道德经在社会管理的应用英文Managing Democracy By The Application
Paper presented at the ldquo;International Forum On The Daodejingrdquo;, April 22-29, Xirsquo;an and Hong Kong, jointly sponsored by the China Religious Culture Communication Association and the China Daoist Association.
Managing Democracy By The Application Of Daodejing
By Alice Chung-Chau Tang, Ph.D.
Introduction and summary: Daodejing as Management Tool for Global Democracy
In the past 60 years, the majority of the member nations in the United Nation have adopted Constitutional Democracy, whether they are of the socialistic or the democratic types.Modern Democracy had been mankindrsquo;s hope for a world of peace with justice when WWII ended.People yearned for peace amidst a burnt out landscape.Democracy was believed to be the best safeguard against nations ever going to wars wantonly again. Yet in the past 60 years, America, the first modern democracy, initiated over 100 military actions all over the globe.Since 2000, it has launched a perpetual war, as ldquo;War on Terrorrdquo; can only be, that is now viewed by all nations to be threatening to the very survival of mankind. Americarsquo;s 60 years-long official policy of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) has accumulated enough fire power to destroy the world many times over.
Not until the democracy of the world rescues American democracy, can there be hope for mankindrsquo;s future.To do so, all the democratic nations of the world need to critically evaluate how can democracy be managed better in order to fulfill its most important goals.
This paper present, I hope, first a compelling history of why and how we got here. Through that understanding, in the words of Nobel Scientist Madame Currie ldquo;Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.rdquo; and psychiatrist Judith Lewis Harman ldquo;Like traumatized people, we need to understand the past in order to reclaim the present and the future.rdquo;, I believe mankind can find its way back to the world of ldquo;Da Tongrdquo; (The Great Harmony) in the east and ldquo;Christian communerdquo; (Heaven on this earth) in the west.
We may best begin from the end:Reclaiming our future of global peace with justice as humanityrsquo;s birthright.For without that, nothing we do may matter any more after another generation.The only way to achieve that, I believe, will be through the teachings of Daodejing to all citizens under democracy today.Daodejing has been proven, with 2500 years of historical success in China as the only super power nation that never engaged in first strike war against another nation, to be best at instilling simplicity and harmony into both the individual citizenrsquo;s and communityrsquo;s way of lives. Without the foundation of simplicity and harmony as a way of life, there can be no true democratic voters, hence no true democracy.
This is actually not new insight at all.In our collective past, over 600,000 polities all over the planet earth have been known to have lived that way of life over hundreds of thousands of years as an ancient democratic way of life of the hunter-gatherers (Ref. 6).Mankind began to lose that from about eight to ten thousand years ago as food resource became inadequate.Thanks to Chinarsquo;s Lao Zi and Confucius, they wrote down our past to ensure that ancient memory be kept alive.With the progress in science and technology in modern times, mankind again achieved food sufficiency.That condition enabled the Founding Fathers of America in a new land to create the modern Constitutional Democracy as a governing form to ensure life, liberty, and happiness for all.They are mostly deist Christians of their time and Thomas Jefferson originally wrote that most famous sentence in modern democracy as: rdquo;We hold these truths sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. hellip;rdquo;It was the much older Benjamin Franklin who argued for the unfortunate change to ldquo;We hold these truths to be self-evident. hellip;rdquo;
I say ldquo;unfortunaterdquo; because in todayrsquo;s hindsight, Jeffersonrsquo;s original sentence would have carried the spirit of democracy through together with its form.American democracy might even have been properly named as ldquo;Deist Christian Democracyrdquo;.It would then have had a much better spiritual foundation to ensure its success.The following two facts I believe support my thesis amply: (1) the fast deterioration of democracy in America to the point
