Ancient Values Influence Behaviour Centuries Later

By Kumar David –

From centuries, Chinese people held that the values of their ancestors should be respected – harmony, courtesy, wisdom, loyalty and filial piety. Esteem for ancient values has a hold on Chinese society even today. One interesting matter is protection of wildlife, nature reserves and a willingness to share space. How sad that in this country (SL) people have little regard for pristine wildernesses, forests and wildlife; we have little respect for the message of Arahat Mahinda. The Yellow River (Huang Ho) carries massive quantities of muddy brown silt that fertilises thousands of acres and accounts for its name (yellow). This cradle of Chinese civilisation, known as the Sorrow of China, because frequent flooding, gives rise to much devastation, but the contradiction has long been stoically accepted.

However, there are contradictions. An ancient Chinese dietary preference, where monkey brain spiced with a dash of strong Chinese liquor scooped through a dish-sized opening on the tabletop, was on the menu in Manchu Han Imperial banquets of the 17th century Qing Empire. Or shark’s fin soup when the fins are cut and the animal thrown back into the sea to suffer an excruciating death.

I am of the view that reverence for ancestral values serves the Party well in enforcing environmentally friendly policies – of course other policies as well! Chinese culture is strong in this respect but Biblical traditions, especially the Tora, the Old Testament, is also chronically persistent. At the end of WW-I and the time of the Balfour Declaration (November 1917) the great majority of the population of Palestine (now Israel) was Arabic speaking Palestinian.

The migration of Jews to the region commenced in the 1920s, becoming a flood with the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust in the 1930s. The preferred destination later changed to the USA in the post-war years because of greater material benefits and distrust of the British, after the British Mandate granted by the League of Nations, effective September 1923. Numerous and complicated manoeuvres were involved, too many to discuss here.

I must not get distracted from my narrative, the grip of inherited ideology, in this case religion over social behaviour. To cut to the quick, the Jews believe that greater Israel including Gaza, the south, the land called Gilead (“There is a Balm in Gilead” e.g. YouTube Chris Brunelle) from the river Jordan to the sea is all part of the Promised Land, the land God Promised to the Jewish People as their Homeland. (Is Sri Lanka the Land of the Buddha, the land where Buddhism was preserved for centuries?).

The remark “Opium of the people” says that religion persuades people to accept despoliation in this life in expectation of greater rewards in the next. Like the devotee of Land of the Buddha and the Promised Land, the Jihadist too looks forward to gratification by succulent virgins in heaven when he charges into battle – ‘the sons of the Prophet are mighty and bold and quite unaccustomed to fear’. Religion is a deep-seated force that overrides logic and even the hold of ethnic empathy among racial groups.

But when such beliefs resonate with ancient value systems, they become deep-rooted. I guess the ancient Chinese values I referred to at the beginning, The Land of the Buddha and the Tora fixation with the Promised Land belong in this category and make resolution of the Palestine conflict near impossible. I routinely support the Two-State concept in Palestine, one state for the Palestinian people and another for the Jews, both democratic. But truthfully, I am pessimistic about such idealism.

If God promised a land to the Jews, they will never abandon it come what may. The Arabic speaking, mostly Muslim Palestinian people are already the majority, and will soon become a big majority in the territory between Lebanon and the southern tip where Israel meets the Red Sea (at a town called Eilot), the Golan Heights, the Haifa-Nazareth provinces, and all the land from the Jordan River to the sea (Gilead), that is all of modern Israel. Rationality, economic sense, peace and human rights are to no avail. Is ethnic cleansing in the name of religion not genocide? This is a greater problem than American military backing for Israel. (Drop food parcels to Palestinians and arm Israel to go shoot them when they rush to collect! Dear God what madness has overcome Biden?)

A few weeks ago, I drew attention to Vladimir Putin’s beliefs and values. He in an anti-Leninist and no believer in any kind of socialism. Putin is a proud and self-proclaimed Russian Nationalist. Colombo Telegraph carried a link to his State of the Nation message in my article of March 3 – see (

His Russian Orthodox faith is practised openly. Another example of deep-seated religion drawing its strength from centuries old traditions. The ancient can be profoundly stabilising or overwhelmingly reactionary and wrong.

I wish now to turn to the ubiquitous concern with corruption. It seems to be deep-seated and has spread its tentacles everywhere. In the US it is nowadays taken as normal that corporate grime will accompany politics. Biden’s son is involved in illegal kickbacks. So are Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin etc. What was known as Tammany Hall was not so much a corrupt office or individual as an entire system. Corporate handshakes are the norm in the US. The bipartisan grip of the Israel lobby is more powerful than the Biden Presidency or the official administration.

It was not so always. Presidents who were probably free from corporate graft were peanut-farmer Carter, Ronald Regan, the Kennedy brothers (their peccadillo related to women) and unquestionably old-timers Eisenhower, Harry S. Trueman and FDR. Today however graft is pathological, bipartisan, and accepted as a norm by the public.

It’s not any better in Russia. Putin reputedly has a luxury yacht stashed away somewhere, and an palace complex located on the coast in Russia. Who knows the truth of these allegations but there is little doubt that oligarchs and thieves fattened themselves robbing the Russian people’s properties and public wealth after the Fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991 on Boris Yeltsin’s watch. MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and other “distinguished” American academic and policy institutions theorised over this “authorised” robbery.

What is different about Putin’s Russia is the absence of formal democracy. You call formal democracy a sham? But few Western presidents can get away with the murder of a political opponent, Alexi Novotny for example, at his direction or more likely (Putin is not such a fool) by his henchmen but forcing him to undertake a clumsy cover up. The murder of several anti-Putin Russian opponents overseas surely must be at his direction. So formal democracy does serve a purpose, a lesson that the NPP can learn to its benefit when crafting its election programme.

What about ‘Communist China’ (oxymoronic Socialist Market Economy, I have argued elsewhere). I have inquired from Chinese friends and colleagues and the prevalent view is corruption in the leadership in the sense of kickbacks from corporate interests is not pervasive. Mao, Chou En Lai, Deng Xio Ping, Hu Jinto, Jiang Zemin, Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang were not financially corrupt, nor are there allegations that their spouses or progeny have accumulated wealth in foreign lands. Corruption however is rampant at the microlevel such as sumptuous dishes at fancy restaurants and luxury services at massage parlours. Of course, guanxi, a social network of personal and business relationships is ubiquitous. An embarrassed President Xi Jinping has been forced to crack his whip in an “Anticorruption Drive”.

Returning to my theme of the passage of time (“Ancient Values”) how long does it take for these trends to fructify, how long does a good wine take to mature? The received knowledge is the longer the better. My son declares that a wine costing less than $40 does not need to be decanted – upstart nouveau riche I respond! But how long. It all depends. In the examples of USA, Russia, China, and what we know best our Sri Lanka, is all different and it all depends on particular phenomena. The grip of Sinhala-Buddhist ideology is deep-rooted, the corruption of the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime was quickly exposed and uprooted. Recognising the fair rights of minority communities . . . how long? It is in the hands of leaders – Anura Kumara, Sangha for a Better Sri Lanka, maybe Hon. Karu J – and mainly the Sinhalese people.

Humans are the drivers of environmental degradation well before global warming does its bit. Wildlife, forests and the environment are suffering from depredation due to human activity. ‘Little do we see in nature that is ours’; ‘Nor can the foot feel, being shod’. Would it matter if our species went extinct on this tiny planet? I think not, surely there is intelligent life enough elsewhere in the billions of light years of the universe. But I better stop before you dismiss me as crazy.

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