 Okay, we're back. We're live. This is Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Jay Fiedel on a given Tuesday. And we have John David. And he's a he's a historian, a professor of history at White Pacific University. And the name of the show is history lens. But that's because history is a lens. Okay, you got to think that through. It's a lens because you look at the world through history. It looks different. We want to have that lens because it helps us see things more clearly. It's so important. John, you already knew this, right? Jay, it's great to be on the show. Yeah, of course. That's my wife. I'll be honest with you. My wife actually came up with the name. We were tossing around all these different ideas. And she said, what about lens lens lens? He's like, you're part of the items and you get it. So she's a good woman. So I wanted to offer you a big fat congratulations. If you won the book award from the Baldridge book company, that really is some things for your Westernization, limits of Westernization book, which you and I have talked about before. Oh, that's the cover of it. Limits of Westernization. It's really a story of East and West. It's really a story of the influence of Westernization on other places in the world. First of all, it's the Kenneth W. Baldridge Prize. And it's not a company. It's actually a professor. I think he was at BYUH, who maybe two decades ago, no, longer than that, three decades ago. Endowed this prize in his name. And ever since then, this is a prize that's given every three years. There's a Baldridge committee that meets. The chair is from BYUH, because they sponsor the prize. And so, yeah, I mean, it's quite an honor. I'm gratified and pleased. I'm also humbled because I know there's a lot of other good books out there. And another book could have been chosen. So I'm quite happy about it. I mean, wow, these things don't happen. Congratulations. Does it come with like the Nobel Prize? Does it come with a big check? It comes with a little check. Okay. I think it's like $500 or something. We still appreciate you a lot, Sean. It's great fun. And I've been getting, honestly, I'm shocked that congratulations I've been getting on social media. It's really been a lot of fun. I mean, I've gotten over 5,000 views on my LinkedIn account of this picture of me and the book and, you know, the announcement. So, wow, I didn't know that that would happen. And part of it is I've really developed. I've really developed my LinkedIn following. So, yeah, I guess so. So you want to talk, you want to talk about why it got the award? I mean, I'm sure you, if you don't know specifically, then you can guess. Why did you get this award? Why is this book important to the Kenneth W. Baldritch organization? Right, to the committee and to the historical discipline. And really, the thing is, this is the only history prize that's given in the Pacific for a book, you know, published by, you know, the way they term it is a book published by a resident of Hawaii. And it's over a three-year period. So every three years, they give the book. And so this was 2017 to 2019. So, and so it's very, to me, it's very interesting what they said in their congratulations letter and in their press release. And I'd actually like to read a little bit of it if I could. Please, please. This is gonna, it might be a little shocking or it might throw you a little bit, Jay, but that's good, right? So this, yeah, so this was written by the, I think mostly by the chair of the committee, a woman named Eve Kohler, who is a professor at of BYUH, bring them young University of Hawaii. So, and so, so she says, John David and breaks new historiographical and political ground in intellectual history with this timely book. And I think the thing is she understood the book right away, which really surprised me because this book has a complexity to it, which, by the way, when we first talked about the book, we really didn't address that ultimate complexity as well as we could. I mean, it's let's do it today. Yeah. Yeah. So, so what she says is set against a contemporary context of trying to understand Asia's gleaming modernization in the 21st century. And that's exactly right. That's why I wrote the book. I was traveling to China and traveling to Japan and I could not understand how Americans could consider what China in Japan did in reviving their economies after World War II and building their infrastructures. I could not understand how this could not be their own achievement. But back in the United States, then politicians, policy makers, military leaders consistently have argued that the United States created modernity in the States. You accept that? No. No, I mean, and that's really one of the main thrusts of the book, is to argue that they're wrong. So, you know, the occupation of Japan, yes, that reshaped Japan in some very significant ways. It also left Japan the same in some very significant ways. So for this committee to understand that this is the context, this question of how could we actually claim this as something that we shaped when in fact, these Asians shaped this. Well, if that goes to American exceptionalism, which you and I have talked about, we were the best things since sliced bread, and it may not have been true, and it probably isn't true now. Right, right. So she actually mentioned, she uses the term exceptionalism to talk about this. So the author, the author talks about the redefining of the history of the origins of modernity. And I'm doing that, that's probably the most complicated part is to look at this question of how modernity and how people think about modernity and how it's structured intellectually, how this was answered by Asians. To me, that was the crucial question that I answered in the book. And she says, diversifying its meeting, recognizing its limits and extract, this is very interesting, extracting from it ideals that could be applied to current global circumstances, rather than giving up completely on modernity. So part of the concept that came out of the book, you know, there's all this talk about postmodernity, right, and modernity has failed us. And, you know, all of this, these attacks on science and rationality in the last few years, I think these actually are a product of our dismissal of the achievements of modernity. Okay, and I mean that in the most concrete sense, the rise of scientific understandings, the rise of rational, the kind of the codification of rational reasoning in universities and in, you know, publications like my book, the kind of the coming together or the emergence of worldwide democracy, you know, so the argument of the book is, and this committee really got it, and again, I'm kind of surprised, but the argument of the book is that actually what we've done is we've expected too much from the modern world. We expected modernity to liberate everyone to be the same everywhere, right? If modernity comes from the United States, then it should look the same in East Asia. So I hear the words of Woodrow Wilson banging around in my head, making the world safe for democracy. And it was repeated later on, too, in the Vietnam War. We're going to show those guys a thing or two because we got a better system and we're going to impose it on them like it or not. Right, so in that, you know, and it's a good idea, right? It was a very good idea, but the problem is that Americans believe that they can apply it the same way in every part of the world. And it's what's true for Japan and China was also true for Vietnam. It didn't work in Vietnam like it did in the United States. So to me, it's fascinating that they've actually understood the book, and I'm really delighted, maybe even more, or at least as delighted with that as I am with the prize itself. So somebody actually got it. Are you finished reading your excerpt there? Do you want to read more? So let me just finish with this because what she did is she quoted the last paragraph of the book, and I'm just going to read this because I think this is another way of saying what I was just saying, but it's really making it more accessible. Modernity fell short of its promise in the 20th century, but this work makes a call for a new understanding of modernity as more diverse and less monolithic. Its universal idea of progress can be replaced by a concept of improvability or what William James described as meteorism and with 11 of humility in the words of anthropologist Margaret Mead, humans are still capable of liberation and rational problem solving. And if we embrace this fact, we can salvage modernity. Okay, so that's my, okay, that's my hope is that actually modernity is not dead. Because I think those who have argued that modernity should die or is dying and let's embrace postmodernity do, they have not fully acquainted themselves with the consequences of abandoning scientific analysis, rational thinking, a kind of a hope for the future of liberation and liberty as a concept that we ought to fight for. So let's not, let's, you know, in other words, there's a lot of loose talk about how we live in the most postmodern world now and, you know, world of fake news and, and, you know, and, you know, and outright lies and this, you know, this other stuff. Let's not celebrate that, folks. Let's understand that if we sacrifice our modern ideals, we're going to lose a lot. Now, modernity itself was not perfect. That's the other part of the argument is, it's diverse. It happens in different ways in different parts of the world. And so we shouldn't expect that it's going to solve all the problems or that it is going to look the same everywhere. And that's, that's the insights of the book is to find that it actually, modernity actually looked quite different from in the, in East Asia from the United States. And it wasn't, as Americans argued, it wasn't that East Asia did not possess modernity. It's just modernity looked different in East Asia. Yeah, it looks different to different people, but it's also dynamic, isn't it? It changes. You know, I mentioned before the show that we are now in a time of transformation. And what is, you know, what is at the cutting edge now in the year? It's way different than what was at the cutting edge a year ago. And I wonder how your book engages, if it can engage, with that high speed transformational process we have right now. Yeah, so, I mean, of course, there's a lot of change taking place. And I think the idea of the overall framework of the book engaged this very directly by arguing, hey, let's, let's pay attention to the science. Okay. So public health, when public health gives guidelines, we should listen. Okay. Yeah, let's, let's, let's let the scientists be scientists and stop tearing down science. Okay. So that's, that's an important part of this. And the other part of this is that modernity was not the be all or the end all, but modernity also brought forth really to the forefront of writing the policymaking and political decision making, a kind of rational thought that had been that really, I don't think we had ever seen before in quite the same way. And now in the last, you know, four years, we've lost some of that. So let's, let's return to a rational mode of decision making in our politics as well. Oh yeah. Politics is a strong thread throughout this conversation and throughout the book. So it's the limits of westernization. I find that interesting in the context of this discussion of the impact of what, what is modernity and what is the impact? Because right now, right now, and if you say that modernity is science and rational thought. Yeah. But I mean, as a core value, a set of values. And then you say westernization is being limited in some westernization is the center of the book. Then I, I, what the image that comes up to me is that, wait a minute, we, we are not following science and rational thought in our public policy right now today. We're not following it. We're disregarding it and we're coming up with media evil interpretations of things that are not true in science. Yeah, I mean, same time the Koreans, you know, and we've had a show about this recently, the Koreans are more modern than we are. They are using science, they are using rational thought and it works for them. So is, is it westernization or is it, is it modernity in some sort of global sense you're talking about? Right. So, so let's take westernization off the books because the term westernization and its use, used by western commentators is the problem that it created all these problems of analysis. And what happened is western commentators fused westernization with modernity and that's where the problems arose. And so in the book, I untied that I pulled those two things apart and so I could see modernity in East Asia as it was being created by intellectuals in East Asia. And sometimes those intellectuals referenced westernization and other times they did not. So other times they referenced their own traditions. Now this is a really interesting question, this question of the relative, what I would term in the COVID crisis, the relative coherence of East Asian peoples, their cooperation, their willingness to make sacrifices for the state and for their own well-being and for their neighbor's well-being, a sense of community, a political community. And so East Asians in the period coming up to, you know, in the 19th century, early 20th century were accused of being fatalistic and led by authoritarian governments, ancient decrepit governments and they were blindly loyal, they didn't think about politics that, you know, the man in the street didn't, or the woman in the street didn't think about politics. And so all of these stereotypes about East Asia are, they're really powerful and they actually remain pretty powerful right through the World War II period. But when I studied East Asians themselves and got beyond the stereotypes, what I found is that East Asian intellectuals very early on were very interested in the concept of civic duty. Ah, a political community, political and social coherence, a willingness to make sacrifices for the political community, whether it's the state or, you know, local. But no question, wasn't that exactly what the founders were after? Wasn't that what Jefferson was about? Well, we all have to make ourselves useful to the community. The problem is it's more complicated in the American case because you have this idea, this enlightenment idea of individual liberty and that tends to, and that enlightenment idea is really grabbed onto strongly by Jefferson and then by those who follow Jefferson. And actually, I mean, liberty is an important concept, but if you just limit it to the individual, if you don't talk about communities of liberty, and if you just oppose it against everything else, right, you have liberty and nothing else but liberty, then political communities suffer. You have chaos, don't you? Yes, you can have chaos, you can have secessionism. This comes quite directly out of Jefferson's idea of liberty. You can have, in today's world, you have people who are arguing that, you know, it's, I have the freedom to discriminate against you because it says so in the First Amendment. So you have all these distortions of, you have all these personal liberty laws that are aimed at, aimed against gun control. So it's interesting that you should bring it up because this plays on a project that I'm currently writing, but in other words, that sense of the community and sense of respect for one another in a community has, in some ways, it's at a minimum, it's been de-emphasized in American modernity and then it's been more strongly emphasized in East Asian modernity. And so, yeah, what I get out of that now is that, is that the United States, especially in this administration, but not limited to this administration, will still have the country is often to this individualism without concern for your neighbor, your community. We have declined in that way from the noble ideals of the founders. And the same time, East Asia, we can talk about Korea, but I think it applies to Japan and to maybe a lesser degree it applies to China, maybe Southeast Asia too, to a limited degree. They are actually, they have integrated some of the influence from our United States democracy, our aspirational democracy, and they are doing in their own way better at this combination of science and rationality and incorporating duty to community. It's very interesting that they actually have taken our thoughts and built a better mousetrap with them. Right. Well, this is the other interesting thing. It's actually not, at least not completely our thoughts that they took. This is where the limit comes in. And China is a little bit of an outline. Of course, China is not a democracy. They do have opposition political parties, but China is a really authoritarian government. So what happens in the early 20th century is that the major intellectuals become very interested in concepts of civic duty or the person's sense of loyalty to the state, obligation to the state. The problem for East Asians is that in previous times, especially in Japan, but this is really true for Southeast Asia, that loyalty ran through families and it ran through local political elites. But it did not run through the abstract of the modern nations. So you think of in Japan, the samurai class and how you had to look up to the samurai and be loyal to the samurai and the samurai's retainers were loyal unto death to the samurai. So there's a very strong sense of loyalty, but it's not pointed at the state. It's not pointed at the nation. So part of what these intellectuals want to do is they want to kind of reconfigure that loyalty focus, especially in Japan. And they do this by looking at an old intellectual, an old neo-confucianist named Wang Yongming. And Wang Yongming argues that actually the duty to the state is even more important than your loyalty to your family. It runs right against the grain of traditional Confucianism, Wang Yongming thought. But his argument suggested it fit better with the modern nation state for East Asians than traditional Confucianism. And here's another thing that's surprising is traditional, what we call Chushi Confucianism, was really all about the individual. I mean, if you have a social structure of the family is there, but but Chushi Confucianism actually emphasizes self-cultivation, the reading of poetry, the wearing of fine clothes, the way that you meet others, the social status is very important. And so, and quite frankly, one of the problems with Chushi Confucianism is that this idea of individual self-cultivation and a kind of almost a lack of accountability to larger political entities, you know, the local government, the provincial government and the emperor, you know, at this center. So Wang Yongming says, no, this is wrong. And what he sees in Chushi Confucianism is a lot of corruption as well. I mean, these elites that are running the country, they're collecting more taxes than they need to because they have all these very expensive habits. They become addicted to opium. They're stealing money from the national treasury. So I'm not putting all of that on Chushi Confucianism, but honestly, that China has a problem. And I think the emphasis of Chushi Confucianism on the individual is part of the problem. So it's interesting to me that these intellectuals in the late 19th in early 20th century, when they go to the United States and they go to Europe, what they find is groups of people interested in working together and a kind of political coherence that they lack because the East Asia is too individualistic. How's that for strange? Well, that's switched around, isn't it? That's right. You know, right now, I don't like to use China as an example because of the human rights issues and the despotic government right now. But the fact is that although they're very scientific, that doesn't rule. What rules is loyalty to the state because that's life or death for you. And that's troublesome. It's troublesome because loyalty, misplaced loyalty to the state here, is loyalty to Donald Trump, who is sort of wrecking our democracy and wrecking our brand for democracy. And that Trump's science. So what we have in, you know, we only have a couple of minutes left, John, what we have, you know, is in the ideal, it was like the enlightenment, the real, the earlier enlightenment. We have a value of science, a value on rational thought, but also, also a willingness to help the society. Now it seems like those things are in not in a good play. And my question is, if I read your book, you know, what what do I get looking into the future? Is this is a lock and hobs kind of dichotomy? Is humankind perfectible? Or are we always going to wind up in this kind of tension which which which which undermines our society? Hey, that's a scary comparison lock and hobs. Come on. No, I don't I think it's I think it's more complex than that, honestly. And this is why the book is so important because it could be that neither lock or hobs are completely relevant right now. It could be actually that Wang Yongming and his his idea of civic duty is more important. And I think the interesting thing for me in writing the book is that what I found is that Westerners and Americans actually have something they could learn from East Asians because East Asians adopted this idea of civic virtue and civic duty pretty well in the 20th century. You can see it in their response to COVID. And we can learn something from that. We don't have to be blindly loyal or we don't have to become a, you know, a dictatorship like China in order for this to work. It doesn't mean that, you know, the loyalty is is kind of absolute. And it comes without strings or without thinking, right? The other part of modernity is is independent thinking, thinking for yourself and rationally being able to evaluate politicians and political circumstances. So I mean, you know, of course, I'm more oriented towards lock than I am towards towards ha, but I'm also oriented towards Wang Yongming. So it's it's much more complicated when you begin to study East Asian history and politics. On that point, I just want to tell you about a conversation I had yesterday with Tai Tai Un Baik, who is a professor at the UH Law School. It was from South Korea. And we were talking about how well they've done dealing with COVID. And he said, you know, the people are proud that they have served the community. The government is proud that, you know, that the community has been served with science and with with loyalty. And I said to him that he's Korean, but he, you know, he lives here. He's as much American as Korean. And I said to him, I said, are you proud? I am very proud. Okay, so so what what you have is this coming together of the nation states are coming together of the society where everyone understands all of these values, the values you talk about in the book, and the combination of cultures that have influenced those values. And they're proud. That's what it is. I mean, the thing is, we have in our own past, really a pretty recent past, political communities coming together, doing their civic duty, fighting for the right thing, enhancing civil rights in their communities. And it wasn't just individuals. This is the distortion that bothers me in some of the current political, you know, discourse. It's like, no, it's actually our, our recent past, the civil rights movement actually was a moment where communities fought for more rights. It wasn't just individuals. So we have, we have the ability to call on that past as well. A past in which civic duty is, is, is paramount. So call me an impression, impressionable reader. Okay. And although this is a scholarly treatise, and you know, it's just the facts, man, just the facts. But, you know, I always, I always believe there's a takeaway in everything, including in the show. And the takeaway from your book, I'd like to know, so I read your book, what would you like my takeaway to be? How would you like your book to influence my behavior, my conduct in the world as it is? Well, what, what, what, what would I get out of it? And how would I change my way of looking at things? Well, I think we've been, we've already been talking about it. I mean, the interview with the scholar from UH Law School, that's part of it, is understanding that modernity is diverse and that we should call upon its diversity and learning. But we can learn things from East Asia. And, and modernity is, it's, so it's not monolithic. And also, there are great limits to how we influence the influence the kind of the power we had over East Asia. And, and, you know, we just have to acknowledge that that's an important correction of the historical record, if nothing else, but there's much else to be said for it. Yeah. John, you are a global historian, and the Lord knows it's a hard job to appreciate history as it is moving on, as it has moved on and is moving on, especially now. And with a book like this, I think that helps us understand how, how the process, the global process. Thank you, John, David, and thank you for coming down. Congratulations again on the Kenneth W. Baldritch Book Award that you got. Thank you, Jay. That's the Loha. Take care. Take care. Loha, stay safe. Wash your hands.