If everybody had a skateboard...

I went to High School in Campbell County, Virginia not far from Red Hill Plantation. I discovered that the most nerd-friendly sport was Cross-Country, but I enjoyed cheering the jocks who played the sports where teamwork and coordination are more necessary for victory. In the part of China where I now teach English, Basketball is the sport people seem most interested in playing. Basketball is a sport well suited to urban environments like the great cities of China and North America.

A few weeks ago, I tried to get my students to sing the lyrics of the beach boys.

“Be true to your school
Just like you would to your girl or guy
Be true to your school
Let your colors fly.”

Actually, in China I haven't seem the same sort of rah-rah cheerleading which characterizes games in the US. My college students say that their High School preparation mostly involved exams and competing against each other in the High School Sports meeting. Another thing which seems to be missing is the booing of the other team I remember when I attended Red Sox games and heard choruses of “Yankees suck.” Unlike Fenway Park, no one here seems to hate the Yankees, though many people on the street greet me with choruses of “Obama!”

I haven't seen cheerleaders. An Australian friend has commented on the presence of dancing girls in reputable bars where men and women go together. “English-speaking girls would be talking about how it was degrading to women.” Perhaps given the hegemony pictures of pretty white girls have over the worldwide media, Chinese girls are glad that their menfolk are having their desires directed toward women from their own race.

What is missing in China is the sort of anti-cheerleading, the snide remarks about the people wearing basketball or cheerleaders uniforms you sometimes hear in the US. “What makes them think they're so great? Why are they trying to show off, why don't they just keeping passing and let some one else handle the ball for a change.” The desire to ridicule and demean other peoples' desires does not seem to be as prevalent in China in this century. My students write essays celebrating “Our China” but they don't feel a need to razz other countries. Many writers in the West participate in a genre of social criticism which implies that failure is a result of emotional attitude, that problems would be solved if people just “kept some things in mind.” Good emotional attitude can build team spirit, but it's not enough to win games. We criticize actions based on the observations a nerd's parents make, instead of the observations jocks would make. We don't talk about the fact that making mistakes is necessary to acquire skills.

My parents gave me a picture book from the People's Republic of China when I was a kid. One of the things I noticed was that next to the shiny pictures of fruit, pigs, smiling grandparents, steelworks, and barefoot doctors—there were also pictures of bayonetts and grenades. In comparison with other third world countries, there seem to be far fewer men with guns protecting shops. But there is a presence of unarmed men in uniform.

When I went to college in the United States there were controversies a bout whether ROTC should be allowed to be present on campus—or put another way, whether poorer students who needed ROTC to pay for college should be able to attend. Here in China every student has to put on fatigues and undergo training in marching in formation—though they don't carry guns. They may bitch about it a little, but I suspect the average college-educated Chinese citizen feels much greater identification with those wearing the uniform of their nation's armed forces than the average college-educated citizen of the US, or Europe. Especially after their role in cleaning up after the Sichuan earthquake.

High School wasn't all great for me. Like almost everyone there were some fights, some name-calling. Moments when I was defined by some one else, their preconceptions, their stereotypes, even their fists. There were other moments when I got to shine, or make decisions. In the moments of victimhood, my identity was chosen and defined completely by other people. But I realized that taking on an identity of victimhood can be a step away from autonomy, making the coercively imposed identity permanent. But though it's a mistake to define yourself through victimhood, there are stories I wish I could change the ending to.

During the First Gulf War I was trying to figure out my own position. I remember trying to articulate varying positions for and against it. Sometimes I felt I had lost an argument, and tried to repeat the victor's position with the next person I encountered. Sometimes I tried to agree with my classmates, sometimes I tried to be contrarian But I never came up with an independent perspective I could feel comfortable with regardless of the attitude of the person I was talking to. I affirmed positions, but they changed with my surroundings, I had not created a stable and coherent self out of my various feelings. Is War wrong, is it right to defend your allies? Is killing the worst thing you can do to someone? Is death the worst, or is there a fate worse than death?

Last semester I taught history of the English-Speaking world. I ended up being drawn to people like Louis Riel and Ned Kelly, people whose lives were cut short by British soldiers and police in Canada and Australia respectively. Now both have become widely revered folk heroes, Riel is sometimes called the father of Manitoba. Many people, including perhaps the descendants of those who executed them, take their lives and words as inspiration. As with Nathan Hale, the British publicly executed them, but they did not render their lives meaningless. They vanished from life, but they did not disappear from history. Decades later, they may seem more heroic than if they had lived long enough to continue their last battles.

How does one assemble an authentic identity? And what are the threats to that process? What do you do to human life, or human history when the only moments you talk about are moments of victimization? When you talk about the Christ only during the passion, and not the rest of the good news.

There are people who would criticize the Chinese government for things that happened under their watch, just as there are people who might criticize my school principals for things which happened under theirs. But even when you are in what looks like a position of power most of what you accomplish depends on the will and morale of your subordinates and you can only influence that in certain directions. To punish bullies, you have to find some one more powerful than them. Repairing mechanisms of discipline and punishment require looking at things from the point of view of the aggressor, and not merely of the victim. All power derives to a certain extent from coercion and other peoples' sacrifice. But trying to seek decision-making power based purely on victimhood is merely trying to make the power of that suffering flow in a different direction. People like Gandhi and King accomplished that by being a source of Authority independent of Law. They demonstrated that the morale of the people who hearkened to their words was greater than that of the men in uniform.

Every decision-maker confronts a finite array of options. Like armchair quarterbacks, it is tempting to assume we understand those options better than they do. To believe that if we were in Chairman Mao's shoes we could have left a better legacy to subsequent generations of the Chinese people. That, not merely individual decisions, but the overall pattern created by those decisions would have been better. Chairman Mao left a legacy which his successors are content to regard as seventy percent right, which is better than most people in the Communist dictator line. You can argue that he should have acted differently in particular situations, just as you can argue that Pontius Pilate should have spared us one or two of the many crucifixions it was his job as to order as Roman governor. But Communist China has incrementally improved the concrete conditions of life for many of its citizens. Prosperity was not instantly brought into being by the Communist revolution, any more than equality was instantly brought into being by the American one, or Salaam by the Iranian one.

The achievement of human liberty takes place according to a plan and timetable of the government brought into being by the Revolution, not according to the priorities of a non-participant.

All governments rely to a certain extent on coercion. But restraint of that coercion can only happen through coercion by a higher authority. The most reliable limits on the power of princes are the limits imposed by human nature—certain things enable human vitality, others hamstring it. In China during the Cultural Revolution, we already saw the limits of what can be accomplished by shame, ostracism, and verbal castigation and what happens to your economy and society when those voices are the loudest. Now people have many more liberties, there is economic freedom, and it is very easy to buy Hollywood movies. You can see game shows, talk shows, and historical epics on TV—including ones sympathetic to thieves or armed revolutionaries. What you do not see is a concerted effort to snidely question and subvert the State. The citizens of China have no freedom to burn their flag, or to carry signs comparing AWOL-airman George Bush to Adolph Hitler. There is no discourse based on the presumption that people with guns are more malevolent than people who say nasty things. People who advance political ideas in China recognize that there may be a price to questioning the ideas for which Chairman Mao risked his life as a common soldier in the People's Liberation Army. Here in China, people may have to die for ideas. But the converse is that the discourse in the United States is full of ideas which are just people on the sidelines egging each other on. The political dialog in the United States is full of ideas and speculations for which no one has ever been willing to risk their life.

My mother's people were Amish-Mennonites. In Delaware, their religious beliefs required them to set up their own school because they did not want their children to pledge allegiance to the Stars and Stripes. They believed in two kingdoms, one of Caesar in which soldiers wield violence and coercion, and a Christian one in which people are only the victims of violence but avoid being its perpetrators. Their menfolk did not put on the uniform of the military, but they maintained their own discipline and distinction from the world of English civilians: the men in plain coats, the women keeping their heads covered. Like soldiers, they witnessed through their clothing that their was a code of conduct and set of rules of engagment they had sworn to uphold and protect as a group.

Those ancestors felt that they could not bear the sword in defense of that banner. But as time has gone on that witness has become confused with other witnesses, including those who feel entitled to snidely denigrate not merely the military-industrial complex, but look for ways to argue that the sacrifice of the soldiers within it is a complete waste. Who dishonor American servicemen in ways that dishonor not merely the policies of particular princes, but every soldier who ever marched beneath any banner throughout all of human history. Who forget who they have put in the wrong in a search for a right they cannot directly define. People notice that in the Orthodox and Muslim worlds men are sometimes spoken of as responsible for things done by their tribe hundreds of years ago. But in modern America there are those who attempt to hold men responsible for things done by all men regardless of tribe or time, and with no possibility of atonement. People who still haven't decided whether the problem is that cops and soldiers follow orders too well, or not well enough.

What we think are arguments about truth, are often arguments about ways of naming things. Which is what war is about. Was it Manassas or Bull Run? Was Napoleon a hero or a Villain? Whether the names are given by soldiers, or tenured professors, or singers and filmmakers, naming is power. Some shibboleths are enforced by herdsmen, others by schoolmarms. But the modern academic dialect may not be as powerful or widely accepted as its enforcers assume. Naming is power, but the human heart responds differently to different ways of naming. Some ways of naming, like Orwellian Newspeak, play on fears and aversions, negative emotions, training us to behave the way a dog responds to a fickle master. Other ways of naming call on our highest instincts, the way a dog responds to the whistle of a beloved master.

After college, I worked in transportation—hoping to figure out a way to get people to drive less. And I was sometimes shocked at how blasé people seemed about all the ills caused by the automobile civilization: car wrecks, pollution, suburban sprawl. I wanted to change things, and I thought the first step was to get the people around me to adopt my way of naming the problem. I thought what I could contribute was the sense of emotional aversion, wake people up to how wrong this was. Later on, I worked with intersections, studying car wrecks. And what I realized was that, there are limits to what you can accomplish through emotional aversion. If you want to redesign an intersection so it produces fewer car wrecks, you have to get beyond an individual car wreck, or even numbers of car wrecks, to patterns—where and why the are most likely to happen. How do you descibe the problem?

When you become political, you often look at the world, the way I looked at my engineering co-workers. And you acquire an attitude of presumptive hostility toward the image, presented in books or Hollywood movies. If you are into black power you see them as racist, if you are a feminist you see them as sexist, if you are a fundamentalist Protestant you see them as undermining Christian values, if you are a socialist or environmentalist you see it as unfair to activists. This is a learning process, that hostility sometimes leads you to understand the image better, and those types of complaints do result in the worst stereotypes becoming less caricatured. But there are certain aspects of the image you cannot change without changing human nature. There are rules of representation which are very difficult to break. Nerds have a hard time getting the girl in High School. And at some point you have to ask whether the hostility or malevolence exists in the thing you are looking at, or in the thing that is looking. And the best responses focus not on the image as a whole, but on particular aspects of the image. There was an article called “Women in Refrigerators” talking about comic books not overall, but the particular aspect that girlfriend or other significant figures in the hero's life, were so often subject to violent and traumatic suffering as a plot device. This was much easier to talk about, than the fact that comic book artists like drawing women they like to look at.

Many social critics name problems the way a nerd names them, as single isolated events which seem to be under the control of a mastermind, and which that mastermind could make disappear. But really changing society requires thinking the way a jock thinks, seeing the interaction of multiple dynamic processes involving various decision-makers where no single strategy guarantees victory. And also where goals separate from you own, such as those of the other team cannot be thwarted merely by trying to make them feel ashamed. In a ball-game you don't try to ask why, or search for a because for every single action. In a game desire is the root of all meaningful experience, both the suffering of losing and the elation of winning, and the way you learn from what happens in both. It is not clear that the past few decades of presuming that our leaders were wrong have resulted in better decision-making.

Our world is in grave danger right now. And saving it requires looking at both nature and human nature. Are the predatory instincts which created eagles and wolves so pathological we have to hire men in Black Helicopters to hunt them down? Can we have a vibrant economy which does not sometimes manifest the exuberance of a meadow in August, and the tragedy of the Killing Frost? Should we sow our fields only with a monoculture of vacuum-sealed seeds with the right labels, with no space for maize criollo? And should we take note that it is precisely the species which has had its consciousness raised, and precisely the parts of the world where it has been raised, which is the biggest threat to the environment. It is the domesticated animals which are destroying the environment, not wild ones. Ants do not hate their anthill, nor bees their honeycomb. Animal instincts allow them to act adaptively in situations of imperfect information, and they do occasionally bring them into violent interactions. We are not merely abstract philosophical constructs, we are embedded in the types of relationships the Beach Boys sang about.

As I walk through the campus of this university, I see flying above in the place of honor, a banner with stars. And I think of those in the soldiering trade who fought to bring this government into being, and those who defend it now. Here it is a scarlet banner with red stars, but I also think of the stars and stripes of my American Republic and the soldiers sworn to defend that. Both in Afghanistan, where we joined our German-speaking allies to enter an existing conflict with the allies of Ahmed Shah Massoud, asassinated by duplicity. And in Iraq, where the English-speaking world found that the shock and awe of bombs bought from the Military-Industrial complex were not enough to achieve victory in a muslim nation. Machinery can always be manipulated by people other than those who think they are in control of the situation. On September 11, 1973 the airplanes of the Chilean air force were commandeered against a democratically elected socialist president. And on another September 11, American airlines were the ones commandeered. The most important weapons in any Prince's arsenal will always be of woman born.

We have not fully achieved the goals of our Revolution, but we have seen progress toward that goal.

Happy May Day!

Foshan University Responds to James Fallows

I assigned my students to write a paper responding to a James Fallows essay (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/chinese-progress). Fallows was talking about the tone Chinese leaders take and how it is so unlike that in other countries. He said that in the early years, the Chinese Communist Party showed great skill at “roping the whale” to keep the American superpower from intervening on Chiang Kai Shek's side. Of course one reason China demonstrates less interest in roping the whale is that now, China is the whale. Former great powers like France need to think about how to rope it. China has great power status internationally and enjoys broad support at home. That support was obvious in my class, where all my students expressed anger at Fallows criticism—though mostly general without any of the in-depth analysis or insight into the Chinese psyche I had been hoping for. A few allowed that some criticisms were valid, but no one seemed interested in responding in depth them. It has occurred to me before that while English majors in the West are generally thought of as alienated or distrustful, most of my students seem happy and sunny, and extend that positive attitude toward their government and other authority figures (including me as their teacher).


In response, I decided to prepare a presentation on the political discourse in the West: Flag-burning, Bush=Hitler, and the general presumption of guilt we have applied to our nation's leaders, and all nations' leaders, since Watergate. And the way that among the commentariat in general—people are attacked for assertiveness or decisiveness. One of the things I noticed about attacks on George W Bush was that often they weren't really personal attacks, they were attacks which could apply to any decision any president could ever make. They were attacks upon sovereignty itself. “All he's doing is benefiting his friends in the oil industry.” If I were president, I would probably make decisions which benefited my friends too—because my friends are in businesses consistent with my values and whose success I believe will make the world a better place. It's not that he's benefiting his friends, it's that his friends are selling products with too many toxic byproducts. “He acts so certain that he's right.” And critiques of him were equally certain that he was wrong.


In my composition class I made a presentation on twentieth century painting as a metaphor for written composition: pointillism, abstract expressionism, Warhol—the deliberate loss of coherence after the second World War. Which could apply to writing as much as to the easel painting. In some ways I think the same thing has happened to our social criticism—people represent cubistic, fractured, wildly-colored visions in which harmony, beauty, proportion, and geometry became things to avoid rather than things to seek.


After Nuremberg in a certain sense Western Culture became an auto-immune disorder. We like to speak of War Crimes as a triumph of Law—but the reason we could try the National Socialists, or Slobodan Milosevic—was because of soldiers: because one group of men with guns and uniforms followed orders more effectively than theirs did.


Here in China, there is a concept called the Mandate of Heaven, that one regime is legitimate until overthrown by another in a Revolution or dynastic change. This is unlike the European concept of the General Will, or a “Right to Revolution.” It is not superiority in the Platonic realm of ideas, but logistical skill at achieving objectives in Geographic space which makes a revolution valid under the Mandate of Heaven. Good ideas can help, such as the three rules and Eight remarks for the Red Army under Chairman Mao. But there is no search for infinitely refined ideas—which would go beyond the margin of error of what can be achieved working with human beings. In a certain sense, armed conflict serves as a sort of Trial by Ordeal for new ideas and leaders.


After Nuremberg, some Westerners thought that a system of Laws could be the answer—putting us in the cubistic position of simultaneously arguing for the superiority of Obedience over Conscience in some cases, and Conscience over Obedience in others. This would allow our conflicts to be resolved by teams of middle-class lawyers instead of working-class soldiers—and we made our first stop along that highway in Bush v Gore. This bourgeois dream would be a triumph for people who never underwent Trial by Ordeal, and could freely scoff at those who had—what Orwell identified among many of his leftist compatriots in the thirties as the contempt for physical courage. This would be a new, antiseptic culture transcendentally superior to all previous civilizations, including those decapitated in the European colonization of the Americas.


But in the last analysis all Law—even International Law, implies recourse to violence, and implied coercion. There can be no Law without an enforcement mechanism. There may be powers which do not flow from the barrel of a gun but Law is not one of them. Gandhian satyagraha showed an alternative to the power of men with guns by refusing to be cowed by them—allowing people who believed in nonviolence to undergo trial by ordeal. In America we forgot this when Civil Rights marchers standing up to Alabama Sheriffs became asking segregationists to stand down before National Guard troops commanded by the City of Washington.


Of all the words ending in -ism, patriotism is perhaps the least idolatrous. It privileges Geographic over Platonic space, which means its discourse is less likely to degenerate into discordant ideological echo chambers. It causes people to put their trust in sovereign leaders with eyes and ears, rather than fearful demagogues most skillful at innuendo and dismissiveness. And one reason Beijing's rhetoric may sound so discordant is that in the West, governmental assertiveness has been muffled in favor of academic assertiveness. Much of our discourse is devoted to compiling statistics on negative effects to show how misguided previous governmental policies were. But even though the authors have twenty-twenty hindsight they almost never describe alternative policies in detail, let alone demonstrate that they were obvious at the time, or would have been without negative consequences of their own.


My students demonstrate their patriotism by accepting Beijing's line on the Dalai Lama and Taiwan—the way most of us accept Hollywood's line. This is in keeping with the Confucian ideas of order: obeying the father or ruler you have, rather than seeking far and wide for the very best one. And it seems that the rebellious element in society gravitates toward crime rather than revolution, just as Robin Hood saw his enemy as the Sheriff of Nottingham rather than the King.


There are many tactics to use when conflicts arise between worldviews: War, Law, Jihad, Direct Action, Satyagraha, Civil Disobedience, Symbolic Defiance, Silence, Complacency, “You're just like them.” Fallows, like many of his generation, seems to feel the best answer is to prevent voices from rising above a certain level. But his attitude also implies that ideas from the twilight of Western Civilization should be recognized as universally valid for the entire globe. And it may be that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Middle Kingdom, like Dar es Salaam is becoming strong enough to resist.

The way people communicated in the old days

The bottom floor of my apartment buildings contains three different photocopy shops—each about 3 feet wide and 10 feet deep and employing three or four people from seven in the morning until ten or eleven at night. During the warmer months I often see a young child and a grandmother. Often, when I go downstairs, the staff are glued to their computer screens: watching Korean Soap operas, Chinese MTV, or American movies over the internet. They close the windows so I can see and print my documents and the screen displays something very familiar. The old Microsoft background of a green hill with the icons for word, explorer, etc—all arranged along the left-hand side. A familiar dialog pops up on the right-hand side when I insert my USB port. Everything looks exactly the same: except that the words under the icons and the dialog box are all in Chinese.

I walk into a bank—there are glass doors, potted plants, people waiting in line behind those self-connecting ribbon dividers, tellers behind plate glass and consultants behind large wooden desks with flat-screen computer. The furniture and even the clothes are just like in the United States—or just like Guatemala. Only the writing on the forms and the people inside the clothes are different.

Outside the bank there are some differences. The traffic lights are arranged sideways and count down how much green or red time is left. The largest of the boulevards have a slightly different arrangement than in America and the bus stops are more likely to have cover for the rain. But the shapes of cars, of buses, all look exactly the same. There are Chinese chain stores with round wooden stools instead of McDonalds style booths—but they have similar illuminated menus, cash registers, and offer food on brown rectangular plastic trays.

In some restaurants, things are different. I notice that in many upscale places the wait staff wear older, traditional outfits, as do some of the chefs. Meanwhile, the people supervising them are wearing Western style suits. This is an interesting metaphor for the current stage of development, in which it seems the Chinese who have adopted Western forms, are in charge of the Chinese who have retained their traditions. Western practices and rituals are dominant for the moment, even though it is Chinese people who perform them.

Sometimes, I watch television. The commercials for Laundry detergent, or alcohol all utilize a familiar vocabulary. A four wheel drive vehicle gets stuck in the mud and splatters all o a young girl's white clothes. A giant javelin splits open an skyscraper so that bored office workers can peer down at a giant dance party twenty floors below. They all feature Chinese faces, advertise products which will enlarge the bank accounts of Chinese capitalists, and were presumably designed in Chinese ad agencies, but the pacing and style all follow conventions which, like the Microsoft start-up screen—are familiar wherever Cathode ray tubes are found. During the age of typewriters, there was a point when the party thought about having the adopt an alphabetic system to write the Chinese language—severing a link more than three thousand years of tradition. Instead many aspects of the modern Western communication system: Soap-operas, commercials, web-pages, phone-texting have been voluntarily adopted, but the traditional writing system has been retained: in Karaoke bars, it appears on TV screens so people can sing along with pop songs—something no one would have imagined thirty years ago.

Last year one of my tasks was to judge a contest based on the phrase: “Good Good Study, Day Day up.” It's an interesting example of Chinglish—the vocabulary is English, but their arrangement follows the rules of Chinese grammar, when repeating a word: person person for everyone—is a way of emphasizing its universality. The types of mistakes my students make in English, or even when they write things which are grammatically correct, but contain unfamiliar juxtapostions, they reveal the assumptions of Chinese grammar and thought patterns.

As I look at the banks, and the streets, and the computer screens, it occurs to me that in Urbanized China too, you see the proliferation of a worldwide cultural vocabulary present wherever skyscrapers, freeways, and men in suits are found. But, like Chinglish, the arrangement of this cultural vocabulary is not identical to the west.

Of course, a generation ago, Chinese people did not practice capitalism or wear Western-style suits. They wore Mao-style jackets without lapels. In between the commercials you sometimes catch glimpses of that. Some shows on TV are modern drama or game shows, or cartoons with fuzzy animals. I even saw what appeared to be a Chinese version of Buffy the Vampire slayer—featuring Chinese actors chasing Chinese vampires through the streets of Shanghai. But some of the shows are historical dramas, featuring people in ornately embroidered ancient dress and hairstyles interacting around ancient courtyards. It occurs to me that these may be the equivalent of the old Cowboys and Indians serials—an attempt to ensure that the lessons of a time when people used their hands to fight and sew and carve wood will not be forgotten in an age when so much of our economic and military life is under the dominion of machines and people who use their fingers mostly to press buttons.

Thee is a mall in Foshan where I go to practice archery. On the third floor of a galleria featuring clothes and makeup, I found a place sort of like a batting cage or a bowling alley. In the middle is a climbing wall, where people can practice rock climbing. Elsewhere in the mall I see hiking gear, so people can head for the mountains carrying backpacks and supplies. I suspect kayaks and surfboards are not far behind. Although these might be seen as European cultural domination, like the banks and the restaurants, there is something else at work too. What people do to earn a living while wearing suits and sitting in front of computer screens imitates the nineteenth European cultural model—though the businesses sell different things from from whale oil and opium. But kayaks and surfboards use the designs of native Americans, though they were constructed of different materials. Even the modern sport of archery owes much to native Americans, and of course has long roots in China and Korea. Here in China people put on suits to play games designed in Europe, but when they take off the suits, they may play games invented somewhere else.

There was a time when people believed that developing our cultural commonalities would create a War-free world, one in which there was no need for soldiers. Or at least, only blue-helmeted UN troops acting as police forces. Here in Mainland China, lots of college kids sing pop songs from Taiwanese idols--you can recognize them easily at Karaoke bars because the characters people sing along with are the older style. But their embrace of Taiwanese pop culture doesn't seem to have lessened their willingness to accept their government's position that Taiwan is part of China. Or their acceptance that military force might be necessary if Taipei gets too far out of line. The notion that national boundaries should dissolve is implicitly a continuation of the Pax Romana, the notion that a single council can decide what is legitimate for the entire known world. And thanks to the dream of Woodrow Wilson, former governor of the state of New Jersey, that primacy passed from the Senate in the Imperial city of Rome to the UN in the Imperial city of New York. The Mediterranean world provides a different model among the Greek city-states, however. Even when there was cultural commonality: they spoke the same language, watched the same plays, and read the same authors--they still recognized that princes and soldiers would occasionally need to kill each other to work out their differences. Thebes, Athens, Corinth, and Sparta all represented fundamentally different ideas about how human societies should develop, and being true to those multicultural ideas, meant that they occasionally chose war rather than submit to Roman policing.

No Longer Lost in the Supermarket

When you fly over the landscape and look down at the patterns of the roads, especially in the American West—a city looks something like a computer circuit. Lines and gates control the flow—in one case of electrons, in the other case of metal vehicles. The impulses flow through the circuit and their interactions cause larger patterns to emerge and move through the system as a whole. The chips in a computer, or the cities in a nation, are all connected together—multi-tasking to support the operations of multiple processes simultaneously. Some processes were some designed specifically for the system, others imported from elsewhere. Currently many of the most powerful networks operate according to scripts written in modern English—although many of these include areas, such as a Chinatown, where designs in older social programming languages are also being compiled.

When the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Program, which was installed after the 1917 revolution, and been running on the Eastern European network since the Second World War, was in the process of a radical system failure, as leaders rallied political structures which had dematerialized while leaving their human hosts alive. Afterward the political network was rebooted with scripts formulated in the United States, but without much consideration that the software might function when overlaid with the Eastern European culture and language. Meanwhile older elements of the cultural matrix, such as literature and the Russian Orthodox church, continued to function as they had for centuries.

Here in China, a crash of the governmental operating system was averted—the government functions with a unified political party and a single source of corruption instead of an antagonisic network of two political parties with separate sources of corruption as in the United States. Over time however, the economic program has been redesigned to provide a better interface with the programs running on other networks. The bills used for the capitalist economy, however, all bear the picture of Chairman Mao. And one of my students has showed me a book of Mao's sayings which they are still required to memorize. The Chinese Network has preserved the emotional value of Mao as an inspiration for its citizens, while the Russian network has allowed references to Lenin and Stalin to fluctuate between the extreme poles of positive and negative, as the United States did temporarily with the "dead white males" who were our founders. One thing which interested me in Honduras was running into Spanish-speaking businessmen who spoke of being inspired by Che Guevara. And young businessmen here in China also speak of being inspired by Mao, the Chinese-speaking guerilla, as they set out on their campaign to aquire large piles of the pieces of red paper with his picture on the front.

European Revolutions have often overlooked the value of continuity. In 1649 a Revolution beheaded the King of England and survived for eleven years until the restoration of his son. In 1789 a Revolution beheaded the King of France and his wife and lasted for twenty-six years until the restoration of his brother. This has led to periodic spasmodic reboots until the current, French Republic 5.0. In 1917 a Revolution executed the Tsar of Russia and his family. This time the Revolution used bullets instead of knives. It managed to survive for seventy-two years, and did not end in a restoration. In North America, a European-style Revolution had goals which allowed George III to retain both his life and his throne and it has survived more than two centuries. Here in China the last human cast in the role of Emporer was permitted to live his natural life for forty years after giving up his throne. The Revolution in Iran was not directly responsible for the death of the Shah. This is not to speak of Revolutions, such as that in Mexico, against men who styled themselves leaders without claiming divine right. This is to note the record of those revolutions which have made flesh culpable for a claim of transcendental legitimacy.

Whatever one thinks of divine right, processes working to solve the problem of just governance seem to do better when they do not make themselves too deliberately incompatible with those running on the network previously. As with Cromwell, Napoleon, and Stalin, revolutions which are too disdainful of previous programming decisions often end up needing to create paralell structures differing in name, but equally or more oppressive. In the US the Revolution has allowed people to identify with the dilemnas faced by those in the King line, without having to obey their servants, or their Red Guards. This is why, when it comes to alterations in the governmental matrix, I favor creating a network of people empowered to write patches for particular errors, rather than awaiting a centrally-scripted Messianic reboot.

No Revolutionary program successfully aggregates the views of all the citizens of a Nation where it takes hold. The Tories who fled to Canada in the 1770s—the first to cross the Northern border in response to the crazy war started by their countrymen—did not view revolt against a lawful King as justified. William Cobbett came to praise the young Republic in the first two decades after the Revolution, and ended up returning to England and endorsing the Monarchical system. The process of creating a more perfect union has unfolded through time, and a young Republic shortly after its Revolution, like a young child shortly after its birth, may be prone to temper tantrums, and disdainful attitudes which are imperfect formulations of its mature identity.
One thing which is interesting to note about Capitalism in China—like Guatemala—is the persistence of small-scale vendors, selling in market stalls the size of office cubicles, or from shopping carts, or bicycles. In a market or on the street there are dozens of market stalls, supervising an area and an inventory which might employ one or two Wal-mart sales associates. There is a definition by which this is inefficient—the assumption that economic transactions should create as few jobs as possible. But it is much more efficient from a spatial perspective. And if economic transactions obey similar rules as floorspace (increasing with infrastructure construction) there may be another defintion by which they are efficient. It is interesting to note that while capitalism in the West has often been associated with the destruction of the niches occupied by the small merchant, it hasn't happened here. Even with Walmart there are still people buying their duck, or eggs, or potatoes, or lotus roots here on the streetcorner. No matter how much education people have, it is unlikely that we will ever create a society in which everyone grows up to be a lawyer or accountant working in an office. And I wonder whether being a vendor in your own tiny shop is more fulfilling than being a factory worker or a sales assistant—or even working in your own tiny cubicle. And the ideas which make sense in a roomful of small vendors may be different than the ones which make sense in a roomful of lawyers, like the current Democratic party.

And calling a market like this capitalism may be a misnomer. Capitalism was invented with the industrial revolution 200 years ago, shortly before the invention of socialism. Outdoor markets are thousands of years old and on every continent except Australia, they have more claim to cultural continuity than either capitalism or socialism. These small-scale vendors don't need the start-up capital it often takes to start a business in the West. They may not have control of the means of production, which for a large factory could only amount to a small voice in a chorus anyway, but they do have more ability to create a job for themselves than in the US, where this sort of street vending is illegal, or requires expensive permits, and most stores are much larger.
There are lots of vehicles on the streets here in China. Buses, trucks, minivans, and sedans in the shapes and colors you find on the streets of the West—though there do seem to be more street trees. Parked at the entrance to an alleyway, I see a three-wheeled bicycle, with a wooden cargo box between the rear wheels. I turn and walk past a row of market stalls—people standing behind their wares. This time, the blue plastic boxes are full of something I have never seen before reptiles: snakes, lizards, turtles, alligator meat—along with fish and scorpions. It is enlightening to observe these living survivors of the older ages of evolution here, a few hundred yards from the minivans and supermarkets of China's modernization program.