Ritual or propriety are the classical interpertations of "li." I believe many Americans have a difficult time seeing value in rituals. I have found a very good discription of the benefits of ritual in "The Happiness Hypothesis" by Jonathan Haidt (p.229):
"You can't just invent a good ritual through reasoning about symbolism. You need a tradition within which the symbols are embedded, and you need to invoke bodily feelings that have some appropriate associations. Then you need a community to endorse and practice it over time. To the extent that a community has many rituals that cohere across the three levels, people in the community are likely to feel themselves connected to the community and its traditions. If the community also offers guidance on how to live and what is of value, then people are unlikely to wonder about the question of purpose within life. Meaning and purpose simply emerge from the coherence, and people can get on with the purpose of living."
That paragraph can use a little explanation. His "three levels" are three levels describing humanity: the physical, the psychological, and the sociocultural (p. 227).
The "question of purpose within life" is something of personal importance to the author. In his youth he suffered existential angst and questioned the "meaning of life." As an adult he has refined the question of the meaning of life from "What is the meaning of life" to "Tell me something enlightening about life" and and two sub-questions: (1) "What is the purpose for which human beings were placed on earth? Why are we here?" and (2) "How ought I to live? What should I do to have a good, happy, fulfilling, and meaningful life?"
Confucianism certainly contributes to helping us answer that second sub-question in a flexible, non-dogmatic way.
I believe Jonathan Haidt would appreciate Confucianism if he studied it. So many of his studies have led him to Confucian ideas. He has developed a Confucian understanding of ritual!
What he has not mentioned is how ritual strengthens community. He still has an individualistic view, not a communitarian view.
Robert
