Yet at the same time Puett was not simply crying “wolf”. A disturbingly large number of scholars have made generalizations that were not simply misleading in their consequences, but have had racist, or “orientalist” undertones, or, more commonly, have just been plain flat-out wrong. To take only a few more egregious examples, although not a trained sinologist, Kant studied China and lectured on Chinese thought in his geography classes including statements that Confucius taught nothing but manners for the elite, and referred to the views of the Daodejing as “the monster system of Laotse”; generalizing his remarks to “a concept of virtue and morality never entered the heads of the Chinese” (Ching 1978: 168–69). These examples could be multiplied many times over, and are not relics from the past:  