the libertarian isolationist interpretation of history, the U.S. changed from a decentralized republic into a militarized, authoritarian empire in the late 19th century, when the Spanish-American War made the U.S. a colonial power and trusts and cartels took over the economy. Every president since McKinley, they believe, has been a tool of a self-aggrandizing crony capitalist oligarchy, which exaggerated the threats of Imperial and Nazi Germany and Japan and the Soviet Union and communist China and now of Islamist terrorism in order to regiment American society and divert resources to the bloated 'military-industrial complex.' If the libertarian isolationists had their way, the U.S. would abandon foreign alliances, dismantle most of its military, and return to a 19th-century pattern of decentralized government and an economy based on small businesses and small farms."
─ Michael Lind in The five worldviews that define American politics

"For centuries in Korea, Confucianism has meant a system of education, ceremony and civil administration as first expressed by Confucius in his writings. Confucian concepts of social harmony and moral precepts permeated the intellectual life of the old East Asia and played a pivotal role in moulding the Korean culture as we know it today. In Korea, Confucianism was accepted so eagerly and in so strict a form that the Chinese themselves regarded the Korean adherents as more virtuous. They called Korea 'the country of Eastern decorum,' referring to the punctiliousness with which the Koreans observed all aspects of the doctrinal ritual."
─ Korean Confucianism

"But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice and madness, without tuition or restraint."
─ Edmund Burke

"We have heard enough of liberty and the rights of man; it is high time to hear something of the duties of men and the rights of authority."
─ Orestes Augustus Brownson

"The Virgin and St. Thomas [Aquinas] are my vehicles to anarchism."
─ Henry Adams

"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead."
─ G. K. Chesterton.

"Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within."
─ José Ortega y Gasset

"We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive."
─ C.S. Lewis

"Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington."
─ Servant of God Dorothy Day

"When, I wonder, did we in America ever get into this idea that freedom means having no boundaries and no limits? I think it began on the 6th of August 1945 at 8:15 am when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima... Somehow or other, from that day on in our American life, we say we want no limits and no boundaries."
─ Servant of God Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

"Burke was liberal because he was conservative."
─ Russell Kirk

"I am often asked if I am a republican or a monarchist. I am neither, I am a legitimist: I am for legitimate government. You could never have a monarchy in Switzerland, and it would be asinine to imagine Spain as a republic."
─ Archduke Franz Joseph Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xaver Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius of Austria

"What we need is more confidence in ourselves, and a stronger belief in our traditions, so that we never are tempted to initiate force to make others live as we do. If we truly have an economic and political message worth emulating, our only responsibility is to set a standard that others will want to follow."
─ Congressman Ron Paul

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