The Master said, “If you are respectful but lack ritual you will become exasperating; if you are careful but lack ritual you will become timid; if you are courageous but lack ritual you will become unruly; and if you are upright but lack ritual you will become inflexible." (Analects 8.2, translated Edward Slingerland).
子曰：「恭而無禮則勞，慎而無禮則葸，勇而無禮則亂，直而無禮則絞。」
I’ve been thinking recently about this passage from the Analects, and about what it says about the importance of ritual (li 禮). More importantly, I’ve been thinking about what this passage says about the art of not being annoying.
Our picture of Confucius is often that of somebody who was very annoying indeed—depending on your perspective, either a principled stickler for tradition who went around annoying precisely the right people, or a frustrating pedant who was just a pain in the neck for pretty much everyone. But if you read the Analects carefully, it seems to me that a much more supple, human figure emerges. And thinking about Confucius’s incessant concern with ritual in this light, it seems to me that ritual, for Confucius, is not so much about holding firm to a timeless and contextless sense of propriety. Instead, it is a means of attuning ourselves to the folks we run into. Ritual is how we get by in the world.
One might think that on this view, ritual was about restraining our more spirited tendencies, channelling our thumos (θυμός) as the Greeks might put it. This idea of ritual may be quite familiar to us. We often see ritual as this kind of reining-in, an attempt at restraining what might otherwise seem excessive. For example, we may be furious with our boss, and would like to tell him to fuck off. But ritual demands that we say, “Well, that’s an interesting point you raise, but have you considered…?” There’s a usefulness to this reining-in. We can’t be rocking around telling everyone to fuck off all the time. It would be, as Confucius rightly points out, a recipe for a kind of unruly chaos, one particular way of being annoying. And, of course, it wouldn’t help us serve our ends—whether these ends are to conform to, or to subvert, the situation in which we find ourselves. For those interested in when it is okay to tell people to fuck off, see Amy Olberding’s essay here—and her book on the subject, as well as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s reflections on reclaiming civility for more radical ends here.
But what interests me about this passage as a whole is the way that it talks about ritual as an attunement in the other direction as well, and the way it lays bare a whole other way of being annoying. Here, ritual is not about holding back from what, in the UK at least, is sometimes called “going off on one”, but it is about holding back from… well, holding back. Or about holding back from diffidence, over-politeness, or undue ceremony.
A couple of decades ago, when I was doing fieldwork in East Indonesia, I used to send my long-suffering hosts mad with my excessive diffidence and over-politeness. Being British, and thus annoying in a very British way, I found myself saying “Thank you”— terima kasih —to everything, until one of my hosts almost screamed, " Terima kasih, terima kasih, terima kasih… Just stop it! It’s making me dizzy!" And so I started to hold back, and things improved. I became marginally less annoying, and it was correspondingly more fun to have me around.
Two decades later, now I’ve settled into the rhythm of life in Taiwan, this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. I’ve been here almost two years in now, and on a good day, my Mandarin is relatively decent. Meanwhile, my Taiwanese is catching up slowly. This all helps ensure that life goes pretty smoothly. But, inevitably—because much about being here Taiwan is unfamiliar to me—, there are times when I find myself out of my depth. And it is when I feel out of my depth that I’ve noticed that my first instinct is to take refuge in over-politeness, or in timidity. And then, inevitably, I become, well… exasperating.
I could read this tendency to be one particular kind of annoying as something indelible about my character. After all, it is the same problem I had in Indonesia all those years ago. But, bearing Confucius in mind, it’s much more interesting to read this as a temporary failure to understand what the situation I’m in ritually requires. Because, sometimes ritual doesn’t just demand that we hold ourselves in, but instead that we loosen ourselves up. Ritual is the art of reading the social world of which we are a part, and—without giving up on our own agency, or departing from our sense of what is appropriate and right—finding a way of attuning ourselves to the situation in which we find ourselves. Or to go even further, and at the risk of overstatement: perhaps ritual, or li 禮, is no more and no less than the suppleness we need, as moral agents, to get along and to get things done, while being as minimally annoying as we can be. And that seems like a worthy aspiration.
Note
Other translations of the passage above are possible. In particular, I’m not sure about Slingerland’s use of “inflexible” in the final line—直而無禮則絞. So I wonder if it could be read instead as something like, “If you are direct and have no ritual, you’ll get in a tangle.” This, experience shows, is equally true.
Image: The Confucius Temple, Tainan. Photo, Will Buckingham.
