Worn-out Shoes and Exile

Reading a translation of the Chinese social anthropologist Fei Xiaotong’s Xiangtu Zhongguo, an analysis of the foundations of Chinese society, I came across his discussion of the different conceptions of justice and morality in the West and China. In it he quoted the following extract of Mencius:

Tao Ying asked, “When Shun was emperor and Gaoyao was the judge, if Shun’s father had killed a man, what should have happened?” Mencius said, “Gaoyao would have arrested him.” “In that case, would Shun not have tried to stop
it?”
“How could Shun have stopped it? Gaoyao would have had the authority to deal with the matter.” “Then what would Shun have done?” “Shun would have regarded abandoning the empire as throwing away a worn-out shoe. He would have secretly carried the old man on his back and fled to the edge of the sea. He would have lived there all his life happily and forgotten all about the empire.”

Fei’s focus is the precedence in China of the personal relationship over the public one. But I think this passage also contains a wonderful image of the casting-off of power, with its echoes of Aeneas carrying Anchises on his back from the ruins of their city state. Shun will live on the margin, the margin of the sea and land; beyond the reach of the state, beyond the idea of a state. We are very used to the idea of a universal justice, even when its mechanisms, in The Hague for example, are somewhat faulty. The light of justice must shine in all the dark corners of the world. The idea that one could avoid the state’s pursuit of justice by removing oneself to a watery, marginal place at the edge of that state, after which the state would leave you in peace, is now very foreign to us.

The entire world, save perhaps Antarctica, is now locked in to the map lines of states. True exile is now impossible. Of course, the vagaries of extradition laws mean that you could probably find a country which wouldn’t send you back, but you would still be bound by the state. What Mencius’ piece suggests is the existence of liminal, state-less areas: marshes, seas, mountains, with which the state does not concern itself. Only there would an exile from power, responsibility, and the state, be truly free.