I am standing on stage pointing to a picture of Richard Nixon shaking hands with Chairman Mao. I point to the man on the left, and ask my students what they think of him. A good guy. Then I point to Richard Nixon on the right. They also think he was a good guy. I chose the slide because we are doing a class on culture and the person writing the text talks about how her students reacted negatively to the the way Chairman Mao was portrayed in a movie about Richard Nixon. In the US there would be a variety of perspectives on these two world leaders: Conservatives would say good things about Nixon and bad things about Mao, Liberals would probably see them both as power-hungry, and there are still some leftists who might say good things about Mao and bad things about Nixon. Most of my students are fairly apolitical, and I have met people in China who voice grudges against Mao for family reasons. And this is not a secret, discussion of this is kept out of public forums, but no one seems to worry that their attitudes will contaminate the greater number of families who remember Mao positively. Nonetheless I think it is significant that among politicized people in the US, few would take the attitude of my students, generally favorably disposed to global leaders from both countries. It reminds me that one of the hangups of the left, the need to renounce American power, is not necessarily a big deal to all foreigners. When some one like Sharon Stone starts talking about the bad karma foreign governments have accumulated the Chinese may question whether it is the place of a blonde in California to second-guess Chinese decision-making. But I think people like my students are only interested in confronting Americans to avoid the pot calling the kettle black, and object to the Chinese government being held accountable to a standard no other government has demonstrated it is possible to achieve. I'm not sure my students would accept criticism of Chairman Mao and his successors just because it comes from some one who spews equal opportunity criticism against Nixon or other Western leaders. I actually had one student, an adult, who chose the name Nixon, as his English name, in tribute to the man who opened a door between the United States and what at the time was the second-most powerful nation ruled by the Communist Party. People are aware of Watergate, but the way it transformed Western attitudes toward the American government, and governments in general, is something most Chinese have been insulated from.
Later during a break between periods, one of my students commandeers the projector to show a video from American idol. It is interesting to me to observe that ideas from Hollywood and Madison Avenue about entertainment have penetrated China so thoroughly, while ideas from Washington about governance have not. Chinese movies are different from Western ones, in terms of the portrayal of sexuality, deference to authority, and familial relationships. Chinese pop music also tends to shy away from the exuberance of Rock and Roll, and sounds more like the 80s pop music I grew with. But it is interesting to see how at least college students show so much interest in imitating American pop culture, while showing much less interest in imitating American elections. People are interested in Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton just as they are in people who rose to the top in fields of sports and music—but they show less interest in importing the political game they play, than basketball and music videos.
My family were liberals in a very conservative town. I remember that in Middle School once we had a mock election in which only six or so of 300 people voted for Walter Mondale over Ronald Reagan. I was one of those six. In High School, I learned that the best way to get along with my classmates involved not discussing politics much.
When I got to college I was in a much more politically liberal environment—however I ended up with a conservative roommate. Every so often I would try to tell him about some horrible thing Reagan or Bush had done, and was honestly amazed when he refused to act ashamed. I would shout some sort of consciousness-raising slogan about “How can you think that...” and would refuse to give an inch. Now that I have been on the receiving end of that sort of easy sloganeering, I realize that communication with some one who assumes they understand what's inside your head better than you do isn't really possible. When some one assumes they know both what you are thinking and what you should think it has ceased to be a relationship between human beings and my roommate's response is the only way I've ever figured out to handle someone exhibiting the attitude I did in those moments. No one's opinions can be summed up in a single sentence, and anyone who thinks that the type of slogans you shout at political rallies contribute anything to personal relationships with people who go to other sorts of rallies is not some one it is not worthwhile to engage with. At those moments, I wasn't treating my roommate as a fellow human being, but more the way a dog barks at some one who has stepped over the line. And what really matters in a situation like that, isn't the content of what comes out of the mouth, it is whether the dog is chained up. And looking back now, I can see that, like most American leftists, I was on a leash, and it wasn't Reagan supporters like my roommate who were holding the other end.
My parents taught me a certain set of things to be ashamed of. They certainly hadn't all stuck, but in the political arena, one of the implications of those values was that Reagan was wrong. My roommates' parents had not taught him to be ashamed of Ronald Reagan. They had taught him manners: like most conservatives I met in college he was far more polite and considerate in personal interactions than I was. His parents had not inculcated the same level of self-doubt and attendant neuroses. Avoiding war, or reaching the fabled point where bombers are financed with bake sales, was not a goal he saw himself as beholden to—during the first Gulf War he helped organize students at our University to make a public display of support for our servicemen and women. I was stuck in a series of arguments with people on both sides and unable to figure out what I actually believed was the right policy either for myself or for the government. I remember going to an antiwar rally and being frustrated by the messages I heard, most of which seemed to be preaching to the choir rather than the sort of outreach to people like my roommate or the people in my hometown which would be necessary to actually stop the war. I thought it would be good to stop Saddam but wasn't sure a war was the way to do it, and I thought it would be good to stop the war, but I wasn't sure shouting “No blood for oil” was the way to do that. And if I was second-guessing the president, it didn't seem too big a step to second-guess the people organizing a political rally. I knew anything I did would be basically symbolic, and I wasn't particularly satisfied with the type of symbolism I saw my side displaying. I understood the purpose of chants, but after they died down, I stood there, listening to the people directing the meeting and thinking “We're never going to stop it this way.” There is a glass ceiling to how far up the pyramid of decision-making certain ideas will rise, even when it is men voicing them.
In addition to political values, I also picked up certain lifestyle and environmental values. In the 1990s in Boston, I saw myself as a bicyclist and public transit user standing against the plague of cars. Once I was talking with an older man, a member of a generation when it was perfectly reasonable to support both public transportation and Ronald Reagan. Riding bicycles in Greater Boston you sometimes get harassed. People in vans pull up and yell insulting things, I had a fast food coke cup thrown at me while bicycling in subzero weather. It is also true that bicyclists, including me, often flagrantly disregard traffic laws—more regularly than we get harassed. The older man had a business counting cars so that engineers and planners like I was at that point in my life could figure out how to redesign traffic intersections. He and his wife rented me a small room in a Roxbury triple decker which other than acquiring his and hers Macintosh computers hadn't changed much since the 1940s. Over dinner he once expressed the feelings which seeing my vehicle in the downstairs entrance aroused.
“You cannot watch an intersection for fifteen minutes in Boston without seeing a cyclist violate the law in a way which would get them immediately arrested in Amsterdam. They are arrogating the privilege of using a vehicle without the sense of responsibility toward others on the road which should come with it. I would like to use a bicycle here the way I do in Europe, but I cannot bring myself to identify with them. Your people need to learn lessons about responsibility from motorcycle riders. It is not a prejudice—it is a postjudice.”
My immediate reaction was to blurt out something about the guys in the vans—but I was living in his house, and I do not remember whether I bit my tongue, or began to speak and was cut off. He was my elder, a Boston native, and some one who lived his life without owning a car. His response forced me to consider that whether one is harassed and whether one should flaunt the law are separable issues. While living under his roof I actually did engage in acts of civil disobedience, organized by elder cyclists, and coordinated with Boston police officers. But that meant something different than speeding by cars who obeyed traffic laws while congratulating myself on not causing air pollution. I also recognize that his hostility towards Boston cyclists, like a hostility towards Boston drivers, was a hostility to an attitude, not to the mode of transportation as such. He wasn't saying it was wrong to identify with a lifestyle alternative, just pointing me to a European model rather than the American one—or motorcyclists, who, unlike bicycle users, often vote Republican. The phrase: “It is not a prejudice—it is a postjudice” stays with me. Living with both of these Reagan supporters forced me to recognize that some of my own attitude towards conservatives—not the ones my parents had taught me, but the ones I picked up from my peers--were prejudices. That despite the slogans we shouted back and forth at each other, there was thought, consideration, and lived experience involved in their attitudes. I was often more ignorant of their beliefs and arguments than they were about mine.
Both the younger man and the older man had working class parents. I remember talking with another student from California about why people like this supported Ronald Reagan. She had worked a year on the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign and assured me there was no need to trouble my pudgy liberal head about that. “You see, that's just false consciousness.” It is true that children of the working class who attend Harvard may not be completely representative of broader working class attitudes, but it seems odd to believe that some one else who attends Harvard and only visits those neighborhoods for political rallies understands those attitudes better. The attitudes people exhibit, and the types of decisions you see them make are different if you watch them over seventeen years solving problems related to work and family, than if you are trying to solve a different set of problems involved in creating political pressure over the course of a single year for a preacher no one expects to exercise executive power. The long-term impact of that campaign was to change certain primary rules so that the 2008 Democratic nominee was some one of African blood rather than the representative of the Clinton machine. Another time she talked about how awful it was that people had to pay their way through college doing manual labor. My roommate cleaned bathrooms in the dorms and I cleaned dirty plates in the dining hall, but she never inquired what either of us thought about the jobs, or what we thought about her implicit assumption that there could be a society in which no one had to do dirty work. The ideas she had picked up allowed her to claim the role of “voice of the oppressed” without bothering to listen to the people she claimed to be opening space for. When college-educated folks talk condescendingly about the false consciousness of working class people with conservative values, I tend to wonder if a tool of Marxist analysis designed to fight against bourgeois hegemony has instead ended up buttressing the traditional assumptions of folks with fancy resumes about the ignorance of the working class. The blue-bood of the aristocracy is often guilty of voicing proprietary attitudes about how the working class should behave, but I sense a different sort of proprietary attitude when a different sort of blue talks about how the working class should think.
Here in China, I teach about the Red State/Blue State divide our two-party system has created back home, and I think about its parallels in other countries, Likudniks in Israel, Ahmedinijad in Iran. In any multi-party democracy there are going to be some people who feel comfortable being identified with devil-may-care rhetoric, and some people who feel that more responsible language is the order of the day. These are simply different aspects of the human personality, and without an external threat, people in a representative democracy will gravitate around different poles. In a system with two political parties there are going to be highly skilled political operatives looking to corral as many people as possible into their respective herds by all sorts of means. This centrifugal force means that the search for a unitary, “authentic” political voice, actually detracts from understanding the polyphonic nature of political thought in a Republic with multiple political parties. Using wedges to splinter the general will is the point of political parties. So that the true search is not for what attitude everyone in the Republic should have, but for what stance children of families like your own should have. And, as in the West Bank and Northern Ireland, part of that struggle is for the fruitfulness which will produce those who will take their stands in the next generation. When I lived in Guatemala, I accepted the idea that politics were less advanced because there were so many political parties, and many came into being around a single politician. But I also consider that the shorter lifespan also reduces animosity a generation later. It may be a good thing that no one in Guatemala will grow up as I did, with a familial obligation to feel hostility to the successors of Nixon and Reagan thirty years after the fact.
If Francis Fukuyama was right that liberal democracy was the end of History—not in terms of events for journalists to write about but in terms of a need for novel thinking on the part of political scientists, then it seems likely that deadlocks like Bush v Gore in 2000, and similar occurrences in Mexico in 2006, Germany 2003, and Minnesota 2008 are the end of liberal democracy. The rise of men like Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee suggests that the next step may be a politician who can count on a bloc less by dint of party affiliation and more by ethnic or religious ties, that perhaps that political history will now head backwards towards the politics of the eighteenth century. It is also interesting to think about what these two men represent. Both evangelicals and left-progressives have a tendency to moral superiority and divisive rhetoric, being the most embarrassing part of their respective party coalitions. The holier-than-thou attitude derives in part from their roots, in the one case in ideas from Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell and the white evangelical church, in the other case from Dr King, Jesse Jackson and the black evangelical church. Huckabee and Obama show a possibility of retaining a continuity with the best of their respective traditions with slightly less moral smugness.
My parents taught me that Reagan was wrong—and I followed up by reading books and listening to songs written by people who took the same view to Reagan and Thatcher. For me phrases like the Dole and police brutality were words rather than personal experience, but listening to Punk and Oi music I internalized the hostility toward the government, police, and Tories which resounds in those words: “The Tory party still stands for, mass unemployment and poverty, a them and us society.”
I have met several foreign teachers from the UK: more than a decade younger than me and too young to remember the eighties. Their parents taught them to remember what Thatcher did to their people: to the working class, to the North of England, to Catholics in Northern Ireland. As my friend from Northern Ireland put it, it wasn't that Thatcher was evil, it was that she was looking out for a different group of families. Because of these bases of tribal solidarity, a generation later they view Thatcher with stronger negatives than most US citizens in view Ronald Reagan. Air Traffic Controllers are not mineworkers, what James Watt did to federal lands is different from English industry, and although Central America was much bloodier than Northern Ireland, it does not exercise the same influence over the minds of people in the fifty states. The conflict there did not get the press you achieve with tube bombings and hunger strikes in the Maze. We have also only been interfering in Central America for a century and a half, far less history than the Brits have in Ireland. Thatcher was able to hold a line, both against the IRA, and against her political opponents in her own nation, and many of the boundaries she fought to preserve on the island endured even after she and her party fell from power. I think about this reading about the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo in Cuba, who drank the same cup as Bobby Sands.
Teaching English Composition and British History I have come to reconsider Thatcher. I identified with people who attributed their suffering to her. But looking back at the alternatives, I have come to realize that people who looked at her the way my roommate looked at Reagan also had some grounds for their perspective.
The Queen of France, Marie Antoinette famously said “Let them eat cake.” It is generally understood that this was not meant as cruelly as it sounds. She lived in a world in which cake was the ever-present alternative to bread—that others might face a more limited set of options was something she never considered. It was an unrealized assumption, which we all make. Like the ones I made when consciousness raising prompted me to confront my roommate with the prejudices I projected into his head.
A similar phrase for Margaret Thatcher is “There is no such thing as society.” And I think it is instructive to compare the significance of these two phrases in both the short and the long term.
Even before political parties there were always people advocating for the needs of the dispossessed. There are also people enforcing the boundaries of the established order, who must ration things and say “no.” Within this class based functional analysis the words of Thatcher, and of Marie Antoinette have the same significance, a justification for saying no to the demands of the representatives of the disenfranchised.
But as arguments and contributions to the long-term political dialog, these words mean something different. I studied Emile Durkheim and and I know very well that there is such a thing a society—rates of suicide, crime and teen pregnancy are stable enough that it makes sense to talk about society in much the same way that it makes sense to speak about a herd of sheep or a body of water, and the recurrent patterns one notices with long-term observation. There are laws of human society which get enforced by statistically consistent population-wide behavior regardless of the laws police officers are told to enforce.
On the other hand, it it also true that the word “society” or “I blame society” was being used in a very irresponsible way in the 1980s. If an individual cannot be held responsible for his actions, it makes even less sense to hold society responsible—society cannot be given a talking to, slapped on the wrist, or sentenced to jail. There is no such accountable moral actor as society. Moreover, the very statistics which show that society is a stable quantity also show that it cannot be easily reshaped by legal fiat—changes in society are gradual and involve changes in the individuals who make it up. There is such a thing as social science, but it has not developed the level of predictive power of chemistry or physics. Thatcher had a degree in Chemistry and worked on methods for preserving ice cream. Like anyone doing practical research, she had to test and discard several mistaken ideas about the nature of ice cream, and she may have recognized that people talking about blaming society as a whole for things they did not feel comfortable blaming the individuals composing it did not understand the properties of the mixture well enough to successfully preserve it. When you describe your own culture as monolithic, external, and wholly malevolent you are not contributing to the sort of dialog necessary to successfully transform it.
Statements about society in the 1980s were often employed for political ends rather than for analytical coherence. Like “spontaneous generation” and other theories prevalent in physical science circles in the nineteenth century, it was a type of explanation, but one which actually made people less likely to find an answer. Because “society” was an incoherent concept, it was in a certain sense like the cake which Marie Antoinette thought working class families could eat, a logically reasonable extrapolation based on limited experience, but demonstrably unwarranted to people whose experience was wider. Both Thatcher and her opponents can be usefully compared to Marie Antoinette: Thatcher from a standpoint of class and power relationships and her opponents in terms of logic and analysis. Which conclusion you view as objective depends on which analytic framework you prioritize. Marie Antoinette said no in a way which attempted to show that other peoples' emotions were unreasonable. Thatcher said no by holding their arguments unreasonable without having to judge the validity of their emotions. Unlike the queen of France, the grocer's daughter from Lincolnshire managed to say no without making unwarranted assumptions about the options in other peoples' lives. It was both an argument and a function of where she was embedded in the political system. For Margaret Thatcher to cut off the representatives of the working class because she was a Tory Prime Minister also had a different significance than a Jesse Jackson volunteer cutting off my comments about what it was like to pay my way through college serving coffee because I was colonized by false consciousness.
The Tories are traditionally the party of the aristocracy and the police in their role as protectors of private property. Both groups tend to acquire experience with how large groups of people function over long periods of time—who can often observe that at the level of implementation, many of the innovative solutions proposed by social scientists are not quite as novel as they think. A social scientist or someone who works in an office can dismiss certain non-linear observations as unscientific, but a police officer or military commander whose life is on the line has to use a different analytic framework. Bad things would have happened to individual members of the working class no matter which party was in power and Thatcher used her power to ensure that these bad things would be distributed according to established patterns, so that the expertise of her allies would remain valid. The things you shout after consciousness-raising involve dehumanizing people with the goal of destabilizing the system, police dehumanize people to maintain order and stability.
Liberalism in the 1980s was supposed to help us find alternative ways of thinking. Among these I think are getting beyond “Us versus them” “Might makes right” and avoiding conflict by looking at things from the other person's point of view. I am beginning to think that these goals are actually impossible to achieve. The recent dust up between Gordon Brown and Gillian Duffy is phrased as an issue of bias, but in a certain sense it is really an encounter between two different ways of phrasing “us versus them.” We the native Britons as distinguished from dirty Eastern Europeans, or We the enlightened liberals against small-minded bigots. Each attitude can be expressed in both a reasonable and a morally superior manner, but what the encounter illustrates is that getting beyond us versus them, may not actually be possible, certainly in an adversarial party political system. The one thing which can be hoped for is that political leaders and the people they claim to speak for have a somewhat compatible vision of what the relevant version of us-versus-them is.
I endorse the heritage of King and the Kennedys, but one thing I consider is that these liberal platitudes sound somewhat out of place in their mouths. Kennedy got elected partly because of his allegations that the Eisenhower administration was too soft on communism, and there was a missile gap. There are also some things about his defeat of Richard Nixon in the 1960 election in Chicago which, if investigated, could have been blown into a Watergate. Martin Luther King differed from Gandhi in believing that military conflict with Hitler could be justified. King struggled to articulate a point of view for his people, but he knew very well that he could not expect everyone to see it that way. His most famous speech talked about the promises of the Declaration of Independence not as a fraud, but as a default, a promissory note marked insufficient funds.
Every so often every English teacher thinks about George Orwell. I think about his idea of thoughtcrime, the way people react to a certain statement as unreasonable or unwarranted. I continue to believe in the value of the liberal idealism of Kennedys and King, and in the need to maintain alternatives to the automobile. But pundits on both sides of the political divide in the US end up dismissing certain ideas of their opponents in a way that sounds like “thoughtcrime!” The sky has never fallen, but you do notice roof tiles falling to the ground with a resounding crash. But despite my feelings about people from the liberal tradition who fell to assassins bullets, I find the ideas of most of those claiming their legacy less persuasive than I find many conservative ideas. If you believe in CIA conspiracies behind those assasinations, that shows that this one may have achieved its objectives. The reasons conservatives give for rejecting certain ideas seem more solid, even when my preferred response is to rehabilitate liberalism rather than go the neo-Con route. Having worked with Creationists, I am not even sure that the limitations on discourse imposed by Creationism will prove as pernicious an influence on free inquiry as political correctness has in the parts of the academy where it holds sway. Railroads, steamships, and the telegraph were all invented before the Origin of Species was written—you can create intelligent designs for technological progress without a belief in evolution. One hundred years ago, Peter Kropotkin already pointed out that despite Darwin's own feelings, his book was deployed to buttress a bulldozer's perspective of progress, ruthless competition and exclusivity which it was worth seeking an alternative to. That my true task, as it was when I went to Central America, was to seek alternatives to particular policies and alliances of Reagan and Thatcher, without treating the words they said as an abomination. General Lee could fight George McClellan without thinking Lincoln (another president from Illinois) was a fool or a tyrant. In a tribal worldview you can see some virtues in even your deadliest opponents. In the wake of consciousness-raising, another issue is that in some cases you demonstrate your solidarity with the values of the working class more by the criticisms you refrain from making than by the criticisms you make. And sitting in the resurgent China left behind by the Great Helmsman, I wonder if our nation will be stronger if we also consider that the Great Communicator was seventy percent right.
Thatcher said that there is no such thing as society, “there are individual men and women and there are families.” It is quite probable that every country will produce some leaders whose job it is to say “no” to the the representatives of the working class. Undoubtedly they will do so with reference to how other people ought to behave. And it is better if those who do so, do so by asking people to think about families than if they do so by talking about cake and prejudice.
Tuesday 27 July 2010
Spring Break 2010
In 1999 I came to China on a family trip. I remember that much of the trip seemed to be oriented around sales—folk arts souvenirs, crafts, silk weavings, tea. We would go to a temple or museum, and then be directed to a gift shop. Then we would go to a fancy restaurant and be treated to local delicacies. It seemed that the tourism industry more than anything was designed to get wealthy professionals working in the vibrant American economy to pump money into places where the artistic traditions of the Middle Kingdom are preserved.
I've been teaching in China for three years, based around the Pearl River Delta. I've traveled to many places within about four hours: Zhaoqing where the first Jesuit mission in China was set up, Kai Ping with a local tradition of tall tower buildings found nowhere else in China, the supermodern superdense city of Hong Kong, and the village my grandfather emigrated from a century ago—living in a small, brick one-storey shed without electricity or running water, forty feet away from the four story dwelling filled with flat screen televisions, where my cousin now lives. This year, for the first time, I went to other provinces. In Fujian province, just northeast of Guangdong I ended up on another Chinese-run tour. Once again, after the museum and puppet performances, we were ushered to fancy restaurants, specialty tea shops, local handicrafts. The Chinese economy has surpassed the American one in terms of vibrancy, but the techniques pioneered with foreign tourists seem to work equally well with native-born tourists. The circulation of currency which is the lifeblood of these places continues in the same manner—even now that transfusions from the US economy are no longer necessary.
Walking around urban China I am struck by how similar it seems to America—more walkable, more urban, more bicycles. Boys follow the NBA and play basketball around the campus. Looking out bus windows as we travel the highways I notice many of the same things: rest stops, roadside attractions, which sprang up along American Highways. Basically, China seems to be living out the American Dream, from the time when your future dream was a shopping spree. I remember hearing once about a plan by the Russian communists to build a set of small towns where people would learn to think and act like people in small town America, so that the Bolsheviks could infiltrate and take over the US—I think John Travolta starred in a movie about this. Here in China it seems that not just one town, but almost the entire country, has been made part of such a project. The major difference is that America was and continues to be riven by a culture war that keeps our two main political parties in business, but because it chose the more efficient system of having only one corrupt political party, Chinese political thought has not been cloven in the same way.
Not long ago I stayed at a youth hostel. It is a sort of funky place, I stay in a room where the décor , bed, and even the door and lock had been designed in a style local to the area. At breakfast I chat with people from Europe and Australia, some using wireless Internet, then I begin to wander around. Soon I am walking a narrow footpath with old tin-roof buildings on either side. No automobiles ever venture here, but I saw lots of chickens in wooden baskets. The path is several hundred feet above a body of water and as I look down I think of how my journey in space resembles a journey back in time. This time the youth hostel was in Chongqing city and the water is the Yangtze River, but those sentences could almost equally well describe visits to Guatemala and Lake Atitlan. The sentence could have been written a century ago, and, I hope will still be possible to write centuries hence. Hostel-related tourism has a different rhythm than professional bus tours, but there is also a familiar global style in the design of the flyers and the sights they advertise. These types of funky businesses are also significant because in order to survive, they have to embrace both the multi-cultural values associated with US liberals, and goal-oriented values associated with US conservatives.
I like China. I like the people I meet at all socioeconomic levels, from the businessmen to the beggars, the people running fancy restaurants, or the people selling fried tofu from the back of a bicycle. On my trip I bought some 70s era socialist realism magazines full of pictures of smiling peasants striding confidently toward the future. I compare it to the pictures in my head before I came to China: people barred from demonstrating, jailed or beaten for making political statements. I think about Chiapas and Guatemala and the world I saw with my own eyes and the bloody pictures in the newspapers. And I think it's simplistic to assume that either set of pictures: the smiling peasants or the bloody peasants, represents the “true” story—both are true for the individuals involved. Every system for maintaining order facilitates one group of people achieving their dreams and stands in the way of other people doing so. To maintain order a government must ensure that both those whose dreams are fulfilled and those whose dreams are thwarted share some unifying symbols.
In the West the standard conflict is between a worldview advocating elections and capitalism and a worldview advocating elections without capitalism. Here in China the solution seems to be capitalism without elections. Of course, the American system of elections and lobbying tends to lead to government by businessmen and lawyers skilled in working with people, whereas the Chinese system leads to government by engineers skilled in working with objects. Capitalists have power within the sphere of business, and as a class, they are no longer officially enemies of the people. But though they can now be members of the Communist Party, the lack of lobbying means that the things which make things easier for businessmen rather than for all the classes who want enterprises to be successful, probably have less influence within the sphere of government than they do in the West. Businesses have to deal with a floor saying they must employ a minimum number of people, not that they have to pay them a minimum wage. But after both working in engineering and thinking about governmental policy, I feel it is important to point out that it is not clear that any government has ever had the choice of imposing a “0-harm alternative” in which no citizens have to suffer. Generally the choice is between policies with the harms distributed in different places, to different groups of people. Everyone in government recognizes that certain orders will be obeyed and others will not be—and in a nation of millions of people, an order that there be only smiling peasants and never bloody peasants is the type which probably can not be obeyed. King Cnut in England, tired of people talking about how much power he had, once commanded the waves to cease. The waves continued to break against the shore. It is of course possible to stop the pounding of the surf—by building a breakwater. But this is a problem for engineers with an understanding of materials science and fluid mechanics, it takes time and false starts to come up with a workable solution, and certain things about the sea will never be changed. Whatever the motives or emotions of the man in charge, the real problem is one of design.
When I worked on an organic farm one thing which struck me was how many of the people who ended up working there had been vegetarians at one point in their lives. We woke up to the fact that eating was a moral act, and refraining from taking life, for us as for the Siddharta Buddha, was a way to organize our lives to change how our needs as living beings impacted the rest of Creation. If you make the moral commitment to vegetarianism you also become aware of all sorts of patterns and connections—there are questions you have to ask, and situations in which your initial moral choice forces you to behave differently than if you had not made it. At one point in my moral journey, a Muslim friend pointed out that if it were not for the instant of violence the human race uses when they kill and eat beef, lamb, and chicken, millions of animals would have no lives at all. This is the argument Peter Singer derides as “Species Fascism” but it stuck with me. And that insight is part of why I ended up on the organic farm, trying to raise animals which had healthy lives and minimally traumatizing deaths. In mathematics: multiplication, division, subtraction, addition, problems have only one correct answer. But once Al gebra appears, the interaction of variables means that for some problems, more than one answer can be true. And that is how I feel about meat-eating: there is an integrity to both the stance of Buddhist non-involvement that of the Halal butcher's directed involvement. But while I recognize the value of the monastic vision in which portions of society adopt Buddhist principles to design lives free of violence, I am wary of a vision of social change which is achievable only if the entire human race adopts Buddhist precepts.
Shortly I will be teaching a class on American History, including a discussion of the Civil Rights struggle against Jim Crow in the Southern States. I think about this issue a lot, both because of my uncompensated work with an organization touting Human Rights as a response to events in the 1980s, and my current position in the People's Republic of China, which has declared that Human Rights are a tool of Western Imperialism. When Dr King appealed to people from places like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania to come South to witness and accompany the Colored peoples' struggle for self-determination, he spoke as the representative of an oppressed race—some one embedded in a particular struggle, a multi-generational struggle which neither he nor his children could by conscious choice escape. Under Jim Crow, a very high percentage of human beings in Dixie were marked from birth with second class status in all areas of their lives. Emmet Till was hung from a tree for just whistling at a white woman. Large numbers of people were willing to risk physical beatings just to sit at lunch counters. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, and people mustered locally available resources to provide alternative transportation. I contrast all this with a recent report I read by Human Rights lawyers in China complaining about how dependent their movement is on outside financing. From everything I have seen, Chinese citizens face far fewer limitations than Negroes during Jim Crow. Small groups face limitations, but unlike the color of ones skin, being a member of the Falun Gong or a House Church is a chosen identity, and limits enforced against such people impact the lives of far fewer citizens than suffered under Jim Crow. And it is legitimate for governments to view foreign belief systems as a threat to stability—many people believe that the spread of Christianity contributed to the downfall of the Roman Empire, or Eastern blocs dissidents to the downfall of the much shorter-lived Soviet Empire. And it was an outside perspective, such as the Northerners who gave their lives in Philadelphia Mississippi, and Dr King's exposure to ideas from India which brought down Jim Crow in Dixie. This is why Imperial China conducted occasional campaigns against Buddhism (which originated in India), and why Chiang Kai Shek was often more concerned with fighting the Communist Party than with fighting the Japanese bandit nation. Of course Both Chiang and Mao incorporated Western beliefs into their leadership philosophies, so it may be easier for the Middle Kingdom to recapture its pre-Western traditions given that neither great military leader of the twentieth century was forced to accept Unconditional Surrender. Some belief systems muster enough local resources to survive government persecution, like the followers of the Cross in Rome and the followers of the Hammer and Sickle in the Middle Kingdom--others wither and die.
During the Cold War, Human Rights provided a way of evaluating the geopolitical situation distinct from the power politics of Washington or Moscow. At that juncture it provided a Third Way. The basis for this third way was the standpoint derived from the secular Enlightenment, and it provided a framework of values distinct from the Realpolitik of Henry Kissinger. Concern for Human Rights led Jimmy Carter of the State of Georgia to withdraw support from the Shah in Iran, and from Somoza in Nicaragua. (He also, incidentally, removed a law barring a man named Jefferson Davis from holding future political office). Human rights provided a rallying point against the Apartheid regime in South Africa. All of these governments in non-European countries ended up falling to local opposition figures. Human rights are a development of the progressive movement which led to food safety laws and health inspection. The reason people listen to a health inspector is because he has the power to have some one's license revoked, and have the restaurant shut down—which is analogous to what happened in these three cases during a period of dominance by Washington DC.
But this is not the end of the story. The government which arose after the fall of the Shah embraced values, but local ones rather than those of Human Rights. The regimes which arose were less subject to the dictates of the West. They are no longer puppets of the West, so they are less likely to worry about a visit from the health inspector. Many western progressives object to Ayatollah Khomeini's views on gender differentiation, Thabo Mbeki's views on infectious disease, and Daniel Ortega's views on legalized abortion. They also object to the Peoples Republic of China's views about the Death Penalty. The human rights community has systematized one set of principles—in line with the progressive tendency of Western European governments after the Second World War. However no one has proven that it is possible to govern a country without some actions which violate the ideas of human rights, or that aspiring to a European standard is what governments outside Europe ought to aspire to. It has not been demonstrated that a transformation other than the one from the Shah to Khomeini, de Klerk to Mbeki, or Somoza to Ortega is actually possible outside Europe. It is the nature of a triangle that the angles always add up to 180 degrees, any change you make at one place must be compensated somewhere else. It may be that there are similar rules governing what is possible within a human society. In many Maya languages, it is possible to use the same word Kej, to describe both horses and deer--and in fact all four-footed animals. The symbol resembles the way your right hand looks when held in a particular way. Some languages encourage you to notice one sort of patterns, others encourage you to notice others. In 1920 the US had twenty million horses (Kej), by the endof the second World War, the rise of automobiles and tractors meant that that numver had fallen drastically. The idea of progress dominant in the West generally involves a lack of animals with any role other than that of neutered pets. But it may be that traditions developed outside Europe and sustained in areas where functional animals are still part of peoples' daily lives retain as much knowledge about the limits of a society of homo sapiens as those held to be self-evident by the people of the automobile.
In one village I worked in in Guatemala a group of masked men called the limpieza social was going out and killing transient men on a list of undesirables, and most of the college educated Guatemalans I worked with were surprised that the village families did not express great concern about this. Both attitudes seemed to me to be products of their educational background, but I was not sure that the attitude of the people who had lived in the village their whole lives represented ignorance. And since all the men involved were the same race, it did not have the same significance from the standpoint of fighting white supremacy as the actions of the Klan. I always worried that some of the aspirations we were encouraging people in Guatemala to have were really just leading them on. It may seem an odd metaphor, but Human Rights felt more like the package bus tour designed to solicit money from professionals, than the funky low-budget hostel drawing on local traditions. At some point the focus shifted away from empowering men of color to something else. And sometimes the mutterings of the progressive white women sounded more like the people with the Klan than the people working to get rid of them. When our clients received death threats, I was never sure that what we could offer for embracing the role of victim was superior to what would happen if they just “got the hell out of Dodge.” I cared but was not empowered to act—the Police were empowered to act, but did not seem to care. When I questioned the progressive white folks about this, I was simply told “I don't see why you're even asking these questions.” The people who worked with lawyers seemed to be uncomfortable with any attitude other than unquestioning obedience—which is different than what I got when I worked at the Engineering firm. Sometimes I felt that what we were doing, was just asking people to rely on reports filed by freelance health-inspectors without any enforcement authority backing them up. In Iran we are witnessing the power of such freelance revolution to transform society--as it did over time in Dixie, but both require people who embrace a claim to legitimacy distinct from the established Authority, not ones who accept Law as the ultimate arbiter.
Meanings and alliances change with the situation. In the 1750s George Washington helped add New France to the territory of the City of London, two decades later he led a successful secession movement from that city by places like Virginia and Georgia. In the 1840s Robert E Lee and Thomas Jackson helped add parts of New Spain like Utah and California to the territory of the City of Washington DC, two decades later the attempt at secession they led was less successful. The Mexican-American War also inspired New England's Henry David Thoreau to engage in the Civil Disobedience which helped inspire Mohandas Gandhi to lead his people in successful secession from the City of London a century later. A change in orientation over the decades can also be seen in human rights. During the Cold War, the Human Rights perspective allowed Western dissidents uncomfortable identifying with standing armies to organize and work to weaken Western Imperialism. In the Cold War context, it was a coherent framework by which they could avoid being either running dogs, or useful idiots, in the dichotomy formulated by Joseph Stalin, who was born in Georgia (the one with its own alphabet). It was also an umbrella which attracted people from a variety of political perspectives and moral frameworks: people whose moral ideal is the Buddhist monk, and those whose moral ideal is the Halal butcher. But now that the Cold War is over, this meat-eater believes that criticism of non-European governments from a Human Rights Perspective reinforces the hegemony of values originating in Europe. What Human Rights meant during the Cold War is different from what it means now that, in the wake of its defeat in Afghanistan, one of the major parties to that conflict has experienced a political and economic crisis and dissolved into independent Republics based on historical divisions of language and culture. In 1989 Erich Honecker discovered that the things he had relied on for decades were no longer backing him up, and Wall Street securities traders discovered the same thing in 2008. It may be that despite their universalist aspirations, all three Great Western hopes of the Twentieth century: Moscow-style communism, Washington-style elections, and International Human Rights embody a vision which can lead people only part of the way towards liberation, perhaps because the principles they held to be self-evident, are in fact not so.
I've been teaching in China for three years, based around the Pearl River Delta. I've traveled to many places within about four hours: Zhaoqing where the first Jesuit mission in China was set up, Kai Ping with a local tradition of tall tower buildings found nowhere else in China, the supermodern superdense city of Hong Kong, and the village my grandfather emigrated from a century ago—living in a small, brick one-storey shed without electricity or running water, forty feet away from the four story dwelling filled with flat screen televisions, where my cousin now lives. This year, for the first time, I went to other provinces. In Fujian province, just northeast of Guangdong I ended up on another Chinese-run tour. Once again, after the museum and puppet performances, we were ushered to fancy restaurants, specialty tea shops, local handicrafts. The Chinese economy has surpassed the American one in terms of vibrancy, but the techniques pioneered with foreign tourists seem to work equally well with native-born tourists. The circulation of currency which is the lifeblood of these places continues in the same manner—even now that transfusions from the US economy are no longer necessary.
Walking around urban China I am struck by how similar it seems to America—more walkable, more urban, more bicycles. Boys follow the NBA and play basketball around the campus. Looking out bus windows as we travel the highways I notice many of the same things: rest stops, roadside attractions, which sprang up along American Highways. Basically, China seems to be living out the American Dream, from the time when your future dream was a shopping spree. I remember hearing once about a plan by the Russian communists to build a set of small towns where people would learn to think and act like people in small town America, so that the Bolsheviks could infiltrate and take over the US—I think John Travolta starred in a movie about this. Here in China it seems that not just one town, but almost the entire country, has been made part of such a project. The major difference is that America was and continues to be riven by a culture war that keeps our two main political parties in business, but because it chose the more efficient system of having only one corrupt political party, Chinese political thought has not been cloven in the same way.
Not long ago I stayed at a youth hostel. It is a sort of funky place, I stay in a room where the décor , bed, and even the door and lock had been designed in a style local to the area. At breakfast I chat with people from Europe and Australia, some using wireless Internet, then I begin to wander around. Soon I am walking a narrow footpath with old tin-roof buildings on either side. No automobiles ever venture here, but I saw lots of chickens in wooden baskets. The path is several hundred feet above a body of water and as I look down I think of how my journey in space resembles a journey back in time. This time the youth hostel was in Chongqing city and the water is the Yangtze River, but those sentences could almost equally well describe visits to Guatemala and Lake Atitlan. The sentence could have been written a century ago, and, I hope will still be possible to write centuries hence. Hostel-related tourism has a different rhythm than professional bus tours, but there is also a familiar global style in the design of the flyers and the sights they advertise. These types of funky businesses are also significant because in order to survive, they have to embrace both the multi-cultural values associated with US liberals, and goal-oriented values associated with US conservatives.
I like China. I like the people I meet at all socioeconomic levels, from the businessmen to the beggars, the people running fancy restaurants, or the people selling fried tofu from the back of a bicycle. On my trip I bought some 70s era socialist realism magazines full of pictures of smiling peasants striding confidently toward the future. I compare it to the pictures in my head before I came to China: people barred from demonstrating, jailed or beaten for making political statements. I think about Chiapas and Guatemala and the world I saw with my own eyes and the bloody pictures in the newspapers. And I think it's simplistic to assume that either set of pictures: the smiling peasants or the bloody peasants, represents the “true” story—both are true for the individuals involved. Every system for maintaining order facilitates one group of people achieving their dreams and stands in the way of other people doing so. To maintain order a government must ensure that both those whose dreams are fulfilled and those whose dreams are thwarted share some unifying symbols.
In the West the standard conflict is between a worldview advocating elections and capitalism and a worldview advocating elections without capitalism. Here in China the solution seems to be capitalism without elections. Of course, the American system of elections and lobbying tends to lead to government by businessmen and lawyers skilled in working with people, whereas the Chinese system leads to government by engineers skilled in working with objects. Capitalists have power within the sphere of business, and as a class, they are no longer officially enemies of the people. But though they can now be members of the Communist Party, the lack of lobbying means that the things which make things easier for businessmen rather than for all the classes who want enterprises to be successful, probably have less influence within the sphere of government than they do in the West. Businesses have to deal with a floor saying they must employ a minimum number of people, not that they have to pay them a minimum wage. But after both working in engineering and thinking about governmental policy, I feel it is important to point out that it is not clear that any government has ever had the choice of imposing a “0-harm alternative” in which no citizens have to suffer. Generally the choice is between policies with the harms distributed in different places, to different groups of people. Everyone in government recognizes that certain orders will be obeyed and others will not be—and in a nation of millions of people, an order that there be only smiling peasants and never bloody peasants is the type which probably can not be obeyed. King Cnut in England, tired of people talking about how much power he had, once commanded the waves to cease. The waves continued to break against the shore. It is of course possible to stop the pounding of the surf—by building a breakwater. But this is a problem for engineers with an understanding of materials science and fluid mechanics, it takes time and false starts to come up with a workable solution, and certain things about the sea will never be changed. Whatever the motives or emotions of the man in charge, the real problem is one of design.
When I worked on an organic farm one thing which struck me was how many of the people who ended up working there had been vegetarians at one point in their lives. We woke up to the fact that eating was a moral act, and refraining from taking life, for us as for the Siddharta Buddha, was a way to organize our lives to change how our needs as living beings impacted the rest of Creation. If you make the moral commitment to vegetarianism you also become aware of all sorts of patterns and connections—there are questions you have to ask, and situations in which your initial moral choice forces you to behave differently than if you had not made it. At one point in my moral journey, a Muslim friend pointed out that if it were not for the instant of violence the human race uses when they kill and eat beef, lamb, and chicken, millions of animals would have no lives at all. This is the argument Peter Singer derides as “Species Fascism” but it stuck with me. And that insight is part of why I ended up on the organic farm, trying to raise animals which had healthy lives and minimally traumatizing deaths. In mathematics: multiplication, division, subtraction, addition, problems have only one correct answer. But once Al gebra appears, the interaction of variables means that for some problems, more than one answer can be true. And that is how I feel about meat-eating: there is an integrity to both the stance of Buddhist non-involvement that of the Halal butcher's directed involvement. But while I recognize the value of the monastic vision in which portions of society adopt Buddhist principles to design lives free of violence, I am wary of a vision of social change which is achievable only if the entire human race adopts Buddhist precepts.
Shortly I will be teaching a class on American History, including a discussion of the Civil Rights struggle against Jim Crow in the Southern States. I think about this issue a lot, both because of my uncompensated work with an organization touting Human Rights as a response to events in the 1980s, and my current position in the People's Republic of China, which has declared that Human Rights are a tool of Western Imperialism. When Dr King appealed to people from places like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania to come South to witness and accompany the Colored peoples' struggle for self-determination, he spoke as the representative of an oppressed race—some one embedded in a particular struggle, a multi-generational struggle which neither he nor his children could by conscious choice escape. Under Jim Crow, a very high percentage of human beings in Dixie were marked from birth with second class status in all areas of their lives. Emmet Till was hung from a tree for just whistling at a white woman. Large numbers of people were willing to risk physical beatings just to sit at lunch counters. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, and people mustered locally available resources to provide alternative transportation. I contrast all this with a recent report I read by Human Rights lawyers in China complaining about how dependent their movement is on outside financing. From everything I have seen, Chinese citizens face far fewer limitations than Negroes during Jim Crow. Small groups face limitations, but unlike the color of ones skin, being a member of the Falun Gong or a House Church is a chosen identity, and limits enforced against such people impact the lives of far fewer citizens than suffered under Jim Crow. And it is legitimate for governments to view foreign belief systems as a threat to stability—many people believe that the spread of Christianity contributed to the downfall of the Roman Empire, or Eastern blocs dissidents to the downfall of the much shorter-lived Soviet Empire. And it was an outside perspective, such as the Northerners who gave their lives in Philadelphia Mississippi, and Dr King's exposure to ideas from India which brought down Jim Crow in Dixie. This is why Imperial China conducted occasional campaigns against Buddhism (which originated in India), and why Chiang Kai Shek was often more concerned with fighting the Communist Party than with fighting the Japanese bandit nation. Of course Both Chiang and Mao incorporated Western beliefs into their leadership philosophies, so it may be easier for the Middle Kingdom to recapture its pre-Western traditions given that neither great military leader of the twentieth century was forced to accept Unconditional Surrender. Some belief systems muster enough local resources to survive government persecution, like the followers of the Cross in Rome and the followers of the Hammer and Sickle in the Middle Kingdom--others wither and die.
During the Cold War, Human Rights provided a way of evaluating the geopolitical situation distinct from the power politics of Washington or Moscow. At that juncture it provided a Third Way. The basis for this third way was the standpoint derived from the secular Enlightenment, and it provided a framework of values distinct from the Realpolitik of Henry Kissinger. Concern for Human Rights led Jimmy Carter of the State of Georgia to withdraw support from the Shah in Iran, and from Somoza in Nicaragua. (He also, incidentally, removed a law barring a man named Jefferson Davis from holding future political office). Human rights provided a rallying point against the Apartheid regime in South Africa. All of these governments in non-European countries ended up falling to local opposition figures. Human rights are a development of the progressive movement which led to food safety laws and health inspection. The reason people listen to a health inspector is because he has the power to have some one's license revoked, and have the restaurant shut down—which is analogous to what happened in these three cases during a period of dominance by Washington DC.
But this is not the end of the story. The government which arose after the fall of the Shah embraced values, but local ones rather than those of Human Rights. The regimes which arose were less subject to the dictates of the West. They are no longer puppets of the West, so they are less likely to worry about a visit from the health inspector. Many western progressives object to Ayatollah Khomeini's views on gender differentiation, Thabo Mbeki's views on infectious disease, and Daniel Ortega's views on legalized abortion. They also object to the Peoples Republic of China's views about the Death Penalty. The human rights community has systematized one set of principles—in line with the progressive tendency of Western European governments after the Second World War. However no one has proven that it is possible to govern a country without some actions which violate the ideas of human rights, or that aspiring to a European standard is what governments outside Europe ought to aspire to. It has not been demonstrated that a transformation other than the one from the Shah to Khomeini, de Klerk to Mbeki, or Somoza to Ortega is actually possible outside Europe. It is the nature of a triangle that the angles always add up to 180 degrees, any change you make at one place must be compensated somewhere else. It may be that there are similar rules governing what is possible within a human society. In many Maya languages, it is possible to use the same word Kej, to describe both horses and deer--and in fact all four-footed animals. The symbol resembles the way your right hand looks when held in a particular way. Some languages encourage you to notice one sort of patterns, others encourage you to notice others. In 1920 the US had twenty million horses (Kej), by the endof the second World War, the rise of automobiles and tractors meant that that numver had fallen drastically. The idea of progress dominant in the West generally involves a lack of animals with any role other than that of neutered pets. But it may be that traditions developed outside Europe and sustained in areas where functional animals are still part of peoples' daily lives retain as much knowledge about the limits of a society of homo sapiens as those held to be self-evident by the people of the automobile.
In one village I worked in in Guatemala a group of masked men called the limpieza social was going out and killing transient men on a list of undesirables, and most of the college educated Guatemalans I worked with were surprised that the village families did not express great concern about this. Both attitudes seemed to me to be products of their educational background, but I was not sure that the attitude of the people who had lived in the village their whole lives represented ignorance. And since all the men involved were the same race, it did not have the same significance from the standpoint of fighting white supremacy as the actions of the Klan. I always worried that some of the aspirations we were encouraging people in Guatemala to have were really just leading them on. It may seem an odd metaphor, but Human Rights felt more like the package bus tour designed to solicit money from professionals, than the funky low-budget hostel drawing on local traditions. At some point the focus shifted away from empowering men of color to something else. And sometimes the mutterings of the progressive white women sounded more like the people with the Klan than the people working to get rid of them. When our clients received death threats, I was never sure that what we could offer for embracing the role of victim was superior to what would happen if they just “got the hell out of Dodge.” I cared but was not empowered to act—the Police were empowered to act, but did not seem to care. When I questioned the progressive white folks about this, I was simply told “I don't see why you're even asking these questions.” The people who worked with lawyers seemed to be uncomfortable with any attitude other than unquestioning obedience—which is different than what I got when I worked at the Engineering firm. Sometimes I felt that what we were doing, was just asking people to rely on reports filed by freelance health-inspectors without any enforcement authority backing them up. In Iran we are witnessing the power of such freelance revolution to transform society--as it did over time in Dixie, but both require people who embrace a claim to legitimacy distinct from the established Authority, not ones who accept Law as the ultimate arbiter.
Meanings and alliances change with the situation. In the 1750s George Washington helped add New France to the territory of the City of London, two decades later he led a successful secession movement from that city by places like Virginia and Georgia. In the 1840s Robert E Lee and Thomas Jackson helped add parts of New Spain like Utah and California to the territory of the City of Washington DC, two decades later the attempt at secession they led was less successful. The Mexican-American War also inspired New England's Henry David Thoreau to engage in the Civil Disobedience which helped inspire Mohandas Gandhi to lead his people in successful secession from the City of London a century later. A change in orientation over the decades can also be seen in human rights. During the Cold War, the Human Rights perspective allowed Western dissidents uncomfortable identifying with standing armies to organize and work to weaken Western Imperialism. In the Cold War context, it was a coherent framework by which they could avoid being either running dogs, or useful idiots, in the dichotomy formulated by Joseph Stalin, who was born in Georgia (the one with its own alphabet). It was also an umbrella which attracted people from a variety of political perspectives and moral frameworks: people whose moral ideal is the Buddhist monk, and those whose moral ideal is the Halal butcher. But now that the Cold War is over, this meat-eater believes that criticism of non-European governments from a Human Rights Perspective reinforces the hegemony of values originating in Europe. What Human Rights meant during the Cold War is different from what it means now that, in the wake of its defeat in Afghanistan, one of the major parties to that conflict has experienced a political and economic crisis and dissolved into independent Republics based on historical divisions of language and culture. In 1989 Erich Honecker discovered that the things he had relied on for decades were no longer backing him up, and Wall Street securities traders discovered the same thing in 2008. It may be that despite their universalist aspirations, all three Great Western hopes of the Twentieth century: Moscow-style communism, Washington-style elections, and International Human Rights embody a vision which can lead people only part of the way towards liberation, perhaps because the principles they held to be self-evident, are in fact not so.
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