Chinese Nationalism – Rational; Taiwanese Nationalism – Irrational?

Taiwanese subservience to communist China is rational; Taiwanese independence is IRRATIONAL.  How do I know this?  ‘Cause somebody from the pro-unification media said so, that’s how!

…an independence movement is not rational.  It is emotional.  That is not easily understood by Americans or Englishmen or Frenchmen, who have little experience of a people aspiring for independence.  Yes, the Americans fought a long war of independence against England, but their yearning for independence was totally different from, let’s say, the Diaspora Israelis, the Basques in Spain and France, Tamils in Sri Lanka, and the people of Taiwan…

You mean, pre-revolutionary Americans sat around and debated the pros and cons of their independence dispassionately, like Vulcans?  And today’s Taiwanese never look at Tibetans being gunned down in the snow, and QUITE RATIONALLY ask, why would we ever want to be a part of THAT?

Please.

What the columnist here doesn’t realize is that rationality applies only to means, not to ends – to how we achieve our goals, not to our goals themselves.  Steven Landsburg gives an example of this on pages 10-11 of his book, The Armchair Economist:

When we assume that people are rational, we emphatically do not assume anything about their preferences.  De gustabus non est disputandum – there’s no accounting for taste – is one of the economist’s slogans.  There is an appalling population of otherwise literate adults who prefer the poetry of Rod McKuen to that of William Butler Yeats.  We do not pronounce them irrational.  Some McKuen lovers might purchase a volume of Yeats with no intention of reading it, because it looks nice on the coffee table or impresses their more sophisticated friends.  We still do not pronounce them irrational.  When we assert that people are rational, we assert only this:  That by and large, a man who wants to read the poetry of Rod McKuen, and who does not care how his books look on the table, and who feels no urge to deceive his friends about his literary tastes, and has no other good reason to buy the collected works of Yeats, will not go out and buy the collected works of Yeats.  And most of the time, this is true.

By the same token, the desire of some Taiwanese to be a part of a Greater Chinese Empire is no more rational or irrational than the desire of the majority to be independent.  Those are merely preferences – obviously with far more reaching consequences than preferring McKuen over Yeats – but preferences nonetheless.  If some Taiwanese block a weapons package for their country over 60 times over two years, they are not behaving irrationally – provided that their goal is for Taiwan to capitulate to communist China.*  At the same time, it is entirely rational for OTHER Taiwanese to doggedly attempt to pass that same weapons package in the face of insurmountable odds – provided that their goal is to keep Taiwan independent.  In short, rationality is nothing more than an amoral tool (that’s amoral, not immoral!) for achieving one’s goals, whether those goals be good or bad.

* We can add extra wrinkles to the argument, as Landsburg has done.  Like McKuen lovers who buy Yeats, some Taiwanese capitulationists might indeed vote for weapons to defend their country because they value the maintenance of their democracy (or they fear of being sent to re-education camps) more than their desire to be part of a Greater China.  Such a vote would not be irrational.  But if a capitulationist was uninterested in keeping democracy alive in Taiwan, and if he felt confident that he wouldn’t be sent to a re-education camp, and if he wanted to be part of Greater China, then we would not expect him to vote in favor of a weapons package for Taiwan.  And this rational and completely predictable response is, of course, what we have witnessed from the KMT over the past 2 years or so.