Pointless video post – ‘Conspiracy in Mind’ by Communic

I’ll be the first to admit that Communic’s brand of extreme progressive metal is something of an acquired taste and may take a couple of listens to really get into; but ‘Conspiracy in Mind’ is really nothing less than brilliant. If I were to sum up the sound here in a single word, ‘haunting’ would be a good one: Oddleif’s melancholy wails and forbidding baritone interludes ride upon a stripped-down thrash riff which can turn either into a sudden stop or a calm, almost peaceful melodic interlude. The bridge is breathtaking; epic, even, as it reincorporates both the melodic and the thrashy elements toward the close. Powerful song indeed.

Blessed Charles, martyr for God and his Church, pray with us

This day, three hundred and sixty-three years past, was a dark day in English history – the regicide and martyrdom, at the hands of an illegal and unconstitutional kangaroo court, of King Charles I, the only person ever to be sainted by the Church of England. King Charles made a number of enemies in his support for such clergymen as Richard Montagu, who attacked the anti-humanist doctrinal excesses of the non-Conformists of his time (including the ideas that the mass of humanity was predestined for eternal torment whilst only a select few were assured places in heaven), as well as William Laud, who was a persistent and outspoken advocate on behalf of the legal and economic rights of tenant and smallholding farmers, against the arrogant and inhumane practice of enclosure. Though his enemies attacked King Charles as an overbearing absolutist, the point should be made very clearly that each of his actions – including the invocation of the feudal privileges of the monarch to the service and financial support of the landed classes – was very much in line with the constitutional balance between the rights of Parliament and the privileges of the monarch. Indeed, when Charles was defeated and dragged before the ‘court’ which ultimately took his life, his own defence was perfectly aligned with the principles of constitutional government, as David Lindsay notes here:

But didn’t Charles I believe in the Divine Right of Kings? No, he did not. Or at least he certainly expressed no such view at his grotesque “trial” pursuant to a Bill of Attainder, and before 80 of his carefully selected parliamentary and military enemies under a second-rate lawyer, John Bradshaw, created “Lord President” because all the proper judges had fled London rather than have anything to do with the wretched proceedings.

There, Charles declared repeatedly that, by denying the authority of the “court” to try him, he was simply upholding the law as it then existed, including the liberties of the English people and the parliamentary institutions of the English State. No law permitted the trial of the monarch, he argued. On the contrary, the law of treason then in force provided for exactly the opposite, namely that any attack on the monarch’s person was itself an offence. Simply as a matter of fact, he was right.

And the subsequent behaviour of the Cromwellian regime fully vindicated him.

And this pattern has held true for many a regime which followed. The ideological heirs of the roundhead landlords and merchants who ended up executing the sainted king – these Parliamentarians who would not put up with a king who exercised his traditional prerogatives to marry a faithful Catholic wife, to appoint sensible bishops and to tax the wealthy, but who welcomed an unbridled dictator in his stead – did not express any qualms about upholding oppressive and dictatorial regimes in Africa or Latin America or Asia, so long as those regimes posed no threat to their continued economic and political hegemony. King Charles I as a saint of the English Church could very well be the patron in Heaven of such constitutionally legitimate leaders as Mohammad Mosaddegh and Salvador Allende, and of such faithful reformers as have had to struggle against the dictatorial regimes which replaced them, without partaking of the militarist and materialist ideology which painted itself as the only alternative.

Blessed Charles, please continue to pray for us now.

WaPo: Chinese liberals fail history

In a small village in Switzerland which serves as host to an organisation dedicated solely to the interests of the increasingly detached (in every possible sense of the word) global financial and economic elites, the Chinese ‘reform’ clique present (including Hu Shuli and Xu Xiaonian) expressed some very… shall we say naïve views of the history of the nation a ways north of them, as well as of their own. They attempted to paint their regime as inherently violent and unstable by casting the roots of their government back to… Otto von Bismarck.

Yes, you read that right. The very same Otto who under his chancellorship dedicated himself to picking up the pieces of the Concert of Europe which had been scattered in the revolutions of 1848 (and as a result gave Europe 20 years of peace), even to the point of his being hounded out of office by a militarist young Kaiser Wilhelm II; the very same Otto who devoted himself to building a social order which could resist both the extremes of laisser-faire economic liberalism and totalitarian communism (and made enemies of the partizans of both ideologies); the very same Otto who, in the effort to do so, built up a very enviable welfare state and an increasingly prosperous Germany in the attempt to bridge class strife and contain the extremes of German and Slavic hypernationalism. Okay, perhaps there are quite a few parallels to be made here, but the Chinese liberals here are engaging in some very specious history in order to advance their own questionable ideology at home.

State capitalism is not something new. When Bismarck invented this idea in 1870 it gave Germany impressive performance over the main superpower of the time, Great Britain… But 20 years later, it was the First World War.

That’s right, Xu Xiaonian apparently blames Otto von Bismarck for the First World War, in spite of the fact that the First World War was the direct result of the ‘badly brought-up boy’ responsible for von Bismarck’s resignation disregarding practically all of the careful, measured foreign policy advice given to him by von Bismarck and treading on various British and Russian toes in the process. Oh, and some South Slavic assassin might have had something to do with it, too. But that’s actually small potatoes to what comes before it.

Bismarck as the inventor of state capitalism? And what was that East India Company whatsit that the British were on about, eh? A capital venture chartered by said superpower, I believe, in 1599, and which was administered directly by the British government after the passage of the Regulating Act of 1773. And this doesn’t count as state capitalism… how, again? But let’s not mind that, let’s move on to this notion that Bismarck had ‘invented’ an ‘idea’ that had already been fully put into practice and had already met with astounding success a hundred years before he assumed the Chancellorship. What did Bismarck have to do with this idea? Oh, that’s right, he erected tariffs to help shelter domestic industries in the wake of a huge stock-market crash in Vienna. Even worse, he created the first welfare, pension and universal health care systems in Europe. And Heaven forbid that we should associate this terrible, terrible concept of ‘state capitalism’ with that Anglo-American golden age of imperialism colonial rapine free trade that brought us John Locke and Adam Smith! No, no, we must associate it with those evil protectionist Germans with their welfare laws, led by the big scary Hun with the big scary moustache. And then, the inevitable invocation of Almighty Godwin:

Even Nazism was a form of state capitalism, and what the Third Reich brought to the world we all know.

Because remember children, erecting tariffs to protect fledgling and vulnerable industries and providing a safety net for workers and retirees is every bit as bad as rounding millions of Jews into death camps, gassing them and tossing them into ovens. And anyone who tells you otherwise is a commie and a fascist. It’s amazing how much sheer Goldberg-style wingnuttery a Chinese econ professor can pack into just three lines of speech; and the fact that his audience was apparently receptive to such rubbish does not speak well either of their collective intelligence or their honesty.

Now, let me be clear. State capitalism - actual state capitalism, with government providing shelter to big rentier corporations and dominating the economic playing field with anti-competitive regulatory measures - is not an admirable thing. That the People’s Republic of China is still, to a great extent, a state-capitalist society is beyond question; but the comparisons with Bismarck’s Germany are facile at best. There is no safety net for labour in China: no welfare, no pensions, no public health care plan, no legal unions outside the state-run one. Such apparently trivial matters are clearly the last thing on these self-styled reformers’ minds, except insofar as such pesky measures might mean raising the tax rates on the sorts of people they represent (those who might take holidays in Davos, for example). And China’s economic protections are of a most peculiar sort: they have been somewhat (and understandably) wary of unhindered foreign direct investment over the past fifteen years or so, but their development model does not appear averse to manufacturing for foreign-owned industries as eagerly as they manufacture for domestic ones. In the terms of geopolitics and foreign relations, some Chinese intellectuals may have a fascination with Bismarck and may even fancy themselves as taking his queues, but this is a case study in how every analogy has its limitations.

Whose universe? Which values?

Apologies to Alasdair MacIntyre for the title of this post; though I hope he would agree to at least some of the content. This is a post I’ve been wanting to write for a long while, and I hope it goes some way toward further elucidating my position, which is inspired partly by Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh and by Anglican theologian John Milbank, and partly by the longer ‘minority-report’ tradition of Tory democracy in Europe, which I believe shares a distinctly common element with trends in Chinese neo-leftism and Confucian palaeo-conservatism.

In 2008, deliberately following in the footsteps of the 1977 group of Czechs and Slovaks who authored a tract opposing communism in Europe, a group of Chinese liberal intellectuals authored the document Charter 08. The foreword of the document begins as follows (translation in English, courtesy the New York Review of Books):

2008… marks the sixtieth anniversary of the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the thirtieth anniversary of the appearance of the Democracy Wall in Beijing, and the tenth of China’s signing of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. We are approaching the twentieth anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre of pro-democracy student protesters. The Chinese people, who have endured human rights disasters and uncountable struggles across these same years, now include many who see clearly that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values of humankind and that democracy and constitutional government are the fundamental framework for protecting these values.

The authors then go on to articulate their vision of the society they want, which includes most if not all of the guarantees of the American system of government: procedural democracy; separation of powers; separation of church and state; privatisation of all state-owned property and enterprise; a free-market economy – in short, a liberal, democratic nation-state. The reaction of the Chinese government to this document was immediate, and it was harsh – a number of its authors were tried and gaoled, the most (in)famous of these being Liu Xiaobo. In the wake of this charter, the term ‘universal values’ has been greeted with suspicion by most Chinese nationalists as a vehicle of Western neocolonialism.

It appears to me that the issue suffers from fundamental misframing. Seriously, who doesn’t like ‘freedom, equality and human rights’? These are values for which, once upon a time, the Chinese Communist Party also fought (and are still proud of so doing!). These are the values which inspired all the great social movements in the Third World (and in the First and Second as well) which have blunted the forces of political and economic domination time and again. But even as they are articulated, they are at once coopted by those very same forces of political and economic domination, whose vehicle for the past four centuries has almost invariably been the liberal, democratic nation-state (or something attempting to disguise itself as one, in the grand tradition of the French Revolution). Both the Indians inspired by Gandhi and Badshah Khan, and their British occupiers, lay claim to these ‘universal values’. Both the Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh and their French oppressors lay claim to them. Civil rights leaders in the United States and their opponents both cited these values in their own causes in the 1960’s. How can these ‘universal values’ be at war with each other so often, even within the same communities?

The fundamental mistake of Liu Xiaobo and those like him is to see an American-style liberal nation-state, divorced from any positive concept of the common good (and from any transcendental normative end of human endeavour from which the common good must flow), as the be-all end-all solution to China’s problems. But (just as China’s current regime must trace its philosophical pedigree back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and all the problems that came with his philosophy) the liberal nation-state must trace its own back to John Locke, to Thomas Hobbes, to Niccolò Machiavelli – the apostles of greed and naked power. The liberal nation-state is designed as a kind of civilised battlefield, upon which competing, individual values vie amongst themselves in a ‘marketplace’, supervised by the watchful eye of a neutral government with a monopoly on force. All value-claims are equally valid, collapsed downward into mere material interests, and all are equally subordinate to the value-neutral brute force of the government (which constrains itself from making any kind of value-claim). All society takes place through a ‘contract’ between individuals with co-incidental (rather than co-operative, or based on common family or common locality or common vocation) value-claims; a ‘contract’ which (even in Locke’s version) inevitably collapses upwards into the nation-state. Civil society – the parish church, the university, the labour union, the town hall – all are proscribed by the central authority of the nation-state through its legal system, overriding traditional privileges and customs; whether liberal or authoritarian, the difference is a matter of degree than a matter of kind.

The ‘universal values’ advocated by Charter 08 are really neither universal, nor are they really actually values. They are code for the nonregulation through the threat of violence of very particular values, values which cannot (in the Hobbesian-Lockean perspective) be reconciled with each other. And the more universal a value-system claims to be, the less a liberal-democratic order will tolerate it, and the more violent and restrictive the action of the liberal state and its champions will take in response. One need only make reference to the incredibly violent secular nationalism of the likes of Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens (as Dr Cavanaugh does here) against any form of public religious expression, the enthusiasm for ever-more-dubious American military interventions on the part of the late Václav Havel (architect of Charter 77), or indeed, the unapologetic pro-Bush neoconservatism and anti-Islamic bigotry of Liu Xiaobo, which all too many Western liberals either gloss over or wilfully ignore (but which have been duly noted by both palaeoconservatives like Daniel Larison and anti-Trotskyist leftists like Tariq Ali).

But what makes China such an intriguing case, is that it is even now searching for exactly such a concept of the common good and a transcendental normative end of its endeavours. Communism’s promises showed themselves to be empty. The promises of post-Deng crony capitalism, and the social and moral decay which accompanied them, are likewise showing themselves to be empty. The promise of economic and financial laisser-faire under a technocratic state apparatus has shown itself around the world to be empty. Many amongst China’s down-but-not-out intellectual class will not be satisfied with such a solution, and are looking for a positive moral direction – and the wiser ones amongst them are taking creative hints (knowingly or not) from Duke Dan of Zhou, from Confucius, from Mencius, from Zhu Xi. This older, humanist virtue-ethical tradition, a product of the Axial Age notable for its similarities with the traditions of Zoroaster, of Socrates and Plato, of the Hebrew prophets, and later of kerygmatic and classical Christianity, may not yet be lost as new generations of Chinese students are exposed to them. What came to be called Confucianism did indeed touch upon universal human values: the inherent dignity of human life (and its need for sustenance); the belonging of human beings to communities beyond place, blood and economic interests; the pursuit of transcendental truth rather than worldly power or gain.

What results from the political application of this tradition, if and when it is rediscovered, may indeed be a democracy – indeed, it is my hope that it retains some democratic properties, such as a radicalisation of Confucian virtue that extends to women and to the poor. But, if so, it will be a democratic model which, rather than wilfully repeating the mistakes of the late-capitalist West, might provide a peaceable, proportionally equitable and virtuous countervailing model and example by which Western culture may correct itself. Even Chinese nationalists needn’t fear the language of ‘universal values’, if they only learn to look for them in the right places.

Kong Qingdong has a point… of sorts

This news is about a week old now, but Confucius’ much-put-upon seventy-third generation descendant, Professor Kong Qingdong, actually does have a bit of a valid point about Hong Kong – if you’re willing to look past his habitual foul-mouthing and the rather incendiary way in which he made it. I have struggled very much with the notion of nationhood, and whether or not it can be healthy; partially due to the teachings of Professor Kong’s illustrious ancestor, who (though now a notable symbol of Chinese nationhood) nonetheless insisted that his ethics and his teachings could be easily understood and practised by non-Chinese. To be honest, I was also incensed by the behaviour of the Hongkonger on this train as he basically called the law down on what appears to be a seven-year-old child for eating instant noodles on a train. (I happen to think, as well, that what Dr Kong said was completely correct – if that seven-year-old had been a Hongkonger rather than a mainlander, the response would have been drastically different, if a response would have been made at all.)

A healthy expression of nationhood is a shared expression of values and of the Good; it makes reference to the common aspirations of a community. At the very moment where nationhood is reduced to a sense of superiority for having a specific lineage or mother tongue, that nationhood becomes destructive – and it appears to be the case that, for many of the areas of the world that have been subject to British colonial rule, this reductionist and violent form of nationalism is all too common, encouraged by administrations which were interested only in extracting resources rather than in defending and developing communities. It is an incredibly sad consequence of imperialism that it has shaped Hong Kong identity in this way: as GK Chesterton put it, ‘Being a nation means standing up to your equals, whereas being an empire only means kicking your inferiors.’ And apparently, in the eyes of still a few Hongkongers, mainland Chinese are inferiors deserving only of the force of their boots. Overcoming prejudices such as these is a key part of the long, hard work of undoing the legacy of the Opium Wars and British colonialism in China. One can certainly make the claim that Dr Kong’s televised rant about Hongkonger ‘dogs’ (and his reference to the decidedly anti-Confucian author Lu Xun in making such a statement) was counterproductive to this goal, but one cannot rightly dispute his analysis of the cause.

This is not, of course, the sort of discussion that the news media, either in Hong Kong, in the West or in mainland China, want to have. Recriminations sell better.

A rousing (High Tory, Catholic) defence of the welfare state

The writing of Mr David Lindsay keeps getting better and better (or perhaps it was always this good!); this post was completely on-the-mark:

“With this sword do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans, restore the things that are gone to decay, maintain the things that are restored, punish and reform what is amiss and confirm what is in good order.”

So says the Archbishop of Canterbury as he hands the Sword of State to the monarch.

Shaftesbury and Wilberforce used the full force of the State to stamp out abuses of the poor at home and slavery abroad, both of which are now well on the way back in this secularised age. Victorian Nonconformists used the Liberal Party to fight against opium dens and the compelling of people to work seven-day weeks, both of which have now returned in full. Temperance Methodists built the Labour Party in order to counteract brutal capitalism precisely so as to prevent a Marxist revolution, whereas the coherence of the former with the cultural aspects of the latter now reigns supreme. But not in the House of Lords. Long may it remain.

As in most European countries, and as in anywhere having the British monarch at the Head, our State is in and of itself an institutional expression of Christianity, whether or not there is an Established Church. Therefore, our Welfare State and other social democratic measures, as in those other countries, are in and of themselves expression of Christian charity and of the Biblical, Patristic, Medieval, Catholic and classically Protestant understandings of society as an organic whole.

American critics of the Welfare State as secular and secularising are not only rather ahistorical in their own terms and somewhat out of touch with the profound Christianity of rural, working-class and black America. They are also captive to the theory of the constitutional separation of Church and State, which has nothing to do with Britain any more than with, say, Germany with her church taxes and her Kirchentag, or Italy with her Crucifixes in the courtroom and the classroom. The solution is not to remove the expressions of Christian charity and of the Christian concepts of organic society from the American civic order, but to remove the American civic order’s formal repudiation of their basis.

What we have seen in today’s nominally conservative media has been what we also saw when the neoconservative wars were most enthusiastically promoted by media moguls who, far from being conservative figures, were somehow all and yet none of Australian, American and British, or somehow all and yet none of Canadian, American and British. Those media have been the prime movers in turning first New Labour, and then also its imitators who have taken over the Conservative Party, into what most of Britain’s supposedly conservative newspapers have long been: more loyal to the United States and to the State of Israel than to the United Kingdom.

A position as unconservative and as far removed from Labourism as it is possible to imagine, and without parallel in any comparable country, if in any country at all. In short, wannabe Americanism, and an abstract America at that, not the really existing country. The sort of thing that the Founding Fathers had in mind, “free” from Christendom and therefore from the principles that begat social democracy in the industrial and post-industrial age.

The bishops did not persuade the House of Lords that there should be no cap whatever on a household's benefit entitlement, but only that it should not include Child Benefit. The universal payment of Child Benefit to mothers is a very strong argument for the restoration of the tax allowance for fathers, and with it for the whole series of measures necessary for the State to do its Christian duty of securing paternal authority, including the economic basis of that authority in high-wage, high-skilled, high-status employment.

And Child Benefit is one of the means whereby the State acknowledges that the procreation of human life is a good in and of itself, in obedience to the first commandment of God to Man in Scripture. Our civilisation, including its social democracy, was built and can only be sustained on that very high, Biblical view of human demographic, economic and cultural expansion and development. We must understand climate change in that light: over thousands of years, our species has demonstrated its God-given capacity to meet environmental challenges and to overcome environmental obstacles. We have to retain our full confidence in that capacity. One small way of doing so is by retaining universal Child Benefit while not counting it towards any - in itself, necessary - cap on entitlement.

It is true that the welfare state and the labour movements owe their very existences to Christian social movements, going back even to the anti-enclosures movement spearheaded by Archbishop William Laud and what would later become the High Church. Even here, Social Security and many other elements of the New Deal would have been dead on arrival without the support activism of various religious social democrats. We are not - yet - an out-and-out laicist state the way France or Turkey have been in the past; but, for the sake of even the trappings of the social safety net so many of us have come to take for granted, we must ensure that the genuine concerns of the (still largely Christian, increasingly Catholic) working class continue to play a prominent role in our political discourse - and not get muscled out entirely by secular and neoliberal forces.

Happy New Year! 新年快樂！

Well, I already missed the Western one on this blog, so I’m not about to let the Chinese one pass me by. Already got to watch the New Year’s show put on by the Pitt CSSA, which was as entertaining as ever! So to all my Chinese-speaking friends, 萬事如意，大吉大利, and to all my English-speaking friends, I wish you much happiness and health in the coming year! And also:



It just isn’t a good Chinese New Year without some Mo Yi. Happy music for a happy new year.