Chapter 9: Harmony but Not Sameness: The Inclusive Leadership Style of the Chinese Profound Persons

Former US Vice-President Albert Gore (2013) blamed the tradition of rationalist dichotomy for today’s leadership crisis. He claimed that, with this cultural legacy, people in the West tend to separate the mind from body, nature from human being, and focus their attention on “ever narrower slices of the whole” while neglecting the whole (2013, p. xxi). He called on leaders to develop a global mind in order to think freshly and reclaim the control of our human destiny in the new area.

Similarly, the Confucian philosopher Tu Weiming (1998) argued that all the wicked problems of today are genetically connected with the “Enlightenment mentality,” which holds that human history follows a linear progression from religion to philosophy to science (rationality) (p. 85). This prevailing ideology not only breeds the modern values such as liberty, individuality, and the rule of law but also causes “sharp difference, severe differentiation, drastic demarcation, thunderous dissonance, and outright discrimination” (Tu, 1998, p. 89). Tu and Ikeda (2011) urged that Enlightenment mentality be reoriented with new views of humanity so that the human race can shake off the crises.