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.
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