Chapter 4

As China grew as a civilization, disorder grew among the people, leaving officials to think of ways to end the turmoil. One of the ways conceived was they the philosophy known as idealism. This philosophy was the idea that if there were strict written laws the officials would quickly get the results the needed, such as punishments to get the turmoil to end, or to reward them for good actions that they wish for them to continue. They also thought of the Confucian answer, a society with no laws but good role models, and a populous that was to act off their morals and not off their desires. As a contrast, the Daoist answer also came into play, though they believed the key was to not act at all and to just retreat into nature.

I found this to be important because I feel like in a way these are still prominent means of solving disorder today, though we tend to rely more on the philosophy of idealism. Each law is there to be followed and if you don’t follow said law the punishment is also written out, so there is no confusion and there is no conflict over the right and the wrong.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chapter 5

When it came to officials, China was among the elite. The had a very advanced system of training individuals to become the officials they yearned for. However, because their testing was so rigorous, it would take a very well-educated man to pass the test to become an official in training, leaving mostly the wealthy to become officials. While this may sound like a good idea, with wealthy officials comes the possibility of corrupt trading as well as the corrupt treatment of others. Because the wealthy tended to look down on the lower class, the wealthy officials would commonly turn a blind eye to the poor punishment of others, even if it was against the written law, because they felt as though they deserved it, just because they were poor. As the officials grew higher in ranks they would even become wealthier, and have special privileges such as fancy, decked out carriages and they would even wear headdresses sashes and seals. They would even use their higher knowled...
Read more

Intro to Part 2 and Chapter 3

As we began to evolve as a populous the question of “how are we going to change”, looks wise, began to arise. As later discovered by history, we didn’t change all too much as time went on. The only true change was seen in the states and empires. With as fast as states and empires were evolving, they were devolving even faster. Nothing major truly happened as we evolved, because the major evolving of the population was done during the agricultural revolution. However, civilization itself began to change. Leaders began to become more oppressive and tyrannical and the population was quickly split into classes. As the populous began to grow bigger, so did the boundaries of the land they inhabited, and so did the power of their rulers. In 500 B.C.E. the largest and most impressive empire was that of the Persians. The Persians not only created one of the first empirical systems, but they also conquered a vast amount of Europe quickly, and embodied many different states o...
Read more