Category Archives: philosophy

by | 2 September 2012 · 7:53 pm

Competing Views of Prussia, 1945

From: Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947, by Christopher Clark (Penguin, 2007), Kindle Loc. 12554-12624:

For the resisters Prussia became a virtual homeland, the focal point for a patriotism that could find no referent in the Third Reich. The charisma of this mythical Prussia was not lost upon the non-Prussians who moved within resistance circles. The Social Democrat Julius Leber, an Alsatian who grew up in Lübeck and was executed on 5 January 1945 for his part in the conspiracy against Hitler, was among those who looked back in admiration at the years when Stein, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst re-established the state ‘in the citizen’s consciousness of freedom’. There was an energetic polarity between the Prussia of Nazi propaganda and that of the civilian and military resistance. Goebbels used Prussian themes to drive home the primacy of loyalty, obedience and will as indispensable aids in Germany’s epic struggle against her enemies. The resisters, by contrast, insisted that these secondary Prussian virtues became worthless as soon as they were severed from their ethical and religious roots. For the Nazis, Yorck was the symbol of an oppressed Germany rising up against foreign ‘tyranny’ – for the resisters he represented a transcendent sense of duty that might even, under certain circumstances, articulate itself in an act of treason. We naturally look more kindly on one of these Prussia-myths than on the other. Yet both were selective, talismanic and instrumental. Precisely because it had become so abstract, so etiolated, ‘Prussiandom’ was up for grabs. It was not an identity, nor even a memory. It had become a catalogue of disembodied mythical attributes whose historical and ethical significance was, and would remain, in contention.

THE EXORCISTS

In the end, it was the Nazi view of Prussia that prevailed. The western allies needed no persuading that Nazism was merely the latest manifestation of Prussianism. They could draw on an intellectually formidable tradition of anti-Prussianism that dated back to the outbreak of the First World War. In August 1914, Ramsay Muir, a distinguished liberal activist and holder of the chair of modern history at the University of Manchester, published a widely read study that claimed to examine the ‘historical background’ of the current conflict. ‘It is the result,’ Muir wrote, ‘of a poison which has been working in the European system for more than two centuries, and the chief source of this poison is Prussia.’ In another study published early in the war, William Harbutt Dawson, a social liberal publicist and one of the most influential commentators on German history and politics in early twentieth-century Britain, pointed to the militarizing influence of the ‘Prussian spirit’ within the otherwise benign German nation: ‘this spirit has ever been a hard and immalleable element in the life of Germany; it is still the knot in the oak, the nodule in the softer clay.’

Common to many analyses was the notion that there were in fact two Germanies, the liberal, congenial and pacific Germany of the south and west and the reactionary, militaristic Germany of the north-east. The tensions between the two, it was argued, remained unresolved within the Empire founded by Bismarck in 1871. One of the most sophisticated and influential early analysts of this problem was the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen. In a study of German industrial society published in 1915 and re-issued in 1939, Veblen argued that a lopsided process of modernization had distorted German political culture. ‘Modernism’ had transformed the sphere of industrial organization, but had failed to effect ‘an equally secure and disturbing lodgement in the tissues of the body politic’. The reason for this, Veblen diagnosed, lay in the survival of an essentially pre-modern Prussian ‘territorial state’. The history of this state, he suggested, amounted to a career of more or less uninterrupted aggressive war-making. The consequence was a political culture of extreme servility, for ‘the pursuit of war, being an exercise in the following of one’s leader and execution of arbitrary orders, induces an animus of enthusiastic subservience and unquestioning obedience to authority.’ In such a system, the loyal support of popular sentiment could be maintained only by ‘unremitting habituation [and] discipline sagaciously and relentlessly directed to this end’, and ‘by a system of bureaucratic surveillance and unremitting interference in the private life of subjects’.

Veblen’s account was light on empirical data and supporting evidence, but it was not without theoretical sophistication. It aimed not only to describe but also to explain the supposed deformations of Prussian-German political culture. It was supported, moreover, by an implicit conception of the ‘modern’ in the light of which Prussia could be deemed archaic, anachronistic, only partially modernized. It is striking how much of the substance of the ‘special path’ thesis that would rise to prominence in German historical writing of the late 1960s and 1970s is already anticipated in Veblen’s account. This was no accident – Ralf Dahrendorf, whose synoptic study Society and Democracy in Germany (1968) was one of the foundational texts of the critical school, drew heavily on the American sociologist’s work.

Even the rather cruder accounts that passed for historical analyses of modern Germany during the Second World War often preserved a sense of historical perspective, rather than settling for generalizations about German ‘national character’. Since the seventeenth century, one writer observed in 1941, the ‘old German spirit of conquest’ had been ‘deliberately developed more and more and along the lines of that mentality which is known as “Prussianism” ’. The history of Prussia had been ‘an almost uninterrupted period of forcible expansion, under the iron rule of militarism and absolutist officialism’. Under a harsh regime of compulsory education, in which teachers were recruited from the ranks of former non-commissioned officers, the young were instilled with ‘the typical Prussian obedience’. The rigours of school life were succeeded by a prolonged period in barracks or on active military service. It was here that ‘the German mind received its last coat of varnish. Anything that had not been done by the schools was achieved in the army.’

In the minds of many contemporaries, the link between ‘Prussianism’ and Nazism was obvious. The German émigré Edgar Stern-Rubarth described Hitler – notwithstanding the dictator’s Austrian birth – as ‘the Arch-Prussian’ and declared that ‘the whole structure of his dreamed-of Reich’ was based not only on the material achievements of the Prussian state, but ‘even more on the philosophical foundations of Prussianism’. In a study of German industrial planning published in 1943, Joseph Borkin, an American official who later helped to prepare the case against the giant chemicals combine I. G. Farben at Nuremberg, observed that the political evolution of the Germans had long been retarded by a ruling class of Prussian Junkers who had ‘never been unsaddled by social change’ and concluded that the Prussian ‘Weltanschauung of political and economic world hegemony is the well-spring from which both Hohenzollern imperialism and National Socialism flow’. Like many such accounts, this book drew on a tradition of German critical commentary on Prussian history and German political culture more generally.

It would be difficult to overstate the hold of this scenario of power-lust, servility and political archaism over the imaginations of the policy-makers most concerned with Germany’s post-war fate. In a speech of December 1939, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden observed that ‘Hitler is not so unique as all that. He is merely the latest expression of the Prussian spirit of military domination.’ The Daily Telegraph published a discussion of the speech under the headline ‘Hitler’s Rule is in the Tradition of Prussian Tyranny’ and there were positive comments throughout the tabloid press.134 On the day of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Winston Churchill spoke memorably of the ‘hideous onslaught’ of the Nazi ‘war machine with its clanking, heel-clicking dandified Prussian officers’ and ‘the dull, drilled docile brutish masses of the Hun soldiers plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts’. In an article for the Daily Herald in November 1941, Ernest Bevin, minister of labour in Churchill’s War Cabinet, declared that German preparation for the current war had begun long before the advent of Hitler. Even if one ‘got rid of Hitler, Goering and others’, Bevin warned, the German problem would remain unsolved. ‘It was Prussian militarism, with its terrible philosophy, that had to be got rid of from Europe for all time.’ It followed that the defeat of the Nazi regime itself would not suffice to bring the war to a satisfactory close.

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Filed under Britain, Germany, military, nationalism, philosophy, U.S., war

by | 1 July 2012 · 4:10 pm

Methods of Social Control in Vietnam

From: Vietnam: Rising Dragon, by Bill Hayton (Yale U. Press, 2010), Kindle Loc. 1550-88:

Since the 1990s, the ‘Cultured Families’ [gia đình văn hóa < 家庭 Ch. jiating, Jp. katei ‘family’ + 文化 Ch. wenhua, Jp. bunka ‘culture’] campaign has become more prominent, mainly because of the failure of a more heavy-handed system. From the earliest days of communist Vietnam, the cornerstone of social control was a system of household registration called the ho khau [= hộ khẩu 户口 < Ch. hukou, like Jp. 户籍 koseki]. It still exists. Every person has to be registered in a specific place at birth. If they want to move, they need the consent of the authorities both where they’re registered and where they want to go. Borrowed from China, the system was initially intended to control anti-communist resistance. Over subsequent decades, even though the central state lacked the resources to ensure it was fully implemented everywhere, it became the basis for economic planning, the provision of social services and the distribution of food and goods.

As the economy liberalised, however, it became easier for people to evade the system. The distribution of state-supplied jobs, food and housing had once been largely dependent on holding a valid ho khau, but as more goods and services became available on the open market, its power was reduced. Villagers left their villages without permission, unregistered housing sprang up in the cities and illegal traders tramped the streets. Daily life could, to a larger extent, bypass the authorities. (Hence the need to augment the ho khau with the ‘Cultured Families’ campaign.) The ho khau survives, however, because it continues to be a useful tool for the state: it reduces migration, provides useful economic data and, above all, helps the police to keep tabs on people. It’s another lever in the official tool kit. Anyone without a valid ho khau is permanently at the authorities’ mercy. Unregistered households have to build a life’s worth of corrupt relationships simply to keep living and working in a particular place. If they misbehave, life can get very difficult.

The consequence for the unregistered can be severe. If an unregistered couple wants to get married, register the birth of their child or even be buried in the cemetery they will find it difficult, sometimes even impossible. They could return to the place where their official ho khau was registered, but if they have been absent for more than six months, they may find that their name has been removed from the register. As a result they will be officially beyond the law. Often the only way to survive is through bribery – paying local officials either to grant them a ho khau or to turn a blind eye whenever they need to do something which requires it. Their births won’t be registered or their marriages licensed, their housing will be illegal and their living conditions precarious. They’re not included in population statistics, poverty calculations or social services provision. More than a quarter of the babies born in 2000 weren’t registered. In just one year that implies 250,000 undocumented children. As a result, the government was forced to adjust the rules to fit reality. New laws and regulations were introduced from 2004 allowing children to be registered where they are born, not where their parents’ ho khau was issued. But local authorities are reluctant to regularise so many new inhabitants whom they would then be obliged to take care of. Consequently communities are growing up across Vietnam, perhaps a few million people in all, who do not officially exist.

In spite of this, and other, clear evidence of the failure of the ho khau system, there’s no sign of it being abandoned. In part, this is because it continues to perform its original function, allowing surveillance of the population. In addition to its more general roles in controlling movement and guiding economic planning, the ho khau is the basis of the Public Security Ministry’s system of political records, known as the ly lich [< 履歴 Ch. lüli, Jp. rireki, as in rirekisho ‘curriculum vitae’]. The ly lich has a long history. In its original incarnation, in the 1950s, individuals were obliged to write their life histories for the police. Those who had worked for the French, been members of non-communist political parties or were part of the landlord class, or whose parents or grandparents did so, could then be kept out of important positions or pushed down the queue for goods and services.

Today the legacies of those old ly lich continue to blight the lives of descendants, particularly among former officials of the old Saigon regime and their children. And new ly lich are still being written. The essay format continues to be used for most people applying for jobs in the public sector and for anyone wanting to join the Communist Party. But the police also compile their own ly lich on those they consider subversive or worth watching – journalists, foreigners, those who have contact with journalists and foreigners, and so on. It may no longer be a universal requirement and it’s no longer such a public procedure but it continues to exist in the processes of the Ministry of Public Security. From secret police files and residency permits to neighbourhood wardens and cultured family campaigns, Vietnam has built a low-tech but effective system of near-total surveillance.

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Filed under education, family, migration, philosophy, Vietnam

by | 13 March 2012 · 6:59 pm

Prussian Progressivism: Hegel to Marx

From: Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947, by Christopher Clark (Penguin, 2007), Kindle Locs. 8160-96, 8229-40 (pp. 431-434):

The one institution that all Prussians had in common was the state. It is no coincidence that this period witnessed an unprecedented discursive escalation around the idea of the state. Its majesty resonated more compellingly than ever before, at least within the milieu of academia and senior officialdom. No individual did more to promulgate the dignity of the Prussian state after 1815 than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the Swabian philosopher who took up Fichte’s vacant chair at the new University of Berlin in 1818. The state, Hegel argued, was an organism possessing will, rationality and purpose. Its destiny – like that of any living thing – was to change, grow and progressively develop. The state was ‘the power of reason actualising itself as will’; it was a transcendent domain in which the alienated, competitive ‘particular interests’ of civil society merged into coherence and identity. There was a theological core to Hegel’s reflections on the state: the state had a quasi-divine purpose; it was ‘God’s march through the world’; in Hegel’s hands it became the quasi-divine apparatus by which the multitude of subjects who constituted civil society was redeemed into universality.

In adopting this approach, Hegel broke with the view prevalent among Prussian political theorists since Pufendorf and Wolff that the state was no more than a machine engineered to meet the external and internal security needs of the society that fashioned it. Hegel vehemently rejected the metaphorical machine-state favoured by theorists of the high enlightenment, on the grounds that it treated ‘free human beings’ as if they were mere cogs in its mechanism. The Hegelian state was not an imposed construct, but the highest expression of the ethical substance of a people, the unfolding of a transcendent and rational order, the ‘actualization of freedom’. From this it followed that the relationship between civil society and the state was not antagonistic, but reciprocal. It was the state that enabled civil society to order itself in a rational way, and the vitality of the state depended in turn upon each of the particular interests that constituted civil society being ‘active in its particular function – equipping itself for its particular sphere and thereby promoting the universal’.

Hegel’s was not a liberal vision – he was not a champion of unitary national legislatures, having seen what they were capable of in Jacobin France. But the progressive orientation of his vision was undeniable. For all his misgivings about the Jacobin experiment, Hegel celebrated the French Revolution as a ‘splendid dawn’ that had been greeted with joy by ‘all thinking people’. Hegel’s Berlin students were told that the Revolution represented an ‘irreversible achievement of the world spirit’ whose consequences were still unfolding. The centrality of reason and a sense of forward momentum suffuse his reflections on the state at every point. There was no place in the Hegelian polity for privileged castes and private jurisdictions. And by elevating the state above the plane of partisan strife, Hegel brought into view the exhilarating possibility that progress – in the sense of a beneficent rationalization of the political and social order – might simply be a property of the unfolding of history, as embodied in the Prussian state.

It is difficult, from a present-day standpoint, to appreciate the intoxicating effect of Hegel’s thought on a generation of educated Prussians. It was not a question of Hegel’s pedagogical charisma – he was notorious for standing hunched over the lectern reading out his text in a halting and scarcely audible mumble. According to an account by his student Hotho, who attended Hegel’s lectures at the University of Berlin, ‘his features hung pale and loose upon him as if he were already dead.’‘He sat there morosely with his head wearily bowed down in front of him, constantly leafing back and forth through his compendious notes, even as he continued to speak.’ Another student, the future Hegel-biographer Karl Rosenkranz, recalled laborious paragraphs punctuated by constant coughing and snuff-taking.

It was the ideas themselves and the peculiar language Hegel invented to articulate them that colonized the minds of disciples across the kingdom. Part of the explanation lies in the context. Hegel’s appointment was the work of the sometime Hardenberg protégé, enlightened reformer and Minister of Education Karl von Altenstein. The philosopher’s writings provided an exalted legitimation for the Prussian bureaucracy, whose expanding power within the executive during the reform era demanded justification.

…

Throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, the ‘Prussian school’ of history would remain overwhelmingly focused on the state as the vehicle and agent of historical change.

After the philosopher’s death during the cholera epidemic of 1831, Hegelianism disintegrated into warring schools and passed through swift ideological mutations. Among the raucous ‘Young Hegelians’ who coalesced in Berlin in the late 1830s was the youthful Karl Marx, a new Prussian from the Rhineland and the son of a Jewish convert to Christianity, who had moved to Berlin in 1836 to continue his studies in jurisprudence and political economy. For Marx, the first true encounter with Hegel’s thought was a revelatory shock akin to a religious conversion. ‘For some days’, he told his father in November 1837, his excitement made him ‘quite incapable of thinking’; he ‘ran about madly in the garden by the dirty water of the Spree’, even joined his landlord on a hunting excursion, and found himself overpowered by the desire to embrace every street corner loafer in Berlin. Marx would later reject Hegel’s understanding of the state bureaucracy as the ‘general estate’, but it stayed with him none the less. For what else was Marx’s idealization of the proletariat as the ‘pure embodiment of the general interest’ than the materialist inversion of the Hegelian concept? Marxism, too, was made in Prussia.

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Filed under economics, Germany, philosophy

by | 26 January 2008 · 10:59 am

Prague, 1994: Fractured Intelligentsia

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), p. 141:

The intelligentsia—one of the characteristic phenomena of modern Central and East European history—is now everywhere engulfed in sweeping change. This world of “circles of friends,” of milieux, where artists, philosophers, writers, economists, journalists all felt themselves to belong to the same group and to be committed to a certain common ethos (albeit often honored in the breach), was something anachronistic in late-twentieth-century Europe—but also something rich and fine. Its extraordinary character was summed up for me in a phrase that Ivan Klíma used in describing how he and his fellow writers had set out to revive the dormant Czech PEN club in 1989. “I was,” he said, “authorized by my circle of friends.” The peculiar world of the intelligentsia under communism was one in which you sought authorization from your circle of friends.

Freedom has changed all that. With remarkable speed, the intelligentsia has fragmented into separate professions, as in the West: journalists, publishers, academics, actors, not to mention those who have become officials, lawyers, diplomats. The milieux have faded, the “circles of friends” have dispersed or lost their special significance. Those who have remained in purely “intellectual” professions—above all, academics—have found themselves impoverished. Moreover, it is the businessmen and entrepreneurs who are the tone-setting heroes of this time. Thus, from having an abnormal importance before 1989, independent intellectuals have plummeted to abnormal unimportance.

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Filed under democracy, Eastern Europe, philosophy

by | 15 September 2007 · 4:11 pm

Disgust Usually Outweighs Detached Reasoning

Via Arts & Letters Daily, I came across a very interesting essay in Edge by Jonathan Haidt, entitled Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion. Here are a few excerpts.

In my dissertation and my other early studies, I told people short stories in which a person does something disgusting or disrespectful that was perfectly harmless (for example, a family cooks and eats its dog, after the dog was killed by a car). I was trying to pit the emotion of disgust against reasoning about harm and individual rights.

I found that disgust won in nearly all groups I studied (in Brazil, India, and the United States), except for groups of politically liberal college students, particularly Americans, who overrode their disgust and said that people have a right to do whatever they want, as long as they don’t hurt anyone else.

These findings suggested that emotion played a bigger role than the cognitive developmentalists had given it. These findings also suggested that there were important cultural differences, and that academic researchers may have inappropriately focused on reasoning about harm and rights because we primarily study people like ourselves—college students, and also children in private schools near our universities, whose morality is not representative of the United States, let alone the world….

Surveys have shown for decades that religious practice is a strong predictor of charitable giving. Arthur Brooks recently analyzed these data (in Who Really Cares) and concluded that the enormous generosity of religious believers is not just recycled to religious charities.

Religious believers give more money than secular folk to secular charities, and to their neighbors. They give more of their time, too, and of their blood. Even if you excuse secular liberals from charity because they vote for government welfare programs, it is awfully hard to explain why secular liberals give so little blood. The bottom line, Brooks concludes, is that all forms of giving go together, and all are greatly increased by religious participation and slightly increased by conservative ideology (after controlling for religiosity).

These data are complex and perhaps they can be spun the other way, but at the moment it appears that Dennett is wrong in his reading of the literature. Atheists may have many other virtues, but on one of the least controversial and most objective measures of moral behavior—giving time, money, and blood to help strangers in need—religious people appear to be morally superior to secular folk.

My conclusion is not that secular liberal societies should be made more religious and conservative in a utilitarian bid to increase happiness, charity, longevity, and social capital. Too many valuable rights would be at risk, too many people would be excluded, and societies are so complex that it’s impossible to do such social engineering and get only what you bargained for. My point is just that every longstanding ideology and way of life contains some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing.

But because of the four principles of moral psychology [outlined earlier in the essay] it is extremely difficult for people, even scientists, to find that wisdom once hostilities erupt. A militant form of atheism that claims the backing of science and encourages “brights” to take up arms may perhaps advance atheism. But it may also backfire, polluting the scientific study of religion with moralistic dogma and damaging the prestige of science in the process.

In my experience, secular academics are just as likely as anyone else to thoughtlessly dismiss in moralistic disgust not just behaviors, but beliefs they find repugnant, especially those emblematic of their social and moral inferiors.

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Filed under education, philosophy, religion, scholarship

by | 12 July 2007 · 3:24 pm

North Korean Ideology: Juche as Kokutai

The North’s successful quasi-Stalinist economic development did not mean that North Korea adopted the particular blend of Marxism-Leninism developed under Stalin in the 1930s. On the contrary, if the North’s ideology resembled any socialist experiment, it was closer to the Chinese model [under Mao]. In retrospect, it is now clear that North Korea actually developed an independent ideological line from the beginning. Perhaps because of its early close association with the USSR and the PRC, the North continued to parrot a line of Marxism-Leninism, but from Kim Il Sung’s first formal elaboration of Chuch’e [= Juche] thought in a 1955 speech, Marxism-Leninism progressively declined as a formal category of thought in the North. In hindsight, it is difficult to see how the North’s economic and social revolution had anything at all to do with Marxist antecedents. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites after 1989, North Korea quickly disassociated itself from Marxism altogether. Moreover, the development of Chuch’e thought in tandem with the rise of the cult of the leader has provided the North with a ready explanation for the survival of its revolution even after the collapse of the Socialist world order.

Not only do North Korean ideologues assert they have leaders such as the world has never seen before, they also have an ideology that completes their self-image as the center of a world revolution. This ideology revolves around the seminal idea of Chuch’e. Chuch’e is a Sino-Korean compound formed from Chinese characters for the words “subject” [or ‘lord, master’] and “body” [主体]. Together they adumbrate the concept of “autonomy” or “self-reliance.” In its most straightforward use, Chuch’e can denote one’s independence and autonomy from any external control or manipulation. Therefore, one core meaning of Chuch’e resonates in society-wide contexts to describe an autonomous, independent, and self-reliant nation. The ch’e in Chuch’e is the same character used in kukch’e, often translated as “national body” or “polity” (see below). Here it can also carry the connotation of the “national face,” as in self-respect. Thus an independent and autonomous nation’s face (honor) must not be besmirched or denigrated. This core definition goes a long way to understanding the intense emphasis in North Korean ideology on their independence, whether in terms of their national integrity, their position earlier in the global socialist revolution, or their autarkic economic policies. The nationalist connotations of Chuch’e developed in the late nineteenth century, when it was used as an antonym of the concept of “serving the great” (sadae), a term used originally to describe the interstate relationship between Korea and China during the Chosŏn period. In the twentieth century, sadaejuŭi (the “ism” of sadae) became synonymous with being subordinate to another, with being a toady. To have sadae consciousness means to worship the outside world while denigrating one’s own culture. Chuch’e thus had come to mean an independent stance, in mind and in body, and in nationalist context it means to uphold the independence and integrity of the nation.

Chuch’e was a useful concept in creating distance with the early Soviet presence in North Korea, and later, during the time of extensive Soviet assistance in the rebuilding and first Five-year Plans, it was deployed to signal North Korean independence. The term, first elaborated by Kim Il Sung in 1955, moved to its central position during the 1960s as Kim maneuvered between his giant socialist neighbors during the Sino-Soviet split. By the 1970s Chuch’ e thought had become so linked to the genius of the Great Leader that it literally became the “ism” of Kim Il Sung, as in “Kim Il Sung-ism.”

In the polemical warfare between the two Koreas, the North’s Chuch’e stance gave it an advantage over the South, especially in the first decades of division. The South was an economic dependent in the 1950s, and until the mid-1960s it relied heavily on American military protection. Although the North was also relatively dependent on the PRC and USSR in the early years, foreign troops withdrew after the Korean War, leaving the North to defend itself. To the North Koreans, the continuing presence of the US Eighth Army in the South has been proof of the ROK government’s “slavish” dependence on outside power. The Chuch’e argument continued to resonate with opposition forces in South Korea into the 1980s, since they had from the start questioned the legitimacy of the ROK government and they railed against the continuing US military presence in the South. They pointed to the contrasting stance of the North and its resolute emphasis on autonomy. Whatever the facts may have been with regard to the North’s actual independence, its consistent propaganda and its emphasis on national independence reminded all South Koreans of Korea’s historical humiliations at the hands of imperialist and colonial powers.

Chuch’e has become the principle behind all government policy in the North, which, of course, has significant implications for economic policy. Indeed, in keeping with astrict adherence to independence in all matters, North Korea has developed perhaps the most autarkic economy in the world. Economic achievements are touted as successes based on self-reliance, and great pains were taken to seek internal solutions to economic problems. The story of the creation of the synthetic fiber “vynalon” by North Korean scientists using indigenous raw materials (in this case limestone) became an often-repeated morality tale of technological self-reliance in state propaganda. Where indigenous capital was scarce or other inputs unobtainable inside the country, the state resorted to exhortation and mobilization of the innate creativity of the masses. Thus all problems, technical or otherwise, are solvable if the people retain a staunch consciousness of Chuch’e. Such a stance inhibits overtures to the outside world for the economic or technical assistance the North now desperately needs to solve its economic woes. With the principle of Chuch’e inviolate, the state finds itself in its own straitjacket. And as we will see below, the new policies that have created zones for foreign investment, initiatives to find foreign capital, and, most obviously, accepting foreign food aid during the 1995 famine are issues that must be justified in terms of the unitary logic of self-reliance.

At its most abstract, Chuch’e operates as a code word for North Korean identity itself. Thus holding a consciousness of Chuch’e is to have a North Korean subjectivity. Some speculate that Kim Il Sung developed the idea in reaction to the vague and virtually indefinable concept of kokutai (kukch’e in Korean) used to evoke “national essence” in Japanese ideology before 1945. All North Koreans are enjoined to hold Chuch’e in their minds and hearts, as only in so doing will their actions be appropriate. Since Chuch’e is the leader’s core inspiration, all his subjects carry the leader in their hearts when they hold fast a consciousness of Chuch’e. Just as the emperor embodied the essence (kokutai) of the nation in pre-World War II Japan, so does the leader, now Kim Jong Il, embody the very essential principle that guides all thought and action in North Korea today.

SOURCE: Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Short History, by Michael E. Robinson (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2007), pp. 158-161

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Filed under Japan, Korea, philosophy

by | 5 February 2007 · 8:47 pm

Pamuk on Tristesse vs. Hüzün

Tristesse is not a pain that affects a solitary individual [like melancholy]; hüzün and tristesse both suggest a communal feeling, an atmosphere and a culture shared by millions. But the words and the feelings they describe are not identical, and if we are to pinpoint the difference it is not enough to say that Istanbul is much richer than Delhi or São Paolo. (If you go to the poor neighborhoods, the cities and the forms poverty takes are in fact all too similar.) The difference lies in the fact that in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past civilization are everywhere visible. No matter how ill-kept, no matter how neglected or hemmed in they are by concrete monstrosities, the great mosques and other monuments of the city, as well as the lesser detritus of empire in every side street and corner—the little arches, fountains, and neighborhood mosques—inflict heartache on all who live among them.

These are nothing like the remains of great empires to be seen in western cities, preserved like museums of history and proudly displayed. The people of Istanbul simply carry on with their lives amid the ruins. Many western writers and travelers find this charming. But for the city’s more sensitive and attuned residents, these ruins are reminders that the present city is so poor and confused that it can never again dream of rising to its former heights of wealth, power, and culture. It is no more possible to take pride in these neglected dwellings, which dirt, dust, and mud have blended into their surroundings, than it is to rejoice in the beautiful old wooden houses that as a child I watched burn down one by one….

The tristesse that Lévi-Strauss describes is what a Westerner might feel as he surveys those vast poverty-stricken cities of the tropics, as he contemplates the huddled masses and their wretched lives. But he does not see the city through their eyes. Tristesse implies a guilt-ridden Westerner who seeks to assuage his pain by refusing to let cliché and prejudice color his impressions. Hüzün, on the other hand, is not a feeling that belongs to the outside observer. To varying degrees, classical Ottoman music, Turkish popular music, especially the arabesque that became popular during the 1980s, are all expressions of this emotion, which we feel as something between physical pain and grief. And Westerners coming to the city often fail to notice it….

Likewise, the hüzün in Turkish poetry after the foundation of the Republic, as it too expresses the same grief that no one can or would wish to escape, an ache that finally saves our souls and also gives them depth. For the poet, hüzün is the smoky window between him and the world. The screen he projects over life is painful because life itself is painful. So it is, also, for the residents of Istanbul as they resign themselves to poverty and depression. Imbued still with the honor accorded it in Sufi literature, hüzün gives their resignation an air of dignity, but it also explains their choice to embrace failure, indecision, defeat, and poverty so philosophically and with such pride, suggesting that hüzün is not the outcome of life’s worries and great losses but their principal cause. So it was for the heroes of the Turkish films of my childhood and youth, and also for many of my real-life heroes during the same period: They all gave the impression that because of this hüzün they’d been carrying around in their hearts since birth they could not appear desirous in the face of money, success, or the women they loved. Hüzün does not just paralyze the inhabitants of Istanbul; it also gives them poetic license to be paralyzed.

SOURCE: Istanbul: Memories and the City, by Orhan Pamuk (Vintage, 2006), pp. 101, 103-104

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by | 31 December 2006 · 4:27 pm

What Motivates Scholarship?

The new scholarly blog, Tibeto-Logic, which I recently quoted on the topic of Cathedral Bell Diplomacy in Armenia and Tibet, articulated something else that has continued to resonate with me. The blogpost I cited begins with a quote from a well-known philosopher and mathematician given the ironical epithet, The Mysterious Whitehead, and ends with some reflexive rumination about the purpose of the blogger’s scholarship.

In considering the history of ideas, I maintain that the notion of ‘mere knowledge’ is a high abstraction which we should dismiss from our minds. Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.

— Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 1933.
…

My present task as a Tibeto-logical thinker is a Tibeto-centric one. I hope I have succeeded in drawing up a small sketch that puts cracks in the stereotype of Tibet as a place cut off from the world. It’s a country right here with us on the ground, living and breathing in our times. Just so or, well, nearly so, it was an integral and meaningful part of Eurasia during the rule of the Great Fifth Dalai Lama. Some degree and kind of globalisation was in process at that time. And that remains true even if, limiting ourselves to what has been said within the bounds of this essay, the international presence in Lhasa would seem to have been mostly mercantile and proselytizing in nature. If these interests were being played out on a less than even playing field, we cannot pretend that today that field is necessarily more even or equitable. We should not be quick to dismiss the past based on ill-considered assumptions that things have gotten better, or all that much better, meanwhile.

And finally, I hope Tibetans will find in these investigations a source of pride in the past and encouragement for the future. There is real reason to take pride in the pursuit of that admirable Buddhist virtue of tolerance (Tibetan zöpa, or kshanti in Sanskrit, one of those Paramitas that go far beyond the bounds of duty) that enabled Tibetan society in the 17th century to often welcome and sometimes embrace the strangers among them: the Armenians, the Muslims, and yes, the European Christian missionaries. Oh yes, you’re right, I neglected to mention the Chinese, Indians, Mongolians and Newars. Now that people from every culture are living in practically every country, it’s increasingly important that we look back to times like these and find out how, and just how well, they did it. It’s in our interests.

This resonates with me on one level because my academic work focuses on a small corner of Papua New Guinea, where my two primary concerns are (1) to document poorly described languages and (2) to demonstrate that the histories of tiny coastal villages there have never been either all that stagnant or all that isolated. My documentation efforts are far from complete, but have at least sufficed to qualify the village in which I did fieldwork to establish its own Tok Ples (village vernacular language) school, despite having no more than 300 native speakers. The initiative was all theirs; not mine. My host during my fieldwork (thirty years ago!) had been a schoolteacher and the village was using part of its timber royalties to further the education of its youth.

But the wrapper of self-examination on the “Mysterious Whitehead” blogpost resonates at an even more abstract level because it acknowledges that, while the means of scholarship are (ideally) rational, the initial motivations are (in general) not. The most coldly rational motivation for pursuing a particular line of academic research is the availability of funding sources whose allocations are very much dependent on the political goals of the granting agencies. Of course, many scholars take pride in biting the hands that feed them, while others pursue their own political agendas even without external material inducement.

In my experience, the prime motivator for the scholarly output of untenured academics is ambition/fear of failure. Since I’ve never had the carrot of academic tenure dangled in front of me, I’ve only experienced the level of paranoia typical of tenure-chasing academics vicariously, most notably in Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Romania, where similar levels of fear seemed to pervade not just academia, but the rest of society as well.

Meanwhile, the prime motivators for tenured academics seem to be (1) collegiality, (2) personal rivalry, and (3) guilt. At least that’s what motivates the fits and starts of my lackadaisical output as an academic hobbyist.

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by | 5 June 2006 · 2:24 pm

Role of Altruistic Punishment in Genocide

Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter have introduced the concept of altruistic punishment to explain cooperation [in group projects for the “public good”]. Following Fehr and Gächter, I define altruistic punishment as punishment inflicted on a defector from cooperation, which is costly to the punisher and without material gain. In a series of public goods experiments that pitted private return against public welfare requiring cooperation in a group project, cooperation was found to flourish when altruistic punishment was possible and to break down when it was ruled out.

Subjects were given the opportunity to invest in a group project with monies handed to them, or to keep the funds. Individually, if they chose to invest, they would receive less than if they kept the money, but collectively the group as a whole would receive more, if all invested…. Subjects could punish others after information was provided as to how much each had invested. But each punishment of another subject was costly. Specifically, subjects who chose to punish were required to forfeit an amount equal to one-third of the monetary punishment imposed on a defector. Thus, the punishment is altruistic. Defectors – those who refused to cooperate – were punished even when material self-interest was sacrificed by cooperators. Participants who chose to punish defectors by withholding monies themselves had to sacrifice monetary rewards….

“Negative emotions towards the defectors are the proximate mechanics behind altruistic punishment.” Concerning altruistic punishment, Fehr remarks, “It’s a very potent force for establishing large-scale cooperation, every citizen is a little policeman in a sense. There are so many social norms that we follow almost unconsciously, and they are enforced by the moral outrage we expect if we were to violate them.” The greater the extent of deviation from cooperation by defectors, the more heavily they were punished by cooperators. It was “punishment per se [that] provided the motivation, not some consequence anticipated by the player.” Instrumentality was not especially relevant….

Altruistic punishment has been robustly established. These findings stem from public goods experiments, but are readily generalizable to social groups seeking a basis for cooperation in the absence of a functioning external authority. Given an extreme, even life-threatening environment, such as massive economic failure followed by war, the particular form of altruistic punishment chosen can be severe.

Even as they were clearly losing their respective wars, Hitler proceeded mercilessly with his extermination campaign, Enver Paşa lent his approval to the Armenian genocide, and the Hutu extremists were rapidly eliminating Rwandan Tutsi. Hitler would die by his own hand, Enver in battle to unite Turkic peoples against the Soviets, and many of the Hutu génocidaires in the refugee camps of northern Congo.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 108-109

In a chapter somewhat disturbingly redolent of “the freakonomics of genocide” Midlarsky highlights altruistic punishment as a factor that not only motivates followers to cooperate in a genocidal project they otherwise find extremely distasteful (or worse), but also motivates leaders to persist in genocide at the expense of losing larger battles against their enemies.

On a more familiar level, “altruistic punishment” might well describe the motivations of political activists who would rather purge their party of defectors than win the next election.

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by | 4 June 2006 · 1:18 am

Utopianism as a Basis for Genocide

In addition to rational choice, utopianism is a current theory that could serve as a starting point for comprehending the onset of genocide. In contrast to rational choice, which provides a social scientific basis, a focus on utopianism would provide an ideological source of genocide as a uniform substratum. This emphasis on ideology is the basis of a recently published well-written comparison of four genocides by Eric Weitz. Focusing on the concept of utopia at the core of genocidal ideologies, Weitz argues for its salience as an explanation of the Soviet, Cambodian, Nazi, and Bosnian atrocities.

In considering Weitz’s argument, though, it is apparent that the Marxist-Leninist cases are conflated with cases that have entirely different etiologies. The Soviets had an elaborate ideational class-based justification for mass murder, as did the Cambodians, while the Nazi and Bosnian instances were based on ethnoreligious criteria without elaborate justification. Thus, the concept of utopia does not go very far in explaining these latter two cases. The Nazis had utopian visions of a distant past including an ostensibly racially pure Ottonian Germany, while the Communists (Soviets and Cambodians) possessed a rigorous, if deeply flawed, ideational structure that predicted a future free of class oppression and conflict.

The consequences of ethnoreligious hostilities are vastly different from those of overtly political ideation. In the former, complete eradication is most frequently the goal, while in the latter elimination of incorrigible political enemies along with reeducation of the remainder constitutes the core of the governmental program. Victimization rates, therefore, differ substantially, ranging from the approximately 67 percent of Jews murdered in Nazi-targeted areas of Europe to at most 10 percent of the Soviet and Chinese populations, and 20 percent of the Cambodian. Moreover, possibilities for reconstituting cultural and religious life were sharply circumscribed for Jews (and Armenians) after their genocides. Such limitations were much less pronounced in the Soviet and Cambodian instances; contemporary Russia, indeed, has seen a massive Orthodox revival after the earlier decimation of church officials by the Bolsheviks….

Even more problematic in applying utopianism is the Armenian genocide. Neither in their past nor in any realistically conceived future could the Young Turks imagine a state “purified” of other nationalities, so that an ideology justifying mass murder could not be used effectively as motivation. Certainly at the time of the Armenian genocide in 1915–16, the Greeks, who were somewhat more numerous than the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and even more dominant in its economic life, were not subject to genocide….

Beyond the problem of generalizability, difficult as it is, the concept of utopianism itself certainly is not sufficient to explain genocide as a behavioral category. There have been utopian socialists of every stripe, for example, from cosmopolitans in the nineteenth-century United States and Europe, to more nationalistic ones in the kibbutzim in Israel. Hardly any had advocated, let alone participated in, genocide. In other words, utopianism can just as readily invoke benign, even reclusive, visions (e.g., the Hutterites), where the last thing any of these utopians wanted to do was to kill or even bother other people.

Where utopianism does get into trouble is in its juncture with the state and especially with state power. The conjoining of the two can lead to genocidal consequences, but it is the state that is the driving force behind the utopian vision or whatever related genocidal motivation (e.g., state security) may exist at the moment of decision. Utopian belief is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding the origins of genocide although, if strongly held, it certainly can provide the ideational basis for genocidal thinking.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 75-76

UPDATE: In a comment, reader Otto Pohl objects:

The percentages compared between Nazi Germany and the USSR and Cambodia are apples and oranges. The total percentage of people under Nazi rule murdered is quite small compared to the Soviet and Cambodian cases. Why compare a targeted minority in one case, Jews, and ignore it in the Soviet and Cambodian cases? Stalin murdered over a third of the Chechen, Crimean Tatar and Mennonite populations of the USSR. In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge completely eliminated the ethnic Vietnamese population. Very high percentages of Chams and Chinese also perished. Socialist racism was quite real and no less deadly than the Nazi variant.

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