Confucius meets Saint Valentine

Every Feb 14, I often wonder what Saint Valentine, a Roman Christian who was imprisoned and executed by the Emperor Claudius II in 296, would make of the modern festival of love and romance. Would he be horrified by the crass commercialization of roses, chocolates and strawberries? Would he pity the pressure men face to create the perfect romantic evening for their dates? Or would he rejoice that despite all these twists and turns of cultural history, his name has become synonymous with love, a virtue so universal that everyone across the world can celebrate it, regardless of their religious or cultural background?

The reason why Valentine’s Day has become synonymous with love and romance remains somewhat obscure. One explanation relates not to Valentine himself, but to the date of his festival. Feb 14 marks a turning point in the seasonal calendar. It is a time when the winter is coming to an end, the first flowers appear, trees begin to bud, and the sounds of birds chirping in the countryside mean that spring is in the air. And when spring is in the air, then love can’t be far behind!

There’s a good argument to be made that Valentine’s Day is in fact the Spring Festival of Christian culture. Both festivals celebrate the birth of spring, the rekindling of relationships and family love in the broadest possible sense. In 2010 Spring Festival actually fell on Saint Valentine’s Day, and this year they are just a week apart, inviting a cultural mashup that brings families together and celebrates love and life.

There’s good reason, however, to be cautious about indiscriminately piling up cultural traditions on top of each other. As cultures beg, borrow and steal from each other, people become rightly upset that their traditions run the risk of being debased, watered down or blended into something completely different.

Cultural purists in India argue that the widespread adoption of yoga across the world is an affront to its religious origins. Christians routinely complain that Christmas has no connection anymore to its original religious meaning. And is Saint Patrick anything more than the patron saint of Guinness?

But would you want to live in a world where yoga is just for Hindus, Christmas can only be celebrated by Christians, and the Year of the Pig is only for the descendants of the Yellow Emperor?

I for one reject this cultural chauvinism, but I equally reject the blending of festivals into an indiscriminate hotpot where all the flavors blend into one.

One of the great insights of the Confucian tradition, especially present in the writings of ritual theorists such as Xunzi, is that social order depends on the proper performance of cultural rites. A chief function of culture is to maximize the efficiency and virtue of interpersonal relationships. Ritual conventions such as smiles, handshakes or bows are highly efficient ways to communicate meaning to one another. They are, in effect, mental subroutines that encode a great deal of information in a small gesture. In any complex cultural context, individuals are socialized into a wide range of gestures and habits that facilitate smooth communication among all individuals, effectively making the sum total of the institution greater than the sum of its parts.

But how do we make this work not just within cultures, but across them?

When capital, goods, services and manpower cross the world with remarkable ease, so also do cultural festivals and traditions. This has been true in China since the dawn of the Silk Road as Buddhists, Muslims, Christians and other cultures have entered and engaged with mainstream Han Chinese culture. Each has transformed and adapted to the other, sometimes with remarkable success, and sometimes against all odds.

Who in the Tang Dynasty would ever have thought that Buddhist monasticism could so firmly have entrenched itself as a part of Chinese culture? At that time, conservative Confucians dismissed Buddhism as an anti-Chinese, anti-family values religious culture that encouraged men to leave their families and live in single-sex monasteries, shunning their sacred Confucian duty to propagate the family. Yet over a thousand years later, Buddhism is the dominant religion in China and an accepted part of the Chinese cultural milieu.

I hope that if Confucius and Saint Valentine were ever to meet, they would each appreciate what the other has become: an icon for the power of relationships in human culture. Saint Valentine would surely be delighted at the sight of Chinese families reuniting over Spring Festival, and Confucius would surely be delighted at the celebration of love at the heart of the human experience. I for one am glad to celebrate both.

James Miller is a professor of humanities at Duke Kunshan University.