ABSTRACT
This chapter explores modernity as both a historical reality and a conceptual framework, and argues that Confucian East Asia helps to identify three sets of issues. These are traditions in the modernizing process, the relevance of non-Western civilizations to the self-understanding of the modern West, and the global significance of local knowledge. The Confucian insistence on the importance of equality rather than freedom, sympathy rather than rationality, civility rather than law, duty rather than rights, and human-relatedness rather than individualism may appear to be diametrically opposed to the value-orientation of the Enlightenment. It is unsurprising that the "Asian values" advocated by political leaders such as Lee Kwang Yew and Mahatir often provoke strong cynical reactions in the West. The Confucian tradition, marginalized as a distant echo of the feudal past, is forever severed from its imperial institutional base, but has yet kept its grounding in an agriculture-based economy, family-centered social structure, and paternalistic polity.
