The Heavy Anglican

Pointless video post – ‘Палаши’ (‘Executioners’) by Мастер and ‘Молитва’ (‘Prayer’) by АнДем

2012-02-08T17:50:00.004-05:00

In addition with keeping abreast of Russian politics of late (both at home and abroad), I’ve also been listening to a lot of Russian heavy metal recently, both old and new. Here are a couple of my favourites:

‘Executioners’ by Мастер, from their 1989 album С Петлёй на Шее (With a Halter Around [Your] Neck). Four of the founding musicians of Мастер (bassist Alik Granovsky, drummer Igor Molchanov, guitarist Andrei Bolshakov and keyboardist Kirill Pokrovsky) were originally part of the Iron Maiden-inspired rock band Ария, but they left partially due to arguments with the manager and partially because they wanted to play a harder, faster style of metal with more of a socially-conscious edge. This is more or less straight-up fist-pumping thrash, albeit with a distinctly different flavour than their contemporaries Metallica and Anthrax. It does sound a bit dated, but that is the way I like it.

‘Prayer’ by АнДем (a newer female-fronted band which started out playing Nightwish covers in Moscow clubs but branched out and started writing some pretty high-calibre speed / power metal of their own) is perhaps one of the grandest power ballads I have yet had the pleasure of hearing. Emphasis on the power. Makes you want to go out and buy a lighter to wave every time it comes on. Do listen to their album Дочь Лунного Света (Moonlight’s Daughter); it is quite an experience.

Where stands the Church?

2012-02-08T13:42:00.002-05:00

In issues of social justice, individual dignity and distributions of power, the Church cannot be silent. The one question which, for me, bore asking in light of the Russian protests is: where does the Church stand? What is the Church saying and doing? The New York Times, though one must naturally take everything said in the self-proclaimed paper of record with several grains of salt, has a very interesting story on the role that the Russian Orthodox Church has played in the wake of the Russian elections. From the way it seems from the direct quotes in the story, the Church is taking the balanced position that non-violent protests should be allowed to occur unmolested as a legitimate outlet for free expression, and that they should have a definite voice in the political sphere, but deliberately stopped short of endorsing any particular platform. Since then, Patriarch Kirill I has been exhorting Orthodox believers to prayer and political moderation. (Neither the current Patriarch Kirill I nor the former Patriarch Aleksei II have exactly been silent on social or political issues, though; for example, both were very stoutly, along with the heads of the Roman and the English Churches, against the murderous folly in Iraq.)

It should be noted that there are two separate protest groups. The one is in favour of political reform; the other is in favour of greater political autonomy for Russia. Both of them, it should be noted, support election reform. Each of them has attracted some rather unsavoury characters (such as the Natzbols). There seems, sadly, to be some NED involvement in funding the political-reform protests. However, it strikes me as immensely interesting that the ‘anti-Orange’ protests drew a large number of scientists and intellectuals to speak for them, including philosopher and geophysicist Sergei Kurginyan, anti-globalisation activist and historian Natalya Narochnitskaya, and Valentin Lebedev, the leader of the Union of Orthodox Citizens. Interesting indeed.

In the coming months, don’t look to the radicals or to the paid operatives (whether NED or United Russia) on either side. Look to the common believers. What they do and say may be much more influential in the long run than what presently appears.

A thought-experiment

2012-02-07T18:06:00.000-05:00

Suppose there were two countries, often seen by each other and by the international community to be rivals, each very powerful and each with wide-ranging, often conflicting security concerns. A comparison of these countries is as follows:

Nation R is a country with a very strong Christian heritage, which is recognised in its civil law and in its public schools. It is very expansive and very rich in mineral resources, including oil. It has a government many would consider authoritarian, but in recent years it has not waged aggressive warfare against its neighbours and has maintained some public order at home. Instead, it is threatened by terrorism, by an alliance of diametrically-opposed nations on its borders and in the international community, and by economic instability. At the same time, they dedicate what foreign resources they have to defending vulnerable populations against Islamist extremism and the extremisms of fascism, radical liberalism and communism. They may be doing so out of realistic concerns, or they may be doing so out of humanitarian and religious obligation; different officials and different people in this nation will tell you different things.
Nation U is a country which makes no formal acknowledgement of a religious heritage, and instead enshrines an economic and social ideology of perpetual class warfare. It is also very expansive and very rich in mineral resources, including oil. It has a government widely hailed by its allies as democratic, but it is controlled to an unseemly degree by corporate interests and has engaged in aggressive warfare far afield. Though the government loudly proclaims to be against terrorism and extremism in all its forms, the recipients of this government’s aid include ultranationalists, radicals and extremists abroad, usually through private foundations or through its intelligence agency. If you ask the officials and citizens of this society what they believe the foreign-policy motivations of their government are, a solid majority will believe that their nation is guided by democratic principles rather than by security interests.

It should be apparent that I am speaking of Russia and the United States here, but the debates I have seen on Syria (and indeed on Russia herself) have been saddening in terms of their lack of critical thinking regarding who the protesters are and what they actually want. It is entirely possible that what the Russian protestors want is something positive, just as it is entirely possible that comes out of such regime change in a handful of the nations affected by the Arab Spring will ultimately be positive, if some semblance of public order can be maintained and liberties for vulnerable minority groups can be protected (and in Egypt that appears the most likely at present). But unless we know for sure what ends we want to achieve by our protests, we will continue to be manipulated the official narrative: a manufactured rather than a sincere idealism which sees a formalistic procedural liberalism at the expense of all else (including the religious freedoms of minorities and the economic rights of all to a decent living) as the ultimate aim.

The Islamists who, as I write, are committing atrocities in Libya and who are awaiting their chance to do so in Syria are hailed as the heroes of a narrative of reform driven by high-minded democratic sentiment.

On the other hand, the peaceful protestors in Greece, in Spain, in Romania and in the United States are portrayed as greedy, resentful, filthy, ignorant moochers who don’t know that the suffering caused by neoliberalism and fiscal austerity mandates from on high build character and should getajobdammit.

Some perspective, please. Please. Please.

A sensible and promising direction for British politics

2012-02-06T00:35:00.000-05:00

may be found in Mr David Lindsay’s Lanchester Declaration, here. I wish him the best of luck in building the base for such a national party, and will continue to dedicate this blog to a parallel direction in American politics.

Here is the declaration in its entirety:

Our common position is one of absolute commitment to the Welfare State, workers’ rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement and wider mutualism, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation rather than environmentalism, fair taxation, full employment, public ownership, proper local government, and a powerful Parliament.

That is fully compatible with a no less absolute commitment to any, all or none of the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, civil liberties, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, traditional structures and methods of education, traditional moral and social values, economic patriotism, balanced migration, a realist foreign policy, an unhysterical approach to climate change, and a base of real property for every household to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State.

Our common position as set out in 1 above requires a truly national party. In the service of that common position, a truly national party would respect and take account of all of the commitments set out in 2 above, though without requiring any of them.

A truly national party would be profoundly sensitive to the interests, insights and aspirations of agriculture and manufacturing, small and medium-sized businesses, each and all of the English ceremonial counties, each and all of the Scottish lieutenancy areas, each and all of the Welsh preserved counties, each and all of the traditional Northern Irish counties, each and all of the London Boroughs, and each and all of the Metropolitan Boroughs.

A truly national party would be profoundly sensitive to the interests, insights and aspirations of the countryside, local government, the trade unions, mutual enterprises, voluntary organisations, and social and cultural conservatives.

A truly national party would be profoundly sensitive to the interests, insights and aspirations of people who cherished ties throughout the world, most especially within these Islands and the Commonwealth, but also to the Arab world and Iran, the Slavic and Confucian worlds, Latin America, and elsewhere, in principle including any country on earth, and ideally including all of them.

None of the above would be to the exclusion of the interests, insights and aspirations of financial services, the presently favoured parts of the country, the towns and cities, social and cultural liberals, or those who cherished ties to Continental Europe, the United States of America, and the State of Israel. But it would exclude any new Cold War against Russia, China, Iran, or anywhere else.

A truly national party would always give priority in international affairs to the ties within the Commonwealth and within these Islands, and could have no truck with any idea of the American Republic coercively imposing utopianism. It would reject that idea’s rewritten Marxism in which the bourgeoisie is the victorious class, because it would reject all class-based politics in favour of what Aneurin Bevan called “a platform broad enough for all to stand upon”.

A truly national party would fight every seat as if it were a knife-edge marginal.

A truly national party as a vehicle for our common position would draw deeply on a heritage variously trade unionist, co-operative and mutual, Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and so on. Integral to that heritage is a valiant history of opposition to all of Stalinism, Maoism, the Trotskyist distinction without a difference, Nazism, Fascism, and the Far Right regimes in Southern Africa, Latin America and elsewhere. Those who have never recanted their former Stalinism, Maoism or Trotskyism, or their former support for those Far Right regimes, admitting that that stance had been wrong at the time, can have no part in a truly national party.

I note with distinct pleasure that, aside from Mr David Lindsay, Dr Martin Meenagh has formally endorsed this declaration and Mr Neil Clark has given it an honourable mention as well!

Again, the very best of luck, gentlemen!

Pointless video post – ‘Conspiracy in Mind’ by Communic

2012-02-02T19:14:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-30T14:15:00.002-05:00

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

2012-01-28T23:39:00.007-05:00

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?

2012-01-26T12:39:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-25T14:22:00.003-05:00

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

2012-01-24T18:44:00.001-05:00

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！

2012-01-22T20:59:00.004-05:00

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.

Busy day yesterday…

2012-01-19T13:54:00.004-05:00

… in spite of that Internet blackout. In this case, I agree wholeheartedly with the cause inspiring this ‘Internet strike’: intellectual property protections at this point in history are utterly ridiculous in their extent, and at this point, they serve only the interests of huge corporations, particularly Hollywood and the big record labels. It is sad that our elected officials are willing, in their rush to make obsequies to (in particular) the entertainment industry, to make such huge sacrifices of transparency and public access to very needful information. Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin has some decent commentary some of the underlying issues at stake in all the Protect IP and Stop Online Piracy fuss.

Elsewhere on the Internet, The European features a very useful interview with none other than Dr Etzioni. I swear, the more I read from the good sociologist, the more I find he has his head screwed on truly straight. I am not sure I agree with him on the way in which ‘humanitarianism’ or a philosophical romanticism are acceptable substitutes for religion qua religion, but I could not possibly agree more with his critique of consumerism (and the materialist assumptions underlying it) and his foci for an alternative mode of thinking which focuses more solidly upon the family, upon friends, upon artistic and aesthetic pursuits and upon the public life.

Along with a growing number of other public intellectuals these days (including some with whom I have disagreed more often, such as Fareed Zakaria), Dr Etzioni is tackling some of the thorniest problems with the modern question of liberalism. Here he addresses a very common criticism of communitarianism (to which the European very bluntly gives voice):

The European: The idea of community interests has often been invoked to justify repression and exclusion. The states with good human rights records tend to be states on the liberal end of the spectrum, the peaceful history of Europe since World War II is also the history of liberal governance.

Etzioni: Communities exist everywhere. It is mistaken to think that they only exist in Communist China or in the left-leaning democracies of Latin America. One complaint that my colleagues from economics departments have about German workers is that they don’t like to move. These economists see that capital has become more mobile and respond by saying that labor needs to become more mobile as well. It does not work that way. Workers like to remain close to their families, to the burial sites of their ancestors, to their friends. That is true across the world, not just in individual countries. In Southern Europe, the Catholic Church is an important provider of a sense of community and social services. In Berlin, Turkish communities provide similar services. These communal ties are not dead. They can be oppressive but there is nothing inherent to communities that puts them at odds with human rights.

To which I would add, a similar criticism may be made of those states which privilege not ‘community interests’ or values, but rather the ‘liberal governance’ and process above all else. True enough, the peaceful history of Europe since World War II is the history of liberal governance… but then, so was the history of Europe since 1848, leading straight into the nightmare of world war. In governance, it would be naïve to ignore the value-laden nature of political institutions or to anticipate outcomes, value-judgements and, indeed, community interests, which are either threatened (directly or indirectly) by liberal process or which seek to take advantage of the liberal process to produce violently illiberal outcomes. In Europe, the most visible example of this is the startling and disconcerting rise of various xenophobic and ultra-nationalist groups (exemplified by the likes of Geert Wilders and Anders Breivik), emboldened by increasingly tone-deaf and inhumane decisions out of Brussels and the public discontent which has followed from them. Indeed, community interests must be seriously considered and defended, and democracy requires a firm commitment to a core set of humanistic values, if it is going to survive in a sustainable form.

Indeed, this question may come to a head much sooner than we anticipate, if Neil Clark’s warning here is any indication. The incredibly process-oriented and economically- and politically-liberal (but decidedly undemocratic) European ‘Troika’ have been forcing incredibly unpopular fiscal policy on a number of EU member states, and it is looking very much like a critical mass of people are angry enough about it to take to the streets (as in Romania).

On a tangentially-related note, it is worth reading first Michael Hudson’s latest blog post (thanks, John!), in tandem with a recent Global Voices Online article ostensibly in support of sex-workers’ rights in China. Here we have a country in which a similar population-control policy was imposed, not by the World Bank, but by the central government – along with an unbalanced ‘opening and reform’ which integrated the country into the neoliberal global economy while uprooting tens of millions of farmers, mostly in the poorer provinces of the interior. As a result, we have a huge, disproportionally male and aging migrant worker population, many of whom have no social safety net whatever, and very few means of gaining one. Quite frankly, prostitution (legal or otherwise), at best, provides only superficial and palliative care to a group of men condemned by their society; at worst, it both obscures and obstructs a true solution to the problem, whilst at the same time exploiting and degrading the labour of the women who participate in the system. What the Chinese rural poor need (and in their history have routinely been denied) is not access to condoms or paid sexual gratification. Much less do they need mandates handed down to them, either by the World Bank or by their own government, artificially controlling their reproduction! What they need are opportunities for stable employment, for marriage and for having families with children (who, in countries like China without social security or a pension system, often represent the only possible means of their parents’ dignified existence in old age)!

It consistently boggles my mind that so many liberals (who, in addition, often like to pretend that prostitution can, in a capitalist economy, ever be a purely consensual – let alone joyful or healthy! – act without severe adverse social consequences) routinely consider the poor, and children, as a problem to be solved rather than as human beings with human needs and human dignity, and thus that these (quite frankly) deranged Malthusian fantasies continue to have such massive currency in the public discourse.

… Anyway. Just a snapshot of what I’ve been reading recently.

Pointless video post – ‘Corporate Masters’ by Tad Morose

2012-01-18T15:14:00.006-05:00

Tad Morose is one of those bands, like Rage, whose music simply ‘clicked’ with me on first listen (and to say they are criminally underrated would be an exercise in gratuitous understatement). They play an enthralling blend of old-school heavy metal with the melodic direction of the best of progressive power and neoclassical metal (and their ex-vocalist Urban Breed could certainly match Geoff Tate at his peak in terms of power, vocal range and emotion), but at the same time featuring a depth and a merciless driving rhythmic sensibility which seems to be lifted straight from the playbooks of Teutonic thrash metal. ‘Corporate Masters’ here is on the breezy, ‘happy’ side for Tad Morose (to the point where it almost seems out-of-place on Undead), a fairly ‘traditional’ power metal number, but I get the impression that such was a deliberate choice on the part of Christer Andersson et al. A remarkable song all the same – it would not be Tad Morose if it weren’t absolutely first-rate, though.

Positive developments in Wukan?

2012-01-16T15:49:00.003-05:00

Okay, so far the situation in Wukan has ended up much better than I expected it would. The paucity of reporting from Wukan and the social media crackdown inside China on any searches relating to the village worried me quite deeply; and I have seen first-hand that treatment of protesting villagers in land-expropriation cases in rural China is often a very far cry from gentle. But this (reported in the Asahi Shimbun), if it truly is the case, is an incredibly positive development for the village: the 65-year-old de facto leader of the protests, Lin Zuluan, was named village head by the CCP (though he has said he plans to step down at the soonest possible opportunity), and new village elections will be held. In addition, there is an ongoing investigation into wrongdoing by the previous village administration; we shall see if it turns up anything or if substantive action is taken by CCP higher-ups.

It is unlikely that this is indicative of any kind of substantial systemic change, but even small victories like this one are welcome.

Breaking the silence: understanding Dr King and nonviolence

2012-01-16T15:17:00.004-05:00

A paper originally written in January 2008, when I was still at Kalamazoo College. I believe that much of it still bears true; though we are no longer at war in Iraq, we have since gone to war in Libya and are threatened with grim prospects in Syria and in Iran. Though my own views have since drifted a few degrees from their Anabaptist wellspring, I still believe that ‘the apathy of conformist thought’ remains the single greatest enemy of a just peace, and the single greatest asset of those who would condemn our nation to a state of perpetual war, and that saints and prophets are not to be taken lightly, particularly not in this day and age. It would be a profound disservice to Dr King’s memory if we remember only his comforting words of equality, so often quoted by the comfortable liberal establishment, and forget the more radical call in Beyond Vietnam to ‘rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society’, that the triple demons of racism, materialism and militarism may be the more swiftly vanquished.

It often seems that the common doom of the prophets of the Hebrew tradition – Moses, Nathan, Isaiah, Jeremiah – was that when they spoke, what they spoke was true and profound and relevant, but fell on sleeping ears which neglected them, scorned them or simply misunderstood them. Such prophets, in principle, were to be venerated, but in practise welcome for prophets was rare, and rarer still any kind of serious consideration for their message. Considering the Hebrew prophets, the resemblance the tale of Martin Luther King, Jr. bears to them is striking. Every American schoolchild hears of the accomplishments of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement and how they led the way to the end of racial segregation in law. They learn to honour him as a great man, even a martyred saint of sorts – a man with a dream, which in the end was realised.

But one problem with making Dr. King into such a saint is that it becomes all too easy to turn his veneration into a kind of pious somniloquy, to slip back into the slumber and apathetic silence which Dr. King had been trying to break. His iconic image has become complacent in its beatitude; the radical edge of his message of non-violent civil struggle has been dulled. The anxiety of Søren Kierkegaard that his work would ‘be conveniently skimmed during the after-dinner nap’ is difficult not to feel now on King’s behalf, especially during this season, when his name and legacy is certain to be preached in hagiographic reverence from pulpits whose voices will then shy away from speaking out against the war in Iraq and all the grievous social injustices accompanying it.

As an Anabaptist, I feel that the methods and philosophy of non-violence, as taught by Christ, Menno Simons, Ghaffar Khan, Gandhi, King and many others, are both invaluable and viable; I try my best to understand them, to articulate them and to live them. Though I have not experienced the discrimination and persecution and hardships that Dr. King and those who participated in the Civil Rights Movement faced, I have often been disappointed and frustrated at how often and how sorely non-violence is misunderstood, even among my peers. It is rarely met with contempt; more often it meets with infuriatingly patronising forbearance, of the sort reserved for mistaken idealists and hopeless daydreamers. It is largely dismissed as a nice dream, but one which could never work in ‘the real world’.

Upon reading Dr. King’s sermons, however, it becomes clear rather quickly that he may have had a dream, but the man was no idle dreamer. Having lived through economic and racial injustice and having seen the anger and resentment that it bred, he set forth a vision from which he expected true and lasting results. He realised that it wasn’t enough that we simply end a war overseas, but that we must take it on ourselves to build a peace, we ‘must with positive action seek to remove… conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice’. To this end, he articulated not the kind of love that is just a nice dream, just a ‘sentimental and weak response’, but the kind of love that demands dedication to a ‘long and bitter – but beautiful – struggle for a new world’ , the kind of love which understands and undertakes, in the words of G. W. F. Hegel, ‘seriousness, pain, and the patience and work of the negative’.

The radical love that Martin Luther King, Jr. made a part of his life and a part of his ministry, the love that transcends sentiment, can be neither silent nor somniloquent. If we decide (as a community and as individuals) that we want to represent social justice and human dignity, that we want this kind of love to be made manifest in our words and in our actions, silence – not speaking when something has to be said – is self-betrayal. For my own part, this means that mere pacifism is not enough. The kind of pacifism that sleeps through peace-time, only to awaken itself to outrage when war’s trumpets shatter that slumber, betrays itself. Wars like these in Vietnam and Iraq may spring from inflamed injustices and inequalities, whether real or perceived, but in democratic societies they thrive on ‘the apathy of conformist thought’. Any pacifism that sinks into such apathetic, conformist quietude, which opposes war but does nothing to prevent it, must be seen as ultimately self-defeating. Truly, in the spirit of Dr. King, we must and we shall continue in our principled opposition to this war in Iraq, which has been the cause of hundreds of thousands of deaths, and which has blinded the society to other urgent issues of social and economic justice. However, if pacifists – myself and my fellow Anabaptists included – truly value a lasting peace as a positive end, out of moral respect for human life and dignity, then it becomes an imperative that we practise not merely pacifism, but an actual, effective discipline of non-violence in the service of social justice, even in times when war is not occupying our attention.

Indeed, like the Hebrew prophets of antiquity, Dr. King spoke a prescient, profound message which still rings true. This truth, in his message of non-violence, deserves to be taken seriously and understood, at a level deeper than simple sentiment. Here we are, forty years after he delivered the sermon at Riverside Church in New York. In this time of war, we again wander the Mosaic wilderness of our own social conscience. The time has come when we must ask ourselves whether we undertake the seriousness and pain, whether we with patience and work take up the struggle for social justice, and speak for a peace that will last. As Dr. King himself put it: ‘This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response.’

On culture (and those laying claim to it)

2012-01-16T10:10:00.004-05:00

Three months ago, President Hu Jintao of the PRC wrote an article in the periodical of the Chinese Communist Party, Qiushi, regarding China’s culture and its status on the international stage. He seemed to be under the distinct impression that ‘hostile foreign powers’ are attempting to lay siege to Chinese culture, to undermine it and to Westernise it, dividing China against itself, by ‘conduct[ing] long-term infiltration’ in the ‘ideological and cultural sphere’. More recently, several responses have been made to Mr Hu’s article, including one by Sam Crane of The Useless Tree, one by Charles Custer of ChinaGeeks. These responses do make some decent points, but the larger issues are somewhat evaded. What is culture? What is driving its change? To answer these two questions is to pose two further: who produces it and who benefits from it?

Sam Crane’s argument goes straight down the liberal-libertarian line of folks like Hayek and Friedman (and yeah, let me tell you… when I think ‘culture’, first thing that comes to mind is the economics department at the University of Chicago): culture is ever-changing, a market-driven artefact of the creative individual, and anything a government does can only serve to stifle and disrupt its creation. I am sure this would come as news to the beneficiaries of the National Endowment for the Arts, among other people, but I get ahead of myself. Sam Crane identifies ‘culture’ only with its reified products – in this case, rock-and-roll music – and its worth only with the popularity or economic success of those products. This is, to say the least, an incredibly narrow view which does skirts around the fears of folks like Hu Jintao and Rick Santorum rather than addressing them head-on, and does no justice whatever to his own side of the argument.

After all, culture is not just our consumption habits. At least, for me it isn’t – and I say this as a metalhead and a fan of Renaissance and Baroque church music (not as contradictory a set of tastes as one might imagine). If heavy metal as a genre were to sink or swim according to its popularity and economic success, it would have died in the ‘90’s and been replaced by grunge or whatever the hell Metallica turned into with the Black Album. But it didn’t die. People were drawn to the music on a deeper level; its artists played it and its fans listened to it for love, not because they wanted to get rich or because they wanted to be seen as ‘in’ (and if they did, they were very quickly outed as poseurs). There is a healthy culture (a ‘subculture’, one might say) surrounding heavy metal, because there is a real community surrounding the music, there are real values (loyalty, fraternity, steadfastness, defiance to the bitter end, overcoming even overwhelming adversity) associated with the music, and there is a musical history which each metalhead is bound to respect or at least acknowledge. Is this culture ‘driven by creativity’? Naturally it is. Does it ‘change’? Sure. But such a glib description of culture does it a vast disservice, because (to continue with my previous example) it is possible to distinguish good heavy metal from corporate shit – and such judgements are not just the domain of ‘elite intellectuals and impresarios’. The culture that endures is defined by the values which inspire people to create; and if your sole value is what is profitable, what you produce is not healthy cultural output at all.

Speaking of creativity, though, as a writer and an artist, let me tell you that I’ve written, drawn and painted both for love of the subject, and for marks (‘profit’, as it were), and I can tell you right now which end results were better. The greatest artists’ motivations were never profit (else they wouldn’t be artists!), but rather a love which transcends the self. If the artistic inspiration that drives culture is not something that can be forced (as Mr Crane very rightly notes), neither is it something which can be bought and sold in a market, appealing only to love of self. It is, in the end, only in the numinous realm of the sacred that the aesthetic can be healthily understood and realised.

On the consumption side as well, cultural production can be either healthy or unhealthy. You can either watch or listen to or otherwise support cultural productions which you like, or you can support cultural productions which someone else (usually someone with orders of magnitude more money and power than you have) tells you to like. Advertisement is the reigning example: huge corporations would not spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising campaigns if they did not alter people’s consumption habits in their favour. Sadly, reigning economic orthodoxy is completely and wilfully blind to the root causes of a person’s preferences. To use Sam Crane’s example, the college-rock band Carsick Cars played at a club where 200 people were still waiting outside the doors to get in when they closed. Now, were all of those people there because they genuinely wanted to be, and really enjoyed and were inspired by the music? Or were they there because the Carsick Cars were on 97.4 FM all the time (I don’t know if this is actually the case) and they thought going to a concert would make them look ‘cool’? In other words, were the people going there fans or poseurs? The liberal-libertarian position does not care about this distinction, and indeed goes to massive lengths to deny its existence (all revealed preferences being equal); the people who are served by this are not, of course, consumers or even the majority of producers, but rather only the large producers who have the capacity to command higher market shares through advertising. This is as true of cultural output as of anything else.

Fourthly, dismissing fears of imperialism as mere ploys to ‘bolster the political power of [an] authoritarian regime’, however appropriate it may be in this example, is not a wise move in general. As someone who has spent time amongst the Navajo and Hopi cultures in his youth, I am familiar with the tactics used by those purporting to support their ‘progress’ and ‘freedom’. There is good reason to fear them, as they were subjected to a very deliberate form of cultural warfare. Their traditional economies were undermined at every turn by government-sanctioned theft of their land (and subsequent forced relocation); they were forbidden from practicing their own native faiths; and their languages were actively suppressed in the schools their children were compelled to attend. But I am sure that the present generation of these now struggling cultures are immensely comforted by Mr Crane’s bromides that the cultural changes to which they were subjected were ‘inevitable’, and that ‘foreign bogey men’ were not in the least to blame for their present plight. Though China has been subjected to this degree of outright domination only thrice in her long history, and her culture has survived each time on its own strengths, the purveyors of ‘free trade’ indeed knowingly attempted to curtail Chinese self-expression (to say nothing of their dignity) for their own profit and power, and resorted to force of arms when their attempts were thwarted by the likes of Viceroy Lin Zexu. The fear of domination by imperialist powers (not only Britain, but also the United States, Germany and Japan) is a very real and long-standing one. Hu Jintao may indeed be taking advantage of that fear for political gain, but Mr Crane does no service to his own argument by ignoring the underlying historical rationale. If recognising the destruction which globalised market forces and the governments behind them have historically wreaked (and in some ways continue to wreak) on people who have historically been subjected to colonialism makes me a ‘culture warrior’, then I make no apologies for being one. (I guess it also makes Skyclad and Anthrax ‘culture warriors’, so I’m in some good company there.)

Culture is not only product. It must refer instead to the shared values and norms, passed down from generation to generation, of a community. And it always makes reference to something outside itself; as Zhu Xi put it, culture (or ‘ritual’) is the representation of Heaven-imparted principles (『禮者，天理之節文也。』). Though certainly culture should imply what people are doing now, it is wise to distinguish between what people do that is psychologically and socially healthy for them, and what is unhealthy. Government control may not, in many cases, be the way to go about it. But then, neither is ignoring the systematic aggression inherent to a globalised, hegemonic and equally government-backed culture.

Rectification of names

2012-01-14T08:31:00.005-05:00

Allow me a few moments to get this straight. A civilian scientist working on a project in the interests of the national security of his country is assassinated using a motorcycle bomb by an assailant who did not make himself or his political affiliation known beforehand. What would we call this if it were done within our borders? Terrorism, right? So why are our authorities not calling a spade a spade when it happens to another country, even if that country does not always see eye-to-eye (to say the very least) with us? And should we not be calling out the cheerleaders of such operations (and they are sadly not few) as giving aid and comfort to the terrorists responsible, whether they are part of Mossad or the Mojahedin-e Khalq?

Let’s be a little bit realistic for a moment. The United States will not always remain the world’s sole hegemon, and if we are going to manage our civilisation’s wane in status with anything resembling grace, we are going to have to pay some attention to the moral ground we occupy, because ultimately our nation’s virtue is the sole source of whatever ‘soft power’ we can effectively wield. This was Yan Xuetong’s view regarding China, if you will recall. Part of our behaving virtuously is condemning terrorism and murder of civilians not only when people we don’t like do it, but also when our allies do it. Otherwise, we only lend more moral ammunition to the likes of Iran’s leadership, and weaken our chances of building bridges on real issues of national security with powers such as Russia and China. The ghosts of Cold Wars past need not haunt either our present or our future… but they will, if we continue to behave in the way we are doing now, turning a blind eye to grievous injustices done to civilians of other nations, carried out by our allies.

Pointless video post - ‘We Drink Your Blood’ by Powerwolf

2012-01-13T12:06:00.007-05:00

I was thinking of discussing the history and theology inherent to this song (exposing the insecurities and tensions of the mediaeval nobility between the pacifistic religion they espoused and the inherently violent position they occupied in society, and so forth), but immediately thought better of it when I realised that this is a freaking Powerwolf song. They don’t think through these things, why the heck should I look for anything deeper? Big, blunt, heavy, pounding anthemic German power metal with aesthetic Gothicism and Catholicism to spare in spades (particularly with all that choral and organ work) is what one can expect from Powerwolf, who have been largely a one-trick dog since day one; their newest release Blood of the Saints is absolutely no exception. And yet, just like a big, dumb, loyal puppy (even if that is a werewolf puppy) one simply can’t hate on them for doing what they do; I’m fond of these guys for the same reasons I like HammerFall and Turisas. They know what they want to play and they go right ahead and play it, in spite of all the ironic grins and chortles that they inevitably provoke with their over-the-top theatricality.

Enjoy!

A good reason to switch to Linux-box Samsungs?

2012-01-11T01:04:00.007-05:00

In a recent report by Beijing-based NGO, the Institute for Environmental and Public Affairs, Apple ranks dead last on a watchdog survey of 29 global communications and IT companies on transparency on health and environmental issues (British Telecom, Hewlett-Packard and Samsung rate tops in transparency and addressing environmental problems linked to their suppliers; I was somewhat relieved to see that Lenovo wasn’t too far down the list). ‘But’, as Eric Loomis of Lawyers, Guns and Money put it (and thank you, Eric, for the links): ‘at least Apple workers in China are forced to sign pacts to not commit suicide’. Of course, this kind of poor performance on environmental and labour issues is not exactly a new story for Apple (here is the original Daily Telegraph article and op-ed), but it is one that requires much by way of retelling.

To me, the phenomenon of Apple fanboy-ism is a rather laughable one. Apple, partly on account of its top-down corporate structure, poor customer service, closed architecture, et cetera, lives and dies on its image; to be fair, they have projected that image masterfully. Even to the point of convincing its fans that everything they do must be above-board.

Subversive politics and the post-action movie

2012-01-10T17:21:00.003-05:00

This post by John (and the Guardian op-ed to which it links) has been on my mind quite awhile, and it is very troubling to my mind as a fan of action movies that part of the culture I am supporting in such patronage is, to borrow the terminology of Methodist theologian Walter Wink, a myth of redemptive violence. Such a myth certainly colours very much of our popular culture, particularly in the wake of 11 September when it very effectively and conveniently simplified for popular consumption a complex problem in international relations which led to the suffering of thousands of innocents – now inflated to millions worldwide as a result of the shifts in our foreign policy (‘cryptofascist’, as it may very well be, or otherwise). America loves the vision of a black-and-white world in which problems are easily whisked away with a twirl of a pistol and a roguish grin, and the Hollywood action movie has traditionally been the way in which the average American could indulge this fantasy. This fantasy is something which I have been rightly trained since childhood (spent in a Radical Reformed community) to resist.

… And yet, in spite of all this, I still love action movies. And the action movies I love most all tend to go against the grain in some fairly fundamental ways: Peter Weir’s Witness. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (thank you, Andreas Modinos!). David Fincher’s Fight Club. Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers. Whether they subvert the action film’s fundamental premises, mythic elements or plot arc in order to explore nonviolent alternatives (as Witness does) or whether they deliberately crank the archetypal action plot arc up to 11 in order to poke fun at the pretensions of the genre (as all of Verhoeven’s action movies do), these – I suppose post-action movies is as good a term as any – are certainly worthy of a second and a third glance. Though they are still characterised by explosions and gunfire and special effects, they fulfill the same function vis-à-vis the Hollywood culture critiqued by Rick Moody that the Gospels did to Imperial Roman ‘evangelical’ literature, or that Shrek did vis-à-vis Disney and the traditional fairy-tale: a retelling of a mythic story which seeks to undermine the basic premises of the myth.

Witness is an incredibly powerful film (to which I was introduced by my parents) which explores the nature of violence in ways which it is very rare for a mainstream American movie to do. The hero John Book, played by Harrison Ford, is an investigator on a murder case in which the only witness is a young boy from an Amish community; ultimately, he is shot and forced to go into hiding in the very same community this boy comes from. Without giving away too much of the plot, one of the ironies of the movie is that the lifestyle of violence which has come as second nature to Book only serves to betray him to his enemies, and in the ending of the movie, the primary villain is shamed by Book before the Amish community into giving up his gun and answering for his crimes. Witness is still very much a cop thriller, but it is one which so adroitly handles its own thematic schema that it manages to present a worldview which is very much along Gandhian or Radical Reformed lines – itself a witness against the myth of redemptive violence in which Book (and, by extension, the audience) had been raised scripture and verse.

The Paul Verhoeven movies take exactly the opposite approach. Rather than subverting plot elements, they take these same elements (and the violence which inevitably accompanies them) to harlequin extremes to make their points. RoboCop is a prime example. Bookended by in-universe news reports and advertising for prosthetic hearts (‘And remember, we care!’) and family games such as ‘Nukem’, the primary fear of the film is that human beings themselves have become products; expendable commodities and replaceable cogs in a neoliberalised cyberpunk universe. The all-pervasive power in the movie, and all of its villains, are under the aegis of OCP (Omni Consumer Products), a defence contractor which has taken control of Detroit’s police force and plans to rebuild Detroit along high-modernist lines, allowing gangster Clarence Boddicker (played by Kurtwood Smith) first dibs in keeping the working class quiet and pliable with drugs, gambling and prostitution. This same Clarence Boddicker put to death Alex Murphy, a newbie cop whose remains and resemblance were used in the construction of the OCP’s prototype RoboCop, and whose memories remain in RoboCop’s programming only to resurface as ‘dreams’. The violence in the movie is so over-the-top that it becomes a form of black comedy in its own right, a parody of the very genre of which it is routinely held as an exemplar. The same is true of Starship Troopers, which takes the latent fascist elements of the novel it was based upon and turns them into the basic theme of the film.

Fight Club is something of a different beast entirely. It’s an action movie, but rather than being about explosions or even fistfights, it’s fundamentally about relationships instead. It may toy on occasion with political ideas, but always in ways which are psychological and painfully personal. It is a critique of capitalism and late modernity, and the ways it spells spiritual doom for the exploiting class as well as the exploited, but it goes out of its way to avoid presenting any kind of viable or desirable alternative, leaving the audience to ‘make up their own minds’ (cop-out? perhaps, but then this is also one). Violence is, very deliberately, the mythic escape (but, rather than being a solution to anything or being endowed with any salvific mythic qualities, it exists only for its own sake), and a form of authoritarian personality cult (Project Mayhem) the end result – but it’s one which is rejected by the narrator at the end.

The subversive currents in all of these movies do not, in themselves, add up to an effective countermyth to redemptive violence – but they do elevate these movies effortlessly above the mass of mindless garbage put out by the likes of Jerry Bruckheimer, Zack Snyder and Michael Bay, adding that extra edge that allows someone like me to provide an intellectual defence of the action movie, even if that defence is one which shows how the action movie genre has, at its best, ample room to parody and subvert itself.

I’m back

2012-01-10T16:04:00.001-05:00

Returning to Pittsburgh from a voyage in the Middle Kingdom to meet my girlfriend’s friends and family, I finally can update my blog once more. I find myself exhausted, jetlagged and down with a horrific head cold, but nonetheless very much rested and at peace – much more so than last semester. The blog has undergone a name-change (to The Heavy Anglican) which has been a fairly long time in coming… though existentialism and neo-orthodoxy remain very much a part of my worldview, they’ve taken a backseat somewhat to my amateurish interest in matters of political economy, history, development policy, international relations and how those all relate to theology and religion. The thought of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Niebuhr and Barth certainly do touch on all of these (often quite closely), but I am finding that authorities from other traditions can bring insights which are just as interesting and enlightening, and several thinkers whom I have come to greatly admire (Johnson, Swift, Ruskin, Chesterton, Grant and the like) simply do not belong to the existentialist tradition, but rather share with it the common ancient Socratic-Platonic one.

Anyhow, much peace and good cheer for the Yuletide season to my gentle readers, and may we have a joyous Year of Our Lord two thousand twelve. It’s good to be back.

Homeownership, rental and other matters: a distributist defence

2011-12-15T09:01:00.000-05:00

The following was submitted by yours truly as an answer to one of the final exam long-answer questions in his neighbourhood planning and community development course. Hopefully it will manage to be thought-provoking!

The question of whether homeownership should continue to be encouraged over rental in the United States is both a contested and needful one at this point in our history as a nation, particularly in light of a financial crisis centred around the securitisation of risk in a speculative housing market. Quite understandably, a number of authors and commentators in the fields of planning, development and policy studies have weighed in on the topic. John Landis and Kirk McClure pose the problem most directly, and link the systemic problems in the current housing market to an ideologically-driven desire on the part of federal policymakers under Clinton and Bush 43 to expand homeownership as broadly as possible – they advocate instead a return ‘to what works’: a mix of rental housing vouchers, tax credits and federal housing initiatives (including HOPE VI) which have met with success under different administrations and economic conditions (Landis and McClure 2010, 340). Susan Saegert, Desiree Fields and Kimberly Libman answer this question – that homeownership has certainly been ‘oversold’ – and go on to pose a deeper one: to what extent is homeownership construed as a social duty in an ideological environment which privileges autonomy and consumption as central to the ‘American Dream’, and to what extent does it serve interests other than those of homeowners and prospective homeowners?

Though both papers are in some respects persuasive – the one from a pragmatic and the other from a more radical perspective – they each tantalisingly but only briefly touch on what this author believes to be the central issue. Landis and McClure believe that part of the current problem is that government assistance to homeowners is diverted in various ways away from those who need it most, and that renters find themselves systematically excluded under the current regime. Saegert et al. see the problem in a financial-government system that supports homeowners only to the extent that it serves the interests of lenders and insurers (Saegert et al 2009), and only to the extent that it ensures that risk is passed on to the ‘end consumer’, i.e. the homebuyer. These are both useful insights, but they both point in a direction partially belied by the conclusions of both authors: toward the heterodox economic philosophy of distributism. A third-way political-economic philosophy inspired by Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 social encyclical Rerum Novarum (‘Of New Things’), distributism was developed by the work of several ex-Fabian socialists and radical Catholic thinkers, with Arthur Penty, Gilbert Chesterton, Fr Vincent McNabb, Hilaire Belloc and Fr José María Arizmendiarrieta being the primary authors and theorists associated with the movement. In short, it calls for the broadest possible distribution of productive property; economic protection of small and cooperative businesses; restructuring of the wage and banking systems; and generally a more direct relation between the laws and social norms governing property and the right purposes of that property (Distributist Review 2011).

As planners and developers of communities, we are, first and foremost, interested in creating and developing places balancing public and private affairs, where people can live, work and play. We are – or should be – normatively very closely concerned with the right use of property, and our policy agendas should certainly reflect that. To paraphrase contemporary American distributist John Médaille: the purpose of public policy is ‘to provide the conditions under which all… communities that make up the social fabric can flourish’, beginning with the family unit (Médaille 2010). Issues such as gentrification and sprawl, as well as the fatal cupidity of various agents in the financial sector which eased (perhaps too greatly) but did not support people’s acquisition of homes, arise primarily from lenders and insurers – as well as homeowners, to be sure – considering housing as something other than a place for a family to live.

It is noteworthy that the 30-year mortgage, enabled by the National Housing Act of 1934, was a working assumption of some of the most successful federal housing programmes of the past century: the loans insured by the FHA and VA were targeted primarily at new families in the wake of WWII. Homeownership was successfully expanded under these programmes and default rates were very low; and though these developments were plagued by the inequalities resulting from discriminatory practices such as redlining, the extension of the same opportunities to families of colour was accomplished under the 1968 Fair Housing Act (Landis and McClure 2010). During the 1970’s, however, houses became instead investments and objects of resale. There was a paradigmatic shift from the real estate as a place for a family to settle down and for a community to thereby develop to real estate as an instrument for making money. Not only homebuyers were affected by this shift, either – because speculation in land creates only rising prices in the long-run (until the bubble bursts), renters are also adversely affected by an intolerable rising pressure on rent (Médaille 2010).

In addition, the concomitant relaxation of the mortgage regulations targeting single-person, divorcee and other non-family households for the federal subsidy programme had a double consequence: the market for homes could steadily increase (and private lenders and insurers thereby benefit immensely) and federal money was made accessible to people whose primary interest in houses was, in fact, speculation. Further relaxation of housing-mortgage regulations followed on ideological grounds, beginning under the aegis of the Reagan Administration (Carlson 2009; Sternlieb and Hughes 1980; Saegert 2009). Though it is shamefully common for lending institutions and the ideological partisans of the neoliberal innovations of the past 30 years (e.g. CNBC’s Rick Santelli’s 2009 on-air rant) to lay the blame at the feet of undereducated consumers (Saegert 2009), it should be quite obvious to the astute observer that there is a path dependency at work involving far more systematic elements.

On the surface, therefore, it does appear from a policy perspective as though ‘homeownership’ as such is a problem, and privileging it over rental more so. But it is important to note that the reason for this is not that ‘homeownership’ qua homeownership is something overrated – rather the regulatory structure governing mortgage practices encouraging homeownership has been stripped not only of its powers but also of its normative content. At the same time, the interests both of eligible, working-class first-time homeowners and of underserved populations for whom rental may be a more viable option are paid lip-service but not truly served. To give just one example, research has been done at the University of Pittsburgh’s economics department suggesting that loosening local-level regulation against subprime lending and usurious lending practices, ostensibly in the name of ‘spur[ring] financial innovations that broadly benefit low-income households’, not only do not widen the total amount of credit available to homebuyers, they also have the undesirable effect of increasing default and foreclosure rates (Xu 2011).

The impact on communities as well as their working-class residents generally likewise continues to be severe. Urban sprawl had already become a problem in the post-war society, due in part to the ascendant ubiquity of the private automobile and the demise of the family farm under subsidised agribusiness, and definitely due in part to white flight, but it was certainly intensified and accelerated by a housing market increasingly characterised by speculative practices and short-term leasing rather than long-term mortgaging – by the early 1990s, ‘unprecedented’ amounts of what was previously farmland were still being developed for new housing tracts in the United States (Pendall et al. 2005). Among the responses aimed at conservation of the traditional community (particularly in an urban setting) have been the ‘smart growth’ and the ‘new urbanist’ movements, which call for mixed housing as well as zoning practices which encourage more active community life. Obviously, the issue of the neoliberalisation of housing policy has very far-reaching implications and not just for individual homebuyers.

Thus, the response to the question of how government agencies are best to provide assistance to homeowners and renters is best addressed not necessarily by one or two isolated policies, however subtle and pragmatic such policies may be. Instead, it appears that a broader policy platform – a distributist platform – is needed, one which reforms lending practices and specifies a proper use for real estate. Smarter regulation of the financial sector along the lines outlined above – and tougher enforcement of existing regulations – would appear to be a start.

Going further, however, encouraging more local, place-based, cooperative alternatives to traditional credit sources (such as credit unions) would ensure that property is disposed in ways which are actually beneficial to the community, as well as ensuring that the well-being of the person(s) or family purchasing the property is respected. Creating a subsidy system that privileges small farmers over-against large agribusinesses will also help to naturally constrain the onslaught of sprawl and discourage speculative housing markets in greenfield construction areas (though this must be accompanied by a legal reform which discourages abuse of eminent domain laws, at the expense of farmers in the interests of housing-and-transportation developers). Supporting mixed-use zoning initiatives will likewise encourage greater and more responsible homeownership by creating more opportunities for small, specialised home businesses – so much the better, if they are organised in the cooperative-syndicalist model of the mediaeval guild! Devolving more financial and economic regulatory powers to the local level (and preventing state-mandated deregulation such as happened in Cleveland) could also be of massive help in encouraging and protecting local development. Dismantling the highway system would be a bad idea at this point in our economic history, though we could certainly do with creating a system of weight-based tolls on public highways to eliminate the non-competitive advantage enjoyed by ‘big box’ stores and strip malls (Médaille 2010). In addition to rethinking public-sector subsidies for homeownership and rental, creating alternative housing schemes which discourage speculation, such as resale restrictions, cooperative land trusts, mutual housing associations or even something as simple as an option for outright purchase of rental property by instalment remain tantalising alternatives to the status quo (Carlson 2009; Stone 2008).

The question of homeownership vis-à-vis rental in public policy terms, then, is still an important one. However, though Saegert et al. identify a number of salient problems with the current system and though Landis and McClure set out what appears to be a good direction with regard to a fair and egalitarian policy agenda, that policy agenda could be greatly enriched by again placing a normative emphasis on the ends of homeownership – to benefit families and to allow the communities which make up the fabric of our society to flourish – and adjusting policy to meet those ends. It could also be further enriched by being made a part of a broader policy platform whose ultimate aim is the widest possible redistribution of the means of production.

Bibliography

Carlson, Allan. 2009. ‘Servile World: How “The Big Business Government”, “The Loathsome Thing Called Social Service” and Other Distributist Nightmares All Came True’. Front Porch Republic. http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/?p=4903#_edn7 (accessed 12 December 2011).
Distributist Review. 2011. ‘Classic Reading List’. The Distributist Review. http://distributistreview.com/mag/test-2/recommended-reading/ (accessed 12 December 2011).
Landis, John and Kirk McClure. 2010. ‘Rethinking Federal Housing Policy’. Journal of the American Planning Association 76(3): 320-1, 335, 340-1.
Leo XIII. 1891. ‘Rerum Novarum: Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Capital and Labour’. English translation online at Libreria Editrice Vaticana. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html (accessed 12 December 2011).
Médaille, John. 2010. Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Health Care, Deficits and More, pp. 110-1, 155, 188-9. Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
Pendall, Rolf, Arthur Nelson, Casey Dawkins and Gerrit Knaap. 2005. ‘Connecting Smart Growth, Housing Affordability and Racial Equity’, in The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America by Xavier de Souza Briggs. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Saegert, Susan, Desiree Fields and Kimberly Libman. 2009. ‘Deflating the Dream: Radical Risk and the Neoliberalisation of Home Ownership’. Journal of Urban Affairs 31(3): 299, 300, 309-10, 312.
Stone, Michael. 2008. ‘Social Housing’, in The Community Development Reader by James DeFilippis and Susan Saegert, pp. 67-78. New York, NY: Routledge Press.
Xu Yilan. 2011. ‘Does Mortgage Deregulation Increase Foreclosures? Evidence from Cleveland’. University of Pittsburgh Department of Economics: Job Market Paper, presented 18 November 2011 at the University of Pittsburgh Centre for Social and Urban Research.

A brief comment on the Wukan protests + pointless video post: ‘OCP’ by Gama Bomb

2011-12-14T11:03:00.009-05:00

A village in China’s Guangdong Province, Wukan 廣東烏坎, is now in open revolt against the local government; see ChinaGeeks and The Telegraph for the full story as it develops. The Party has been laying on the censorship rather thick for this one, methinks; one may count on them to do precisely the wrong thing (censoring any news about Wukan and doing nothing to help the villagers) in a situation such as this. For some of the political background, may I humbly offer this assessment from a couple of weeks back:

In the meanwhile, in China, Bo Xilai and Wang Yang have been using local models in China in an attempt to shore up support for the more interventionist, public-good provisionist, actively anti-corruption Chongqing model and the more developmentalist, neoliberal, laissez-faire Guangdong model, respectively. Although both appear to be equally divergent from China’s current authoritarian-capitalist status quo (Mr Bo in the direction of greater economic democracy and a social safety net, Mr Wang in the direction of more authoritarian-capitalist ‘reforms’), in actuality Mr Bo is the more open to the guidance of democratic principles (willingly taking the advice of social democrats such as Dr Cui Zhiyuan, for example) and true exposure of the inner workings of the Chinese government to the public eye, whilst Mr Wang appears to be merely another rehash of Jiang Zemin: gleefully adopting the advice of market ‘reformers’ and technocrats and gutting public goods provision, and shielding those very same technocrats from any real sort of public scrutiny.

And, naturally, the same principle applies to public protests. The Chinese government under Jiang Zemin sounded a hasty retreat from Tian’anmen only for the 1989 protests to disappear quickly and quietly down the Memory Hole; the same sort of dynamic appears to be holding true for the Wukan protests under Wang Yang. (How long before that Google search is blocked?)

Apparently I am not alone in the opinion that this development does not look particularly good for Mr Wang, though naturally I tend to take a far more… some might say ‘cynical’, but I prefer the term ‘realistic’, view of Chinese liberalism. As long as its primary theorists continue to follow the sorry, intellectually-bankrupt roads trodden by the likes of the Austrian school (Liu Junning) and the neoconservatives (Liu Xiaobo) rather than the more humane liberalism of, say, EF Schumacher, authoritarianism will continue to be a mark of Chinese politics (especially among those who make the biggest show of being against it) for a long time to come.

And speaking of ‘realistic’ views on liberalism, particularly in its more extremist forms, a great comment by John from Economics is for Donkeys on my last post (I really appreciated this one, gave me an excuse to post another thrash metal video):

I am glad the interview with the libertarian quotes Hans Herman-Hoppe. Hoppe is often praised by Christian monarchists because he has argued that monarchy is the ultimate private government. Apparently, Hoppe's concept of monarchy would be OCP from the RoboCop movies, but with a crown.

Dick Jones! Dick Jones!

Ah, Gama Bomb. We respect you, too! Best of luck to the villagers of Wukan. Stand strong, and thrash on, my gentle readers! \m/

Two very worthwhile articles

2011-12-13T10:50:00.005-05:00

Very fine article up at The National Interest by Dr Amitai Etzioni.

‘[T]he nations of the euro zone must prepare the ground for fiscal federalism via a major community building drive, aiming to bestow on the zone the kind of loyalties so far only commanded by national communities—or they will have to scale back their conjoined activities, especially the common currency. A sociologist notes with much regret that there have been no successful drives to build communities composed of nations and that such a development—if it can be accomplished—would be slow and very demanding. It is too early to write a eulogy for the euro zone, but it is time to prepare the family for the sad state of the patient—and what is prescribed for him.’

And, on Naked Capitalism and The Distributist Review, the first part of a promised six-part series by Harvard postdoc Dr Andrew Dittmer, a warning worthy of George Orwell against the excesses of ideological libertarianism. Though extraordinarily witty, it cannot rightly be considered parody since a great deal of it consists of actual quotes from the work of an ‘economist’ of the Austrian school; definitely worth a read!

My apologies to my gentle readers; finals season being what it is, I should be as brief here as possible. Hopefully once I resurface I will be able to post something more substantive!

A few words regarding the public role of faith

2011-12-10T20:32:00.003-05:00

Lincoln Chafee, Governor of RI

It all started when the good governor of my home state of Rhode Island, Gov Lincoln Chafee, put up a holiday tree in the state Capitol building, causing something of a furore from the American religious right. I did not join in this conversation because – and I believe that my fellow Rhode Islander Fr Bill Locke put this quite nicely – I do not believe that Our Lord or his disciples or the Church Fathers would have cared overly much about what we call a tree, so much as they would have cared about the weightier matters of social and economic injustice which haunt our society these days. If there is one thing I have learned about the culture wars, it is that being a conscientious objector pays off… most of the time. On other, weightier issues than these, however, the battle must certainly be joined.

That said, it rather baffles me how thin-skinned American Christians, particularly on the religious right, can be. As secular and (in religion as in everything else) as privatised as the society may have become, we are not a society which actively persecutes Christians. And for this we should be thankful, for there certainly are such societies in the world which do persecute Christians: Egypt (particularly after the Arab Spring) and the (northern) Sudan being the most high-profile examples. In the Middle East, safe havens for Christians, particularly of the venerable indigenous communities, have historically existed – such as Syria and Iran – but they are undermined by the foreign policy of the US-led West with disheartening regularity; these Christians deserve, at the very least, our efforts at creating a more dovish and more humane foreign policy. In the Balkans up until very recently it was very dangerous to be a Christian (particularly Orthodox) in certain parts of what once was Yugoslavia – as in, one’s very life (let alone one’s livelihood) being at stake. As such, it strikes me as somewhat petty that certain segments of far-right Protestantism in this country will gripe about a Christmas tree being called a ‘holiday tree’. What awaits them is hardly the fate of St Stephen.

Indeed, the political climate is such in the United States that far-right Christianity is so far removed from oppression that it is, has been, and probably will be for the foreseeable future, used as a political tool by the opportunistic. Rev’d Eugene Cho has posted an incredibly thoughtful response to the political advertisement by Rick Perry by two young women who sought to create a more constructive public voice for religion. They – and he – get my thanks for seeking to articulate a radical stance that seeks to avoid both the extremes of the ever more pervasive privatisation of religion on the one hand, and ressentiment-filled religious identity politics on the other.

Good cheer to my gentle readers, and my thanks for your forbearance upon reading my latest rant!

Pointless video post - ‘Breakdown’ 『崩潰』 by Suffocated 窒息

2011-12-09T01:33:00.002-05:00

Well I’ll be... a Chinese retro thrash band that actually sounds like thrash! I kowtow gladly before these dudes and their deathrashy awesomeness. Admittedly, here they sound a bit green. Their style is incredibly straightforward, well-executed, but also a bit... unpolished, shall we say. Not a bad thing at all: ‘Breakdown’ is pure thrash front to back, and the guitar solo is definitely horns-worthy. On their 2010 album, 《紛擾世界》 World of Confusion, though, they manage to have hammered out a style which brings massive doses of pure slayage. And by hammered out, I mean hammered out: they shift easily and effortlessly between melodic thrash in the vein of Overload, to a more traditional deathrash with very heavy influences from early Sepultura and Testament, to straight-up death metal and more grueling, grinding crossover numbers (like the epic 『使命召喚』 ‘Call of Duty’) that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Toxic Holocaust album. Throughout it all, they maintain a progressive mentality (if not an actual progression) which allows these variations to mesh together more-or-less seamlessly, though in actuality the progressive influence is a common trend I have noticed among a number of new Chinese metal bands. Great, great stuff.

Enjoy, my gentle readers!

Full of grace

2011-12-08T18:53:00.005-05:00

A happy Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin to one and all!

I’m still feeling slightly frazzled from final projects (one concerning a game-theoretic analysis of Greece and the EU, one concerning Brown University’s Asian student body, one concerning school impact on Homewood civic engagement and the last concerning the developments of Chinatowns on the East and West Coasts), and need to begin preparing soon for exams, as well as getting a visa for another China visit. To me have been now imparted several skills, including how to make maps with ArcGIS 10 and how to design a research proposal; as well as several old skills being further honed, such as how to scramble and slam out multiple papers during the last couple of weeks of term. And I am rereading Utopia. Such is graduate school; wouldn’t really have it any other way.

Please, sir, I want some More

2011-12-06T05:10:00.007-05:00

I have covered in this blog a number of historical English thinkers, authors and public intellectuals whose work I believe reflects a subtle, traditionalist and Platonic strain of socialist political-economic thought in the Anglosphere: Laud, Astell, Johnson, Swift, Oastler, Porteus, Ruskin, Morris, Chesterton, Grant, Lewis. Not long ago I did a brief not-quite-hagiography of Fürst Metternich. Yet, I have neglected – to my everlasting shame – one of the very giants upon whose shoulders all of these proto-, Christian and Tory socialists have stood. As the Chinese would have it, ‘I have eyes, yet I did not recognise Mount Tai’. This giant, of course, was the Tudor-era classicist, lawyer, parliamentarian, polemicist, philosopher, poet, Lord Chancellor, martyr and saint, the matchless Sir Thomas More.

Probably best known for his opposition to the annulment of the marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon which cost him his life and gained him the Beatific Vision, and perhaps only slightly less well-known for his fantastical treatise Utopia, which set out his communistic political ideals (borrowed quite heavily from Plato) as well as skewering various European practices and institutions (including the injustices of the creeping enclosures movement, the burden and bane of many an English peasant) upon a rapier wit, there was yet a good deal (if you will pardon me) more to Sir Thomas than first meets the eye. A precocious teen, he very early caught the eye and ear of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Morton, and was made his page as well as being recommended to Oxford University at the age of fourteen. He became proficient in Greek and Latin and versed himself in the early Church Fathers, and went on to become a lawyer and a parliamentarian for Norfolk – where he promptly drew the ire of Henry VII for his outspoken opposition to new levies for personal royal use. This same outspokenness and frankness of temperament would serve him well in his later career, though it would prove often to be to his own detriment, and ultimately his death. As a lawyer, though, he was very scrupulous in the types of cases he took, and he never demanded fees from the poor or widows or orphans for his legal services.

He married twice – the first time to his younger pupil Jane Colt in 1505 and the second time after her death in 1511 to an older widow, Alice Middleton. Both marriages (toward which his attitudes were blessedly insular) were by all accounts happy. Sir Thomas proved a faithful and devoted husband, as well as a doting father both to his own daughters by Jane and to Alice’s by her first marriage. His advocacy for women’s education (later shared by his contemporary humanists Erasmus and Elyot) would later prove an inspiration for Mary Astell’s own.

From all appearances, the young Henry VIII took as quick a liking to More as his father took a dislike to him. He rose quickly in the ranks of Henry’s service, was knighted and appointed a member of the Privy Council. He eagerly joined Cardinal Wolsey’s sadly-abortive legal crusade against enclosures (up until Wolsey fell out of favour with the King) and very quickly took up his pen in jousts of letters with Protestant thinkers both on the continent and in England, including Martin Luther, William Tyndale and Simon Fish. He was able and more than willing to respond to the particularly acerbic prose of Luther in kind. Given that many of these Protestant missives were aimed as much at the King as at the Church, More proved his loyalty to Henry as well. In his later career it is arguable to what degree power changed him, and led him to alter his humanistic principles, but the fatal epilogue of his story shows clearly where his loyalties lay… even if, as long as he could, he attempted to reconcile his friendship with the King with the radical departure the same King was making from communion with the Church in Rome.

Sir Thomas More is yet another case study in how one should not easily dismiss saints, for they have a tendency to be unruly, troublous, inconvenient and generally obnoxious to those seated on the highest thrones of worldly power. The saint is a friend neither to tyranny nor to capital. And one can quite readily see how his influence – or at least his idealism – long outlasted him. He is remembered as a saint both in the Catholic Church and in the Anglican Communion. William Morris modelled much of his own political economic thought on Sir Thomas More’s work. Fr Jonathan Swift hailed him as ‘the person of the greatest virtue this kingdom ever produced’ (and Dr Johnson concurred!). GK Chesterton likewise declaimed that he ‘may come to be counted the greatest Englishman’… though perhaps the most surreal testament to his memory is the stele in Moscow which lists him among eighteen other thinkers who ‘promoted the liberation of humanity from oppression, arbitrary rule and exploitation’.

Count me with Swift and Johnson and Chesterton, though. I likewise see Sir Thomas as a great (and a good) Englishman, both profound and humane. Would there were more like him.

Jonathan Freedland: ‘It is democracy itself that the markets seem to despise’

2011-12-03T17:09:00.005-05:00

Well, two final projects down for the term, and two more to go. Guess I have a little bit of time to work on a blog post now.

There was a very interesting piece in The Guardian by Jonathan Freedland a couple of weeks back. Though he does (along with the rest of the Guardian’s commentariat, not to mention that of the New York Times, the Washington Post and other American print) tend to draw distinctions in ways which are (I believe) a little bit too hard-and-fast between authoritarian and democratic (is Singapore as ‘authoritarian’ as the mainland? is Russia – where women very much have the rights to drive, vote and show their faces in public – anywhere near as ‘authoritarian’ as Saudi Arabia?), I believe the point he makes is a very sound one. Though the neoconservatives and the libertarians have long pretended otherwise, for the sensible and the attentive it has long since been the case that globalist, neoliberal capitalism and democracy make for very fidgety bedfellows indeed.

But in the light of the economic crisis, the strain in that relationship is starting to show more than ever. A referendum in Greece over the austerity measures being imposed on it from without was cancelled; pan-European technocrats have taken the reins of the Greek macroeconomy and are hell-bent on riding it roughshod over the working class, pensioners, civil servants and any other plebes who have the temerity (nay, the effrontery!) to take a train or a public bus to work, or to fall ill and take up precious hospital space.

In the meanwhile, in China, Bo Xilai and Wang Yang have been using local models in China in an attempt to shore up support for the more interventionist, public-good provisionist, actively anti-corruption Chongqing model and the more developmentalist, neoliberal, laissez-faire Guangdong model, respectively. Although both appear to be equally divergent from China’s current authoritarian-capitalist status quo (Mr Bo in the direction of greater economic democracy and a social safety net, Mr Wang in the direction of more authoritarian-capitalist ‘reforms’), in actuality Mr Bo is the more open to the guidance of democratic principles (willingly taking the advice of social democrats such as Dr Cui Zhiyuan, for example) and true exposure of the inner workings of the Chinese government to the public eye, whilst Mr Wang appears to be merely another rehash of Jiang Zemin: gleefully adopting the advice of market ‘reformers’ and technocrats and gutting public goods provision, and shielding those very same technocrats from any real sort of public scrutiny.

And, naturally, the same principle applies to public protests. The Chinese government under Jiang Zemin sounded a hasty retreat from Tian’anmen only for the 1989 protests to disappear quickly and quietly down the Memory Hole; the same sort of dynamic appears to be holding true for the Wukan protests under Wang Yang. (How long before that Google search is blocked?) By all means one may examine his motives, but even though Mr Bo Xilai appears prima facie to be more heavy-handed, we should keep in mind that thus far he has consistently moved in favour of truth-to-power, rather than in favour of erasing truth by momentarily constraining power.

And then we have, as Mr Freedland deftly points out, the peculiar breed of neoliberal / liberal-interventionist commentator in the United States which yearns for this country to ‘be China for a day’; and by China Mr Friedman evidently means Guangdong rather than Chongqing. Even though he is very quick to hedge his wish about with all the right liberal-democratic verbiage, this should tell one all one needs to know about where the sympathies of the neoliberals lie where issues of democracy, economic self-determination and the rule of law are concerned.

Be ye not fooled: the champions of the invisible hand are themselves apparently quite eager to equip it with a very visible steel gauntlet. Let us hope that our nations have the resilience to – to paraphrase Mr Freedland – assert that people, rather than markets, are sovereign.

EDIT: Here is an article describing Mr Bo’s drive to open official CCP archives to the public and focus more attention on the actions of government and Party members. One may argue that it is little more than Mr Bo blowing his own horn, but it does highlight one of the ways in which he represents a massive change for the People’s Republic, in a far less authoritarian direction.

Pointless video post - ‘World Chaos’ by Holy Moses

2011-11-28T23:55:00.005-05:00

Holy Moses is another one of those criminally-underrated German bands (like Tankard), dating back to the infancy of this newer and more aggressive style of metal that came to be known as thrash, that deserve a much more hallowed place in the annals of metal history than they often receive. Sabina Classen slays so much it’s crazy; given that female vocalists in thrash are so seldom found, you just know they have to be that much more epic than the rest. Ms Classen simply never disappoints here. Even though World Chaos (for which this is the title track) is very much a work of ‘crossover’ thrash (as the punkish lyrics readily attest) and doesn’t quite live up to the sheer, consistent kinetic force of, say Finished With the Dogs or New Machine of Liechtenstein, it still ranks among my favourite thrash metal albums, full stop.

Enjoy, my gentle readers! \m/

A few words on Metternich

2011-11-25T02:00:00.005-05:00

Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar, Fürst von Metternich-Winneburg zu Beilstein

Happy turkey day, gentle readers!

People who know me well are usually not surprised to know that I’ve had a fascination with the historical figure of Klemens Wenzel, Fürst von Metternich, since before I graduated from college: a bundle of contradictions (or seemingly so) drawn to another. Metternich has garnered in much of the world the reputation of an arch-conservative, even an absolutist reactionary, seeking quixotically to hold back an inevitable tide of progress, which finally saw him defeated in the liberal revolutions of 1848. During his heyday, though, he was the bogeyman of many a ‘free-trade’ liberal, nationalist and free-speech advocate in his day, with the anti-nationalist Karlsbader Beschlüsse being the primary symbol of the censorship and repression with which Metternich was associated. As a personal figure, as well, he appeared to exemplify at once both the worst and the best of the old European nobility. Peter Viereck describes him as a ‘Frenchified German dandy… witty, pleasure-loving and arrogant’, which is perhaps not an unfair description. Continental in his attitude toward marriage (to put it politely, given his affairs with a number of high-profile women including Caroline Murat, Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister) and almost hubristically confident in his (formidable, to be sure) intelligence and abilities, he nevertheless dedicated those very same talents of which he was so cock-sure entirely to the service of his emperor and to the ancien régime.

Yet, under the international system he engineered, Europe enjoyed over a generation of peace – and what is more, it was not a peace enforced by the hegemony of a single economic or political regime, but rather a participatory and (largely) communicative system wherein powers were balanced with each other. He did not always get along with Emperor Francis; indeed, he opposed the most egregious forms of domestic censorship, advocated moderate local self-rule for Italians and Hungarians, was an ardent defender of the rights of Jews across the Continent in an era when they were still massively unpopular even amongst liberals, and was a consistent advocate for constitutional reforms within the Habsburg Empire. He attempted to bridge the gulf between the serfs, the growing proletarian class, and the landed gentry through his ‘socialisme conservateur’ – a vision of political economy which shares in its cosmopolitan reconciliation of the classes a great deal of overlap with later Catholic social theology, and by which the Prince made himself the ‘enem[y] of anarchy, moral and material’. In a time where liberal thought was converging upon the nation-state as its greatest vehicle of political empowerment, Metternich turned his vision at once upward to a greater international order and downward to more local forms of order.

One may argue the finer points over whether or not what he did was ultimately best for Europe as a whole, but there are many points that I think one can successfully take from his thought. For one thing, Metternich was far-sighted enough to see that the ethnically-homogeneous ideal of the nation-state was a horrible idea (a hearty thank-you to California Constantian for the link!), and that the secret societies within such ideas were allowed to manifest themselves in violent extremes were not a healthy development but rather a ‘gangrene of society’. Though one may decry that the Karlsbader Beschlüsse themselves were an extreme and repressive measure, one must remember that out of the ‘liberal’ Burschenschaften against which they were primarily aimed arose many of the aggressive hyper-nationalist and anti-Semitic tendencies which ultimately plunged the European continent into another total war, a genocide. By contrast, it is well to remember that Prince Metternich’s socialisme conservateur was at once the fountainhead of his support for the traditional monarchical state, as well as being the very source of his defence of the basic dignities of the Italians, the Hungarians and the Jews in Europe.

In keeping with the season, in addition to the other parts of my life for which I give thanks, I feel I owe a debt of gratitude to the intellectual inspiration of Fürst Metternich – a flawed but nevertheless incredibly profound political theorist as well as master diplomat.

Yan Xuetong: ‘China must display humane authority in order to compete with the United States’

2011-11-23T03:40:00.003-05:00

I’ve been linking to the Hidden Harmonies blog a lot these days. There’s a good reason for it, however. Although Hidden Harmonies gets a pretty bad rep in the China-expat blogosphere for being basically (an ‘angry youth’ 憤青 outlet / a five-dime 五毛 corner store / a bunch of supposedly-ignorant ABCs venting about American media bias and international relations / all or any of the above as the detractor’s narrative demands), and even though the commentary on many of the articles does sometimes get a bit heated, they truly are an invaluable resource when it comes to the analysis, translation and dissemination of critical research from within China, partly because of their enthusiasm for the subject at hand. It also doesn’t hurt, from my humble perspective at least, that they have a rare, sensitive and often penetrating scepticism of the ways in which the neoconservative foreign policy agenda of the Bush Administration (and to a certain extent, Obama’s as well) has shaped both our foreign relations and our journalistic best practices; this is a sensitivity which a number of other China expat blogs very much lack.

So it was with considerable interest, nay, enthusiasm that I read the redoubtable DeWang’s link-up to and commentary on a New York Times editorial which was translated from an essay by Yan Xuetong, Dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University. Dr Yan’s thesis boils down to the argument that what is needed right now in China is a healthy dose of actual Confucianism, rather than the current government’s fad use of Confucius and his students as mascots of Chinese culture and CCP rule. In short, the Chinese government needs to be more focussed on developing local, domestic institutions than on its foreign PR, shift away from developmentalism to focus on social and economic equality, and serve as a better moral role model for the rest of the developing world rather than attempting to compete in terms of hard power and economic influence.

It is a profoundly, indeed unabashedly, palaeoconservative argument (Dr Yan speaks approvingly of the traditions of virtue ethics and the independent civil service in China going back past the Tang Dynasty – one might cite approvingly his parallels with the political thought of George Grant, though his positing China as an alternative vision of ‘nation’ rather than Canada will result in a very different-looking philosophy), with just enough of a hint of Chinese New Leftism in his prescriptions of social safety nets and economic justice measures meant to collapse the growing wealth gap to get an ovation from me. Though Dr Yan is a self-professed realist (and I have no reason to doubt him), here he hints at a normative international relations approach which mirrors and encompasses the profounder insights of realism without succumbing to Reinhold Niebuhr’s heretical interpretation of original sin; marking a moral dimension to power itself rather than merely to its uses.

I very much look forward to reading more of Dr Yan’s work to see how he fleshes out more of these ideas.

月氏歌

2011-11-20T10:35:00.004-05:00

天山路叉選一條
颳北風示吾歸遭
颻雪被戎血泮燒
聽遠西漠中慨號
追赤鹿者凡等儼
劃江船并遊凍原
酷滄長晦鍛煃魂
寒黑中聽烔義論

- 郭明正, 2011年11月20日

Translation:

Song of the Tokharians

I choose a path from a fork in the Tian Shan road,
As the North Wind whispers to me, 'turn back'.
The driving snow is melted by the heat of my barbarian blood
As I hear the distant lament from the western desert.
Among the followers of the elk, all are equally glorious,
The river-boat rowers and the tundra wanderers.
Bitter cold and long nights forge hearts afire;
In the winter dark one hears the scalding word of justice.

- Matthew Cooper, 20 November 2011

Localism, finance and federalist legalism + pointless video post – ‘River of Rapture’ by Death Angel

2011-11-19T15:53:00.004-05:00

In the past couple of days, I have attended a heavy metal concert featuring thrashers Testament, Anthrax and Death Angel, as well as a brown-bag talk from Pitt economics PhD student Xu Yilan and her paper on the effect of financial deregulation on home foreclosures. Her paper was very well-conceived, painstakingly rigorous in methodology and quite interesting both in terms of its own argument and in terms of the history it uses to tell its story.

In November 2006, the Ohio Supreme Court overturned a city ordinance issued by Cleveland, heavily regulating loans originating at interest rates higher than 4.5% above the T-bill base rate in order to discourage usurious mortgage lending practices, on the basis that they were more restrictive than state laws governing mortgage lending, and thus violated the ‘home rule’ provision of the Ohio State Constitution. Maryland’s Supreme Court slapped down a similar county-level ordinance at about the same time. As a result, according to the study by Ms Xu, subprime lending practices took off (subprime loans increasing by 30%, and total loans by subprime lenders by 40%) even though overall credit was unaffected. In addition, there was a nearly 50% increase in loan foreclosures! This study suggests, quite tellingly, that:

local regulations do impact the housing market, often to a higher degree than higher-level regulations,

heavy regulation does not necessarily have a deleterious impact on the total amount of credit in the market, and

lenders will take what slack they are given – that is to say, if subprime and usurious lending practices are deregulated, you will find more of them in the market as a result.

It also demonstrates a rather uncomfortable tendency in American political discourse to limit our discourse on federalism to merely the relationship between states and the federal government, getting bogged down in arguments about ‘states’ rights’. I must confess that, despite my distributist and pro-subsidiarity inclinations, I am heavily sceptical to the point of dismissive of the common run of ‘states’ rights’ arguments in American political discourse given the way that they have been aligned with some incredibly ugly race politics in the American South, predating the Civil War. That is an important argument, but separate from the one I want to make here, however – and it is the case that the amount of legal leeway given to states has, granted, resulted in some remarkable institutional experimentation. It is certainly not an empty reputation of the federalist system that it allows for a significant degree of regional autonomy and difference, to the point where states may be justly thought of as ‘crucibles of democracy’.

At the same time, though, states have proven that they can be every bit as tyrannical as the federal government in terms of enforced conformity, if not more so. Jim Crow is only the most egregious historical example. Cleveland created its own laws and apparently had some success in enforcing them; as a result of state-mandated deregulation, however, predatory lending practices boomed again within the city itself. It strikes me as a structural weakness of our political system that local politics are bound up entirely in their relationships with the relevant state authorities, whilst the ‘federalist’ arguments are relegated to the national stage and concern only ‘states’ rights’ rather than the rights of cities, towns, counties and communities. Additionally, the corporate news media, also hoping to create news with the broadest possible audience in mind, focusses disproportionately on this higher level. Small wonder the American public care so much more about presidential and congressional politics than what goes on in their own backyards!

Thus, it strikes me that in such cases as Ohio and Maryland, ‘states’ rights’ as commonly advocated by libertarians and palaeoconservatives with national political aspirations, are in fact the bane of truly distributist and localist concerns. This is just my interpretation of the paper, however. I highly recommend reading Ms Xu’s work on its own merits – as presented, it was a very interesting economics paper in its own right.

The night before, however, I attended an epic concert on the North Shore by Testament, Anthrax and Death Angel. My gentle readers may be familiar with my Testament fandom (and Anthrax aren’t bad at all either!), but their fellow Bay Area thrashers Death Angel are also worth an honourable mention and pointless video post here. As a live act, the Filipinos pull some massive weight, and in terms of their energy and presence were able to stand toe-to-toe with the renowned brethren for whom they opened. Their new album Relentless Retribution not only has some of the most awe-inspiringly ferocious album art I’ve seen on a thrash album in a long time, but also has some awe-inspiringly ferocious music as well, such as ‘River of Rapture’ here:

My favourite song on the album is still probably the opening track, ‘Relentless Revolution’, though: classic thrash metal at its peak, spirited, aggressive and incendiary (this one they did play at the concert!). I certainly appreciated hearing Death Angel for the first time – amazing stuff.

Authority, intelligence and the IAEA

2011-11-10T16:32:00.005-05:00

Cartoon courtesy China Daily cartoonist Luo Jie 羅傑, via Hidden Harmonies blog.

The IAEA released its report on Iran earlier this week, and it was followed by the all-too-predictable chorus among the EU calling for more sanctions, as well as the all-too-predictable objections from Russia and China (though China’s was carefully massaged and muted). There are authority and credibility problems abounding, however, that go far beyond the anticipated objections of international political players. For example, the entirety of the first eight pages of the recent report, whilst in some respects quite alarming, refers solely to:

45. The information indicates that prior to the end of 2003 the above activities took place under a structured programme. There are also indications that some activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device continued after 2003, and that some may still be ongoing.

The entire report, in fact, is littered with this sort of highly-qualified and very vague language – high on incidents and accidents, hints and allegations (some of which are in excess of ten years old), yet somewhat low on current facts; much more suited to a press release for an elected official than to an internal policy document of a respected international agency. What facts there are, are facts referring to activities that are at least eight years old. And yet, how is this news being reported?

Report: Iran developing nuclear bombs (and later, Iran’s nuclear programme alarms world powers)
Iran ‘months from building atomic bomb’, claims atomic agency report
The truth about Iran
IAEA report: Iran has been working toward nuclear bomb since 2003

At this point, it appears that both the news media and the IAEA itself are actually being used as ready-to-hand tools of the foreign policy agendas of a few national governments. The New Statesman’s Mehdi Hasan and Emptywheel’s Jim White each cover in some detail the ways in which IAEA has been institutionally compromised and made a tool of the foreign policy priorities of the United States in particular with this report. One of the difficulties of being a member of an Abrahamic faith in an age such as this one, is that the sorts of truths and authorities one wants to be able to take for granted (like those responsible for our physical security) appear to be, in actuality, the fear-spreading tools and playthings of the powerful where most they should be the goods all people can hold in common. This is a theological and philosophical argument, but the way the assumptions are being hashed out in practice could very well end up placing a lot of real people – Iranian, Israeli, British, American – in harm’s way.

Pointless video post - ‘No Fear’ by Rage

2011-11-09T14:08:00.003-05:00

Since 2005, the Rhenish-Belarusian power trio Rage has been on the warpath, so to speak, against the post-Bush foreign and economic policies of the United States, and delivered three albums which contained outraged political broadsides against the military-industrial complex, corporate greed and neoliberalism: 2006’s Speak of the Dead (with Mike Terrana of Masterplan on drums), 2008’s Carved in Stone and 2010’s Strings to a Web. ‘No Fear’, from Speak of the Dead, was perhaps the trendsetter in this regard. In addition, the song is a sterling example (alongside, say, Angel Dust’s ‘Bleed’) of what power metal should sound like - hard, crunchy and heavy whilst at the same time losing as few of the melodic or emotional elements as possible, something at which Peter Wagner and Victor Smolski are both rather ingenious. The album is slightly schizophrenic, which is by no means a bad thing, since it features also a lengthy symphonic arrangement (‘Suite Lingua Mortis’) with the Belarusian Inspector Symphonic Orchestra accompanying. Rage unfortunately also has a twinge of the knee-jerk anti-religious sentiment to which heavy metal in general is often prone, and their lyrics aren’t necessarily the deepest around, but in the face of their sheer all-around awesomeness I think a great deal can be forgiven.

Enjoy, gentle readers!

於貔抱者、於龍戡者（下部） – Of panda-huggers and dragon-slayers, part 2

2011-11-08T14:51:00.003-05:00

As with ChinaGeeks, Lawyers, Guns and Money is one of those blogs I read not so much because I agree with it all the time (though I certainly agree with LGM’s social-democratic commenters more often than I agree with the neoconservative-tinged cast which frequents ChinaGeeks), but because one can generally count on the opinions expressed therein to be both thoughtful and provocative. Dr Robert Farley manages to hold the line on that front with his insightful piece on the GOP’s attitudes toward China; though he focusses, by his own admission, primarily on Mitt Romney the staff of his campaign. (Also noted by Dr Farley: Hong Bopei Dashu, though experienced in the affairs of the Middle Country, is nevertheless not a front-runner in this race, likely not so much on account of his Mormonness as of his moderation.)

I think Dr Farley’s analysis certainly holds water. There is a very definite split within the Republican Party corresponding to the differing attitudes between the libertarian (read: pro-tobacco, as here, and other harmful drugs) and the neoconservative (read: pro-military-industrial complex) camps. The businesses which primarily leverage the most votes for the Republican Party tend to be against war with China, as (following the example of the East India Company) they see China as a huge export market for American exports. On the other hand, the influence the neoconservatives have had on the Republican mainstream has made it nearly impossible for the Republican leadership (including the current crop of presidential candidates) to express themselves in anything other than an American-exceptionalist and democratic-utopian idiom. (The exceptions, Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul – for whom I don’t otherwise harbour any sympathy whatsoever – have been deliberately sidelined by the party as a result of their dissenting opinions.) But this sort of two-faced approach is very much on full display within the Romney campaign.

I think it would be likewise interesting to analyse the Democratic Party’s positions on China. Though the economic incentives are different (with large union support supplanting that of the tobacco and defence industries), I think we are likely to find that opinions are likewise dissonant and distorted by the (if I may borrow Dr Wang Hui’s usage) anti-political institutionalisation of politics. The Obama Administration has taken what may charitably be called a ‘balanced’ and what may less charitably be called an ‘incoherent’ policy toward China; on the one hand taking a hard line on Chinese currency and a strident neo-liberal line on trade policy, but on the other quietly easing off on human rights issues. Also interesting to me is that even within Democratic ranks, there is a certain level of dissent on trade policy – Mr Robert Casey, Jr (our good Senator from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) is quite remote from being a panda-hugger on trade policy, on account of his care for local production and manufacturing – although his free-trade scepticism certainly is not exclusive only to China.

Although I am much more sympathetic to Mr Casey’s localist, scale-free position than to Mr Obama’s, Ms Clinton’s or the average Economist reader’s as a matter of principle, I tend to think that China’s leadership also must consider its own position, and the manufacturing and industrial jobs that are fleeing Guangzhou and the SEZs to take advantage of yet-cheaper labour in Vietnam, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Before the likes of Clinton decry a trade barrier as ‘unfair’ in the kneejerk way they are often wont to do, or before another Casey takes aim at China as a job-stealing bogeyman, perhaps they ought first to take a fuller account of the various levels of unfairness at play on a global scale, in which Vietnamese and Bangladeshi wage-slaves are every bit as much victims as the Chinese and American workers whose jobs evaporated overnight. Chinese workers and American workers need not be enemies – just as the states and institutions which govern them are not.

How do you solve a problem like Medea?

2011-11-08T13:38:00.010-05:00

Image of surprisingly-not-alpine-Austria but Mount Damavand of north-central Iran, courtesy Wikipedia

My apologies to my gentle readers; I can rarely pass up an opportunity for a bad, bad pun. This one arises from a comment that one esteemed reader, Mr James P— of Kongming’s Archives (and a man of integrity and courtesy whose opinions in general I’ve come to respect very highly) left for my last blog post on Facebook:

I don’t think there is suitable justification for a war there by a long shot and I believe this is a bad time for what would likely turn into another lengthy, bloody, and costly war. I’m definitely not in favor of this. But an analysis of such a war seems incomplete at best when it overlooks the myriad problems with Iran, it’s government and leadership, and the role they play internationally.

This is true, though the answers are likely not as Mr P— is wont to assume. I believe Iran is problematic. I appreciate and admire the antique humanist strain within Shi’a Islam (which is more or less in continuity with the Zoroastrian, Achaemenid fountainhead of Socratic-Platonic-Aristotelian ethics, the monotheistic radicalism of the prophets of Old Israel and, by extension, the radicalism of classical Christianity) to which Iran’s government pays tribute, as in the reservation of seats in the Majlis for religious minorities. I also recognise, however, that there are numerous ways in which that very same government undermines its own commitment to its ideals by violating the dignity of its citizens. There are a number of people who can make that case far, far better than I can – Ms Naj over at Neoresistance is always a reliable advocate for those in Iran who are systematically bereft of power (and, to her great credit, she remains stridently anti-war and pro-economic justice).

Though the problems with Iran’s government, leadership and foreign relations may be myriad, I do tend to think that the hierarchy begins with the inconvenient truths revealed by Operation Ajax nearly sixty years ago. Certain sometimes-dominant elements within the state apparatus of the United States and of the United Kingdom are unwilling to give face to states in the region (even moderate and reformist ones such as the government of Mr Mosaddegh!) which do not acquiesce to their economic colonialism with the appropriate level of servility. The resultant humiliation of having an autocrat who was little more than the puppet of Western petrol interests was, rather understandably, a little much for the Iranian people to bear. Sadly, it also served to poison the social-democratic and constitutional-monarchist vision of the overthrown Mr Mosaddegh such that the (republican, albeit religious) purveyors of the Islamic Revolution were able to paint themselves as the Last Best Hope for Iranian self-determination. This is the ace hand they still hold, and which they still play at every opportunity when the United States and Allies make aggressive noises in Iran’s direction.

This desire for and insecurity about sovereignty issues also informs the movements Iran’s government is making toward becoming a nuclear state. Though Iran is a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and has been a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency since its inception, its historical vulnerability to foreign attack and hostility from the US and Great Britain (plus or minus Israel) certainly provide an incentive to acquire nuclear energy technology and weaponry, and to build bridges with nations historically less aligned with the Anglo-American West (namely Russia and China). One may react with chagrin to a Russia-China-Iran bloc; one may deplore the acquisition of nuclear arms; but it strikes me as a bad-faith argument to pretend that any of these moves somehow place Iran’s government outside the realm of rationality (if we are defining rationality in terms of foreign-policy realism).

In terms of their international role, on balance I believe it is wrong to stigmatise (as much of the Anglo-American press outside outlets like the Guardian tends to do by default) either the Iranian government or the Iranian people as ‘irrational’ in their pursuit of greater sovereignty, and even nuclear technology, when a significant part of the context is two neighbours – Pakistan to the east and Israel to the west – each with already existing nuclear arms and each with disturbing proclivities to violence and zealotry (whether of an Islamic-fundamentalist or of a secular-Zionist flavour). Even more so when one considers that the two international powers most stridently attempting to isolate Iran are also aiding and abetting Islamic fundamentalist and secular über-Ba’athist elements within Iran. Though I am not (I repeat, not) a fan of the current administration, I fear that an order in which Jundullah or the Mojahedin-e Khalq are given preference on account of their foreign support would likely be much, much worse. All this is dancing around the central issue, though; as Ms Naj notes, 120 noted Iranian intellectuals and human-rights advocates have come out quite stridently against war as a viable option to settling Iran’s current woes.

My apologies, Mr P—: I fear that, even though I may have cursorily touched on some of the thorny issues surrounding American foreign policy toward Iran, this ended up being more of a post on ‘how don’t you solve a problem like Medea’ as opposed to how we do. On the brighter side, though (mileage may vary depending on how likely the Iranian government is to listen), I think quite a number of Iranian citizens (and that number is not insignificant) are amenable to letting bygones be bygones… if we give them a reason to.

Enough is enough

2011-11-03T15:11:00.007-04:00

I shall keep this short.

At times it seems like the American populace is on the tracks facing down an out-of-control locomotive, one which has already claimed thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of lives in the Fertile Crescent, in Central Asia and in North Africa. Now it appears that further fuel is being added to the boiler by a British Ministry of Defence and a hawkish Israeli administration which are pushing ever more shamelessly for a pre-emptive war against yet another ancient, venerable and humanistic civilisation: namely, that of Iran. Such sabre- and shamshir-rattling is not in the interests of the American or the British public, to say absolutely nothing of the Iranian public, on whose territory such a war will doubtless be waged, or of the Israeli citizenry, who will further alienate themselves from their neighbours in a war that will doubtless further devastate their nation’s reputation in the region.

The standards by which we are now considering what comprises a valid just cause for military action, or even a valid authority to declare that cause, are – thanks in part to the neoconservative policy agenda which has now been enshrined in unholy precedent by Bush and Blair, and in part to the increasingly paranoid, increasingly petulant, increasingly amoral and increasingly unhinged foreign policy of the state of Israel – at an all-time low. President Obama, having been elected on a mandate to volte-face on the perversities of the prior administration, now sadly appears to be poised on the brink of yet another (to borrow the words of our august Archbishop) ‘criminal, ignorant and potentially murderous folly’. And the silence from the Anglo-American progressive blogosphere is both deafening and shameful.

Enough, is enough, is enough.

EDIT: Here’s hoping Peter Beinart is right.

Pointless video post - ‘Battalions of Steel’ by Saxon

2011-11-01T21:38:00.004-04:00

A blessed Feast of All Saints to my gentle readers! To celebrate in remembrance of all who have attained the beatific vision and have entered the Kingdom, I present you with ‘Battalions of Steel’ from Saxon! Okay, yeah, I admit, the lyrics are cheesy in the brotherhood-of-heroes-for-metal-honour-and-glory way that only power metal can possibly be, but the musicianship is awesome. If the Son doesn’t throw up the horns as the Church Triumphant rides out with this song, or one like it, blaring from the Marshalls on the towers of Heaven when he returns in glory, this faithful metalhead will be seriously bummed.

Vengeance, forgiveness, love, patriotism and care for the common people

2011-10-31T15:35:00.004-04:00

Last night I finished the fan translation of Eagle-Shooting Hero 《射鵰英雄傳》 by Sir Louis Cha (better known by his nom de plume Jin Yong 金庸, taken from the character elements of his given name 查良鏞), also on a recommendation from my significant other.

What a ride.

Never mind that the whole thing is only marginally shorter than War and Peace, and that I’ve been reading it on-and-off since July; this book is amazing, even in translation (however rough it may be). The elderly Hong Kong master of letters has a reputation both in China and among the overseas Chinese community that is apparently fully deserved. Not only is this an admirable work of historical fiction in its own right (taking place during the conquest of China by Jingghis Khan, and incorporating historical figures such as the great Khan and his Daoist advisor Qiu Chuji seamlessly with his fictional characters); it tackles philosophical and moral questions as well as an Edith Pargeter novel can.

The primary story follows two sons of renowned Song heroes: Guo Jing 郭靖, son of Guo Xiaotian, and Yang Kang 楊康, son of Yang Tiexin – named by Qiu Chuji after the Humiliation of Jingkang 靖康之恥 when Jurchen soldiers from the bordering kingdom of Jin looted and razed Kaifeng, and kidnapped the Song Emperor and his relatives. The two boys, though their fathers are close friends from the same village, grow up separately from each other and lead very different lives: Guo Jing is raised by his mother and by his martial-arts masters on the Mongolian steppe, whilst Yang Kang is adopted by a Prince of Jin, and changes his surname to Wanyan 完顏. Whilst Guo Jing is crude, unlettered, stubborn and slow-witted, and learns things only through sheer repetition and force of will, Yang Kang is erudite and clever. More importantly, though, Guo Jing, being raised by his mother and by six martial artists of lower-class upbringing (the Six Freaks of Jiangnan), is honest to a fault and brave bordering on foolhardy. Yang Kang, though, with his court upbringing, becomes something of a pathological liar.

Guo Jing is introduced to the world of ‘rivers and lakes’ (the martial-arts world) by his teachers, and sent on a quest by his mother to avenge the death of his father at the hands of the Jin. On this quest he not only has repeated run-ins with his sworn brother Yang Kang, but also meets his star-crossed lover Huang Rong, the overpoweringly-intelligent daughter of one of the most powerful (and cruel) martial artists in the world.

I won’t give away too much of the story here; suffice it to say that this epic explores a number of ethical questions in detail – and in ways which are surprising. Though the book as a whole upholds the virtues of filial piety and loyalty to one’s country, the reader is sometimes left to cheer when Guo Jing is aided by someone acting against the wishes of a parent or of a king – only to be left scratching his head (as Guo Jing eventually does) at the contradiction. Though Guo Jing himself is presented as the Confucian paragon and the ethical centre of the story’s universe (in a rather ironic way, given how he is also presented as half-barbarian on account of his Mongolian upbringing), Huang Rong is a much more accessible character, whose conscience is more readily conflicted by the tension between filiality, upright behaviour and her practically all-consuming love for Guo Jing.

War itself is an ever-present force which is often brought to the foreground – the Jin attack on Ox Village (separating Guo Jing from Yang Kang) and the bloody Mongolian conquests of Jin and the (supposedly Jin-aligned) eastern Iranian kingdom of Horezm bookend the novel. The suffering of common people in war, and at the hands of military leaders and bandits, is likewise emphasised, as is the duty (ever-present in wuxia novels of this kind) of the world of rivers and lakes to come to the defence and aid of the innocent.

Even across the combined language and cultural gaps of the translator and the reader, the book lost none of its emotional potency or its ability to engage. The demands of honour and virtue, pitted against the personal desires of the protagonists, were so well-balanced that one had to feel empathy for Guo Jing even as his sense of honour led him to repeatedly thwart his own and Huang Rong’s desire for a peaceful life together. Sir Louis Cha manages quite adroitly to keep his characters sympathetic without turning them into saints or martyrs… the one possible exception being Hong Qigong, one of the five best martial artists in the world, and the leader of the Beggar Clan.

It is certain, once my workload becomes a little more manageable, that I’ll pick up the two sequels in the trilogy: Divine Eagle, Gallant Knights 《神鵰俠侶》 and Heaven-Reliant and Dragon-Slayer 《倚天屠龍記》 (which are equal in length). But I have a sneaking suspicion that Eagle-Shooting Hero will continue to be my favourite in the trilogy.

Highly recommended reading

2011-10-29T16:50:00.000-04:00

It seems both John at Economics is for Donkeys and California Constantian have been in top form this past week.

John has linked to a great article over at Naked Capitalism, which does an excellent job of cutting past the layers of mendacity surrounding Greece’s fiscal crisis as in, say, the Financial Times: hardly the outcome of an overactive welfare state, the problem in Greece is that a significant portion of its populace (the top earners, to be precise) pays next to nothing in taxes, and (long story short) the current institutional setup is such that the government is powerless to do anything about its own monetary policy.

California Constantian, on the other hand, has touched on matters somewhat closer to home geographically, and in a way which I highly appreciate. The former part, which reduces to absurdity Ron Paul’s claims to anti-corporatism by noting that the policies he favours all have a disturbing tendency in the pro-corporate direction, concludes that measuring one’s own public morality by adherence to the Constitution is ultimately unsatisfactory. He then makes the more radical (or reactionary) suggestion that a written Constitution under the hermeneutic control of a political elite is not going to guarantee for us a just society, and follows up said suggestion with an alternative: a public figure who is exempt not from public life, but rather from the political class itself – in other words, a monarch. I do very much agree with him thus far – indeed, his argument carries valuable echoes of a Metternichesque ‘socialisme conservateur’: constitutions are the work of generations, and have only the authority given to them by tradition and by the people under them – and the American Constitution does not have even the first advantage! However, his argument to this point rests upon the good behaviour and philanthropic spirit of the monarch herself – historically, as monarchs have generally been drawn from the warrior castes of their respective societies (even in such intellectually-inclined societies as China, the imperial families all started off as warlords), I’m not sure this assumption naturally holds. If I may take his argument further; what is needed is a non-political head of state, informed by a religious establishment which emphasises economic justice and the common good.

Actually, my third recommendation for the week is the civic republicanism of Jim Sleeper . This strikes me as a very tempting correction to the ills of a fragmented body politic, but it also seems to me that if it relies over-much on the way American political institutions are currently structured, into an over-reliance on the high interpretive powers of the Supreme Court or an over-reliance on top-down reforms vested in the executive apparatus under the Presidency, such a republicanism may be doomed to distort itself ultimately into the heresies of neoconservatism, ultra-liberalism or identity politics.

Currently reading 1587 by Ray Huang (黃仁宇), on a recommendation from Jessie Zong. So far, it looks to be a very interesting historical work on the beginning-of-the-end for the Ming Dynasty. Hope to do a post on it later.

無題

2011-10-28T21:23:00.001-04:00

傳聲不可知
回答何境意
日日爬山聽
時樂時哀已
坐峰決無遁
終聞仙緲樂
慰偯咷之音
安心歌也悅
每瞠雲雨霽
抱愛水風姮
自沉撫心問
曰者或回聲

- 郭明正，2011年10月28号

The real defenders of human rights (not who you’d think!)

2011-10-25T01:35:00.003-04:00

Lin Zexu 林則徐

The Qing Dynasty – the last of China’s Imperial states – was founded by a Tungusic tribe descended from the Jurchens 女真 calling themselves ‘Manju’ 滿族. Their first king, Aisin Gioro hala-i Nurhaci 努爾哈赤, broke away from the ailing Ming Dynasty and proclaimed himself the king of the Later Jin 後金, claiming continuation with the mediaeval Jurchen Jin Dynasty headed by the Wanggiyan 完顏 family (and made infamous by the Condor trilogy by Jin Yong). It was not long, however, before the nobility of this kingdom, which came to rule all of China under Kangxi 康熙, adopted Chinese culture almost wholesale, as many foreigners who came to rule China had before them. A number of their leaders, nobles, intellectuals and civil servants carried on even more drastic reforms than those of the early Ming rulers: although they could be very the Yongzheng 雍正 and Qianlong 乾隆 Emperors were both highly talented administrators and implacable enemies of corruption, and even put into place a number of prohibitions on the sale and ownership of slaves, far more effective and wide-reaching than even the Ming-era reforms had been.

Particularly during their peak, the Qing emperors were masterful politicians who ruled over a cosmopolitan state rivalling that of the Xianbei Tang Dynasty, and used many different means to legitimate themselves. To the Tibetan government and to the Mongols, the Qing Emperors were devout Buddhists who derived their ruling legitimacy from their adherence to that religion. However, to the Chinese people, the Aisin Gioro kings showed a distinctly more Confucian face… though in the case of Yongzheng and Qianlong, this was more than just a façade. They depended on and rigorously upheld a Confucian standard of integrity for their civil servants. This rigour outlasted their reigns, however, among these officials. One particularly (and justly) famous civil servant, Commissioner Lin Zexu 林則徐, would become famous for upholding his nation’s honour and for advocating the same human dignity in China that people in the West enjoyed: particularly life, health, self-determination and freedom from the degradations of opiate addiction at the hands of the drug-pedlars of the British East India Company.

In his famous 1839 letter to Queen Victoria (which the much-esteemed monarch never herself read), the good Confucian Commissioner Lin expressed himself with outrage and eloquence at his people’s ill-treatment at the hands of British traders:

The kings of your honourable country by a tradition handed down from generation to generation have always been noted for their politeness and submissiveness. We have read your successive tributary memorials saying, ‘In general our countrymen who go to trade in China have always received His Majesty the Emperor's gracious treatment and equal justice’, and so on. Privately we are delighted with the way in which the honorable rulers of your country deeply understand the grand principles and are grateful for this Heavenly grace. For this reason the Heavenly Court in soothing those from afar has redoubled its polite and kind treatment. The profit from trade has been enjoyed by them continuously for two hundred years. This is the source from which your country has become known for its wealth.

But after a long period of commercial intercourse, there appear among the crowd of barbarians both good persons and bad, unevenly. Consequently there are those who smuggle opium to seduce the Chinese people and so cause the spread of the poison to all provinces. Such persons who only care to profit themselves, and disregard their harm to others, are not tolerated by the laws of Heaven and are unanimously hated by human beings. His Majesty the Emperor, upon hearing of this, is in a towering rage. He has especially sent me, his commissioner, to come to Guangdong, and together with the governor-general and governor jointly to investigate and settle this matter.

[…]

Let us ask, where is your conscience? I have heard that the smoking of opium is very strictly forbidden by your country; that is because the harm caused by opium is clearly understood. Since it is not permitted to do harm to your own country, then even less should you let it be passed on to the harm of other countries -- how much less to China! Of all that China exports to foreign countries, there is not a single thing which is not beneficial to people: they are of benefit when eaten, or of benefit when used, or of benefit when resold: all are beneficial. Is there a single article from China which has done any harm to foreign countries?

[…]

As for the barbarian merchants who come to China, their food and drink and habitation, are all received by the gracious favor of our Heavenly Court. Their accumulated wealth is all benefit given with pleasure by our Heavenly Court. They spend rather few days in their own country but more time in Guangzhou. To digest clearly the legal penalties as an aid to instruction has been a valid principle in all ages. Suppose a man of another country comes to England to trade, he still has to obey the English laws; how much more should he obey in China the laws of the Heavenly Dynasty?

This communication, and the destruction of Indian opium with which the courageous Commissioner Lin followed it up, was met with gunships, which opened fire on civilian ports and looted all livestock from townspeople and villagers who could not pay for ‘protection’. China was subjected, ultimately, to a humiliating defeat and the cession of Xianggang to placate the British East India Company’s desire for ‘free trade’ (meaning, naturally, ‘free trade’ in a dangerous and often-deadly drug).

It is an oft-repeated Big Lie on the part of liberals and neoliberals that human rights and free trade go hand-in-hand; but this Big Lie requires, in China’s case, not only the acceptance of a blatant insult to their experience and cultural history, but also the acceptance on the part of everyone else an incredibly gruesome fiction. The defenders of human rights, in China, were neither the ‘free trade’-supporting Western nations who greeted the British victory against China with their own gunship delegations demanding extraterritoriality and other concessions from China, nor the nations which made blatant use of low-skilled, low-paid labour when the Qing Dynasty was in such a weakened state. Rather, in China’s case, the defenders of a transcendental ideal of human dignity were the very same Confucian officials and ideology that all later Western and Western-influenced thinkers would make the focus of their sustained attacks.

Pointless video post - ‘Missä Miehet Ratsastaa’ by Teräsbetoni

2011-10-23T08:35:00.001-04:00

This band was introduced to me by Andreas - an old friend of mine from grade school days - and his family, who recently visited the United States. Teräsbetoni (lit. reinforced concrete), a recent Finnish power metal act, entered this song, ‘Missä Miehet Ratsastaa’ (‘Where the Men Ride’) in the Eurovision contest in 2008. Their style has been frequently compared with Manowar, but thankfully they do not take themselves too seriously (as the video very clearly shows!). They’ve managed to get a great deal of attention in Finland, and I can see quite clearly why; it sucks, though, that their albums are so difficult to locate in the United States… Anyway, my gentle readers, please enjoy the reinforced concrete (there’s a phrase I never thought I’d see myself typing)!

One country, many nations?

2011-10-23T00:33:00.001-04:00

Colin Woodard, via Dave Brockington. I’m pretty much in full agreement with Mr Brockington on this one; this is an immensely interesting map and a thesis which looks, on its face, to be intuitively convincing. I share Mr Brockington’s concerns, however, that the division of the United States into its cultural regions rather discounts the impact of successive waves of immigrants, and furthermore appears slightly deterministic (which seems to be somewhat the wrong attitude to take, particularly when speaking of phenomena like the Tea Party).

Being fully cognisant of the fact that the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’, my own family’s cultural affiliation appears notoriously difficult to pin down. The Coopers were originally Pennsylvania Quakers (authentic Midlanders), before the War of American Independence forced my own branch of the family to migrate into the Deep South, where they stayed until two generations ago, when my grandfather relocated first to Providence, Rhode Island (deepest, darkest Yankeedom) and then to Arlington, Virginia (Tidewater), where my aunt and my father were born and raised. The Doanes, on the other hand, are Yankees through and through – but they don’t fit Mr Woodard’s Weberian ‘ideal type’ at all. Rather than being patrician, Puritan social engineers, they have been and are much more similar in temperament to the Midland ideal type: Methodist and broad-church to a fault with a very strong sense of family and place, my grandfather is a dairy farmer who distrusts big government and big religion as much as he distrusts big business. Somewhat oddly, my own ‘red Tory’ political, religious and cultural attitudes appear vaguely to be those of a High-Church or Catholic Tidewaterman (though I was raised in Madison, Wisconsin – which, according to Mr Woodard’s reckoning, is a Yankee stronghold).

Which brings me to another point. The religious culture of the Midwest is indeed heavily Protestant, but the Calvinist legacy, if it ever existed there, has long since faded to the faintest echo (except possibly in Western Michigan, but there it survived due to Dutch Reformed immigrants, not Puritans of Scotch or English extraction). The culture of the Great Lakes states has been far more closely shaped by immigrants from Central, Eastern and Northern Europe (note the preponderance of German, Swiss and Finnish culture still lingering around places like Stoughton, New Glarus and the mining towns of northern Wisconsin, or the Norwegian culture stretching all across Minnesota), who share in the anarchistic and egalitarian tendencies of their forebears, who fled from their home countries largely during the mid-1800’s (a tumultuous time in Europe). Also (applying Mr Woodard’s implicit assumptions regarding the formation and character of these cultural blocs), if Upper Canada resembles the Midlands at all, it is more likely than not an accidental resemblance, due to the constitutionally-moderate, anti-slavery and communitarian leanings of the United Empire Loyalists who settled there in the wake of the War of American Independence.

I’m not particularly sanguine, either, on a.) the intractability of the Tidewater region in its historical alliance with the Deep South, or on b.) the ease with which El Norte can be comfortably brought into the modern American progressive fold alongside, say, the New Netherlanders. During the Civil War, the High Church Episcopalians and the Catholics of the Coastal border states were heavily divided on the issue of slavery, which really was dying out, particularly in the large cities (which had begun to resemble the economy of the North). Maryland was home to one of the largest populations of freedmen in the entire country, although the vestiges of slavery lingered through the Civil War. Since then, in spite of occasional bouts of Confederate nostalgia, Northern Virginia and the Research Triangle in North Carolina have made them key swing states in recent elections (both having gone to President Obama in 2008). Since the party realignment in the wake of Civil Rights, also, both Delaware and Maryland have been Democratic strongholds.

Regarding El Norte, Catholicism runs very deep within the Hispanic and Southwest American Indian cultural template (although said Catholicism is also quite often very Low-Church, even Charismatic in flavour), and although Democratic candidates have found common ground with them on issues of immigration, they remain very culturally conservative, overwhelmingly pro-life and opposed to same-sex marriage. The faith of the average norteno is still a faith which is (in the words of Mr Lindsay) characterised by ‘compassion for the poor, disgust at wars of aggression, revulsion at the lying of countries into such wars and at gargantuan personal profiteering from them, hostility to drugs and to sexual promiscuity’.

Still, the central thesis is immensely thought-provoking, and I agree with Mr Brockington that the quibbles with Mr Woodard’s thesis do not overshadow his ability to tell an intuitively-convincing tale; and that what remains is to test his model empirically.

Oh, for the love of Karl…

2011-10-22T16:06:00.013-04:00

It is a very strange phenomenon of American foreign policy that neoconservatives like Tom Ridge (yes, that Tom Ridge) are STILL refusing to learn anything from history and aligning themselves shamelessly with the extreme Ba’ath Marxists in the Mojahedin-e Khalq (or, for that matter, the extreme Sunni Islamist Jundullah), all the better to throw Iran into another more ‘America-friendly’ ~~Pahlavi dynasty~~ dictatorship (until such time as those same neoconservatives decide they have ~~non-existent weapons of mass destruction~~ ~~a sufficiently evil dictator~~ a dearth of the kind of democracy we like, over which we need to go to war with them, and so on and so forth).

Iran has had a very rich history of human rights, constitutional monarchy, philosophical and artistic sophistication, firm religious moderation and respect for the rule of law going all the way back to its great Achaemenid shahs. (Mr Mosaddegh himself was a moderate Shi’ite, a fervent constitutional monarchist and, in spite of his Western demeanour, a stout Iranian patriot.) I am certainly not friendly to the borderline fundamentalism of the current administration, but I also have enough sensitivity to Iran’s national experience to know that interference from abroad, whether by Marxists, fascists or Western liberals, has rarely if ever turned out well in the long run. Which makes me much more deeply sceptical when the neocons – who combine in their political philosophy many of the worst elements of Marxism (a deterministic and teleological historical mindset), fascism (the articles-of-faith that states must always compete in terms of hard power, and that hard power is the only thing that ‘some states’ not-like-us can understand) and Western liberalism (the article-of-faith that American-style democratic capitalism must be spread around the globe, whether by its technocratic missionaries or by the sword) – seem so gung-ho about interfering in the region yet again…

Perverse (dis)incentives and theology in Guangdong hit-and-run

2011-10-19T20:43:00.002-04:00

The news is already nearly a week old, but it is still extremely outrageous. A little toddler named Yueyue 月月 wanders down a narrow street of Foshan, Guangdong, alone, and is hit by an oncoming white van which showed no hint of slowing down, until it has already hit her; at which point it stops, goes into reverse and runs over her again before driving away. What is even worse is that eighteen people, one of whom in all likelihood saw the accident, passed by the poor little girl without lifting a finger, and a second van ran her over as she lay prone on the street. In the end, only an elderly scrap pedlar named Chen Xianmei 陳賢妹 bothered to move her out of harm’s way and inquire as to where the girl’s parents were. This story has been covered at Hidden Harmonies, Shanghai Scrap, chinaSMACK and Shanghaiist. The entire incident is intensely depressing.

I realise there is a very strong tendency to want to blame the society for this, particularly given the perverse disincentives currently in place because of the Peng Yu Case (彭宇案), in which a man who helped an elderly lady (who had suffered a fall after colliding with someone whilst waiting for a bus) was promptly sued by said person for having collided with her in the first place. The suit was (astoundingly) successful, and the ‘reasoning’ the judge used (insofar as I can understand it) was that, since he was the first one on the scene to help, he must have felt guilty about having injured her in the first place. On the one hand, I understand quite clearly that this case had a profound and negative impact on the society; seemingly reinforcing the idea that ‘no good deed goes unpunished’. I’m very unwilling to chalk it all up to that, however, since this happened in a broadly public setting and (as has been argued very broadly elsewhere) the ‘bystander effect’ is a very universal phenomenon. The only reason one can possibly have for trusting myself not to pass a young girl by on the side of the road is when one has actually done so (I say this as much of myself as of anyone else).

One thing I would like to comment briefly on (another kind of perverse disincentive at work) is the way in which Ms Chen was treated both while she was attempting to rescue the injured girl and in the aftermath when she ended up a heroine, both lauded and reviled out of proportion. Lauded because she did what no one else would; and reviled at first because she was seen as a busybody who couldn’t mind her own business (if she had been a young up-and-coming businesswoman rather than a working-class elderly pedlar and recycler, would she have met the same reception?), and later because of envious people suspecting her of being a fame- and fortune-seeker rather than a woman who managed to do the right thing and save a little girl’s life. In our current economic and social climate, as I believe the reaction has shown, another Lei Feng 雷鋒 (a popular hero of the PRC era, who was famed for his selfless service to his community and country) is probably not going to be well-received. Somewhere along the line (Cultural Revolution, anyone?), China has become a country where people who do not keep their heads down will be punished.

I really don’t want to make it sound as if it is cultural – or if it is, it is a culture which is common between East and West. In American society as well as Chinese society there is a definite pressure to ‘fit in’, to keep one’s head down, to mind one’s own private business, to not get involved. I think one of my friends, Yu Dong (also from Guangdong), has it pretty much right. He cites Lu Xun – one of whose themes is the idea that modern China has become a society of jaded, anaesthetised spectators. Lu Xun is very evocative, and there’s a lot in his writings to admire. But at the same time, his attachment to the existentialism of Nietzsche proves his undoing: his need to get under the skin of his readers, to write out of the spectator’s shoes in a position of detachment to provoke the reader, he takes so seriously that he winds up in a self-made hell of madness, bitterness and disenchantment.

The tale of Yueyue and of Chen Xianmei proved just how right he was, and just how wrong. Lu Xun justly wielded his pen against the crowds who stood by whilst atrocities were committed before their eyes. He had enough of a sense of irony that he could step into the follies of the crowds, but he did not have enough of a sense of humour to forgive them. If one really wants to get around the ‘bystander effect’, one has to have a sense of humour about it; not only irony. But once we get into this discussion (which naturally attributes meaning wherever one notes irony or humour), the next logical step must be a religious one.

Sinostand’s attitude (and the one the CCP has) toward religion in the wake of this tragedy – as a means of retaining power over people, using Heaven and Hell as a Machiavellian carrot-and-stick to influence good behaviour – I find to be fundamentally facile and unhelpful. The studies cited by Sinostand take assume only a functionalist, consequentialist morality (a sad product of our soulless system of economics) in which personal utility is the only consideration; this only matters because, to a certain extent, the testers (and the broader capitalist society) say it matters. The true irony is that it is in the interests of the high-powered and moneyed controllers of capital and technocratic managerial class to see religion as a tool to keep the rabble in line. But if the Nanjing Judge side of the equation has any meaning at all in this instance, people who fear punishment, divine or otherwise, will not be the ones to move themselves to undertake good actions – Confucius was ultimately right that harsh punishments do not give people a sense of shame in order to distinguish right from wrong. Further (and more to the point theologically), Jesus never spoke of Hell to the poor, to the common people or to the ‘sinners’; he only spoke of Hell to those who were already ‘righteous’: the religious authorities and the wealthy. If Jesus truly embodied this theology, the Sanhedrin and Pilate would have seen him as a useful tool rather than a threat!

This really is pure and utter tragedy; I truly cannot blame people for reacting the way that they have. One ray of hope, though, is the outpouring of generosity which the Chinese people have shown to Yueyue’s family in the wake of the event. It appears that, when it comes to a sense of morality in the Chinese people, all is not (as somewhat feared) lost.

Thank you, Rob Klugerman and Yu Dong, for the links!

A belated 雙十節快樂!

2011-10-13T11:30:00.011-04:00

Sorry, this is really 囧 on my part. I need to be much, much better about blogging holidays. Particularly when Dr Sun figured into my last post so heavily as a proponent of a viable Confucian synthesis with Western thinking!

Anyway, Hidden Harmonies has a solid (if somewhat polemical, in HH’s usual style) article for the occasion. Naturally, I very much concur with the ideal of establishing a ‘free and democratic nation with an equitable distribution of wealth’; but I also share Allen’s concerns that freedom doesn’t necessarily entail following (or continuing to follow) the same blood-soaked and exploitative path that so much of the modern West has. One of the reasons that China continues to intrigue me is that its traditional thinkers, as well as a number of its more contemporary ones, hint strongly at an alternative vision of modernity which parallels similar Socratic-Platonic-Aristotelian turns among critical, radical-conservative thinkers in the West. But, as Zhou Enlai once put it, it’s still far too soon to say.

EDIT: My attitude toward modern Western notions of freedom and democracy quite nicely parallel those of David Lindsay, here:

The West is the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire. I would die to protect it, on whatever shore it found itself, and it now finds itself on every shore. But if by “the West”, you mean the rootless, godless, globalised, hypercapitalist, metrosexual wasteland of usury, promiscuity and stupefaction, then I hate it as much as does any Islamist.

Though Mr Lindsay expresses himself rather polemically here, I think he’s got it pretty much right. ‘The West’ (in the latter sense) is as much to be found in the PRC as it is here; though the tempering elements that can preserve true freedoms without trammelling people under the forces of a ‘rootless, godless, globalised, hypercapitalist, metrosexual [I would say “faceless”]’ order are more like to gain reception by reconceiving existing institutions in accordance with Confucian norms, than they are by an increased importation of pre-packaged institutions from abroad.

Pointless video post - ‘NM 156’ by Queensrÿche

2011-10-13T10:44:00.005-04:00

This is perhaps one of the best songs the ‘Rÿche has ever written, coming off their legendary full-length 1984 debut, the Warning. As well as being lyrically masterful (playing upon tropes from a dystopian technocratic future, inspired no doubt by the likes of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and CS Lewis’ Space Trilogy), it simply exudes atmosphere: the repetitive drum and guitar riff being disquieting, spooky, building up to an epic chorus line, which at last declares a human element breaking out into the pure sanity of emotion (as opposed to the computerised logic which is ‘just a synonym for this savagery’): ‘have we come too far to turn around?’. Awesome, awesome song.

In which I agree and disagree with Sam Crane on the subject of Master Zhongni

2011-10-12T01:25:00.023-04:00

Zhu Xi (left) and Zhou Enlai (right)

Sam Crane, in this post at the Useless Tree responding to
a Reuters blog post on a Confucius Institute in Kentucky, tackles the question of whether Confucius can save the middle class. His short answer – no – is one I can certainly agree with, though for different reasons than the ones he gives… having to do both with the character of the great disappearing American middle class and with the character of Confucian philosophy. However, I believe Mr Crane’s attempted accommodation between modern Western liberalism and Confucianism to be somewhat misguided on several counts.

I’ve discussed Confucius and the ways in which Westerners should (and should not) productively interact with his philosophy at length elsewhere – mostly in relation to liberals and palaeoliberals who want to co-opt him into saying things he manifestly never would have supported himself (given both what he wrote and the context in which he wrote it). So when I see yet another liberal (albeit of a much more moderate and left-liberal bent) attempting to create a programme to make Confucius more ‘broadly… acceptable’, more ‘relat[able]’, more ‘relevant’, it does rub me somewhat the wrong way*. First of all, from a literary and an historical view, neither Confucius nor his disciples were very interested in bowing to the ‘way things were’ in order to become more ‘broadly acceptable’ or more ‘relevant’: Confucius ended his career in relative ignominy and frustration at the state of the world, a poor teacher in his own hometown; Mencius retired early in similar frustration with his lack of influence. However, in spite of these ends, neither man truly wanted to ‘sell out’ or adapt his thought to the dominant paradigm of the day – to the pursuit of gain (li 利) at the expense of justice (yi 義).

I do agree with a lot of Mr Crane’s exposition on the places of ‘overlap’ between Confucianism and contemporary liberalism, but I think his commenters have already done a fairly good job of showing the deficiencies of translating zhi 志 as ‘free will’, in the voluntarist and content-free sense it is often meant by contemporary liberal thinking. For the Confucians 志 is not without virtue-ethical content. When Confucius said, in Analects 9.25, ‘三軍可奪帥也，匹夫不可奪志也’ (‘A commander can be kidnapped from a large army, but a common man’s will cannot be taken from him’), Legge notes that the ‘man’ being considered is ‘one of a pair’ (相匹) – that pair being ‘husband and wife’. Relationships and embedded (rather than necessarily universal) ethics are present in implication even when Confucius nears something approaching a liberal sentiment. Also, very interesting is the context in Analects 12.1 and 12.2:

顏淵問仁。子曰：克已復禮為仁，一日克已復禮，天下歸仁焉，為仁由已，而由人乎哉。顏淵曰：請問其目。子曰：非禮勿視，非禮勿聽，非禮勿言，非禮勿動。顏淵曰：囘雖不敏，請事斯語矣。

Yan Yuan asked about humanity.

The Master said: ‘To restrain oneself and follow ritual is humane. [If one can] for a single day restrain himself and follow ritual, his humanity would be recognised everywhere. Humanity is self-originating; can it not only then occur in others?’

Yan Yuan asked, ‘Please tell me, how does this happen?’

The Master said: ‘Do not look at what goes against ritual; do not hear what goes against ritual; do not speak what goes against ritual; do not do what goes against ritual.’

Yan Yuan said, ‘Although I am unwise, I will follow these words.’

Mr Crane takes the first part of this quote, and takes it to mean that humane behaviour being self-originating is an affirmation of the individual responsibility for his own actions; of standing over and above his own desires (which might, if we consider the passage in isolation, make of Confucius a sort of proto-Kantian!). But note that there is an interesting (and troubling, for this interpretation) dialectic at work in the latter part of the passage: it is not the ‘I’ directing and controlling his own desires in isolation, but rather the individual conscience is something in some numinous way received: from ritual! Poor Yan Hui’s modest and (what reads like a) rather befuddled response may carry the interpretation that the reader is not merely supposed to take the first part of the passage for granted, as a ‘given’ affirmation of the ‘I’. The ‘self’ is, for Confucius, suspended in dialectic with the power that created it.

Useful also are James Legge’s own notes (though, naturally, Legge’s missionary tendencies ought to be taken with a grain of salt; he is apt to rather overstate his case, particularly when he is attempting to draw parallels between Confucian assumptions about human nature and the Christian doctrine of original sin). But his point about the teleological connotations of li 禮 (‘ritual’) ought to be well-taken: as Zhu Xi defined it, it was 天理之節文 ‘the cultural artefacts of Heaven-imparted principles’. The good life can be lived out only within a community defined by rituals oriented to a higher purpose outside itself.

The anti-consequentialist nature of Confucian ethics is well-documented in the exchanges between Confucius’ disciples and 墨子 Micius (popularly thought of as China’s first utilitarian, though that term is somewhat disputed), as well as the countless passages in Mencius and the Analects (i.e. 4.16) which place (another) li 利 ‘gain’ (whether collective or individual) in a subordinate position to yi 義 ‘justice’ (‘君子喻於義，小人喻於利’). But Confucius is exceedingly careful to steer clear of the opposite polar extreme of liberal deontology: for Confucius, moral sentiment (志 may be translated thus, but in a negative sense Confucius uses chi 恥 ‘shame’) must first be properly aligned for truly good intent, and thus action, to arise – in marked contrast to the Kantian demand that sentiments be divorced from intentions. If any meaningful connexion with the normative demands of any Western ethical tradition is to be made with Confucianism here, it seems it must be made through Plato and Aristotle.

Which brings me to my evolving suspicion that Confucianism may, in fact, be much more radical than Mr Crane supposes. Though Confucius’ intellectual legacy was indeed one of the most prominent and most tragic victims of Maoism run amok during the Cultural Revolution, we should be careful to remember that both the Georgist socialism of Sun Zhongshan and the radical conservatism of Zhou Enlai were informed by Confucian influences, and Mr Crane himself would also very likely acknowledge that this influence may continue to speak through the intellectual standard-bearers of the Chinese New Left.

EDIT: After reading some of Mr Crane’s back posts, such as this one, I have a somewhat greater appreciation for what he’s trying to do. And I have the utmost respect for the comparative religion work of the former Dean of Marsh Chapel, Dr Robert Neville. But, being both a metalhead and a MacIntyrean, I think it may be necessary (as a bulwark against the new Dark Ages of which MacIntyre warns) to build small enclaves of Confucian or Confucian-sympathetic asceticism within the broader society, rather than seeking a society-wide rapprochement (either in China or in the United States) with Confucian ethics. If we are approaching a new Dark Ages, or for that matter, a new 戰國時代 Warring States Period, that may be the necessary means of, shall we say, taking hold of the flame.

* To Mr Crane’s credit, and I do give him major props for this, he does actually (in the comments) recognise the suspended and embedded nature of individual agency within the Confucian worldview, and also poses the question of whether and to what extent ‘liberal Confucianism’ would still be Confucian. I’m highly tempted to say that if it did (and still retain some of its Confucian character), it would probably end up looking very much like Sun Zhongshan’s 三民主義 (Three Principles of the People), and have a distinctly religious-socialist rather than a secular flavour.

… Still, the whole language of being ‘relevant’ doesn’t mesh well with my own philosophical and theological instincts. Making oneself understood is good, and being sensitive to the needs of others is better still, but – as my dad would put it – too many good things have been sacrificed already upon the altar of Relevance, including many worthwhile aspects of Christianity itself (hence, the rise of moralistic therapeutic deism).

Pointless video post - ‘Alsatia’ by Galneryus (and ‘Soundchaser’ by Rage)

2011-10-09T23:21:00.006-04:00

‘Alsatia’ by Japanese shred metal outfit Galneryus is certainly a solid offering; not quite sure what to make of the distorted voice at the start. The crunchy opening bass riff reminds one a little bit of later Angel Dust; there are some peculiarly Japanese, almost poppy-sounding elements to the bridges, but thankfully these do not detract from the song as a whole. Apparently this is the opening theme to an anime which I have not seen, Mnemosyne no Musumetachi 『ムネモシュネの娘たち』, which is apparently a thriller about a private investigator with a dark past who is unable to die. If the music is anything to judge on, this is one I should watch.

UPDATE: Hier ist auch noch etwas mehr Rage, denn man kann einfach nie genug Rage haben. SOUNDCHASER! ... Ich frage mich auch, ob Victor Smolski weiß doch, was das chinesisches Schriftzeichen 《禪》, das er trägt, bedeuten.

Truth to power, and power to truth

2011-10-09T22:07:00.006-04:00

I leave it to my gentle readers to decide which is which in this particular instance. I believe there is substantial room for interpretation, even though readers will remember that I am decidedly not a fan of Liu Xiaobo (noted bigot, corporate tool, seditious imperialist and supporter of indefensible wars), nor am I a great fan of his substantial legions of liberal ‘arse-kissers’ (melektaus’ term) in the West.

Let me be clear, though: I believe extrajudicial killing is profoundly wrong if not outright murder, regardless of the culprit’s identity. On al-Awlaki I may be willing to grant some room for interpretation, but there can be none for the killing of Samir Khan. I don’t believe there is any justification for it, regardless of the opinions of the people involved. Even the barbarity of mobile executions (for the use of which there is still a trial, regardless of whether one agrees or not with the actual ruling) rather pales in comparison to drone strikes against citizens completely outside courts of law.

Generally, though, the Chinese government is not interested in extrajudicially slaying its citizens living abroad, even ones with dubious political goals and known records of support for terrorism. Not that I don’t have my problems with the Chinese government, but as a rule, they do not make a habit of killing dissidents (even radical ones) abroad, MacGyver episodes notwithstanding.

EDIT: Not really an update, but it seems a propos somehow. From ChinaGeeks. My agreeing with Chuck Custer is one of those blue-moon phenomena, but I think he’s right on the money with this one. Imprisoning a six-year-old girl because of who her father is? Why doesn’t the government just go ahead and bring back 株連九族 (executing everyone within nine degrees of relation) while they’re about it?

States suck sometimes.

A modest proposal for the Occupy Wall Street movement

2011-10-09T22:01:00.003-04:00

I generally agree with Paul Krugman here – I see in the Occupy Wall Street movement a loose collection of disparate movements in what vaguely appears to be a productive direction. But then I read embarrassing articles like this, and my palm gravitates automatically to my forehead. Yes, Columbus Day is something of which even good Catholics ought to be well and thoroughly ashamed (Chris being as unabashed a genocidal bastard as many contemporary twentieth-century dictators one might care to name), but it has nothing to do with a movement to – and let me check if I have this right – occupy Wall Street. I would say that staying on message is the challenge now, but it is sadly apparent (particularly to outside observers) that a message is precisely what the movement lacks. And this isn’t a concern troll talking, unless one is willing to count Paul Krugman also as a concern troll, but rather a potentially interested and certainly sympathetic bystander.

So, if I may, as a potentially interested and certainly sympathetic bystander, offer a humble suggestion, I would like to propose the following. If Occupy Wall Street is genuinely interested in counteracting the destructive influence of large banks on the political arena and on the body politic in general, it would seem to me that making it a priority to impose an interest rate limit (or, to use an elegant term for a more civilised age, an ‘anti-usury law’) on banks in the United States would be a good place to start. If they are feeling somewhat bolder and more idealistic (a strong likelihood in the target demographic of OWS), perhaps reintroducing some of the Social Credit ideas of Cliff Douglas as a set of concrete policies: in place of the Fed, a full-reserve national bank under the direct control of the legislature (in our case, the US Congress) and a regulatory agency to ensure that the money supply does not exceed or run short of the productive capacity of the economy. Be nice if we could get Citizens United reversed and corporate personhood overturned, but first things first.

Anyway, just tossing ideas out there. See if there are folks who are keen.

Pointless video post - ‘The Trooper’, performed by Rage

2011-10-07T21:41:00.008-04:00

One of Maiden’s great anti-war classics, updated into a relentless thunder-and-steel speed-metal storm by Teutonic power then-quartet, now-trio Rage.

You’ll take my life and I’ll take yours too -
You’ll fire your musket but I’ll run you through!
So when you’re waiting for the next attack,
You’d better stand - there’s no turning back.

The bugle sounds as the charge begins;
But on this battlefield no one wins.
The smell of acrid smoke and horses’ breath
As you plunge into a certain death.

[...]

And as I lay there gazing at the sky,
My body’s numb and my throat is dry -
And as I lay forgotten and alone,
Without a tear, I draw my parting groan.

於貔抱者、於龍戡者 (Of panda-huggers and dragon-slayers)

2011-10-01T21:29:00.010-04:00

A little something for the first of October. 祝大家國慶節快樂! Also, a happy belated 2,562nd birthday to Master Zhongni!

Dr Amitai Etzioni, founder of the Communitarian Network used both these terms (‘panda-huggers’ and ‘dragon-slayers’, which I’ve translated into Chinese as 貔抱者 and 龍戡者, respectively – though, to be fully accurate, the 貔貅 pixiu actually refers to a benevolent mythical creature which is thought to be associated in antiquity with the giant panda) to describe what he sees as a growing polarisation in American foreign policy – no longer between ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’, these categories correspond strictly to how the United States should approach its foreign policy with China. The issue is whether we should view China as a foreign policy threat or as a possible foreign policy partner.

Dr Etzioni places himself with a slight note of reticence in the ‘panda-hugger’ camp (where I gladly join him). On the ‘dragon-slayer’ side is Dr Aaron Friedberg of Princeton University, writing for the Wall Street Journal, for the New York Times and for various other venues on how China should be seen primarily as a rising threat to our power and interests. Dr Friedberg, though he uses quite a bit of realist language, actually ultimately argues from a liberal perspective, emphasising the differences in ideology between China and the United States in terms of the vision of each nation for the future of East Asia and using this factor to drive his point home that the interests of the United States and China might diverge in the near future. There may be a point to this – as witnessed by the ongoing flame war between the 五毛黨 and the 五美分黨 (the ‘Five Jiao Party’ and the ‘Nickel Party’; pejorative terms used for the online sockpuppets of the Chinese and American governments, respectively), many observers (and perhaps the governments of the US and China themselves) view the US and China as ideologically at odds in several respects.

But, very worth reading also are Dr Etzioni’s pieces on the same subject: ‘Is China a Responsible Stakeholder?’ and ‘Who’s Afraid of the Chinese?’. In the first, he puts forward the argument that China, though its performance in the past on issues of being a responsible member of the international community and a responsible citizen under international law has been, shall we say, chequered, he also notes that China’s government is increasingly cognisant of international obligations and standards, and ever more willing to abide by a set of norms observed and encouraged amongst the nations of the developed West. Further evidence of this has been China’s understated cooperation with the Obama Administration’s demands to back off from their support of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He notes that, no, China does not live up to these standards – but then, very few nations actually do, including nations to whose abuses we are wont to turn a blind eye (like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan); and that one’s attitude toward China is different depending on one’s normative and positive interpretations of the role of the United States in global affairs. Are we a hegemon, or are we another player in an increasingly multipolar world?

The other article engages in a little more realpolitik. China, by any rational standard, cannot hope to compete with the US in terms of sheer ‘hard power’, even within its own sphere of influence: much of their military equipment is out-of-date, and what they do purchase they purchase on a budget one-sixth the size of ours; there is relatively scanty proof that China harbours any ambition of militarily dominating even its own region; and their own security is best assured at this juncture by ensuring their population’s basic needs of food, clothing, shelter, education and vocation.

I tend to take Dr Etzioni’s view of things, thus perhaps making me a member of the Panda-Huggers. China’s government is, sad to say, currently not as effective as it ought to be even at doing the things they ought to be doing – like taking care of their own more vulnerable members. (One hopes that President Hu and Premier Wen continue on their present course, and that the sage advice of Dr Wang Hui and Dr Cui Zhiyuan may have more impact in the future than it presently appears.) I do admit to being rather leery of our continued volume of overseas trade with China, as much for conservationist and distributist economic reasons as for geopolitical ones (such trade does precious little to benefit the small farmers and 個體戶 getihu small-business owners in China, or in the US), but thankfully I do not believe that continued good relations need rely on an unjust and unsustainable form of economic dependence.

Happy Saturday evening to my Pitt friends, and Happy National Day to my Chinese friends! Try not to get too drunk!

Pointless video post - ‘More Than Meets the Eye’ by Testament

2011-09-25T15:21:00.010-04:00

Testament’s another one of those names in American (particularly Bay Area) thrash that deserves to be hailed alongside Slayer and (early) Metallica - but which has sadly never achieved such recognition (in spite of having solidly outclassed the recent output of both bands). The blend of thrash metal instrumentation with Chuck Billy’s more death-growly vocals never really caught on with the listening public when they were all abandoning the genre in droves to go listen to Pantera, and when nearly every other thrash band decided to sell out. Still, these guys show that they can (and do) kick some serious arse.

But I watch this video and... damn if it isn’t the trippiest, weirdest, most visually confusing and overdone music videos I’ve ever seen - and I’m including the music video for Black Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’ in that, by the way. True to its word, though, there really is more than meets the eye... which is a good thing, because what meets the eye is: Photoshopped cartoon skulls in transparency effects, an automated portcullis which looks like it came out of a late-90’s arcade shooter, Force Lightning emanating from Alex Skolnick and Chuck Billy (yeah, you guys are awesome - but not Jedi) and more bats than one would care to count.

Still, awesome song. And awesome album. 2008’s The Formation of Damnation is actually fairly broad-ranging and heavy in theme, even for a thrash album - from the War on Terror (‘The Evil Has Landed’) to scathing criticism of Bush (‘The Formation of Damnation’), religious extremism (‘Dangers of the Faithless’) and the oppression of innocents (‘The Persecuted Won’t Forget’) to good old-fashioned fun biker rock (‘Henchman Ride’) and existential, religious questions (‘Afterlife’). The last actually appears to be pretty personal for Billy, a lapsed Catholic whose close call recovering from cancer led to his renewed appreciation for the big questions (though now from an American Indian perspective).

And did I mention the whole album is solid and unrelenting thrash, front to back? Definitely worth a listen or ten. Very, very fun stuff.

An insightful and interesting talk by Dr Robert Putnam

2011-09-24T22:22:00.004-04:00

The author of Bowling Alone, and one of the founding members of the communitarian political-philosophical movement in the United States, came to speak at Pitt at GSPIA’s invitation yesterday. And he didn’t aim small in terms of his topic: the relationship between social interconnectedness and economic equality.

His thesis is thus. There is a strong correlation between economic equality and social connectedness – that was the easy part to demonstrate. He plotted the levels of social trust against the GINI coefficient across the globe (the most trusting nations – and also the most equal – were the typical Northern European offenders: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Belarus; the least trusting nations were those like Brazil and Egypt with massive inequality problems), across the United States (almost straight down the OLS regression line, with Vermont topping the charts on both measures and Mississippi trailing in last place) and across Italian provinces (again, the data went straight along the regression line). The not-so-easy part was the direction of the causation. Though most laypeople (as well as most scholars) would answer if asked what the causal relationship was between the growing economic inequality and the social disconnect / hyper-individualism we see now in American society, we would tend to think that the causal relationship was one way: economic inequality causes social disconnect – with the causal explanation being something along the lines of poor people growing poorer growing envious of rich people getting richer, and rich people growing suspicious and untrusting of everyone they see as not sharing their interests. Dr Putnam argues that this is not, in fact, the case – rather, it is social disconnect which causes economic inequality.

Indeed, he showed the data, plotting over time the levels of social engagement and of income equality in the United States. Intriguingly enough, we see social capital peaking in the 1960’s, and falling off (first gradually, then more and more drastically) around the same time that Dr King was shot. Income equality, however, reached its peak in the Carter years, before plummeting with Reaganomics 15 years later. The level of correlation was, in fact, quite stunning. Dr Putnam built up a convincing case that those generations (particularly the WWII generation) which were most closely connected with each other tended to push harder for public policies which would benefit everyone equally – civil rights, Social Security, the Great Society… and those generations which were not closely connected with each other tended to be more concerned with individual welfare and individual profit.

He made some very, very decent points here, though I think he could have done a little better fleshing them out. He describes WWII as having been a major force in creating networks of social trust among people of all races and classes – pretty much everyone in the country knew someone who had been at war. Dr Putnam gladly acknowledged (when I raised this question at the end) that this was not the case either with Vietnam, or with our most recent post-conscription military adventures. At the same time, though, he also saw that supporting a national conscription or a national service policy would be rather a non-starter among my own age group.

The end of the talk was something of a clarion call, though – he described in a series of vignettes and statistical references the sort of society that we were rapidly becoming. The ‘good news’ was that middle-class families are staying together more (as in, divorcing less), spending more time with their kids, staying in one place more and getting involved in religious and community organisations more. Their children also were benefitting from this arrangement: middle-class high school students were more likely to have a sturdy network of friends and acquaintances, were more likely to build off of those networks through their secondary education years, and were more likely to succeed economically based on who they knew. The ‘bad news’ was that the American working class is, to increasing degrees, the American middle class’s Dorian Grey portrait: a working-class high school student is much more likely to be isolated growing up, to not have a secure living space, to have stressed and detached parents (and very likely a single or divorced parent), to not have a close and functional network of friends, and to not have access to the kinds of social capital that could alleviate economic stress. Even worse, this economic stress has every likelihood (due to the modern economy’s excessive demands on a worker’s time and its unstable, disruptive influence on family life) of perpetuating this isolation, creating a vicious cycle from which escape is made ever more difficult.

We are becoming, in other words, the world of another Sybil. However, unlike in Benjamin Disraeli’s novella, the divide is not between a wealthy nation and a poor nation; it is between a wealthy nation and what is increasingly looking nothing like a nation at all. The effects, though, are very likely to reach us all unless we begin bridging that gap.

Definitely food for thought. Not to mention action.

When the links to the video of this talk are made available on the GSPIA / Centre for Metropolitan Studies website, I shall certainly post them.

A brief meditation on being 25

2011-09-22T10:15:00.003-04:00

Yesterday was my twenty-fifth birthday. It’s rather boggling to the mind that I have now been present on this earth for a quarter of a century – the tricks time can play are sometimes rather cruel. I can remember a time when Bill Clinton’s hair was a colour other than white. I can remember a time when Al Gore was a politician rather than a voice in the wilderness warning modern society of its ecological danger and calling for us to repent. I can remember a time before the 11th of September, 2001. Much as I dislike saying it, we’ve changed. And we’ve not always changed for the better. I suppose I could say the same of myself.

I’ve lived in six houses, one apartment and three college dorms, across three countries and six US states. I’ve said hello to a very friendly cat when he was one, and said goodbye to him when he was fifteen, only to say hello to two more cats (not as friendly). I’ve visited more national parks than I’d care to name, and I’ve stayed at home more than I should. I’ve been a member of a Mennonite church, a Lutheran church, a Church of the Brethren, a Congregationalist church, a Methodist church, a Friends meeting and three Episcopal churches (which I have made my home-on-pilgrimage). I’ve become an ardent metalhead. I’ve attempted to figure out where I fit into this world, and I suppose I won’t stop now.

Anyway. Here’s to the next quarter-century. Here’s hoping that it may be more hopeful and humane generally than the last, but every bit as memorable.

2011-09-20T20:16:00.006-04:00

Tomorrow, the state of Georgia will destroy a living, breathing human being. This will occur based only on a handful of eyewitnesses (a very unreliable form of evidence - the state has no physical evidence of Mr Davis’ guilt) - the great majority of whom either partially or wholly recanted their testimony under closer scrutiny. And it will occur despite the outcry for clemency from a number of authoritative figures within the Church, who ought to serve as the consciences of our time: the Rt Rev’d Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Rt Rev’d Archbishop Wilton Gregory and His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI.

Regardless of one’s opinion of capital punishment in general, this is not the appropriate action of a judicial system whose right and proper end is the pursuit of justice, which is based in truth. This is not the action of a good or healthy society. This is, rather, a system whose procedures and whose value system will produce a result which is entirely depraved: the destruction of the life of a man who may be innocent of this crime, in the pursuit of vengeance.

UPDATE: I concur with the New York Times editorial board.

Of Adams, Jackson and Calhoun – and new battles on old fields

2011-09-18T18:59:00.008-04:00

John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States
I am currently reading Peter Viereck’s Conservatism, which actually manages to be a fairly good overview of various strains of thought which can really only loosely be put together. He quite astutely identifies three strands in American thinking which have come to dictate how we conduct our politics – each typified by a politician representing a different set of interests and goals and political constituencies. In fact, what we are doing right now in the American political scene – though we don’t really realise it, given the disconnect much of the American populace has from its own history – is fighting out the same battle once more.

This goes back to the four men whom Viereck identifies as the leading lights of American conservative thought, insofar as any thought among the Founding Fathers could be considered conservative (which I doubt): Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, John Jay and James Madison – the founders of the Federalist party and the Brahmins (to use the common phrase) of an elite merchant class based primarily in the American North, centred around Boston. Theirs was a conservatism which was based – unlike the more liberal thought of Jefferson and Paine – in very deep convictions about original sin, and the need for legal and cultural stability in the face of faction. It was Hamilton who devised a system which would direct the people’s allegiance, loyalty and religious impulses toward a common centre in the US Constitution and in the office of the Presidency (as we have seen in abundance!). One may question whether or not this action was ‘conservative’ as these were norms which were written, not grown; created rather than cultivated, philosophically emphasising negative liberties and individualism over positive liberties and stability… but this is the closest we have to a conservative tradition.

It is into this very tradition (wary of mob rule, painfully aware of original sin, staid and militant advocates of stable political institutions) that John Adams’ son, John Quincy Adams, was raised. One can detect his aversion to mob rule and his allegiance to the tradition of natural law and the unwritten English constitution in his Letters of Publicola, rebutting the ultra-liberal Thomas Paine:

[The] principle, that a whole nation has a right to do whatever it pleases, cannot in any sense whatever be admitted as true. The eternal and immutable laws of justice and of morality are paramount to all human legislation. The violation of those laws is certainly within the power, but it is not among the rights of nations… [If what Mr Paine says is true, t]he principles of liberty must still be the sport of arbitrary power, and the hideous form of despotism must lay aside the diadem and the sceptre, only to assume the party-coloured garments of democracy.

Originally, JQ Adams had only to contend against his Vice-President, John Calhoun – aptly remembered by Erik Loomis of Lawyers, Guns and Money as ‘[o]ne of the most evil men in US history’ – however, his defeat in 1828 came not at the hands of the Southern partizan Calhoun, but of another pro-slavery Southerner, Andrew Jackson. Jackson practically embodied the ultra-liberal ideals of Paine: he ran under the party slogan ‘the Supremacy of the People’s Will’ (with all of the Rousseauean connotations that carries!), and routinely took presidential actions which ran roughshod over checks and balances, as well as over various foreign nations (as the Cherokee, Seminole and Choctaw were considered at the time) with the Indian Removal Act.

Viereck briefly notes that these three men – Adams, Jackson and Calhoun – mutually despised each other, and the way their political fights shaped up, they divided the nation along sectarian lines. Viereck makes note of a ‘Jacksonian West’, which gave rise to a populism which was virulently hostile to the conservative elites of the Northeast – ‘with its faith in an idealised a priori abstraction called “the common man”… [a]s if original sin could cease at the Alleghenies’. The South, naturally, followed the theories of Calhoun, who was bent on carrying the unstable and sinful institution of slavery forward in perpetuity, as a ‘positive good’. The North – and not just the metropolitan merchant elite of the coast, but also the smallholders and independent workmen of Vermont, New Hampshire, upstate New York and most of Pennsylvania – largely followed the conservatism of Adams: suspicious of both the concentrations of power in the slaveowning class of the rural-industrial South, and of the Rousseau- and Paine-spouting Western frontiersmen who thought by their faith in their commonness and the forward march of history that they could do no wrong.

Naturally, there are many new issues (like the rise of modern industrialism) which have come into play, but what is truly interesting to me is that there is this idiom that has passed into modern use which corresponds to the threefold political fracture in the United States. Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry both expound the same radical-liberal, very anti-conservative Jacksonian narrative which absolutely denies original sin; they are speaking to a political bloc which aspires to use majority rule to ‘take back Washington’ (from whom, one might ask?), and are none too careful about which checks and balances they override to exercise their political will. If one reads the Tea Party platform carefully, one can see precisely where and how their political goals translate to increased powers, even dictatorial powers, for the presidency; as well as all of the anti-conservative energy, land-use and tax policies on display.

Of Calhoun’s corner, it is best represented by the presidential campaign of Ron Paul, who is notoriously tone-deaf if not downright insensitive regarding issues of civil rights for men and women of colour in America, and who expounds the political philosophy of Calhoun on ‘states’ rights’ and ‘nullification’ at every turn. It is worth noting that he’s not a very good or even consistent conservative given his rather unprincipled stance on abortion, and his unwillingness to actually conserve resources which by rights belong to everyone (I’m thinking here of his stance on selling off publicly-owned land).

And then there’s Adams’ own corner – the traditionalist yet socially-conscientious conservatism which weakly echoes the Tory radicalism of various English thinkers across the pond (my gentle readers should be very familiar with the breed at this point – Johnson, Oastler, Ruskin, Morris, Disraeli, Chesterton, Eliot, MacIntyre). At this point, it stands fairly vacant. The Roosevelt family, to a certain extent, mirrored the career of the Adams family in a number of ways: though Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy was questionable, his insistence on civic tradition and his distrust of the concentrations of power in big business that led to his ‘Trust-Buster’ moniker are good examples of how he followed through on the Adams legacy. Franklin Delano was also interested in yoking the cause of the Eastern elites to that of organised labour through the New Deal – a large part of which was concerned not with building new economic and political institutions, but rather with stabilising ones which were already there. To a certain extent, the Democratic Party follows in FDR’s footsteps (very selectively and very tepidly), but even in the present day Republican Party, there are several former politicians and public figures who have adopted policy positions and political philosophies which overlay somewhat that of Adams – Jim Jeffords and Lincoln Chafee leap to mind.

In the broader scheme of things, I certainly hold out for a more radical, more MacIntyrean alternative – but within the historical idiom of American politics I am certainly most sympathetic to the Yankee conservatism of John Adams and his son, John Quincy. This tradition remains my touchstone in American politics; my grandfather – himself a smallholding Vermont dairy farmer – identified very closely with this tradition.

On the paucity of modern moral reason

2011-09-14T21:51:00.006-04:00

Ah, the New York Times, one of the last of a dying breed which actually does its level best to speed its own demise by not actually reporting anything significant (like the completely-fabricated casus belli of the Iraq War) when it actually matters. Often, though, the linked blogs and opinion columns are interesting even if one doesn’t necessarily agree with them - and this is certainly true of David Brooks’ latest, on the general incapacity of young Americans to engage in any meaningful kind of moral reasoning.

Brooks essentially follows in broad strokes the argumentative path already well-trodden by the new virtue theorists and the communitarians: Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and (to an extent) Allan Bloom - that the current moral discourse has had its legs effectively shot off by a practical-theoretical individualism which undermines any attempt to build a consensus around the Good, and that the current lack of rigour with which young people approach moral discussion is a symptom of this rampant individualism. I am sympathetic to this argument right up until the point where I remember that it’s David Brooks writing it.

This is nothing against Mr Brooks personally, only that I believe his general position on the society and on the economy is actually a part of (and a contributing factor to) the problem he is attempting to describe. I am thinking of a column that he wrote nearly two years ago, as the recession was still happening, where he praised the American cultural fascination with an uncertain future. He also participated in a debate with Gail Collins around the same time in which he laid out his position much more clearly. He liked the American model, in which entrepreneurs were given greater mobility, greater flexibility, greater ability to hire and fire at will without regard for the fallout in the labour sector, because it - in his words - led to ‘more exciting lives’.

In that discussion, I believe, Ms Collins rather hit the nail on the head: the sort of ‘excitement’ for which Mr Brooks was hankering came at the expense of job security... though I think it was disingenuous of Ms Collins to suppose that merely having health insurance can make up for having a stable vocation and a stable residence within a community. To some extent, the ‘excitement’ inherent to the neoliberal economy is of a distinctly puerile sort and is (often, though not always) confined to a very specific set of people - the people responsible for making risky decisions (such as the managers of various automotive and manufacturing firms over the past 30 years, or more recently the investment bankers in the run-up to the credit crisis) are in a position to reap the lion’s share of the benefits of success, but the costs of failure are all shunted off onto their employees or onto their clients. As we have seen, those costs can be substantial, and those costs are not simply in lost jobs but also in broken homes and broken communities.

I’ve generally found that when David Brooks veers into social commentary rather than political or economic shilling for the GOP, his writing becomes much more tolerable. Given his past writing, however, I take this recent position with much more than a grain of salt, and implore Mr Brooks to consider that most axial traditions have it that virtue is cultivated primarily within the family and within the community (for Plato and Aristotle, this was the polis; for Confucius and for Mencius, this was the kingdom or guo 国; for the Hebrew prophets, it was the congregation or qahal קהל). Any meaningful, sensible virtue ethic must take the form of proper roles lived out in some form of community, whether academic or religious or civil - it makes no sense to support, on the one hand, a return to axial moral thought; and on the other to support a neoliberal economic structure which has no reason to respect community ties.

Pointless video post - ‘Breaking the Law’ by Judas Priest

2011-09-13T20:14:00.009-04:00

Listening to some vintage Brit metal again - British Steel, in point of fact. Every time I hear this song I get the nagging feeling that the same thing must have happened to Judas Priest’s ‘Breaking the Law’ that happened to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ - though perhaps not to the same extent, naturally. Rob and Glenn were never as overtly political as Bruce, of course (or even some other Brit metal acts), but this song in particular certainly has an anti-Thatcher political angle which is rather difficult to ignore. Actually, it’s a fairly straightforward song - it takes the perspective of someone who just can’t win by playing by the rules that the neoliberal economy and its cheerleader state lay down on him, and who robs a bank out of protest. There are a number of really nice touches to this video - one of them being that they come to the bank disguised as 17th-century Puritans, only to break out into their jackets and leather pants!

Enjoy, gentle readers!

Remember, remember

2011-09-11T14:45:00.003-04:00

This is a day we are told, in advertisements or (in our case here) on the line marquees of our local Port Authority public busses, to ‘never forget’. It is a day which, rightly, will be remembered as a day of immense historical importance. The eleventh of September ten years ago changed a lot of things. I was fourteen then; I remember the shock and grief and outrage as the footage held us transfixed from our classroom televisions. It left a deep impression even on my fourteen-year-old self with his marginal understanding of international affairs.

However, I think it is important to remember that a great many things – good and bad – did not, in fact, die or change as a result of the horrific events of that day. It did not mark the beginning or the end of an era so much as punctuate certain trends which were already very much at play in the world and had been since the fall of the Berlin Wall: our uncertain standing as the most powerful nation in the world; the existential anxieties and need to redefine ourselves that came with such a position; and the rise of a violent (and itself very modern) fundamentalist backlash against modernity in many corners of the world (including our own). But these are only contingencies, and at some level unreal, as all ‘big picture’ concerns ultimately are. It is easy to miss the small tragedies and graces that befell the individuals, the families, the people of New York City who felt the pain most closely. Host of The Daily Show Jon Stewart and folk singer-songwriter Lucy Kaplansky both captured the mood of the city and its residents well, and they each say it much better than I can:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

September 11, 2001

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

I think and I hope that real, embedded remembrances like these are what end up enduring from the eleventh of September. Not the war, not the hatred or the rage, not the way we claim that it has changed us.

Happy (American) Labour Day!

2011-09-05T11:08:00.005-04:00

Naturally, I realise that the history of labour in the United States (and in Britain) is nowhere close to being as happy or nostalgic as Saxon’s ‘The Ballad of the Working Man’ makes it out to be; still, it’s a great rock tune and a great expression of solidarity with the working classes, whose way of life nearly has disappeared.

Happy Labour Day, everyone. Tonight I’ll be hoisting my tankard to remember the past, and to hope for the future in these dark times.

‘The deity which disappears’ (or, the impossibility of moral atheism)

2011-08-29T01:23:00.007-04:00

I have long struggled to understand the appeal of authors like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. To give but one example, there is no doubt in my mind that Christopher Hitchens is an entertaining writer, but hardly could I go a page in God is Not Great without thinking that perhaps his intended cure is worse than the disease he is attempting to diagnose. He complains that all religion is lethally violent and seeks to control others’ beliefs; yet he turns around and supports pre-emptive strikes against Iran, ultimately because its people hold different political and theological views than we do. He complains that all religion is either founded in ignorance and wishes to stay there, or wilfully distorts the truth; yet he mischaracterises historical figures at whim (poor St Augustine with all his critical genius and learning – even for his time – he dismisses as an ‘ignoramus’; and let us not go into the bile he heaps upon believers in modern times, when he is not simultaneously attempting to cast Dr King in the ill-fitting role of ‘humanist’!), whether out of ignorance or out of a desire to distort fact for polemical purposes. With distinct relish he accuses religious folk of all manner of sexual abuse all the way up to child rape, then turns around and lambastes them for the prudishness of wanting to protect people from sexual predation through legislation (like that against abuse, rape and underage sex, perhaps?).

Sadly, the sort of atheism which has been branded and bottled and sold on the popular press for a very pretty penny by the aforementioned authors is actually very little different than the fundamentalism it spends most of its time reviling (when it is not first in bad faith – no pun intended – setting up fundamentalism as the authoritative voice within religion, rather than as the modern aberration any honest historiographer of religion must call it).

We may observe that it has its own creation myth: that the ‘enlightened’ world is a mere four hundred years old and was created practically ex nihilo in a very short time by its own sainted elect: Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume and Hobbes. It has its own dogmas: that for any available question which might enter the mind of a human being, her answer will unfailingly come from the purveyors of the scientific method (thankfully, those same purveyors – for the most part – have in-built a more professional modesty which circumscribes their own field of expertise). If one disagrees with this dogma, one is damned to the outer darkness of ‘irrationality’ (where there is unfailingly much by way of wailing and gnashing of teeth). And its self-appointed prophets appear more than willing to spread their doctrines by sword and nuclear fire against their ‘irrational’ (and thus safely dehumanised) opponents abroad, and enforce their ostensibly tolerant order with a torture-empowered national security state at home. There is a New York Times-bestselling industry in half-baked nouveau atheist tomes (and a loyal following besides) which must be the envy of many a televangelist and religious self-help author.

Now, these observations should not really come as any surprise. I’ve tried to make it a point, as Dr Wang Hui often tries to do, to point out the ways in which two seeming opposites (such as modern American liberalism and modern American conservatism) are actually more alike than different. My question here, though, is why. The answer, as authors such as Bill Egginton (author of In Defence of Religious Moderation) and Fr John Haught (author of God and the New Atheism) have pointed out, lies in the nature of how both the nouveau atheists and the fundamentalists conceive ‘truth’. Is God a hypothesis which can be proven or disproven? (Both the nouveau atheists and the fundamentalists tend to say ‘yes’.) Is there a penultimate, infallible and simple guide to metaphysical / existential / moral questions? (Again, both the nouveau atheists and the fundamentalists are in accord on this point, though they differ on what that guide actually is.) Both the nouveau atheists and the fundamentalists agree that a literalistic reading of a religion’s holy books is the only valid reading, and that the groups which hold to these literalistic readings are the only followers of ‘true’ religion – and the rest of us are merely following ‘watered-down’ or ‘lukewarm’ versions.

Both Egginton and Haught make the only responsible reply to this last assertion: that the founders of the religions the fundamentalists purport to follow (and the nouveau atheists purport to debunk) insisted on a transcendental model of truth and a multi-layered reading of scripture (whatever it happens to be). The humanistic moral legacy to which both groups of extremists lay claim is, in fact, the child of theology: which is ultimately the study of a truth which is eternally and ultimately suspended – a glimmer on the horizon, ‘an eagle on the mountains’, in short (in the words of GK Chesterton), ‘a deity which disappears’. Its humility is also its radicalism: the higher the mountain of our knowledge grows and the further we can see from it, the more distant and paradoxical appear the solutions of epic questions: of evil, of free will, of the nature of creation; and the more monsters we can slay in their pursuit.

Fundamentalism, on the other hand, is very much a modern phenomenon: it treats mythical stories as literal fact, which not even the original authors and early commentators on Scripture took as such (both the Talmud and the Church Fathers were more interested in the import of Genesis as story than as scientific treatise). The nouveau atheists, likewise – as Haught notes – are not interested in engaging with actual religious traditions, but rather limit their discourse to ‘the unreflective, superstitious and literalist religiosity of those they criticise’. It is in the interests of both to assume that all truth can be known by human beings through the application of a single ‘code of codes’ (to use Egginton’s phrase), rather than admitting the metaphysical, existential and moral significance of myth.

Bill Egginton attempts to counterpoise to these allies-in-extremes a form of religious pragmatism, whose primary feature is just this humility in the face of transcendent truth. Let us take note, though, that it was (in part) the assumptions of pragmatism that rather got us into this mess. The separation of realms of truth into those foundational (or ‘fundamental’) facts which can be publicly used, and those unfounded questions which must be confined to contemplative solitude, was part of what gave both fundamentalists and nouveau atheists their ground against the religious moderates Egginton champions in the first place. More tantalising to me is Egginton’s insistence on myth as valid knowledge and valid discourse.

Let us turn, then, to the myths which the nouveau atheists espouse. The tenets of their mythical system may be described thus (here I paraphrase Fr John Haught):

The universe is self-caused, and has no overall point or purpose.

Every humanly-thinkable question has a natural explanation and a natural cause. The corollary to this is that every human attribute, including reason and what we perceive as freedom, can be explained in purely naturalistic terms.

Religious belief is not only unnecessary, but epistemologically and morally harmful.

Not only does morality not require religious belief, but people without religious belief are actually better people.

I actually hold (with Fr Haught, apparently) that a person holding to these myths is incapable of being truly moral, insofar as morality depends on the transcendental insight of the Golden Rule: regarding the Other as truly Other, but possessed of the same worth as Self. Leaving aside the question of whether the attribution of such worth to the Other is a religious exercise (I hold that it is, inescapably), we can see in practice how the nouveau atheists (Harris most dramatically) preclude meaningful dialogue even with religious moderates by damning them as ‘irrational’ – much the same way as fundamentalists preclude meaningful dialogue with their opponents by outright damning them. One doesn’t talk with ‘irrational’ beings, one medicates them, confines them, or in the last instance disposes of them. I wasn’t the only one to note that there was more than a whiff of the fasces about the assertions of Harris and pre-waterboarding Hitchens that we require an aggressive, imperial foreign policy and a torture state to keep unruly religious folk in line (particularly those brownish ones with the funny-sounding names).

Morality appears to be on much firmer ground with those who propound a mythology which a.) allows for the equality under their Creator of all beings capable of reason; b.) can be at rest in a state of doubt regarding natural determinism; and c.) is suspicious of all foundational truth claims which leave no room for paradox.

Pointed video post - ‘For Whose Advantage?’ by Xentrix

2011-08-27T21:04:00.004-04:00

It’s rather sad that thrash metal from Britain gets so often overlooked, particularly given the roots of thrash in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal – Motörhead, Judas Priest and Diamond Head being massive influences on the subgenre as a whole. Xentrix, along with a few other gems – Sabbat, Pariah (and their love-child, early Skyclad), Lawnmower Deth, more recently Gama Bomb and Evile being a few of the ones I enjoy – has some very notable output which should be listened to today. Just as true today as in 1990, during the first Gulf War:

They do not want to see their own stupidity
For whose advantage anyway?
This reckless nature you display
Is raping those who have to obey

On a very closely related note, there are some good posts by Neil Clark and John, linking to a very enlightening (if polemical) Counterpunch article, on the Libyan war – sorry, ‘intervention’ (a topic on which I have been sadly remiss since it began). I made the point that if we do go into Libya, it should be solely for the right reasons, and with sensitivity to the fact that our actions (‘our’ in this case being NATO) would come under heavy scrutiny from the Rest regarding our motives. It appears we have approached Libya, sad to say, with neither the necessary caution nor the necessary sensitivity. In the end, this will be to the advantage of the petrol companies; it very much remains to be seen whether it will be to the advantage of the Libyan people.

The smart money indicates that it is not.

Pointless video post - ‘Brainwashed’ by Nuclear Assault

2011-08-21T19:28:00.003-04:00

Herein is my latest exhibit in how truly amazing the late Reagan years were in terms of musical output - most of it (like Nuclear Assault here) stridently anti-administration. Nuclear Assault was a crossover byway of the New York thrash titan Anthrax, started by bassist Dan Lilker (also of SOD and, briefly, the sadly underrated German thrash band Holy Moses). Their music also happens to be virulently catchy, even if their vocalist is slightly grating - though I think their message is almost better suited to today’s media environment (replete with the inanities and distortions of 24-hour cable news) than it was even to the day and age in which they were singing. Please take a couple minutes to enjoy a solid headbang or two to ‘Brainwashed’, my good and gentle readers!

Back in the Burgh with a killer case of jetlag

2011-08-20T05:04:00.001-04:00

I need some orange juice – got as much as I could during my thirty hours on flights and in airports, but apparently not nearly enough, and that’s the only thing that has been proven to help me with jetlag. I’ll probably pop over to the Sunoco station soon and see if they have any. Got to bed at about 10:30 last night and got up at 3:00 in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, so here I am typing random thoughts which will be posted later to my blog.

So, I’m back. And main glad to be – I missed Pittsburgh quite a bit. The bridges, the rivers, the skyline dominated by the Cathedral of Learning, the familiar streets and sights and smells (it’s been awhile since I’ve walked past a Jimmy John’s)… but that was before my streak of infernally bad luck hit. In my jetlag-drunk stupor, I left my house keys on the table and left the apartment to walk to the post office to check up on a package that had been marked ‘delivered’ but which had mysteriously gone missing. Neither post office I went to could help; and it was then I noticed that I was missing my keys, so I went to campus and called my landlord on a phone I borrowed from the Card Office. At that point, they were not willing to let me back into the apartment without proof that I was allowed to be there (the lease is in my roommate’s name, and he’s in DC at the moment), so I went to the computer lab to send an email to them, which I just managed to do before the skies opened up, complete with thunder and lightning, and the power went out. All over Oakland. For four hours.

Thankfully, I was able to borrow somebody else’s phone to contact my landlords, and they let me back into my apartment, if just to grab my computer and phone and keys and head out again in search of electricity and internet. Hillman had electricity, but internet was sketchy to say the least. (I’d gotten some orange juice at one of the only stores open on Forbes – 7/11. The others were Starbucks and McDonald’s; a passerby remarked to me that if ever Starbucks or McDonald’s shuts down, you know that it’s the end of the world.) Eventually, I gave up and went home with Jessie, and slept off some more of my jetlag.

So… yep. Here I am. Still jetlagged, and still writing about it. Can’t really much think of anything clever or worthwhile to say here; just let everyone know how I’m doing. I’m only back in Pittsburgh these couple of days; I fly out with Jessie tomorrow to Providence to visit the family. I’ve had just about enough of airports, I believe… At any rate, best to my readers, and hope these past few days have been kinder to them than to me!

On the London riots

2011-08-14T02:50:00.011-04:00

Of all the commentary I’ve seen thus far, Graeme over at The Roar of the Masses could be Farts seems to me to have it pretty much right - though I would argue that he is off in saying that ‘decency’ and ‘morality’ are meaningless concepts here, when he is clearly arguing the opposite: that it is a profoundly indecent and immoral society which so strongly denounces and insults the people living and struggling on the bottom rungs whilst willing to tolerate (with perhaps only a bit of feeble hand-wringing) a wealth gap in which the top 10% earn, on average, 100 times more than the bottom 10% (reaching its worst point, it should be noted, under a New Labour government). This is a structural problem, but sadly it will not be treated as such by those in and near the halls of power.

Also, check out the articles Graeme linked at the bottom of his post. Well worth the reading - particularly this one. I do not approach these issues, it should be noted, from a Marxian perspective - I’m still very much a ‘feudal socialist’ with notable MacIntyrean sympathies; at the same time, it is incumbent on us to be sensitive to the larger picture, the systemic outlook.

Just to be clear - I feel no more compunction to ‘stand with’ the rioters here than I do to support the folks in Xinjiang who went around attacking bystanders with knives. But likewise, I say this in the same spirit of ‘tough love’ that I gave to China in that blog post - I love Britain and what it could and should have been; but they have to rediscover that ideal and fight for it once again, instead of succumbing to the comfortable, stultifying and ultimately crippling logic of empire. And they won’t do it by picking up a broom and sweeping all the ‘undesirables’ under their collective rugs (or by shooting them with plastic bullets or hosing them down with water cannon, either).

See also the ever-redoubtable Neil Clark on the topic; also a much-needed voice here.

A fond farewell to Cathay and all her glories

2011-08-14T01:28:00.005-04:00

Drum Tower 鼓楼

Kabobs and beer 串啤 - VERY spicy!

Well, this is quite a way to go. I’ve been suffering recently from a persistent headache that has sometimes gotten to migraine strength, the internet has been notoriously temperamental (more so than usual, that is) of late, and it is currently raining but not too hard (it was pouring earlier). Still, yesterday I got to do some more touristy things, exploring around the Forbidden City, the Drum Tower 鼓楼 and Andingmen 安定门 for fun, eventually going for kabobs and Yanjing beer and later karaoke with a few of my friends here. A fitting way to end my time in Beijing, actually!

The kabobs we had at this place (mantou 馒头 along with roasted chicken thighs with peppers) were ridiculously, lip-numbingly spicy; as a side dish we were served chilled pears with crushed ice as a ready fire-extinguisher (they disappeared in a hurry, that I will say). After that we talked about history (mostly ancient history - 夏商周 the first three dynasties of China, and what the defining marks of each era were) and spent a few hours at a KTV bar belting out tunes (naturally, the ones I picked out were Black Sabbath, Nightwish and Queensrÿche - though I was surprised to see the power-metal act Last Successor 末裔 on the setlist!). A lot of the available selections were pretty mainstream pop and pop-rock, mostly Chinese artists I hadn’t heard of (though I did a passable rendition of ‘99 Red Balloons’!). A very fun guys’ night out before I return home in a couple of days.

It’s strange; I’m very eager to get back - I miss my girlfriend terribly, along with mostly-English conversation, good cheese and internet that isn’t blocked / service-denied. But there’s a strange melancholy in my leaving, as it probably should be; I deeply love this country, and it comes to feel like home in a number of ways.

Pointless video post - ‘Emerald’, performed by Skyclad (Thin Lizzy cover)

2011-08-09T22:33:00.009-04:00

Pioneering British folk-thrash-heavy metal band Skyclad (the brainchild of Pariah’s Graeme English and Steve Ramsey, along with the incomparable Martin Walkyier of Sabbat, who quit Skyclad and rejoined his former band some years back), performing Thin Lizzy’s ‘Emerald’. Skyclad are awesome and would be if just for the masterful guitar and bass playing of the NWoBHM veterans at its core, and the inspired lyrical genius of Walkyier (with his penchant for puns and wry humour); but they are also a highly political band, exuding the kind of critical, anti-imperialist (and at the same time rooted) egalitarianism that I’ve come to greatly appreciate and embrace (as well as being environmentalist, though not of the noisome Malthusian sort who have grown in prominence recently). Check out also their patriotic ballad ‘Moongleam and Meadowsweet’ from their debut album The Wayward Sons of Mother Earth (deep, deep shades of Ralph McTell on that song, and not just in the singing); also compare and contrast with the considerably more critical (and slightly more punk-sounding) ‘Think Back and Lie of England’ from their 2000 Folkémon album.

Awesome, awesome stuff, regardless of whether they’re doing sweet-and-peaceful or heavy-and-angry. Enjoy, folks!

Re-watching Raven in the Foregate through Anglo-Catholic eyes

2011-08-06T20:52:00.004-04:00

Brother Cadfael (Derek Jacobi) with Hugh Beringar (Eoin McCarthy)

I truly and deeply enjoy the murder mysteries of Edith Pargeter (aka Ellis Peters), which are not only thrilling mysteries but masterworks of historical fiction in their own right – not only did they have a profound impact on my writing style and subsequent literary tastes, but also upon my theology. One gets the impression (through the views of her sleuth and the moral centre of the stories, the Crusader-turned-Benedictine Brother Cadfael) that Edith Pargeter’s own theo-politics are very Broad Church, but nonetheless a profound respect for both the monastic Teutonic Catholicism of the Normans and Saxons and (slightly more) for the hermit-revering Celtic Catholicism of the Welsh who inhabit her world, seeps through. Many of her books, Raven in the Foregate being one and the Heretic’s Apprentice being another, have deep theological implications (though at the same time, all of the views she plays around with are spoken through masterfully-portrayed characters, each with believable flesh-and-blood faults and failings), which struck me all the more on this re-watching of the screen adaptation of Raven in the Foregate.

The screen version makes a few simplifications and takes several liberties, notably with the character of Deputy Sheriff of Salop Hugh Beringar (though some glimmers of the old Hugh surface: when Cadfael asks him cagily if, should he by chance have spoken with a noted rebel and fugitive from the King’s justice the night before [which he had], Hugh would want to know about it – Hugh dryly replies ‘no’), but it follows fairly closely Pargeter’s intense portrayal of the period’s history. The Church, though in principle seated above temporal politics, nevertheless gets involved massively in the anarchic fray between King Stephen and Empress Maud. Abbot Radulfus is commanded by Henry of Winchester to replace the late priest of the Foregate of Shrewsbury with a political partizan loyal to King Stephen – Father Ailnoth. In the movie as in the book, Ailnoth is nearly the embodiment of the creeping legalism that was strangling an ever-more bureaucratised Church. Where the previous parish priest of the Foregate, Father Adam, was forgiving, compassionate, sensitive to local customs and concerns, Father Ailnoth – though well-read and intelligent – insisted on a peculiarly functional reading of the letter of the law.

In the movie, we get to see several examples of this. He leaps to the defence of a sadistic, murderous knight who shares his political allegiance (even while the knight has a defenceless, wounded prisoner shot dead rather than taken to trial). The poor Saxon farmers working on Church land under Father Adam’s supervision are immediately evicted by the Norman Ailnoth. When they plead for their traditional rights and spoken agreement with Father Adam to be respected, Ailnoth gives them a cold ‘not-my-problem’ and notes that he is only under obligation only to written law; when they appeal to his conscience on behalf of their families, Ailnoth lambastes them for having children while poor. He refuses to hear the confession of a young, unmarried pregnant girl in distress, which is suspected to drive her to her death under mysterious circumstances. He is portrayed as an austere ascetic who sees the mass of humanity as beneath him and worthy of contempt – in a peculiarly Puritanical moment, he orders all of the flowers to be taken out of his chapel and destroyed.

On the other side, we have the pious, if struggling and all-too-human, residents of the Foregate taking their concerns before Abbot Radulfus, who is torn between his need to keep King Stephen and the Church hierarchy sweet, and his desire to see the Foregate restored to the harmony it had under Father Adam. Ailnoth is ultimately found drowned in the Severn, caught up by a mill-wheel with a gash on his throat and a large bruise from a blow to the head; and pretty much the entire Foregate is held under suspicion on account of their grievances against Ailnoth.

I won’t get into spoilers; suffice it to say that the movie does a fairly good job of sticking to the book, except that two of the characters are changed to have a second romance subplot which wasn’t there in the original. It was particularly interesting to me in that Ms Pargeter seems to be making a passionate plea for greater charity and generosity of spirit in the Church; a plea which is echoed even more intensely in the movie. If the Heretic’s Apprentice was her most ‘Protestant’ novel (and even then that’s arguable, as her supposedly ‘orthodox’ heretic-sniffing antagonist himself holds some downright Calvinistic beliefs about Hell and predestination), this is certainly her most ‘Catholic’ one. For Ms Pargeter, knowing Scripture is good, intelligence is good, and even rigorous morals are good (particularly the near-Klingon sense of personal honour and fair play she lends her heroes, whether monastic like Cadfael or secular like Hugh Beringar) – but unless it is all directed toward a greater end and expressed in charity, compassion and justice, it is all in vain.

I very much enjoy the way Ms Pargeter carefully weaves together a rich universe of a slightly-fictionalised 12th-century England, which is romantic and religious without being revisionist or saccharine. And I highly recommend this movie (but read the book first!). Both are sure to please history and theology nerds as well as mystery buffs.

Just for the record…

2011-08-05T11:36:00.006-04:00

Matt Damon is awesome. If you haven’t seen the video, you should. Mr Damon is, in spite of his use of colourful metaphors - quite voluble and articulate on the subject and gets at the very heart of the Christian idea of vocation. Teaching is a profession which, by its very nature (and particularly in our anti-intellectual society, which tends to treat them like dirt) attracts those driven by caritas - even though they do enjoy living and must, like the rest of humankind, eat, they aren’t teaching just to collect their next paycheck.

Matt Damon is right here in more ways than one. The education problem in the United States is a lot more systemic than just bad teachers. Part of it - a large and substantial part of it - is the cultural expectation (on teachers and on students!) underlying the viewpoint both the Reason.tv reporter and cameraman express here. This expectation demands that education prepare students for ‘the real world’ - meaning a highly bureaucratised, technocratic and impersonal system which looks for a certain set of commercially applicable skills, among which is not creative, broad or moral thinking. Modern American society doesn’t want creative students or creative teachers; it wants cogs in a capitalist machine. Our society overvalues the knowledge-ideal of τεχνή (tekhne, from which comes our word ‘technical’) as a model of education and undervalues παιδεία (paideía, from which comes the English ‘encyclopaedia’) - learning for its own sake, particularly in the liberal arts. I tend to think of the scorn that is regularly heaped upon college English majors, or (in the United States, not so much in China) the awkward silences, looks of puzzlement and comments of ‘so what do you plan to do with that?’ that accompany my pronouncement that I studied philosophy in college.

A paideia ideal of education for its own sake won’t fix everything, naturally. What I hope it can do - as with many other believers in a liberal education - is open up people’s minds and hearts to the idea of vocation: of not just a skills-focussed ‘job’ interchangeable with any other, whose only end is making money. Vocation is a committed labour one undertakes to the greater glory of humanity and - ultimately - of God; though most teachers in American public schools are likely alien to such language, I argue that they are on a similar path. It is not a job, as Mr Damon notes, to which people flock because they envy the pay or the benefits. And, with a few notable exceptions, the teachers I had the good fortune of working with as part of my Peace Corps and AmeriCorps service in both American and Qazaqstani public schools did have the best interests of their students at heart. (The administrators, on the other hand, were a notably mixed lot.)

Here is the original video of Matt Damon cussing out the cameraman:

And some Holy Moses for good measure! \m/

Free music - Education

On the violence in Qeshger

2011-08-04T12:19:00.002-04:00

Tempers flared. Knife-wielding attackers lashed out at the law and anyone nearby. Hostages were taken by desperadoes. Lawmen shot first and asked questions later. The Chinese West erupted once again in violence, leaving at least 18 people dead. Ms Räbiya Qadyr of the World Uyghur Congress blames the Chinese government; the Chinese government blames the ETIM and terrorists ostensibly trained in Pakistan. I have remarked on the situation that took place two years ago. It greatly saddened me then, and it saddens me now. I have a great deal of sympathy for the situation of the Uyghurs in East Turkestan, given the prejudice, cultural and religious humiliation, poverty and poisonous inequality they must still endure.

However, I have felt – and still feel – that even though Xinjiang (as with Tibet) is and would be vastly better off under Chinese rule than as its own independent country, China must hold itself critically to the ideal of the ‘harmonious society’ it has set for itself, rather than taking it as a given that it will occur with greater attention to ‘scientific development’. Here I don’t think we can afford to ignore the possibility that we are seeing the tragic results of a developmentalist market ideology – it is almost a certainty that the wealth gap between ethnicities in Xinjiang took off in the early 1980’s in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, and then again under Jiang Zemin – that has certainly had unequal outcomes and has very likely a consciously unequal implementation. Uyghurs are increasingly upset at the lack of economic opportunities close to home, the inaccessibility of institutions of higher learning, the Mandarin language barrier. Much of the ‘development’ carried out in Xinjiang under the Great Western Development Strategy has been extraction-based, carried out by state-owned or large commercial enterprises. It has been heavily localised in the north of the region, with nearly all of the managerial jobs going to Han Chinese and a sizeable share of the profits going back east to corporate headquarters.

Something also has to be done about regional prejudices among the population – the prevailing stereotype of Uyghurs amongst Chinese, particularly in the east, is that they are back-biting and ungrateful recipients of Han Chinese largesse, that they are intractably backward, violent and untrustworthy sneak-thieves. To be sure, the Uyghurs are not the only victims of prejudice in China – Han Chinese just as gleefully stereotype amongst themselves (indeed, much the same way as we do here); I’ve heard the same descriptors (particularly the ‘untrustworthy’ bit) applied to people from Henan – which, not coincidentally, also happens to be one of the regions with the highest poverty rates in China. However, this particular prejudice does undeniably contribute to an atmosphere in which prophesies of violence fulfil themselves.

The common retort to the people who express such concerns as I am doing now is that the speaker is a Westerner who has an interest in undermining China’s sovereignty. I do not speak here as a Westerner, but as a friend of China; and I have no wish to undermine any legitimate country’s sovereignty. Indeed, I certainly believe that China can do better. But the government, the businesses, the society all have to be willing to look honestly in the mirror – whether with regard to a tragedy of mere chance (such as the train accident two weeks ago), or with regard to a wholly human tragedy such as this one in Xinjiang. What China needs most today may just be another Lu Xun.

The distributist model, not quite dead in China

2011-08-02T10:57:00.004-04:00

Having worked and researched at PlaNet Finance China for two and a half months now, it certainly appears as though there is a long way to go in mitigating the excesses of both state and market here, particularly when it comes to financing small businesses. On the one hand, there is only one among the five large state-run banks which pulls its weight much at all in terms of small-business lending , and that is the Agricultural Bank of China. There is, as is to be expected somewhat, a self-serving relationship between the state-run banks and large businesses here. Mr He (何先生, a good, loyal and efficient People’s Bank of China or China Banking Regulatory Commission functionary from Beijing) enjoys having banks loan money to Mr Ge (葛先生, a liberal, well-respected member of the Shanghai executive class) because he knows Mr Ge can pay him back and produce the GDP growth he desperately wants; and Mr Ge enjoys his privileged access to loans from Mr He because it means he can leverage that much more power over Mr Zhang (张先生, who might be a hard-up farmer in rural Gansu or a worker from Anhui sending remittances back to his family), who is in many real ways shut out of the entire process. The names might be different, but the dynamics are the same everywhere in this brave new neoliberal world.

On the other hand, though, even in Beijing and other large cities around China, the family business – the getihu 个体户 – continues to be a quietly persistent feature. I noted in one of my past blog entries that I enjoy frequenting a small restaurant on my street, run by one family from Sichuan. Ninety-nine percent of China’s formal economy is made up of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs, though many of the enterprises here considered ‘medium-sized’ would actually be considered ‘large’ in the United States), and they account for a solid majority of jobs. When it comes to financing, however, the situation becomes tough on account of the problems mentioned above. Several different approaches are being tried – rural credit cooperatives, mutual funds, village and township banks, and the Postal Savings Bank (which, along with the Agricultural Bank of China, is one of the few unqualified success stories coming from either the public or for-profit banking sectors); even so, credit is bottlenecked. Many family businesses still turn to pawnshops, loan sharks or other shady side ventures for funding, if they look for funding at all, and end up indebted. I think PlaNet Finance China is doing a fine job of keeping their horizons broad – I was pleasantly surprised at their positive reactions to the critique by Ha-Joon Chang of common microfinance practices, and a heartening approach to microfinance which gives equal if not greater weight to SME financing as to ‘classic’ microfinance.

Hopefully, Mr Zhang will not go without other allies in the coming decades. Though much of the Chinese New Left is still wrapped in nationalism and veneration of Mao Zedong, there are a few voices within this movement who are calling for a solution that carries the spooky echoes of a distributist economic philosophy. I’ve mentioned Wang Hui 汪晖 already fairly frequently in my blog, but it also strikes me that his colleague Cui Zhiyuan 崔之元 is also trying to articulate and study a kind of human-scale market economics which directs private property to what might be considered distributist ends (this depends on our reading in his use of the term ‘socialist’ a broader, religious-tinged tradition which includes the thought of Ruskin, Oastler, Morris, Maurice, Cole and Penty – though both Dr Cui and Dr Wang would likely describe themselves as influenced more by the liberal utilitarianism of JS Mill and the post-Keynesians). This article provides a very interesting perspective of the work of Dr Cui in Chongqing under Party Secretary Bo Xilai 薄熙来. It’s worth a read even if one doesn’t agree with all of the policies and directions the Chinese New Left is taking. Particularly of interest to me is how Dr Cui sees China’s institutional environment as more malleable and amenable to change than those in the West.

Dr Cui Zhiyuan 崔之元博士 of Qinghua University

I have two weeks left in Beijing, and I am left with the bittersweet emotions of leaving a beloved friend to return to an even more beloved home. I hope everyone there is doing well; I should have time and opportunity to make a couple more posts before the long flight home. Be well, gentle readers.

Pointless video post - ‘Hordes of Chaos (a Necrologue for the Elite)’ by Kreator

2011-07-28T00:04:00.001-04:00

Ah, Kreator, prodigal sons of thrash metal, the melodic elegance of the searing rage that your music has lent to a truly sucky news week in human affairs (terrorist shootings in Norway, more terrorism in India, train accident in China with the usual initial evasions of responsibility, starvation in Somalia) is worthy of great praise. It is a good thing that my chosen vice is heavy metal; I am not certain how I could stay sane in a truly insane world of ‘everyone against everyone’ without it.

One of the great titans of Teutonic thrash, Kreator made several highly ill-received ventures into Gothic metal before returning to thrash with their album Violent Revolution; it looks like they’re working out the kinks in their style, as they’ve been playing a progressively more melodic style of thrash since Violent Revolution, and Hordes of Chaos is no exception to this rule.

Lincoln and the Confucians

2011-07-27T15:40:00.014-04:00

庄子见鲁哀公。哀公曰：‘鲁多儒士，少为先生方者’。庄子曰：‘鲁少儒。’哀公曰：‘举鲁国而儒服，何谓少乎？’

庄子曰：‘周闻之，儒者冠圜冠者，知天时；履句屦者，知地形；缓佩玦者，事至而断。君子有其道者，未必为其服也；为其服者，未必知其道也。公固以为不然，何不号于国中曰：“无此道而为此服者，其罪死！” ’

于是哀公号之五日，而鲁国无敢儒服者，独有一丈夫儒服而立乎公门。公即召而问以国事，千转万变而不穷。庄子曰：‘以鲁国而儒者一人耳，可谓多乎？’

Translation:

Zhuangzi visited Duke Ai of Lu. Duke Ai said: ‘In Lu there are many Confucians, but few of your own followers, sir.’ Zhuangzi replied: ‘Lu has few Confucians.’ Duke Ai said: ‘All over the state of Lu people wear Confucian clothes; how can you say they are few?’

Zhuangzi said: ‘I have heard that Confucians wear round hats to show they know the seasons of heaven; they wear square sandals to show they understand the earth; they hang crescent-shaped jade discs from their belts to show that they can make firm decisions. A gentleman who has found the Way may not wear such clothes, and someone who does wear such clothes may not have found the Way. Because your Grace does not believe this is the case, why not have it proclaimed in your state that: “All who have not found the Way but wear these clothes shall be put to death”?’

Within five days after Duke Ai proclaimed this, no one in the state of Lu dared wear Confucian clothing, except one man who wore Confucian clothes and stood at the Duke’s gate. The Duke summoned him and asked him about state affairs, and though they talked of many things, he did not waver. Zhuangzi remarked: ‘In Lu there is only one Confucian, how can you say there are many?’

From 《庄子专田子方》 Zhuangzi, Tianzi Fang; manga version below courtesy Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, Volume II

What was the point of this story, one might ask? Well, people certainly do put on clothes and act in a way which is not suitable to them, which is rather the point. I do not pretend to be a Confucian but rather hold to the High Church rites of the Anglican Communion, even though Confucius and Mencius both have made profound impacts on my own philosophy and theology. Yet even today, there are those who go about in Confucian clothing but do not understand the Confucian way, and who would be put to the executioner’s sword in the state of Lu.

I daresay that reading Confucius and Mencius, we can understand how they both were wont to think. They valued honesty and virtuous comportment in government. They were for humane expression in both one’s personal and one’s political life. They believed in proper, caring, proportionate relationships between people and excoriated those who abused their relationships. They believed in peace, but also recognised that peace was not possible without a just and harmonious social order, characterised by a respect for holistic dignity of persons rather than property rights (as evidenced by Confucius’ asking in the Lunyu after the servants when the barn caught fire, rather than after the horses). They sought to reunite the warring states under just such a humane order. They believed that the acts of the just were guided by Heaven – but they were for mercy and leniency in the execution of the laws. There is one elegant English-language quote that captures the Way of Confucianism rather better than any other I’ve heard, and it goes like this:

‘With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.’

These words were spoken by one of the most famous, and simultaneously one of the most misunderstood and unfairly maligned, presidents in American history. I am referring, of course, to one Mr Abraham Lincoln, from whose second inaugural address these words come. I admit to being more than slightly defensive of the historical honour of Mr Lincoln, as a Tory radical and as a fervent opponent of slavery, racism and exploitation of the lower classes.

The Confucians, valuing honesty and the scholarly virtues, were naturally very careful historians (particularly Ban Gu and his sister Ban Zhao), and though their history was always viewed through a lens they were not particularly friendly to revisionism. I have recently noted the way in which libertarians have misread Confucian philosophy for their own purposes. The petty and partizan revisionist view of Mr Lincoln, of which this particular author, of the same crowd (and axe-bait for Duke Ai of Lu if anything can be) is a notably rabid proponent – which, in the most unhinged and immoderate terms, claims he is a tyrant, a war criminal and a usurper of power, which claims that his only end was to seek power and that he was a hypocrite over the issue of slavery, which claims that the Union over which he presided attacked the seceding states and which claims that he paid no heed to the civil rights of the people of the North – should rightly be treated with scorn and ridicule.

The truth of the matter is that Southerners pre-emptively attacked Fort Sumter under an imagined provocation, which was and had been the rightful territory of the United States government when its commission was made. It should, if we are being technically accurate in our history and in our rectification of names, be considered a war of Southern aggression.

The very quotes which such petty people and partizans use to scorn Lincoln as a hypocrite actually show a highly complex, intelligent human being of likewise complex morals whose first priority was social harmony in the state he governed, a Confucian goal if there ever was one. And, as GK Chesterton was careful to point out, if Lincoln was fully in the right about any one thing, it was that America, if it was to survive at all, was one nation and not two – just as he recognised the ultimate futility of the barbarous institution of chattel slavery having any place in a harmonious nation. When the opportunity presented itself in late December of 1863, Lincoln made his feelings known on the subject unambiguously by calling for a Constitutional amendment that would end slavery. As for his being a tyrant and a usurper of power, the record stands that he was fairly and democratically elected. Twice. Even in a nation which was embroiled in a war for its very survival, Mr Lincoln never lost sight of the fact that he was answerable before Heaven and before the people. In his second inaugural address, he by extension made himself answerable to the people of the defeated South, offering leniency and mercy instead of retribution and harsh punishment. Unfortunately, he was treacherously assassinated before he could fully put these words fully into practice, and his successors were not keen to honour the work Mr Lincoln had begun.

As for the impingements on civil rights: yes, Mr Lincoln did suspend habeas corpus in 1861. And then he willingly, on his own accord, restored it in 1862. It is not, as a rule, a defining mark of tyrants that they willingly relinquish powers they have given themselves. However, after a second imposition later that year, Congress then took it upon itself to suspend habeas corpus by law in 1863; Lincoln did not, naturally, veto this bill, but neither did he exercise it to its full extent. Compare and contrast this with the actions of one Mr Jefferson Davis, who not only suspended habeas corpus indefinitely but also declared martial law throughout his stolen half of the states, and who ended up having to put down counter-secession movements in several states using brutal military force.

Let me be clear: I am not partial either to modernism or to Americanism, and I abhor the way in which Northern industrial and financial interests ultimately gained control through the consolidation of power in the federal government which followed (but such was hardly Mr Lincoln’s purpose, nor was it his doing alone; indeed, the lion’s share of the blame belongs to Taft). But I do also have several clear and distinct Catholic convictions (I use the term broadly) – among them: that God looks upon faith and makes no distinctions based on race, gender or economic status; also among them: that the Triune God is a social God wishes people to live in harmony with one another. Dr Samuel Johnson was clear that chattel slavery as practiced in the Americas was an innovation of colonial conquest, a great destroyer of both virtue and harmony in personal relationships, not just for the slave but also for the master; and a cultural and social order that was devoted primarily to the cause of not only defending, but spreading slavery to its neighbours (the American West, Cuba, Mexico and Brazil) either by political pressure or by imperial conquest, was doomed to failure from its outset.

As a Tory radical in the tradition of Dr Samuel Johnson, Richard Oastler and Bp Beilby Porteus, I cannot help but look at the massive, industrialised factory farms and dehumanising conditions under which the majority of slaves in the antebellum South worked with contempt and revulsion, and at the hypocrisy of the false gentlemen (I borrow the expression from the Chinese weijunzi ‘伪君子’) in revolt, who claimed to be acting in the best interests of their country (the more so because they put on a tremendous pretence of being in continuity with tradition – and yet the cotton industry, so dependent upon European markets and expendable uprooted human beings with no legal standing, was thoroughly capitalist and globalist in the worst of all possible ways). Interestingly, such revulsion was common amongst other contemporary Tories as well. The stridently traditionalist Pope Gregory XVI issued the bull In Supremo Apostolatus condemning slavery and the slave trade in general, but in context specifically against the institutionalised enslavement of black people in America, an evil which the Confederacy was established to propagate and perpetuate and which Mr Lincoln sought to limit and to end. (Unfortunately, his pious but muddleheaded and legalistic successor lacked Pope Gregory’s profundity and keen insight on social issues and foreign affairs.)

Thankfully, there has been one person, who (though I have reservations about the particular and uncompromising brand of republicanism he championed) by rights may be considered an actual Confucian (even if he didn’t wear the Confucian garb), and who had a proper appreciation for the contributions of Mr Lincoln. Sun Wen’s Three Principles of the People, on which much of subsequent Chinese political philosophy (good and bad) has been based, paid homage to Mr Lincoln’s borrowed phrase in the Gettysburg Address: ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people’.

Well, end of this defiant Tory radical’s latest rant. Back to normal reflections on life in China soon, I promise.

Prayer for the north

2011-07-25T00:26:00.003-04:00

I have been deeply anguished these past few days over the violence that shook Norway last week, and my heart goes out to the souls of the departed, and to everyone who lost a family member or a loved one in the attack. I’ve been at a loss to come up with words suitable to describe the tragedy. (This is not to de-emphasise in any way the even greater inhuman horrors that have been visited upon the people of Somalia or Mumbai in recent times or the sympathy I feel for them, but this story in particular has just stuck with me.) This man wilfully attacked and killed 92 people, many of whom were children. He shot them down with an automatic weapon – he must have looked at each and every one of them even as he mowed them down. What bothers me even more is that he, in spite of appearing clear-headed, shows absolutely no remorse for his actions. He’s so morally certain in his beliefs that he thought that killing children (whose sole wrong was being associated with a political party with opinions different from his own) on an island camp was the ‘necessary’ thing to do – in fact, he shows very little difference from the fanatical Islamists he professed to hate.

God save us all – myself included – from such sinful, self-imposed ideological blindness and hatred. Stå fast, Norge. My prayers and thoughts go with you.