After the Future

Cixin Liu: Democracy and Culture

In a 2018 New Yorker profile of the Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu, Jiayang Fan writes--

I looked at him, studying his face. He blinked, and continued, “If you were to loosen up the country [China] a bit, the consequences would be terrifying.” I remembered a moment near the end of the trilogy, when the Trisolarans, preparing to inhabit Earth, have interned the whole of humanity in Australia:

The society of resettled populations transformed in profound ways. People realized that, on this crowded, hungry continent, democracy was more terrifying than despotism. Everyone yearned for order and a strong government. . . . Gradually, the society of the resettled succumbed to the seduction of totalitarianism, like the surface of a lake caught in a cold spell.

Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.” He gestured around him. “You’ve lived here, in the U.S., for, what, going on three decades?” The implication was clear: years in the West had brainwashed me. In that moment, in Liu’s mind, I, with my inflexible sense of morality, was the alien. Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.” He gestured around him. “You’ve lived here, in the U.S., for, what, going on three decades?” The implication was clear: years in the West had brainwashed me. In that moment, in Liu’s mind, I, with my inflexible sense of morality, was the alien. 

And so, Liu explained to me, the existing regime made the most sense for today’s China, because to change it would be to invite chaos. “If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth,” he said. “I would evacuate tomorrow, to the United States or Europe or—I don’t know.” The irony that the countries he was proposing were democracies seemed to escape his notice. He went on, “Here’s the truth: if you were to become the President of China tomorrow, you would find that you had no other choice than to do exactly as he has done.”

It was an opinion entirely consistent with his systems-level view of human societies, just as mine reflected a belief in democracy and individualism as principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes. I was reminded of something he wrote in his afterword to the English edition of “The Three-Body Problem”: “I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”

The most interesting part of this excerpt is the sentences I've highlighted in the last two paragraphs, "The irony that the countries he was proposing were democracies seemed to escape his notice". And then her assertion that her "belief in individualism and democracy are principles to be upheld against all outcomes". 

Fan betrays the cluelessness of cosmopolitan elites that I described in my post last week about the military and foreign policy establishment. It is not ironic or inconsistent at all that Liu can see the danger that democratic governance would pose to Chinese society while at the same time embracing life as it's lived in a liberal democratic society.

Liu's view is more complex, and he is right about Fan if indeed he sees her as brainwashed. She is a 'type', even if she doesn't think she is. She thinks of herself, I'm sure, as an independent, critical thinker. She writes for The New Yorker! But she's just mouthing the cosmopolitan Liberal talking points. Her editor doesn't pick up on it, because he or she is also brainwashed, i.e., captured by his or her unconscious presuppositions.

It is obvious to me that Liu is not contradicting himself in saying that democracy is not right for China now even though it is for many Western societies. That doesn't mean that a Liberal Democracy will never be right for China. It has to find its own way, it has to grow from the seeds that we see were sown there in Tiananmen or in Hong Kong. The problem for the Chinese, as for all societies, is to live in the tension between the realities on the ground and one's idealistic aspirations. One might see that as dancing in one's chains. Not a bad metaphor for the human condition in general.

As I wrote in my Bobos post recently, I believe that the French and American declarations were a profound evolutionary step forward for humanity.  And while I also believe that the Liberal Order to which those declarations gave shape is currently near collapse, that doesn't mean that we stop evolving.

I believe that we will find a way to preserve what was best in the Liberal Order, particularly its ideals regarding liberte, fraternite, egalite. I believe these ideals are universal and transcultural, but I also believe that even the Western societies in which those ideals were first articulated were not politically or morally mature enough to realize them except in a very preliminary way. We are seeing in the U.S. slow collapse of the constitutional framework designed as a first attempt to realize those ideals. It was bound to fail sooner or later because its contradictions and shortcomings were just too profound. But there have been and will continue to be repeated attempts to overcome these contradictions. What number of republics is France up to? I've lost count. 

The ideals that shaped the Liberal Order are seed ideas, and they germinate and grow in different ways in different soil conditions. The country that soon after the articulation of the ideals in the Declaration became the slave state known as the U.S.A. was simultaneously an interesting embodiment and a mockery of those ideals. And the country that soon after became France's First Republic very quickly unraveled into a military dictatorship. And France ping-ponged through the next 150 years between right and left in its own peculiar French way.  

Indeed, it's very much an open question whether whatever level of its realization of these ideals the U.S. has achieved will survive in the U.S. to the end of the decade. But even if we regress into an era of dark, fascistic politics, which is a real possibility, I believe that the political DNA of these ideals is strong enough that it will eventually restore the U.S. to its better self.

How much stupidity and suffering we must endure between now and then remains to be seen. But perhaps we need to wander in the wilderness for a while in order that it might become clear to everyone that the ridiculously obsolete U.S. Constitution has to go so that a new one, better adapted to realities in the 21st Century and beyond, can be formulated. I have lost all patience with the U.S. Constitution fetishizers, whether they are Liberals or Conservatives. 

But the important point is that neither American or French society was ready in the late 18th century to become a truly open, egalitarian democracy, and neither has truly become one today. But each in its a few-steps-forward-then-a-step-backward way has made progress. So the mistake is to think that because we do from time to time take a step backward that progress isn't possible.

So the mistake, therefore, is to think that the ideal is wrong because societies cannot embody it immediately--or permanently. This is the mistake made by eastern European autocrats or the Chinese who believe that Liberal Democracy is always and everywhere delusional. But it is also a mistake that Neocons and others in the foreign policy establishment, for whom Anne Applebaum is a representative type--make in thinking that a Liberal Democracy can be imposed by force or fiat in Iraq or Afghanistan--or China. And so it's also the mistake made by all cosmopolitan elites--for whom Jiayang Fan is a representative 'type'-- who are smugly complacent in thinking that their embrace of Liberal Democracy is always and everywhere better, and so therefore any society that doesn't embody its ideals is deserving of their opprobrium. That in Fang's words, "democracy and individualism [are] principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes." This is rank, naive Jacobinism. 

The seeds of these ideals are have been strewn everywhere, and if there are places, like China where they have sprouted and then been stamped out, other seeds will keep sprouting and there will be a time when the conditions will favor their flourishing. The Chinese are famous for the ability to take the long view, not something Western utilitarian Liberals are capable of. The Western sense of justice or fairness requires that if some have it now, then so should everybody. Immediately. "Regardless of outcomes". Regardless of how much suffering and chaos the effort to impose it causes. Regardless whether this effort has any reasonable chance of success. This seems to be Fan's view--and the view of most liberal media types. If North Atlantic societies can have Liberal Democracies, why can't China? Why can't Afghanistan? 

Because that's just not how it works on planet earth.

So the challenge is, as always, to live in a metaxic tension between the harsh realities on the ground and the ideals we aspire to in a hoped-for future. The ideals cannot be imposed, they can only be grown, and they grow in the space between the current reality and the unrealized ideal. The mistake is to refuse to live in the discomfort of being neither here or there, i.e., to be naively idealistic like the Neocon Right and Jacobin Left, on the one hand, or to be so cynical as to believe that progress is impossible, that humans are too evil, that life on earth can only be a Social Darwinian eat-or-be-eaten agon. 

The latter seems to be kinda/sorta Liu's vision, and perhaps that is what Fan is really reacting to. It's a little more complex for Liu, but at least in The Three Body Problem the values frame irredeemably Social Darwinist. It's a battle between two factions for whom Social Darwinist assumptions completely circumscribe the antagonists whether on earth or on Trisolaris. On earth there are the Naive Idealists whose disappointment in humanity has made them profoundly cynical about humanity. They have come to be believe that humans as a species are not worthy of survival and so work in collaboration with the invading Trisolarans.

Then there is Team Human who understandably see these collaborators as traitors. Team Human, of course, is represented by an international coalition of scientific, military, and security elites because what other humans really count, right? In any event, for these elites the only imperative is the survival of the human species in the face of threat from the alien invaders who are more advanced civilizationally, i.e.,scientifically (does anything else really matter for Liu?). For them survival and continued evolution of the species is an end itself that justifies any means to preserve it. 

But if within an exclusively Darwinist values frame humans as a species have no more cosmic significance than any other species, who really cares about what happens to humans in the future? (The Trisolarans aren't due to arrive for another 450 years!) If there isn't more to fight for--some spiritual ideal, for instance--than simply surviving, is the fight and the human species being fought for worth the trouble? Why not just allow the superior Trisolarans or, more relevant to our current situation, the more faster evolving AI-driven machines to win? Humans had their run, let whoever comes next take the field.

I haven't read the other books in Liu's trilogy, but I suspect he'd say that the continued human evolution through scientific exploration is justification enough for human survival. There seems to be an unconscious Fichtean idealism, and in that what I see as a parodic spiritual impulse, in Liu's vision of ever-increasing scientific and technological development. He might argue that the very fight for survival against the Trisolarans pushes the human race to greater levels of innovation and discovery, that is, to a higher civilizational level. Humans evolve to higher levels of civilization precisely because of the threat to their survival posed by a superior civilization. It's not just species survival that matters, but civilizational (scientific/technological) advancement. That's what justifies human species survival. 

But I'm not going to parse out what's wrong with the logic here because in the end all Liu is really talking about is China vs. the West, isn't he? And if all he really cares about is nationalistic vanity disguised as species vanity, it's not very interesting, at least to me. I'm not denying its motivating power of survival and the need to dominate, but hopefully there is more to being human worth fighting for. 

How Does this End Well?

The big question for me going forward is to what degree the craziness of the hard right in this country will retain the level of legitimacy it now enjoys? A related question is what has to happen for its grip on so many Americans to loosen? The answer to the second question is foundational for any answer for the first.

Why is the hard-right fantasy that America is being taken over by evil Liberals so attractive? I just spent a weekend with a family member who believes that the Democratic Party is a subsidiary of an international Jewish oligarchy that seeks to establish a new world order that will exterminate religion and freedom. He believes Putin is a good guy who is just trying to restore Christian traditions after atheistic communism, that the anti-Putin Democrats in the U.S. are bent on starting a new Cold War.

He believes that this oligarchy controls the mainstream media and so everybody getting his information from the New York Times, CNN, etc. is being brainwashed. He believes that the election was stolen because this kind of control is so powerful that it reaches into the voting machines in all the states. It's a seamless explanation impenetrable by any information that doesn't fit. Clearly this narrative makes sense of the world for him in a way that other narratives don't.

This family member is not crazy or stupid. He's a kind, thoughtful man who, who, however, spends a lot of time on the internet, and mostly talks with others who reinforce this world view. I hope my conversation with him planted some seeds of doubt that might germinate later, but while he respects me, he believes I'm being duped. He sees me as I see him. So this is the state of things. Two world views both of which see the other as being brainwashed and with no neutrally respected arbiter to mediate. 

If this were twenty years ago, I'd just shrug my shoulders and think of him as a lovable eccentric. But twenty years ago this was fringe thinking--it was in the same category as thinking that the moon landing was faked by filming it on a movie set.

Most people don't spend the time or make the effort to think things through. They just go along to get along, and so that's what frightens me about this level of delusion. More and more people are going along with this than with what has been a flawed but relatively sane mainstream or conventional narrative. The legitimacy of the conventional narrative is breaking down progressively year after years, and I don't see how to stop it. There seem to be no more conventional narratives to organize our imagination of what's real within American society, so anything goes, and this creates a situation where worst who are full of passionate intensity are carrying the day against the best who are hamstrung by their convictionless embrace of complexity.

Because anything goes without a mainstream narrative, a field opens up for the craziest and most aggressive subcultures in this potage of world views to push their way into power. This is exactly what we see going on in the right right now. They just keep telling their big lies over and over again, and more and more Americans have no resistance to it. If so many people believe it, more Americans come to reason, there must be some truth to it. What do I know? If everybody in my church believes it, well, they're good people. It must be true. it must be true. 

In most fights, those who lack conviction are going to get steamrollered by those whose convictions are passionately held, no matter how delusional. So how does this end well for the forces of sanity in America? It's clear that it can only end well if a more robust narrative emerges that is grounded in reality and which provides a satisfactory alternative for people otherwise drawn to the delusional narrative. People are not going to give up what gives their lives meaning for a narrative of complexity that doesn't fit well with their presuppositions and that they find difficult to understand. 

People are starved for meaning, and they will take it wherever they can find it. I think this is hard for Liberals to understand because many of them are quite comfortable living in a world where there need be no overarching, collective meaning narrative. It would be great if that were possible for everybody, but it's become clear that for a huge swath of the American populace it is not. This is a real problem, and it's not going away. So the challenge is to develop a meaning narrative that is both healthily realistic and that works with many of the traditional suppositions of the the people who cannot live without the overarching narrative.

The churches used to do this insofar as there were many levels of entry from the kind of simple peasant piety one found in the countryside to the kind of intellectual sophistication you found coming from great souls and minds from the early church fathers through Aquinas and Bonaventure to Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King. So the problem comes down to Liberals who are comfortable in a complex, pluralistic world where there is no one overarching meaning narrative facing down Conservatives who feel a kind of desperate need for an overarching meaning narrative. 

And while I realize it seems crazy unrealistic, it seems that some kind of socially integrating big story has to develop if the centrifugal forces working within American society don't lead to his utter disintegration. We need a coherent metanarrative in which both sophisticated cultural elites and simple ordinary folk feel that they belong in the same world and where there is mutual respect for the one by the other. 

All I know is that being religious is baked in to the human condition, and we have a choice going forward to either be overwhelmed by really bad religion or to develop a healthy alternative out of the historical cultural resources available to us. What that would look like I have no idea, but I think that something that developed a system of what Charles Taylor calls hierarchical complementarity as found in Buddhist and in Catholic or Orthodox Christian societies would provide a framework for people participating a different levels of seriousness but within a larger cosmic imaginary and a compelling theological mythopoeisis of history that is not in contradiction to what science tells us. 

I have written here for years that the I suspect that the way forward into the postmodern--i.e., whatever comes after the modern--will be a synthesis of modern critical left-brained techno thinking with a retrieval of aspects of premodern religiosity that has a more right-brained receptive approach to the mystery of being than currently acceptable, an approach, in other words that can be comfortable with sacraments and shamans as well as computers and biotechnology, that integrates the pre-Axial with the post Axial, Heidegger with Silicon Valley in a dynamically evolving coincidentia oppositorum. This is what I believe needs to happen, but how it happens I have no idea. But I feel fairly certain that unless it does, unless there is some kind of transcultural awakening or renaissance along these lines, the machines will win by default.

 

The Sixties

Obama is taking some flak for distancing himself from the MoveOn mentality and toward the faith-based mentality, and I thought I'd make an attempt to explain why I think it's probably a good idea. It is insofar as it is part of a longer-term strategy to explode the left/right/center media narrative that has developed since the sixties and that I wrote about the other day. The real issues before us are not defined by left vs. right, but by those who want to preserve democracy and the rule of law vs. those who are promoting or are ok with or don't care about the nation's drift toward a national security surveillance state. Nothing matters more than arresting this drift because of the threat it poses to the idea of America.

That idea isn't dead yet, but it's moribund. Obama's campaign revived my hopes that it the idea might survive and move toward a greater realization of itself because he was right on the issues and because he understood to effect a re-alignment around those issues. That means creating an atmosphere within the Democratic Party that is more hospitable to Main Street than many Main Streeters feel is currently the case. And a part of creating that atmosphere requires moving away from the style of liberal politics that endoresed or became associated with the New Left in the sixties.

You could make the argument that the movement toward a national police state began in earnest during the fifties and sixties. Reading Rick Perlstein's Nixonland will educate those of you who didn't live through it and remind those of us who did why the new lefties of the sixties provoked the backlash that justified such a movement in the minds of many Americans. It's not that the Left was wrong about the war and race; it wasn't even that the the anger and frustration by many who opposed the war was unjustified--it was. Then as now bi-partisanship meant a shared commitment to idiocy, and that idiocy defined our national policy. It was infuriating. But the anger and frustration about the war combined with Black anger and frustration created a continuous media spectacle of riots and violent confrontations with the police that scared the hell out of most Americans, and they wanted the police to put an end to it.

Perlstein's narrative makes clear that the new lefties, no matter that they were right on the issues, developed a style of protest that was easy for Main Street to hate. They were deliberately provocative and divisive, and their tactics, rather than to quicken the conscience of Middle America, provoked instead its disgust and in doing so delegitimated their cause. The New Left driven protests assumed the illegitimacy of the Johnson and Nixon governments, but neglected to persuade the rest of the country.

A precondition for the success of any political protest requires that the majority of non-protesters sympathize with the protesters. That's what distinguished the Civil Rights protests before the riots and protests like Solidarity in Poland. The New Left tactics were more about expressing rage than effecting change, and despite their being right on the issues, their tactics delegitimated their positions.  People would rather be wrong than be associated with that rabble. Given the choice between the legitimacy of the state and its police powers and the legitimacy of the protesters who challenged that legitimacy, Americans chose the state.

Perlstein is very interesting in the way he describes the media coverage of the police brutality during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The media was outraged at the police because the police was indeed over-the-top brutal. But it soon became clear that the police were surrogates for what a majority of Americans would have liked to have done themselves--beat the living bejesus out of these ungrateful, morally degenerate, unpatriotic punks:

The media had left Chicago united in the conviction they were heroes, prophets, martyrs. "The truth was, these were our children in the streets, and the Chicago police beat them up," the New York Times's Tom Wicker wrote. "In Chicago," Stewart Alsop wrote, "for the first time in my life it began to seem to me possible that some form of American fascism may really happen here." Top executives at all the networks, New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Washington Post and Newsweek publisher Katharine Graham, Time Inc. editor in chief Hedley Donovan, and Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler posted an unprecedented telegram to Mayor Daley excoriating the way newsmen "were repeatedly singled out by policemen and deliberately beaten . . . to discourage or prevent reporting of an important confrontation between police and demonstrators which the American public as a whole has a right to know about about.

Then they learned the American public thought differently. . . .

Bumper stickers proliferated nationwide: WE SUPPORT MAYOR DALEY AND HIS CHICAGO POLICE. Sixty percent of Americans polled supported the sentiment, and 90 percent of the seventy-four thousand letters City Hall relieved in the mail in the two weeks after the convention. It wasn't, they said pace Tom Wicker, their children being beaten in the streets of Chicago.  And these media mandarins, they said, weren't their moral authorities.

And the public being their customer, it wasn't long before the media mandarins' interpretation changed.

The editor of the Chicago Daily News, whose publisher had signed the telegram to Daley, abjectly apologized for one of his reporters who had shouted at policemen beating three women,"For God's sake stop that!": "He acted as a human being, but less than a professional, he was there as a reporter not to to involve himself."

Chicago's American was the conservative Hearst paper, and even their tough-guy, cop-loving columnist Jack Mabley had written about how "a policeman went animal when a crippled man couldn't get away fast enough." Shortly thereafter, Mabley climbed down from his short career as a cop critic in a moment of severe self-doubt: "80 to 85 percent of the callers and letter writers cheering for Daley and the cops: You can't help that gnawing feeling--can all these people be right and I be wrong?"

Godfrey Hodgson wrote of the media about-face: "They had been united, as rarely before, by their anger at Mayor Daley. Now they learned that the great majority of Americans sided with Daley, and against them. It was not only the humiliation of discovering that they had been wrong; there was also alarm at the discovery of their new unpopularity.  Bosses and cops everyone knew were hated; it seemed that newspapers and television were hated even more."  pp. 335-37

I quote Perlstein here to make a couple of points: The liberal media narrative was created in the sixties, and intellectuals and others who sided with blacks and anti-war protesters lost all credibility with Main Street. Not because they were wrong, but because they became associated with the forces of social chaos. Their being right on the issues wasn't enough because they hadn't earned broad public legitimacy, and indeed supported the behavior of many whom the broad public perceived disturbingly illegitimate, which in turn caused them to lose whatever legitimacy they had.

It's not about facts; it's about legitimacy. The media types saw and experienced for themselves unfettered police brutality. Their initial outrage was more than justified. But Main Street thought the protests were illegitimate, so it was quite at one with what Daley and his police had done. Main Street was terrified by the social chaos that had been unleashed, and it looked to thugs like Daley to force the demon back into the box. People said they were for law and order, but put the emphasis on order--if the police have to step all over the law to insure order, so be it. They saw it as the reassertion of a legitimate order on an illegitimate  threat to that order. Challenges to the status quo just don't work unless they are broadly perceived as legitimate no matter how legitimate the protesters' cause might be in their own minds. The first task for any protest is to earn legitimation by the broad public. Being right isn't enough.

This is how police states are born.  And nine out of ten times when a confrontation develops between an angry mob and the power of the state, the state wins--and the majority applauds. Liberals and intellectuals sided with the angry mob in the sixties because they understood that the mob was right on the issues.  A majority of Americans sided with the police and the so-called law-and-order pols because they thought the world was falling apart and that was more of a problem for them than whether the war was wrong or whether blacks had justified grievances.

So this is why I think that any kind of progressivism that has a chance of working in this country has to dissociate itself from the delegitimated new-left style of the sixties. It has to bring Main Street on board, and the new-left style of liberalism still causes a kind of revulsion in Middle America that makes it extremely difficult for Main Streeters to look at the issues except through this distorting left-right, liberal-conservative lens. They see the issues in tribal terms, and the tribal alignments determine one's attitudes no matter what the facts on the ground might be. And as long as those tribal alignments persist, it is very difficult for people who came to loathe "liberalism" in the sixties to support policies, even if they are in their interest, even if they are fundamental to the idea of America, if they are policies they perceive as  promoted by sixties-style "liberals."

How to do this is not obvious or easy, but it seemed to me early on that Obama was trying to find a way. I hope I was right about that. I don't think MoveOn is some terrible fomenter of political illegitimacy, but I think it has limited Main Street appeal because of its association with sixties style liberalism. And so I'm all for any attempt to find a way to promote the legitimacy of challenges to the current political arrangements, and if it's necessary in order to achieve that to disavow the sixties style of politics practiced by the netroots or progressive "community", so be it. But it's a question of changing style and tactics without compromising on substance. And that's a distinction that seems to have been lost on the Obama campaign the last week or two. A new narrative is growing that Obama is just a politician who talks pretty but doesn't really believe in anything. I don't believe that to be true, but he better not let such a narrative get legs.

I understand the need to be practical about political reality, but I think that his so far believable presentation of himself as the politician who finally will say NO to the kind of Beltway politics expediency-based is capital that he should be very careful not to squander. We'll see how much the expediency-driven decisions of the last two weeks in the long-run hurt him, but I think they did him more harm than good.