For Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, the problems of modern moral theory emerge as ‘the product of the failure of the Enlightenment project’. On the one hand, the individual moral agent, freed from hierarchy and teleology, is now conceived as sovereign; on the other, ‘the inherited, if partially transformed, rules of morality’ have lost their older, teleological character, not to mention their ancient categorical character as expressions of divine law. Unless these rules can be found some new status—‘one which would make appeal to them rational’—then, the Scottish philosopher argues, ‘appeal to them will indeed appear as a mere instrument of individual desire and will.’footnote¹

Failure of the Enlightenment project? That is the clearest message of the covid-19 catastrophe. The buckling of the direct institutional heirs of Hobbes, Locke and Montesquieu, along with the manifest collapse in the us and uk of the core functions of the state—providing for the security of persons and property—form a telling contrast today with the East Asian polities that trace their intellectual heritage to a different set of thinkers. It is not good enough to argue that the crisis is ‘unprecedented’; there are plenty of precedents—sars, hiv, Ebola, mers, not to mention smallpox, yellow fever and bubonic plague. Washington and London had weeks of explicit warnings about the outbreak, and an array of examples to follow, yet pleas from epidemiologists went unheard. Nothing was done to stockpile equipment and, as a result, tens of thousands of avoidable deaths will follow. Nor can one simply cry, ‘Trump! Trump!’, as if Trump had arisen from nowhere to hijack previously functional political machinery. The very fact that an ignorant boor of a carnival barker could seize the reins of power is a damning indictment of the overall political order.

China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore: these are the six polities juxtaposed to the us and uk as places that got it right. Though we don’t know for sure, it seems likely that covid-19 originated in Wuhan, where wild animals jammed together in wet markets, catering to an enthusiasm for eating exotic creatures, permitted a bat virus to jump via an intermediate vector to human hosts. It had happened before (vide sars). But this time the virus broke out in the run-up to a Lunar New Year celebration that saw millions of Chinese travelling—domestically and internationally—and local officials determined to suppress bad news. What we know for certain is that the virus spiralled out of control before the leadership in Beijing had grasped what was happening. By then it was too late to prevent widespread infection in Wuhan’s Hubei province or to confine the epidemic, which soon spread beyond the country’s borders. But once the severity of the situation became apparent, the Chinese government took action, locked down the province and imposed drastic measures nationwide—measures that appear to have worked for the time being, with new cases slowed to a trickle.

The responses varied slightly in other ‘successful’ polities. South Korea implemented immediate and widespread testing, while Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong employed a mixture of social and border controls, testing and exhortation—so perhaps draconian shutdowns are not the only solution. To be sure, Japan is something of an outlier. At the time of writing, it has resorted neither to Beijing-style authoritarian restrictions nor to the Korean ubiquitous-testing model, and its pleas for people to observe social distancing have fallen partly on deaf ears. It’s possible that Japan’s social practices—bowing rather than hand-shaking, donning of masks at the first sign of a sniffle—along with ‘just-enough’ control measures, which include shutting down schools and prohibiting large gatherings, on top of earlier preparations to head off an anticipated flu epidemic, helped to prevent things from reaching critical mass. Perhaps numbers were suppressed in a vain attempt to keep the 2020 Olympics on-track and stop people from flooding hospitals; or Japan may be sitting on an Italy-like time bomb that has yet to explode. But for now, the country seems to count as one of the polities that suffered early exposure but managed to bring the situation under control.

Which leads to a perplexing question: what do the successful polities have in common? It is clearly not unanimity of response. Nor is it a defining political feature: China and Singapore are one-party dictatorships, China unabashedly so; Singapore has the trappings of parliamentary democracy, but woe betide anyone deemed a threat to its rulers. Hong Kong is slowly being digested by Beijing—it does have a genuine opposition, but its days are probably numbered, alas. South Korea and Taiwan, by contrast, are liberal democracies where power changes hands in relatively free elections, while Japan lies somewhere in the middle: in practice it is a one-party state, but—unlike in Singapore and China—opponents of the ruling party are not hounded into bankruptcy, while at present academics, writers and gadfly publications risk nothing more than marginalization by taking potshots at the political elite.footnote²

Here MacIntyre’s line of thinking provides a clue that might steer our analysis. To be sure, his relevance to this question is inadvertent—After Virtue contains only one passing reference to East Asia, in a trenchant aside on the Noh drama—but it is worth teasing out anyway. MacIntyre famously suggests that Western moral—and, by implication, political—language is grounded in a deep structure that has collapsed. Furthermore, our memory of the collapse—and with it the underlying meanings of the words and concepts we use to discuss political and moral reality—has largely vanished. We bandy about terms like ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’, but we have forgotten what they mean.

What does this have to do with the rapid coronavirus response in Seoul and Singapore, as opposed to the dithering in Washington and London? What makes Asia’s elites, if not less prone to corruption, then at least more attuned to reality—better able to hear bad news and act on it? Among other things—and this is where digging through the unacknowledged assumptions that prop up distinct political orders can be helpful—the ‘successful’ East and Southeast Asian polities all share a Confucian political heritage. This doesn’t mean that aspirants for membership in today’s ruling elites must submit sterling examples of the Eight-Legged Essay, the requirement for entry into the mandarinate of the Song, Ming and Qing dynasties, which demonstrated mastery of the Confucian classics. Those seeking advancement in China’s Ministry of Commerce spend about as much time studying Mencius and Zhu Xi as their counterparts at the Federal Reserve spend reading Aristotle and Aquinas. The Confucian institutions that could once be found in the Forbidden City or the shogun’s Edo have long since been displaced by the outward trappings of a Leninist state, or in Japan’s case by British parliamentary-monarchy forms, American constitutional notions and bureaucratic models derived from 19th-century continental Europe. Just as Western political structures are no longer justified through revelation and natural law, explicit links between East Asian politics and the Confucian tradition have vanished. Indeed, Confucianism was seen as a major ideological obstacle by modernizers and revolutionaries in East Asia, just as Voltaire had once commanded, ‘Écrasez l’infâme!’