My Yale Students’ Turn: Sunzi, Laozi, and Zhuangzi as Solutions to Today's Financial Crisis

A year ago my Yale colleague Harold Bloom, in his op-ed in The New York Times (entitled “Out of Panic, Self- Reliance”) pointed out the striking similarities between the financial crashes of 1837 and 1929, and also 2008. He noted that in 1837 the great American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson was so “electrified” by the financial storms that he proposed “self-reliance” as the solution to the American people at the time. Emerson felt that his generation was “bankrupt of principles and hope, as of property” and so he hoped that all Americans would use the chance to recover their traditional value of self-reliance. Seeing a recurrence of the great depression in 2008, Bloom strongly urged today's new American president to find a similar solution to the economic crisis.My Yale students, however, do not believe that Emerson, the 19th century Concord philosopher, has the solution for our financial crisis in today's global age. Instead, my students look to the Eastern civilization for guidance, thinking that it is time for the West to learn from the intuitive mind of the East.In my course on Sunzi, Laozi, and Zhuangzi last semester, our main topic of discussion naturally focused on the applicability of these ancient Chinese thoughts to modern issues. Coincidentally the students in my class fall into 3 groups: (1) those who apply Sunzi's pragmatic military advice to today's economic issues, (2) those who believe in Zhuangzi's idealistic Daoism and prefer a solution that is beyond the immediate, and (3) those who mediate between the first two positions, while drawing their ideas largely from Laozi.It is the purpose of this paper to sum up how my Yale students, in these three different (but complementary) groups, applied the ancient Chinese philosophers and their texts to a diverse range of contemporary issues--especially as a response to today's financial crisis.