Environmental activist and See Through Network founder Robert Stern, AKA SternWriter, reflects on what 60 years on our planet and 40 years reflecting on the philosophy of Confucius have taught him about helping Unwilling Inactivists speed up carbon drawdown

Like Confucius, SternWriter is a big fan of human civilisation. Unlike Confucius, he was born as the global impact of humanity’s fossil fuel addiction began to shape our planet’s atmosphere, the environment we live in, and our species’ odds of long-term survival. In this article, he (SternWriter) reflects on what his six decades on the planet, four decades of familiarity with an ancient Chinese philosopher, and three decades covering human-induced climate change, have taught him about our capacity for self-harm, and chances of reverting to a sustainable relationship with Earth.

Confucius he say, ‘It’s the Lunyu’

As a Wood Snake, I’m now embarking on my sixth duodenary cycle, which is to say I’ve turned sixty.

The year I turned twenty, I was studying Chinese literature. That was the year I was introduced to a 2,500-year-old collection of thoughts called 論語 (‘lunyu’ or ‘selected sayings’), first as an accidental tourist, then in a classroom. 

Even as a 20-year-old born the year Malcolm X was assassinated, I’d heard of ‘The Analects of Confucius’, the name by which the Lunyu is known to the English-speaking world. Like most people, I couldn’t have told you what ‘analects’ meant, but when I looked it up, it turned out to be…’selected sayings’.

For everyone in my 3rd-year Classical Chinese class at Edinburgh University, Confucius was both familiar and mysterious. We’d all grown up telling jokes with ‘Confucius, he say…’ as a punchline (‘Confucius he say, man who have last laugh, not get joke‘ etc.). But none of us could have quoted a single authentic Confucian saying.

When I turned 20, I was studying in China. 1985 was the year China started opening up internal travel to both Chinese citizens, and foreign students. For no particular reason other than it was now possible, I resolved to climb China’s Five Holy Mountains. This largely involved ascending stone steps worn over millennia by pilgrims, so was more of a logistical than a physical challenge for a fit young man.

The Eastern Holy Mountain, Tai Shan, was in Shandong Province. En route, I passed through the nearby town of Qufu. I soon realised it was Confucius’ birthplace – even in 1985, it was a kind of Confucian theme park, with statues and museums devoted to the great local hero, and everything named after him.

There I learned the Chinese name for The Analects, and clocked that ‘Confucius’ was a Latinised version of its author’s Chinese family name, 孔 (‘Kong’), meaning ‘hole’. In China, Confucius was known as 孔子, ‘kongzi’,  or ‘Master Kong’. 

Back in the classroom, some of us attempted further jokes about ‘King Kong’, before having our pronunciation corrected. The vowel in ‘Kong’ is like the ‘u’ in ‘full’, not the ‘o’ in ‘bong’. Confucius he say, not so funny.

Even for me at that point, the name ’Confucius’ served as little more than a generic term for ‘ancient Oriental wisdom.’ Most Westerners, pushed to describe Confucius’ appearance, would describe a Chinese scholar with long black robes and a long white beard, looking inscrutable. 

As for what Confucius’ actual wisdom might have been – not a clue. If I’d had to answer an essay question on Confucianism, I’d have had to resort to dimly-remembered fortune cookie platitudes, like anyone else.

The ignorance is mutual, incidentally. Chinese schoolkids use ‘Shakespeare’ as a punchline for playground jokes. They too can picture The Bard’s bald head and steady gaze. They too would struggle to tell you anything substantial about his actual work.

There aren’t many such cross-cultural intellectual superstars. Later that year, back at Edinburgh University, when my Classical Chinese module kicked off with the Lunyu, I began to understand why his name still reverberates down generations.

And why Confucius’ ancient Oriental wisdom still echoes in my own head four, decades on.

Two Literary Legends

Like English speakers quoting Shakespeare in everyday speech, native Chinese speakers can’t help quoting Confucius whenever they open their mouths. 

It’s usually inadvertent, so embedded have their sayings become in their respective languages, but just as British (or Canadian, or Ugandan) schoolchildren can quote some Shakespeare on demand, Chinese (or Korean, or Singaporean) schoolchildren can quote freely from the Lunyu.

As likely as not, they’ll recite Analect 2.4, the passage in the image above.

吾十有五而志于学，(wu shi you we er zhi yu xue)

三十而立，(san shi er li)

四十而不惑，(si shi er bu huo)

五十而知天命，(wu shi er zhi tian ming)

六十而耳顺，(liu shi er er shun)

七十而从心所欲，不逾矩。(qi shi er cong xin suo yu, bu yuju)

These 38 characters are as familiar to Chinese-speakers as the ‘seven ages of man’ speech Shakespeare put in Jaques’ mouth, in As You Like It (‘All the world’s a stage…’), is to English speakers. Only pithier.

A standard translation goes something like:

“At fifteen my heart was set on learning,

at thirty I stood firm,

at forty I had no more doubts,

at fifty I knew the will of heaven,

at sixty my ear was obedient,

at seventy I could follow my heart’s desire without overstepping the boundaries of what was right.”

But it’s not quite as simple as that.

The complexity is only partly due to linguistics. The rest is interpretation, and the psyche of the contemporary reader, not the intention of the black-robed, inscrutable author.

I enter my sixth duodenary cycle, the bit I’m increasingly interested in is all to do with Homo sapiens evolved storytelling preferences.

More specifically, the behavioural psychology that triggers us from our default state of inaction into acting, and the cognitive dissonance that stops us by letting our hearts rule our heads. Much more scrutable.

Turning 20

Faced with the original Lunyu text, I first had to get past the language barrier.

As I started to scratch the surface of classical Chinese’s richness of allusion, density of meaning, and intrinsic poetry, I realised that translating it f was a lot like decoding a crossword puzzle. 

At the time, my reading language level was roughly that of a below-average Chinese high-school student. That is to say, reading the Lunyu was just as hard for me as a Western university student as it was for a teenage native speaker of modern Chinese. 

Which, it turned out, was quite hard.

Each Chinese character’s grammatical function depends on where it comes in the sentence. As classical Chinese has no punctuation (can you spot any full stops, commas, speech marks etc. in the image?), you can only infer whether a character is a noun, verb, adjective, adverb etc. from context. Get the first part of speech wrong, and you can mangle the rest of the sentence into technically plausible nonsense.

Getting the grammar is only the first obstacle to understanding Confucius’s ancient Oriental wisdom. It eliminates one layer of possible ‘wrong’ readings, but still leaves a multitude of plausible ‘right’ interpretations because each character can have multiple core meanings. 

This is why, when I ‘cheated’ by looking up English translations by great Western scholars in search of the ‘correct’ answer, they were all different. 

Even more alarmingly, Chinese textbooks were no more helpful. Classical Chinese is like Latin for contemporary Chinese speakers – you can catch the drift, but any proper understanding requires study. Modern colloquial Chinese ‘translations’ of Analect 2.4, I discovered, were as unhelpfully diverse in resolving this Confucian confusion as translations into foreign languages.

Linguistically, this was the result of different scholars giving different weights to the different possible core meanings of each character. The results could all be grammatically plausible, but different to the point of being mutually contradictory.  

So even as I struggled to understand even their ‘basic’ meaning as a 20-year-old student, the Lunyu hinted at a deeper truth.

Each interpretation of The Analects, revealed as much about the historical and political context of each translator, Chinese or Western, as the intentions of Confucius.

Just as interpretations of Biblical tenets, like the Ten Commandments, literally ‘carved in stone’, shifted as centuries passed, societies changed, and paradigms shifted, the Lunyu was as much mirror as canonical truth. Each reader’s understanding of the Lunyu reveals as much about their own prejudices and preferences as about those of Confucius himself.

Historical context was just as important for the reader, therefore, as for the black-robed author. Confucius wrote the Lunyu amid the tumult of the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 BCE), as the Zhou dynasty was crumbling into warring regional states, to help good leaders restore order. But what world does the translator inhabit, and what lenses distort their vision?

At 20, maybe I had less life experience to distort my view, or may have been more ignorant of the distortions we’re all born with.

Either way, the deeper I scratched beneath the Lunyu’s surface, the more the tantalizing its ambiguous appeal became.

After all, at this point I was closer to 15 than to 30, and it was certainly true that my heart was set on learning, 

Maybe that Confucius bloke was onto something.

As my own life unfolded, I’d return to this passage in the Lunyu, checking in every decade to check up on the ‘wisdom’ of  that Confucius bloke.

Turning 30

At thirty, after a false start trading textiles for a Japanese global trading company, I’d established a career as a TV news journalist. 

I had no qualifications beyond my formal office Japanese language skills, but after helping ABC News cover the 1992 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) conference, held in Kyoto, got my first TV job as an ‘Associate Producer the ABC News Tokyo Bureau.

As I celebrated my 30th birthday, camping in Death Valley, I’d been headhunted by CNBC Asia in Hong Kong. I’d now be in front of the lens, presenting the news, fronting business news features, and reporting on 1990s China as NBC Asia’s Shanghai Bureau Chief, then CNN Beijing Bureau Producer/Reporter.

At 30, I’d become an established, respected, news journalist. 

I stood firm. Check.

Turning 40

At forty, I was back in my native UK with two young children, having cracked two challenges. 

First challenge was how to stay in TV journalism while still being a present father to my two young daughters. 

I got a great gig co-presenting a Chinese language game show. I was told 100 million Chinese had seen it, but it proved to be a one-off.

The worlds of news and documentary turned out to overlap much less than I’d hoped, but I’d managed to find a way to switch from the former’s 5am-airport-dash thrills to the latter’s relatively sedate pace. I was still telling visual stories, but with a better work-life balance.

Challenge number two was a different kind of nourishment. How could I feed a family while still telling the kind of stories I wanted to tell?

After struggling to enter the sanctum of documentary filmmakers, I was dismayed to discover  that hardly any of my new colleagues actually earned a living from telling the stories they wanted. 

They straddled the worlds of self-financed ‘passion projects’ that might win awards but were vanishingly unlikely to make any money, and ‘mortgage-paying work’, usually commercials or reality TV. 

When it came to broadcast documentaries, supply turned out to far outstripped demand, so the buyers called all the shots, and TV didn’t think the public was that interested in environmental stories.

But speaking broadcast-level Japanese narrowed the supply considerably, earning me a nice niche making docs about Europe for Japanese public television. 

This afforded me far more discretion about making the kind of films I wanted, which, increasingly, were on environmental themes.

I had no more doubts. Check.

Turning 50

At fifty, I was in a deep depression. 

Japanese public broadcasting’s nourishing teat had dried up, as Japan became more introspective following the Fukushima environmental disaster.

Early adoption of online crowdfunding had briefly promised a possible path to getting paid to make documentaries about subjects I liked, but this had turned out to be a false dawn, once everyone else had cottoned on.

After a second crowdfunding effort had proved much harder than expected, the third – on a sustainable theme closer to my heart than innovative ukulele orchestras world tours, failed utterly.

My daughters were doing fine and I’d paid enough attention to the financial experts I interviewed in the 90s to have invested wisely, so earning money wasn’t so much the issue, as finding a way to get anyone to listen to the stories I wanted to tell. 

Those stories were by now almost exclusively environmental. Climate, a eccentric obsession when I turned 20, was clearly an existential crisis by the time I turned 50. My efforts to get people to do something about it within the constraints of feeding a family, had fallen on deaf ears.

Now, it seemed, I couldn’t even find any deaf ears.

I knew the will of heaven. Bit of a stretch, but in a way, check, if the ‘will of heaven’ means ‘things change and you have to change with them’.

Turning 60

The 60 line is the most enigmatic of this brief, but famous Lunyu passage.

Like all Confucius’ sayings, it’s open to many different interpretations in Chinese, and hence English translations, but 六十而耳顺 is particularly challenging.

The first three characters, 六十而, are an unambiguous set up for the punchline, meaning  ‘at the age of 60 then…’.

Modern disputes about what 耳顺 (er shun) means, make this the most  debated of all the lines of this Analect. 

When I first encountered the Lunyu as a 20-year-old student, they taught me that interpretations reveal as much about the scholars as they do about Confucius’s own intent.

Now, however, a Wood Snake embarked on my sixth duodenary cycle, I can bring the benefits of my own 40 years of life experience.

Now I’ve abandoned earning of living for full-time storytelling designed to nudge Unwilling Inactivists into speeding up carbon drawdown, what more can I read into these two characters?

The first character 耳 means ‘ear’. It shares similar allegorical/metaphorical connotations to ‘ear’ in English, but its core meaning is unambiguous. So far so good.

顺, however, is much trickier.

Mathew’s, the standard Classical Chinese-English dictionary, gives three root meanings:

1) Favourable; prosperous

2) To obey; to agree

3) In accordance with; to go with

Quite a spread, hence a wide variety of possible translations.

Ask ChatGPT to translate this line, and it comes up with:

“At sixty, I was able to accept what I heard.”
or more interpretively:
“At sixty, I accepted things without resistance.”
“At sixty, I could listen and understand without judgment.”

All perfectly plausible and defensible translations, requiring eight, five, and seven English words to nail down what Confucius meant by the two characters 耳顺.

Google Translate, if you’re curious, translates the line as:

Sixty-one ear.

To Google’s credit, this matches the original’s pithiness, but falls somewhat short it terms of sophistication…

What of James Legge, the great Victorian-era Sinologist and Oxford University’s first-ever Professor of Chinese? Legge took on the task of translating all China’s major religious and philosophical canonical texts. When it came to the 60-year line in Analects 2.4, Legge reckoned an adequate rendition required no fewer than eleven English words:

At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth.

We can only speculate what an Aberdonian who learned Chinese as a missionary, and had to explain to his Chinese colleagues the justification for the Opium Wars (which he ardently opposed), may have had in mind when choosing these words.

Which in turn prove the more profound point that we hear what we want to hear – which happens to relate to my personal favourite interpretation of Confucius in relation to climate activism.

But before we get to that, I should probably offer my own favoured translation of 六十而耳顺:

‘at sixty, my ear was attuned’.

Attuning Ears

I like this translation because it cleaves close enough to the classical Chinese characters’ core meanings, while still preserving enough ambiguity to intrigue and provoke. 

Attuned to what?

To be clear, readers of The Analects 2,500 years ago in Shandong Province, would probably have been perfectly clear that Confucius meant ‘attuned to the moral code in the rest of The Analects’.  This was so obvious it didn’t need stating.

But The Analects are no longer a practical political handbook to restoring a stable political hierarchy during a period when China had descended into warlordism. Fortunately.

The Lunyu has become a kind of moral code/philosophy, with millennia of different refractions to suit virtually anyone’s personal taste. 

Within a couple of centuries, Mencius’ ‘legalistic’ interpretation of Confucianism was vying with Xunzi’s ‘moralistic’ take.

These were just the opening volleys of a still-active battle to claim the true meaning of Confucianism. Mencius vs Xunzi were the first of innumerable ‘schools’ of neo-Confucianism, covering a ludicrously broad spectrum from touchy-feely Daoist versions to hard-core justifications for modern autocracy.

Today, China calls its network of Chinese language and culture schools embedded in foreign universities 孔子学院, or ‘Confucius Institutes’, which perfectly reflect this long-standing game of using Confucius as a political football.

To China, Confucius Institutes are:

non-profit educational institutions jointly established by Chinese and overseas partner institutions based on principles of mutual respect, friendly consultation, equality and mutual benefit.

To wary foreign academics, they’re:

a way for Beijing to spread propaganda under the guise of teaching, interfere with free speech on campuses and even to spy on students.

What’s Right

So what have my 40-year-association with this 2,500-year-old inscrutable font of ancient Chinese wisdom, combined with what I’ve observed in my own 60 years on our rapidly-changing planet, taught me?

Like Confucius’ contemporary Sunzi’s ‘Art of War’ or Macchiavelli’s ‘The Prince’ two millennia later, time has eroded Confucius’ original historical context, but added rich layers of subsequent re-interpretation. 

Each passing century liberates us to adapt The Analects to our own time, place, and preoccupations.

Which is why, as I turn 60, I not only favour the ‘ear is attuned’ translation, but would like to believe that my ear is, indeed attuned.

This translation leaves space for us to fill in the gaps ourselves, two and half millennia after a ‘transmitter who invented nothing’ (as Confucius describes himself in The Analects) composed these 38 characters, on the other side of the planet.

But it also invites us to articulate how we fill in the gaps.

So here’s my own ear-based wisdom, for what it’s worth, based on my own life journey to date, prejudices and preoccupations, for what they’re worth.

The day I was born there were 320 parts-per-million of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere.  Today, as I turn 60, there are 427.  What has this taught me?

‘Most people don’t listen most of the time, 

but we’re all heroes of our own stories. 

To move people from inaction, 

first open their ears’.

Next task, translate this into classical Chinese before I turn 70, and risk overstepping the boundaries of what was right.

We could all do with not overstepping boundaries of what’s right.