Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Verso: New York, 1991.
Theorists of nationalism have often been perplexed, not to say irritated, by these thrAnderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Verso: New York, 1991.
Theorists of nationalism have often been perplexed, not to say irritated, by these three paradoxes: (1) The objective modernity of nations to the historian's eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists. (2) The formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept -- in the modern world everyone can, should, will 'have' a nationality, as he or she 'has' a gender -- vs. the irremediable particularity of its concrete manfiestations, such that, by definition, 'Greek' nationality is sui generis. (3) The 'political' power of nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence. In other words, unlike most other isms, nationalism has never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles, Marxes, or Webers. (5)
It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. [. . .] In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. (6)
Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when eve nthe most devuot adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such relgions, and the allomorphism between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state. (7)
The cultural significance of such monuments becomes even clearer if one tries to imagine, say, a Tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a cenotaph for fallen Liberals. Is a sense of absurdity avoidable? (10)
No surprise then that the search was on, so to speak, for a new way of linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together. Nothing perhaps more precipitated this search, nor made it more fruitful, than print-capitalism, which made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways. (36)
Out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity (yes, you and that naked baby are identicaly) which, bcause it can not be 'remembered,' must be narrated. Against biology's demonstration that every single cell in a human body is replaced over seven years, th enarratives of autobiography and biography flood print-capitalism's markets year by year. (204)...more
Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington, Indiana University Press: 1993.
By the logic of comChow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington, Indiana University Press: 1993.
By the logic of commodified culture, feminism shares with other marginalized discourses which have been given "visibility" the same type of destiny--that of reification and subordination under such terms, currentlypopular in the U.S. academy, as "cultural diversity." (69, "Postmodern Automatons")
Pressing the claims fo the local therefore does not mean essentializing one position; instead, it means using that position as a parallel for allying with others .FOr the "thir world" feminist, espeicially, the local is never "one." Rather, her own "locality" as (70) construct, difference, and automaton means that pressing its claims is always pressing the claims of a form of existence which is, by origin, coalitional. (71)
The dominant message of "King of the Children" could thus be described this way: after the blind demolition of tradition and the imposition of uniformity in thought, the younger generation should be allowed to start afresh by relearning the fundamental principles of literary creation, that is, by writing in such a way that words reflect the reality of human action correctly. Accordingly, if only one would begin at the foundations, one could, hopefully, restore meaning to the human condition in China. (76, "Pedagogy, Trust, Chinese Intellectuals in the 1990s")
For the Barthes of the 1950s [in Mythologies], there is one type of speech which is the opposite of myth. He describes it in a way that reminds us of the pedagogical revolution in A Cheng's story: If I am a woodcutter and I am led to name the tree which I am feeling, whatever the form of my sentence, I 'speak the tree', I do not speak about it. This means that my language is operational, transitively linked to its object; between the tree and myself, there is nothing but my labour, that is to say, an action. This is a political language: it represents nature for me only inasmuch as I am goig to transform it, it is a language thanks to which I 'act the object'; the tree is not an image for me, it is simply the meaning of my action. But if I am not a woodcutter, I can no longer 'speak the tree', I can only speak about it, on it. (77)
I use "enemy" to refer not to an individual but to the attitude that "women" is still not a legitimate scholarly concern. Depending on the occasion, this enemy uses a number of different but related tactics. The first tactic may be described as habitual myopia: "You don't exist because I don't see you." The second is conscience-clearing genitalism: "Women? Well, of course! . . . But I am not a woman myself, so I will keep my mouth shut." The third is scholarly dismissal: "Yes, women's issues are interesting, but they are separate and the feminist approach is too narrow to merit serious study." The fourth is strategic ghettoization: since "women" are all talking about the same thing over and over again, give them a place in every conference all in one corner, let them have their say, and let's get on with our business. These tactics of the enemy--and it is important for us to think of the enemy in terms of a dominant symbolic rather than in terms of individuals, that is, a corpus of attitudes, expressions, discourses, and the value espoused in them--are not limited to the China field. They are descriptive fo the problems characteristic of the study of non-hegemonic subjects in general. (100, "Against the Lures of Diaspora")
While there are many efforts to demonstrate modern Chinese literature's continuity with past literary achievements, what distinguishes modern Chinese writings is an investment in suffering, an ivnestment that aims at exposing social injustice. This investment in--or cathexis to--suffering runs through Chinese cultural production from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present--frmo the upsurge of interest in romantic love in popular Mandarin Duck and Butterfly stories of the 1910s, to the pro-science and pro-democracy attempts at national self-strengthening in May Fourth writings, to the focuses on class struggle in the literature of the 1930s and 1940s, to the official Communist practice of "speaking bitterness" (suku), by which peasants were encouraged by cadres of the liberation forces to voice their sufferings at mass meetings in the 1950s and 1960s, and to the outcries of pain and betrayal in the "literature of the wounded" (shanghen wenxue) of the post-Cultural Revolution period. In other words, the atempt to establish a national literaturein the postcolonial era requires a critical edge other than the belief in a magnificent past. For twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals, this critical edge has been class consciousness. (102)
Among Asian classicists, culture is often still viewed as a kind of (124) general ltieracy which comes before such things as periodization and specialization. According to this view, if one has spent enough time with the classics spanning a few major dynasties, one would also be qualified to deal with anything that comes afterward. The reverse, however, is not true: if one has worked only with modern literature, one is a kind of illiteratre who does not possess the depth of knowledge and breadth of experience which a classical education offers. This notion of a general literacy that one acquires not as a skill but as an upbringing in standard written texts and well-aged artistic practices (such as qi qi shu hua, or music, chess, calligraphy, and painting, for the Chinese) acts as a way to define the limits fo centralized culture, even if the practitioners of that culture are dilettantes only. The farther one is removed from this centralized literacy, the more dubious is one's claim to the culture. When I told a senior Chinese classicist that I was going to a conference on contemporary Hong Kong literature, for instance, the response I got was: "Oh, is there such a thing?" (125, "The Politics and Pedagogy of Asian Literatures")
The problem she [the Asian literature teacher] faces can be stated this way: Does she sacrifice the specificities of the language in order to generalize, so that she can put Asian literatures in a "cross-cultural" framework, or does she continue to teach untranslated texts with expertise--and remain ghettoized? (128) ...more
Democracy must mean more than procedure; it needs the depth culture has to offer. An emancipated society has to mean not only control over economic liDemocracy must mean more than procedure; it needs the depth culture has to offer. An emancipated society has to mean not only control over economic life, but satisfying relationships, everyday dignity and solidarity, and narratives which make one's life not only prosperous but also meaningful. (ix)
And dialogue is not an innocent or open procedure, either: it is the search for that great white whale of the liberal imagination, compromise, a search which rules out certain kinds of solution in advance. Like the term 'democracy' itself, 'dialogue' sanctions a strategic call for specific procedures under the rubric of abstract principle. (9)
For with the triumph of the novel and 'novelization', history has become an internal rather than merely external fact of genre. (13)
One can easily imagine a democratic situation within which language is employed, but the thesis that there is such a thing as a novelistic style means that there is a democratic way of employing it, that grammatical, syntactic, and lexical structures themselves instance or embody kinds of social relationship. 'Style' is Bakhtin's name for the place where the external 'facts' manifest themselves at the level of the sign, where meaning becomes impossible without them. (21)
The novel--'artistically organized social heteroglossia' (DN 76/262)--is Bakhtin's word for those modern and democratic facts of language with which traditional stylistics cannot cope. And so as we try to grasp the distinctiveness of novelistic style we find ourselves having to reconceptualize the communicative process itself, and draw into it the historical world which had been left outside. (23)
But what Rousseau or Kant have written makes no difference unless it describes the compelling force of such erasons in practice; it is only when objects feel bound to norms and values because they are the result of democratic discourse that we are moving in the universe of modern democracy. (32)
Language does not articulate values or principles from a neutral perspective, making their acceptance or rejection a matter for individual initiative: its meanings are positions taken or refused, its forms opportunities for ethical relationships. (35)
But the inability to account for the legitimacy of many modern political orders--we see it today when analysts throw up their hands in the face of the 'antique hatreds' of nationalism--may be the symptom of an unresolved theoretical problem: the belief that justice in pure form is enough to motivate support for a political order. Bakhtin, too, sees authoritarianism as 'pre-modern'; his bearers of the alien holy word have supposedly been expelled from the linguistic territory of modernity. But in his account, the opposite of authoritarian fear and submissiveness is not purely 'political' reason purged fo all emotion, but democratic 'sobriety' and ironic distance. The political theory which restricts dialogically maintained consent to questions of pure right panics when confronted with popular acquiescence in manifest injustice, and must call upon the psychologism it otherwise rejects. But the psychic forces in play when 'totalitarianism' is the order of the day do not disappear in democracies, and they too must be part of any intersubjectivity which supports a democratic life. In that case, democratic orders do not depend upon the mere absence of fear, ressentiment, or whatever emotion one associates with the 'totalitarian', but upon the presence of its opposite, whether this is called sobriety, confidence, civility, or respect. (40)
Compromise has distinctive formal features: it cannot, by definition, be incarnated in a systematic philosophy or theory of society--it must assume the form of a narrative, to wit, of the realist novel fo the nineteenth century. In modernity 'culture' takes over the task of legitimation from religion, but this entails not the substitution of one system of belief for another, but the replacement of the strong and systematic belief necessary for religion by the weak, narrative kind of belief typical of the novel. Or, to put it more exactly, it entails the replacement of belief in the usual senes of the word by narrative itself, which alone can make compromise something liveable and even pleasurable. One cannot, therefore, simply confront liberal democracy with its own claim to justice and fairness, for it alraedy has cultural mechanisms which assume the world is unfair, or cruel, occasionally arbitrary, and often violent. The culture fo the capitalist democracies works not through persuasion or strong ideological argument, but by the creation of templates for a lief well lived, in full knowledge of the world's dissonances and inadequacies. In which case a critical democratic culture must take aim at the weak, narrative kind of belief embodied in modern culture, not in order to demonstrate that it is weak, which is its premiss, but to point a (42) critical gaze at the anxieties and dissatisfactions which it seeks to defues or displace. (43)
Weber himself more or less admitted this when he efined demoracy as the absolute antithesis of legal rationality, as an irrational 'charismatic authority'. The majority who follow a charismatic leader do so spontaneously--neither procedures nor mechanisms have a role in the creation of the obligation which binds the former to the latter. They see in their leader a promise or an aura, and Weber clearly thinks that those who believe in this sort of thing are beyond the pale of rational discourse. (43)
Thus in his earlier Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau argues that 'there are some tongues favourable to liberty. They are thre sonorous, prosodic, harmonious tongues in which discourse can be understood from a great distance.' (46)
Meaning relies on the presence of oral language much as sovereignty depends on the presence of the people; representation in politics is thus deemed corrupting and dangerous for the same reasons that representation of speech by writing is deemed dangerous and unstable. In this context, 'writing' signifies a political problem, not the mere fact that no field is big enough to contain 'the people', and it is the definitive rebuke to Rousseau's concept of a homogenous body politic which needs to learn nothing because it needs only know itself. 'Writing' means not so much the physical fact of graphic language as the uncertainty, flexibility, and disputatiousness which are part of every public sphere, an openness which Rousseau hopes to shut out of modern democratic politics. (47)...more
For the substance of a poem is not merely an expression of individual impulses and experiences. Those become a matter of "Lyric Poetry and Society" --
For the substance of a poem is not merely an expression of individual impulses and experiences. Those become a matter of art only when they come to participate in something universal by virtue of the specificity they acquire in being given aesthetic form. [. . . I]mmersion in what has taken individual form elevates the lyric poem to the status of something universal by making manifest something not distorted, not grasped, not yet subsumed. It thereby anticipates, spiritually, a situation in which no false universality, that is, nothing profoundly particular, continues to fetter what is other than itself, the human.
You experience lyric poetry as something opposed to society, something wholly individual. Your feelings insist that it remain so, that lyric expression, having escaped from the weight of material existence, evoke the image of a life free from the coercion of reigning practices, of utility, of the relentless pressures of self-preservation. This demand, however, the demand that the lyric word be virginal, is itself social in nature. It implies a protest against a social situation that every individual experiences as hostile, alien, cold, oppressive, and this situation is imprinted in reverse on the poetic work: the more heavily the situation weighs upon it, the more (39) firmly the work resists it by refusing to submit to anything heteronomous and constituting itself solely in accordance with its own laws. The work's distance from mere existence becomes the measure of what is false and bad in the latter. In its protest the poem expresses the dream of a world in which things would be different. The lyric spirit's idiosyncratic opposition to the superior power of material things is a form of reaction to the reification fo the world, to the domination of human beings by commodities that has developed since the beginning of the modern era, since the industrial revolution became the dominant force in life. (40)
If, by virtue of its own subjectivity, the substance of the lyric can in fact be addressed as an objective substance -- and otherwise one could not explain the very simple fact that grounds the possibility of the lyric as an artistic genre, its effect on people other than the poet speaking his monologue -- then it is only because the lyric work of art's withdrawal into itself, its self-absorption, its detachment from the social surface, is socially motivated behind the author's back. But the medium of this is language. [. . .] For language is itself something double. Through its configurations it assimilates itself completely into subjective impulses; one would almost think it had produced them. But at the same time language remains the medium of concepts, remains that which establishes an inescapable relationship to the universal and to society. (43)
Baudelaire's work was the first to record this; his work, the ultimate consequence of European Weltschmerz, did not stop with the sufferings of the individual but chose the modern itself, as the antilyrical pure and simple, for its theme and struck a poetic spark in it by dint of a heroically stylized language. (44)
My thesis is that the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism. But since the objective world that produces the lyric is an inherently antagonistic world, the concept of the lyric is not simply that of the expression of a subjectivity to which language grants objectivity. (45)...more
The 1919 May Fourth student movement was its most well-known predecessor and the 1976 Tiananmen Incident its most recent, but in between were the muchThe 1919 May Fourth student movement was its most well-known predecessor and the 1976 Tiananmen Incident its most recent, but in between were the much less-remembered Tiananmen Square antigovernment protests of 1925 and the ensuing massacre of civilians by army troops in 1926 (Spence 298-303). June 4 therefore has its lineage. What partly distinguishes this latest Tiananmen is its global dimension in an age fo technology and speed. Unlike its precursors, the 1989 incident unfoled via media venues that enabled it to become an international drama almost instantaneously. As Fang Lizhi observed from his Beijing asylum within months of the crackdown, this specific Tiananmen would be "the first exception" to the "Technique of Forgetting History" enforced by the CCP since its coming into power, for unlike previous instances of national persecution and disasters that had been systematically erased from the historical record by the regime, in 1989, for "the first time," thanks to the presence of foreign journalists inside China and their instrumental role in positioning the world as "opinion makers," "Chinese Communist burtality was thoroughly recorded and reported, and . . . virtually the whole world was willing to censure it" (274). (8, w/ ref to Jonathan D Spence's "Tiananmen" in Chinese Roundabout: Essays in History and Culture)
If 1989 can be comprehended as the first Tiananmen to bear out Paul Virilio's thesis about human experience in (8) the age of "glocalization"--on his wry metaphor, "a constricted planet that is becoming just one vast floor" (23)--then it has also fallen prey to what he calls "a bug in the memory," as the human perceptual horizon shrinks from the skyline to the television box, from "the line of the visible horizon" to "the square horizon of the screen" (26). (9, w/ ref to Paul Virilio's Open Sky)
An overdependence on the witness can lead to a moral and intellectual complacency on our part, where we feel obviated from the need to probe further from history's continuities, meanings that exceed mere facticity to impinge on our present and future. (12)
That critical discourses have shifted from vocabularies of humanism and displacement to those of transnationalism and globalization in the past two decades may be one indicator of this development. The old terminology is not so much superseded as redefined and recontextualized--which is precisely the story of Tiananmen fictions. (18)
So, while there is obvious and significant continuity between mainland and diaspora in terms fo authorial commitment to and political appraisal of Tiananmen's history, the two sites and their respective fictions seem to occupy polar ends on the spectrum of formal strategies. Where the latter in-vade, the former e-vade: as diasporic texts strive to access the 1989 Square by lapsing their distance from it, mainland ones evoke the same imagined space-time by skirting along its contours. Both lie "outside" the symbolic Square in this sense, and their mutual outside-ness can be understood as a structural relation to absolute state power, defined by a sliding scale of proximity, rather than any firm opposition of belief or desire. (27)
One direct if unexpected repercussion of the PRC's ban on June 4 is tha tEnglish has emerged as a major linguistic platform for the global discourse on Tiananmen in almost all genres. This is not a self-important proclamation about the necessity of privileged status of English as the language of Tiananmen; any such claim would rightly meet with quick skepticism. Rather, it is an observation about English's visibility as the linguistic route through which much Tiananmen writing passes or gets materialized in the post-1989 world. (31) ...more
But the Party also believes it has learned from Tiananmen that democratization is not an irresistible force. There is a widespread view in the West thBut the Party also believes it has learned from Tiananmen that democratization is not an irresistible force. There is a widespread view in the West that where globalization and modernization occur, fundamental changes in the Party-state system ar einevitable, leading to the rise of civil society and some form of democracy. Whether this is right or wrong, the leaders in power in China do not believe it. For them, the lesson of Tiananmen is that at its core, politics is about force. (xxxix)
Some said that the ten years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) constituted a state of anarchy and that the ten years of reform (1978-1988) constituted a state of government with no doctrine; the former was a decade of turmoil, the latter a decade of aimless change. (17)
At 10 P.M. another report said more tha neight hundred students had entered the Square with banners bearing messages such as "Education saves the nation," "Peaceful petitioning," and "Oppose violence." The 8:35 P.M. report said students at the monument were shouting, "Down with dictatorship," "Demand freedom," and "Down with the police." (39)
Today Wang's [Wang Zhiyong, beaten unconscious by officers on Apr 20] bloody clothes were displayed on the campus of CUPSL, and enraged students called for a strike. (40)
1. [fax on Apr 21] The number of students bringing wreaths to the Square in the daytime hours fell off noticeably; the great majority of people milling in the Square were gawkers. (42)
[Zhao Ziyang at Politburo meeting] Second, we must at all costs avoid any incident of bloodshed, because if such an incident should occur it would give some people the pretext they are lookign for. But we should use legal procedures to punish severely all who engage in beating, smashing, and robbing. (50)
At 12:50 P.M. [Apr 22], three student representatives knelt on the steps to the Great Hall, the one in the middle holding up a large paper containing seven demands. (51)
[Chen Xitong on fax of meeting Apr 23] At Peking Unviersity students are setting up a news center. At Qinghua some students are preparing to set up a broadcast station. This shows that this student movement is a planned, organized turmoil. [You zuzhi, you jihua de dongluan. This is the first occurrence in the documents of the stock phrase that appeared in the April 26 editorial . . .] (53)
The Associated Press reported that Chai Ling [on Apr 23], sokesperson for the newly formed United Students' Association, said the Peking University students had decided to oppose the original plan to end the boycott on May 4 and now suggested that their activities should have no fixed end date. (55)
[report to party central apr 24] The following is from a conversation State Security personnel had with a student who asked to remain anonymous: The students said there were five reasons for the rise of this student movement: (1) Many students had been determined to pursue a democracy movement for quite some time, and Yaobang's death was only a catalyst. (2) Students these days feel that Marxist-Leninist theory no longer makes sense. (3) Students are extremely negative about corruption and the general social ethos and have no confidence that the problems can be solved. (4) Students are highly pessimistic about their prospects for job assignment. (5) Students feel strong urges to participate and to make themselves heard. . . . (64) A few of the extrtemely radical students have told their parents that "even if I go down, the movement will go forward." Some students have already prepared for bloodshed. (65)
Before the April 25 evening broadcast of the April 26 editorial, there were reports from around the country that the students were growing tired after ten days of demonstrations and that organizers were seeking ways to keep the moevment alive. But the editorial created an explosive reaction that pushed the student movement to a new high. (76)
[Yang Shangkun at politburo apr 28] People in Hong Kong are also paying close attention to this student movement, and in their minds they are connecting our treatment of the moevment with the retur nfo Hong Kong. Xu Simin, Liao Yaozhu, and other patriotic individuals have been calling publicly for the government to begin dialogue with the students soon and to refrain frmo taking military action against them. The international reaction to our tolerant handling of the April 27 demonstration has been quite favorable. (89)
At 2:30 P.M. [Apr 29] Yuan [Mu], He, and two other government representatives received forty-five students. Yuan took a hard line throughout. There was no serious problem of corruption inside the Party, Yuan said, and Party leaders were reducing expenditures by canceling the annual Beidaihe meeting at the beach and banning the import of expensive cars. He also denied the existence of a censorship system even though the editor-in-chief of the World Economic Herald had just been fired. Demonstrators in Beijing, Yuan claimed, were manipulated by persons behind the scenes who presented a serious threat. He and his colleagues evaded many of the students' questions by changing the subject. Li Peng and other leaders were pleased with Yuan's performance. Tian Jiyun commented sarcastically that he was an excellent practitioner of shadow boxing. (96)
With Peking University, Qinghua University, People's University, and Beijing Normal University setting the pace, students at forty-five schools were now boycotting class. There were about ninety thousand boycotters, about 70 percent of all college students in the city. ...more
Lu Xun. Wild Grass: Chinese-English Bilingual Edition. Trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. Chinese University Press: Hong Kong, 2003.
When I am silent,Lu Xun. Wild Grass: Chinese-English Bilingual Edition. Trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. Chinese University Press: Hong Kong, 2003.
When I am silent, I feel replete; as I open my mouth to speak, I am conscious of emptiness. (Foreword, 2)
Despair, like hope, is but vanity. (Hope, 36)
On the boundless wilderness, under heaven's chilly vault, this glittering, spiralling wraith is the ghost of rain.... Yes, it is lonely snow, dead rain, the ghost of rain. (Snow, 40)
The thing was completely forgotten, with no hard feelings. In that case, what forgiveness could there be? Without hard feelings, forgiveness is a lie. What hope is there for me now? My heart will always be heavy. (The Kite, 46)
This was dead fire. It had a fiery form, but was absolutely still, completely congealed, like branches of coral with frozen black smoke at their tips which looked scorched as if fresh from a fireplace. And so, casting reflections upon the ice all around and being reflected back, it had been turned into countlwess shadows, making the valley of ice as red as coral. (Dead Fire, 68)
Though the wild thistle is virtually crushed to death, it will still bear one tiny flower. I remember how moved Tolstoy was by this, how it made him write a story. Of course, when plants in the arid desert reach out desperately with their roots to suck the water deep below the ground and form and emerald forest, they are struggling for their own survival. Yet the tired, parched travellers' hearts leap up at the sight, for they know they have reached a temporary resting place. Indeed this evokes deep gratitude and sadness. Under the heading "Without a Title,<" in lieu of an address to the reader, the editors of The Sunken Bell wrote: "Some people say our society is a desolate. If this were really the case, though rather lonely it should give you a sense of infinity. It should not be so chaotic, gloomy and above all so changeful as it is." (The Awakening, 124) ...more
No necessity forced them to leave their country; they gave up a desirable social position and assured means of livelihood; nor was their object in goiNo necessity forced them to leave their country; they gave up a desirable social position and assured means of livelihood; nor was their object in going to the New World to better their position or accumulate wealth; they tore themselves away from home comforts in obedience to a purely intellectual craving; in facing the inevitable sufferings of exile they hoped for the triumph of an idea. (36)
One may count on it that the majority of mankind will always stop short in one of these two conditions: they will either believe without knowing why or will not know precisely what to believe. (187)
Moreover, there is less reason to fear the sight of the immorality of the great than that of immorality leading to greatness. In democracies private citizens see men rising from their ranks and attaining wealth and power in a few years; that spectacle excites their astonishment and their envy; they wonder how he who was their equal yesterday has today won the right to command them. To attribute his rise to his talents or his virtues is inconvenient, for it means admitting that they are less virtuous or capable than he.n They therefore regard some of his vices as the main cause thereof, and often they are correct in this view. In this way there comes about an odious mingling of the conceptions of baseness and power, of unworthiness and success, and of profit and dishonor. (221)
Do you wish to raise mankind to an elevated and generous view of the things of this world? Do you want to inspire men with a certain scorn of material goods? Do you hope to engender deep convictions and prepare the way for acts of profound devotion? Are you concerned with refining mores, elevating manners, and causing the arts to blossom? Do you desire poetry, renown, and glory? Do you set out to organize a nation so that it will have a powerful influence over al others? Do you expect it to attempt great enterprises and, whatever be the result of its efforts, to leave a great mark on history? If in your view that should be the main object of men in society, do not support democratic government; it surely will not lead you to that goal. (245)
When a man or a party suffers an injustice in the United States, to whom can he turn? To public opinion? That is what forms the majority. To the legislative body? It represents the majority and obeys it blindly. To the executive power? It is appointed by the majority and serves as its passive instrument. To the police? They are nothing but the majority under arms. A jury? The jury is the majority vested with the right to pronounce judgment; even the judges in certain states are elected by the majority. So, hoewver, iniquitous or unreasonable the measure which hurts you, you must submit. (252)
I know no country in which, speaking generally, there is less (254) independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America. (255)
Formerly tyranny used the clumsy weapons of chains and hangmen; nowadays even despotism, though it seemed to have nothing more to learn, has been perfected by civilization. . . . The master no longer says: "Think like me or you die." He does say: "You are free not to think as I do; you can keep your life and property and all; but from this day yo uare a stranger among us. You can keep your privileges in the township, but they will be useless to you, for if you solicit your fellow citizens' votes, they will not give them to you, and if you only ask for their esteem, they will make excuses for refusing that. You (255) will remain among men, but you will lose your rights to count as one. When you approach your fellows, they will shun you as an impure being, and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you too, lest they in turn be shunned. Go in peace. I have given you your life, but it is a life worse than death." (256)
In Spain the Inquisition was never able to prevent the circulation of books contrary to the majority religion. The American majority's sway extends further and has rid itself even of the thought of publishing such books. One finds unbelievers in America, but uneblief has, so to say, no organ. (256)
This is particularly true of democratic states organized after the fashion fo the American republics, where the majority has such absolute and irresistible sway that one must in a sense renounce one's rights as a citizen and, so to say, one's status as a man when one wants to diverge from the path it has marked out. (258)
Our written laws are often hard to understand, but everyone can read them, whereas nothing could be more obscure and out of reach of the common man than a law founded on precedent. Where lawyers are absolutely needed, as in England and the United States, and their professional knowledge is held in high esteem, they become increasingly separated from the people, forming a class apart. A French lawyer is just a man of learning, but an English or an American one is somewhat like the Egyptian priests, being, as they were, the only interpreter of an occult science. (267)
But juries used in civil cases too are constantly attracting some attention; they then impinge on all itnerests and everyone serves on them; in that way the system infiltrates into the business of life, thought follows the pattern of its procedures, and it is hardly too much to say that the idea of justice becomes identified with it. (274)
When the Creator handed the earth over to men, it was young and inexhaustible, but they were weak and ignorant; and by the time that they had learned to take advantage of the treasures it contained, they already covered its face, and soon they were having to fight for the right to an asylum where they could rest in freedom. It was then that North America was discovered, as if God had held it in reserve and it had only just arisen above the waters of the flood. (280)
Heraclitus was the first to emphasize this in the reality of the world: panta rei, his motto, "Everything Moves," "imperishable change that renovates Heraclitus was the first to emphasize this in the reality of the world: panta rei, his motto, "Everything Moves," "imperishable change that renovates the world"; he did not, in the Cartesian and Newtonian manner, distinguish between being and becoming; to him fire was both matter and force. (284)
For "even in science," as Heisenberg says in The Physicist's Conception of Nature, "the object of research is no longer nature itself, but man's investigation of nature. Here, again, man confronts himself alone." (287)
Outside applied science the historical development of ideas is, of course, less predictable--though, as I wrote before, in our democratic times much of the earleir independence and unpredictability of the humanities also has been eroding. Still, what happens when really significant correspondences occur? They involve not so much the "filling of gaps" as coinciding recognitions of the inadequate level of "research," of the insufficient depths, or heights, of the prevailing "dialogue" (Bernanos: "the worst, the most corrupting lies are problems poorly stated"); and this calls forth, of course, not so mucch new answers as new questions (or, perhaps, new recognitions of old questions) by solitary thinkers whose main fields of study may be quite different but who possess similar qualities of personal interest. It is thus that they are literally dissatisfied with the inadequacy fo the prevailing categories of thought. It is thus that their different paths converge: for, let me repeat, the way to certain truths leads through a graveyard of untruths. (291)
As Santayana said, "In the great ages of art nboody talked of aesthetics." (317)...more
History Consciousness: or the remembered past John Lukacs Harper & Row: New York, 1968
Huizinga, in his article, came up with a definition: "History is tHistory Consciousness: or the remembered past John Lukacs Harper & Row: New York, 1968
Huizinga, in his article, came up with a definition: "History is the spiritual form in which a culture is taking account of its past." (8)
The "inquiry" or "research" meaning of historia reflects, as Canon Alan Richardson put it, the existence of "the kind of intellectual exercise which the Greeks practised and the Hebrews did not"--or, in other words, it reflects a striving for truth even more than for justice. (11)
The distinctions ancient and modern, the innovations retrograde/i> and progressive, appear around 1600; Francis Bacon seems to have lent the modern meaning to progress in time (as distinct from its earlier meaning in space, "a royal progress"). (13)
Eighteenth century: History as literature; the narrated past. Nineteenth century: History as science; the recorded past. Twentieth century: a dual development: on the surface, history as a social science; the ascertained past. But, in a deeper and wider sense: history as a form of thought; the remembered past. (22)
Let me repeat that all human existence is historical existence, that historical thinking is potentially inherent in all human nature, and that some kind of a historical sense may be found among all human societies, including the most primitive ones: but the development of these capacities depends on their recognition: the actual consciousness of these qualities differ. (23)
Even now a person in the West may disregard most of Oriental history with little consequent loss to his proper understanding of the processes of history, while the converse is not so: no intelligent Oriental can afford to remain ignorant of Western, and specifically of European, history. And this is true not because the West has ruled the East longer than the East ruled the West; it is true because historical thinking has been a Western, though relatively recent, achievement; and because the history of the West has been exceptionally "paradigmatic"--that is, full of potentially instructive examples. History in the West has been less repetitious than elsewhere; exceptions have broken through the surface of routine more often. The historical pattern of other civilizations is more repetitive and more uniform, corresponding to some extent with the frequent element of religious fatalism which, in turn, is involved with the insufficient maturity of their historical thinking. It is thus that, by and large, similar conditions have repeatedly tended toward similar results in the "mythic and mysterious" East rather than in the "systematic and rational" West. (Still, uniformity and repetitievness do not necessarily mean predictability. In the East history may haev "repeated" itself more often than in the West: but this does not mean that what was happening in the East was more predictable, except perhaps in a negative sense: for in history, unlike in science, it is more reasonable to predict what is not going to happen than what is going to happen.) (24)
Even the writings of Tolstoy and of Dostoevsky reveal at times, in a flash the very divergent tendencies of Western and Eastern Christian traditions. "History," said Tolstoy to Gusev, "would be an excellent thing if it only were true." "If anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, Dostoevsky wrote in one of his letters, "and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with the truth." This is exactly what a Western Christian cannot do: he cannot separate Christ from the truth; and in this very Dostoevskian statement there gleams a fideistic, a near-Buddhist tendency which, notwithstanding its Christian fervor, departs from the entire Western tradition--it is a renunciation of our aspirations, and of our concept of historical truth. (27)
Many (though surely not all) of those American professors buzzing about nowadays in India or Japan on Ford or Fulbright grants do nto erally have much of a deep human interest in the East: they have, rather, chosen the Orient as a Field because of their inadequate interest in the historical traditions of the West. Yet our greatest historical thinkers were not universalists: they were convinced fo the uniqueness of the Western heritage, including that of Christianity. . . . Tolerance and generosity, like indifference and high-mindedness, are quite different things: it is easier to profess abstract virtues than to practice real ones; it is easier to be humanitarian than human; it is easier to propagate a superficial appreciation of faraway peoples than to be racked with pain and concern in attempting to understand one's own. (30)
Death and the past are not the same. Death is irrevocable; the past is not. And, if death and the past are not the same, life and the present are not the same either. The present is an abstract illusion, the elusive and slightly sickening sensation of past and future meeting in our minds; but life, unlike the present, is not an illusion at all: it is a reality. Thus, in a sense, it is life and the past that belong together; and, in another sense, it is death and the present: for death is not the freezing of the past, it is the freezing of the present. (35)
The principal intellectual element in this uneasiness has been the new recognition that even the materialist certitudes were crumbling. It is only natural that people should be confused when their accepted institutions and truths, their categories of thought and concepts of life, show cracks in their foundations. ("Sea-sickness," Samuel Butler wrote, "is the moral pain at seeing our converts escape us.") There is an immense fragmentation fo knowledge; the power of concentration weakens, sometimes fatally; there is feverish activity but without purpose, efficiency becoming fret and fuss, running in circles; private anarchy and public over-organization abound. Once large and inspiring words--Liberty, Freedom, Democracy, Justice--are losing their meanings; the meanings of other terms change, it appears that about more and more thing sthe Opposite of Everything may be true, that the existing state of affairs might be best expressed through paradoxes, that satire even illuminates less and less, since serious Facts are often mroe absurd and ridiculous than their exaggerated Fiction could be. These are the marks of an interregnum. (43)
Consider the antecedent political events of the Civil War, wrapped as they were within layers and layers of legal arguments (for the law is often a peculiarly American substitute for philosophy); there is a lofty trickiness in the Lincoln-Douglass debates which is very American; and the fundamental problems were, of course, much deeper than the legal, constitutional, political arguments. (65)
. . . and in 1836 William Henry Harrison was the first presidential candidate who decided to "stump" the country in order to make himself popular; he was perhaps the first American who "ran" instead of having "stood" for such an election. This marked a turning-point in the history of AMerican democracy, the turn in the concept of high elective office from delegation to representation. perhaps it was in 1836 that the transformation of the united States from a constitutional to a democratic republic was completed. Another turning-point may have been 1917, the American entry in World War I, and Wilson's creation of the deplorable Creel Committee on Public Information, the first official American government agency dedicated to large-scale opinion-making; or, perhaps, the 1950's, with the emergence of the pollsters and of the televised electoral campaign, when the measurement and the manufacture of popularity became synchronized and combineed operations. (84)
"In a modern society," W.H. Auden wrote in 1948, "whatever its political form, the great majority prefer opinion to knowledge, and passively allow the former to be imposed on them by a centralized few--I need only mention as an example the influence of the Sunday book supplements of the newspapers upon our public libraries." Auden grasped what may be the essence of the contemporary historical problem of public opinion: the propagation of preferences through the procedures of publicity, procedures which involve new and subtle falsifications of reality peculiar to our age. (88)
"What is truth?" I cannot answer Pilate's question; but I shall not wash my hands under the laboratory faucet of the specialist; if I cannot answer what truth is, I can at least say what it is not. Apart from all metaphysics, I can but say that the purpose of historical truth (like every fact, every truth is to some extent historical) is understanding even moer than accuracy, involving the reduction of untruth; and I can say that the nature of truth is inseparable from personal knowledge; that it cannot be proven by definitions but that it can be suggested through words. (108)
Consider what Maupassant wrot ein his only essay (disguised as his preface to Pierre et Jean). The aim of the realistic novelist "is nto to tell a story, to amuse us or to appeal to our feelings, but to compel us to reflect, and to understand the darker and deeper meaning of events. . . ." A historian could have written that. The functions of historians and novelists overlap; their dependence is mutual; their approach is much the same--description, in prose, always the description of some kind of past (for even the utopian noevl projects the reader in time beyond the "events" narrated by the author in "retrospect"). In the broad sense every novel is a historical novel. The novel was a typical product of the Bourgeois Age. Literaturein almost all of it sknown forms was either created or first perfected by the Greeks: the novel is the only exception. If this is one of the reasons of its possible demise, this was one of the principal reasons of its emergence two hundred years ago. Not only was the novel a "transitory response to certain conditions"; more than that, the novel may have been a manifestation of the development of historical consciousness. For the once customary view of equating the novel with narrative, seeing in it a prosaic form of the epic, is mistaken. "The novel and the epic," wrote Ortega y Gasset in 1914, are precisely poles apart. The theme of the epic is the past as such: it speaks to us about a world which was and which is no longer, of a mythical age whose antiquity is not a past in the same sense as any remote historical time. It is true that local piety kept gradually linking Homeric men and gods to the citizens of the present by means of slender threads, but this net of genealogical traditions does not succeed in bridging the absolute gap which exists between the mythical yesterday and the real today. No matter how many real yesterdays we interpolate, the sphere inhabited by the Achilleses and the Agamemnons has no relatinoship with our existence,a nd we cannot reach it, step by step, by retracing the path opened up by the march of time. The epic past is not our past. Our past (118) is thinkable as having been the present once, but the epic past eludes identification with any possible present, and when we try to get back to it by means of recollection it gallops away from us like Diomedes' horses, forever at the same distance frmo us. No, it is not a remembered past but an ideal past. (119)
"The poet and the historian," he said in Poetics (IX, 1), "differ not by writing in verse or prose. The work of Herodotus might be put in verse and it still would be a species of history with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philoosphic and higher thing than history; for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular." (125)
The desire for change is a fundamental human characteristic (curiosity rather than carnal desire may be a source of passion). (136)
And the most meaningful reflections of these distinct tendencies of national character are to be found, of course, in the different national languages, the habits of which are veritable mirrors of national characteristics. I have mentioned the subtle differences of the "same" words in different languages earlier. Let em repeat here that expression does have a nationality, even while thought may not always have one. I say "always" because expression has a way of forming consciousness; it is therefore legitimate to speak of national mentalities, and of tendencies of national consciousness which are discernible on occasion. (205)
We may say of persons that the main motive factor of their actions is self-interest; but this is a truism. Take such different modern thinkers as Machiavelli, La Rochefoucauld, Bentham, Stendhal, Spencer, Tocqueville, Marx, Freud--yes, of course, this is what all of them say. But the better thinkers among them (Stendhal rather than Bentham, Tocqueville rather than Marx) do not leave it at that; they see deeper motives: fear and greed, guilt and ambition, all entangled; the best of them see vanity (a forgotten word nowadays) as th ebasic human motive. FOr what is self-interest, after all? Its formation comes from the concept of the self: an entangled thing, a complex thing, a tendency rather than a category, an aspiration rather than a constant. (207)
The decisive element is often not so much what a person "is" but what he wants to be. (Ortega y Gasset: "Life is a gerundive, not a participle: a faciendum, not a factum. Life is a task. . . ." Tocqueville: "a serious spiritual business.") And this is true of entire nations, too, whose character traits are formed but not caused: formed by their histories, and by their conscoiusness of their histories. (210)
Thus, while a person is responsible for his a,ctions, a nation is responsible only in part; for a nation has but a halfway sort of claim to immortality. Men die and disappear from this earth while nations do not die for a long, long time; but while the soul of a man is liable to divine judgment and is immortal, the soul of a nation is not. (211)
Let me, thus, round out the reverse Cartesian phrase too. Sum ergo cogito ergo sum. Again, the logic in this seemingly--but only seemingly--circular statement is not mathematical but historical. I was born a human being. I exist. I think. And my recognition of the historicity of my thinking lends another dimension to my existence: the two sums, the two "I am's," reflect two levels: and the causality implied by the two connecting ergos are slightly different, too. I am, therefore I think, therefore I am. (226)
It indeed seems that Western civilization, during the last one thousand years, may have shifted its intellectual emphasis twice: (232) from theology to humanism, and then to scientism--or, in other words, it seems that while in the Middle Ages the principal business of man's intellect was considered to be man's knowledge of God, thereafter the emphasis may have changed to man's knowledge of man, until lately it became man's knowledge of his environment. (233)
The now fashionable kind of environmental subjectivism cannot go beyond a certain level of honesty, sicne it says, at best, something like the following: "I am writing or saying this because, at this time, this is my subjective impression; and since it is a subjective impression, it cannot be absolutely certain." But the purpose of human knowledge is understanding rather than certainty; and, moreover, the issue involves too, as we have seen, the purposes of the expression, which are perhaps even more personal than are the motives of the impression. What the historian should say, instead, is something like this: "I am writing or saying this because this is at the this time my personal way of seeing and saying something that I believe to be true." (236)
Being capable of love at almost any time is one of the major capacities in which men differ from animals, one of the reasons for thi sbeing that the development of this capacity is involved with imagination (whence the circumstance that certain men with high intellectual powers have been highly successful lovers.) Ortega y Gasset as well as his bete noire Stendhal recognized, in their different ways how, contrary to modern Freudianism, lust is not, as Ortega put it, "an instinct but a specifically human creation--like literature. In both, the most important factor is imagina- (239) tion. . . . The sexual instinct . . . in man . . . is almost always found to be indissolubly united, at least, with fantasy." To this I should add that sexual perversion may be often not the result of a hormonoal or physical imbalance but of existential and historical conditions, involving a disease of imagination. (240)
Imagination does not create images that are completely new. Wha tmemory and imagination together help create are always, to some extent, recognitions, including, of course, new varieties of recognitions. The common sense of the English language intimates this truth, sinc we employ the word "recognition" more often and more broadly than the word "cognition." Perhaps this usage in itself suggests how every cognition is, to a great extent, a recognition, involving some kind of association relative to something that we already know-the reverse of this truth being that remembering is something more than a mental reaction; it is, rather, a kind of construction; as the young Ortega y Gasset wrote in 1914 about the act of seeing: it "consists of applying a previous image which we have to a present sensation." (245)
In the first place, as Pascal said, we often understand more than we know, to which I shall add that this happens almost always through some kind of remembering. In the second place, history is a form of thought resting on common sense and on everyday language--something which facilitates (though probably it does not create) the really amazing condition that not only is there no essential difference between present-knowledge and past-knowledge but that there is not very much difference between the nature of our knowledge of those fragments (247) of the past that we personally "witnessed" and of our understanding of those that we had not. (248)
But the basic human factor is personal, not environmental, since men may transcend all kinds of tendencies, the influences of environment as well as heridity: as the Austrian neuropsychiatrist Viktor Frankl recently wrote, man is "no 'product' at all, except in the sense that his life is the result of his choices; he himself is formed by his own choices; and his education, really, means th[e education of his capacity to choose." (257)
Truth is an existential, a sensual as well as an intellectual experience. It exists within us. The truth is always richer than the lie. "The profoundest of all sensualities," D. H. Lawrence wrote, "is the sense of truth." "Mysteries," said the theologian Jouve, "are not truths which exceed us, but truths that include us." "The true artist," Camus said, "forces himself to understand instead of judging"; and the historian Marc Bloch wrote that "not to understand is to admit defeat." (267)
Yet the introduction of the name "wavicle" does preciously little to solve the problem of whether light consists of waves or of particles; and it may be that the continuing nominalistic habit of proposing new terms (sometimes rather silly-sounding ones, such as "neutrino") suggests that illusion of the modern mind which tends to substitute vocabulary (280) for thought, tending to believe that once we name or define something we've "got it." Sometimes things may get darker through definitions, Dr. Johnson said; . . . (281) ...more
BELLICOSE AND THUGGISH: The Roots of Chinese "Patriotism" at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century (2002)
The "great rejection" idea is upside-down theoBELLICOSE AND THUGGISH: The Roots of Chinese "Patriotism" at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century (2002)
The "great rejection" idea is upside-down theory in the sense that it begins with a neat formula and then fills in facts to suit it. It says: in politics, reject Western "political hegemony" and oppose "peaceful evolution" in a pro-West direction. In military affairs, prepare for confrontation with American "military hegemony," an call for a multipolar international order. In economics, prevent "capital hegemony" from controlling China, and retain our people's economy as the indisputable top priority. In the cultural realm, prevent "Western discursive hegemony," which is also "cultural colonialism," and advocate the indigenization of scholarship. (81)
Western rules and standards are everywhere. In the view of the hegemony theorists, the "system hegemony" (81) of the West is unfair. It did not come about because Western culture and Western systems are superior to others or because they are intrinsically more "universal." It came about because the West has been economically, technologically, and militarily more powerful. Material differences, not value differences, put it where it is. (82)
In recent world history, the worship of violence has always found convenient pretexts: during the Second World War, the efficiency of Fascism was the rationale; during the Cold War, it was the Communist ideal of one-world harmony; and now, for China, it is ultra-nationalism. (83)
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EPILOGUE TO Chinese Politics and China's Modern Intellectuals (1989)
I might point out that the West's overriding emphasis on rationality, science, and money has resulted in the loss of individuality and in a commercial[ization that overwhelms all resistance; I might also criticize the economic stratification that technological itnegration has brought about, and I can repudiate the ways in whichc onsumer culture has inured humanity to an unquestioning addiction to affluence and a cowardly fear of freedom. (122)
How can people who lack a sense of "original sin" ever hear the voice of God? From the early Middle Ages, when God was a being of reason, to the late Middle Ages, when God was a figure of power, to modern times, when God became even more profoundly subjected to reason, and finally to today's world, where God has gradually become secularized, human civilization has been in descent. By its own hand, humanity in the West has killed the sacred values of its heart. (123)
My wife [first wife, Tao Li] once wrote to me in a letter: Xiaobo, on the surface you seem to be a rebel within this society, but in fact you have a deep identification with it. The system treats you as an opponent, and in so doing it accommodates you, tolerates you, even flatters and encourages you. In a sense you are an oppositional ornament of the system. But me? I'm an invisible person; I disdain eve nto demand anything of this society, and don't lose sleep over how I am going to denounce it. It is I, not you, who am fundamentally incompatible with it. Even you cannot comprehend my profound indifference. Not even you can accommodate me. (124)
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THE EROTIC CARNIVAL IN RECENT CHINESE HISTORY (2004)
Especially stunning is the fact that cultured people--literary people--can view this kind of blatant "sex banquet" as a form of high culture. They quote the poetic line "With bodies warm and stomachs full, thoughts next turn to sex" and cite the Chinese sex craze as evidence that ths society is achieving middle-class prosperity. (165)
The roots of this cynicism and moral vacuity must be traced to the Mao era. It was then (an era that "leftist" nostalgia today presents as one of moral purity) that the nation's spirit suffered its worst devastation. During the Cultural revolution people "handed their reddest hearts to Chairman Mao." Why, after doing that, would one still need one's own spirit? (170)
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FROM WANG SHUO'S WICKED SATIRE TO HU GE'S EGAO: Political Humor in a Post-Totalitarian Dictatorship (2006)
There is some truth in this. Egao in post-totalitarian Chian is a symptom of spiritual hunger and intellectual poverty at the same time. It can be seen as a kind of psychosomaticc drug, something that works hand-in-hand with the vacuous comedy shows that the official media present, except that it can be even more effective than those in its power to anesthetize. People can get drunk laughing at one political joke after another that tells about suffering, corruption, and unhappiness. Jokes on such topics can become mere commodities to enjoy--as in "That's a good one!" One could even say that the laughter egao induces is a heartless kind, soemthing that buries people's senses of justice and their normal human sympathies. (184)
When "carnival" comes along, according to Bakhtin, the people at the grassroots, accustomed to their place at the receiving end of scoldings, suddenly become "fearless." They produce a spontaneous logical inversion of the base and the noble, of up and down. They use parody, mockery, ridicule, and insolence--sarcasm of several forms--to vent their sentiments, but these are not (185) simply negative sentiments aimed at knocking something down. Satire of what is wrong implies that something else is right; it tears things down for the sake of rebirth. (186)
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JUNE 2 HUNGER STRIKE DECLARATION (1989)
[Our Basic Watchwords] 1. We have no enemies. We must not let hatred or violence poison our thinking or the progress of democratization in China. 2. We must reflect on our ways. China's backwardness is everyone's responsibility. 3. We are citizens before we are anything else. 4. We are not seeking death. We are seeking to live true lives. (282)
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USING TRUTH TO UNDERMINE A SYSTEM BUILT ON LIES: Statement of Thanks in Accepting the Outstanding Democracy Activist Award (of SF, in 2003)
We can even say that what the autocrats at the top fear most is not violent uprisings, which they can put down (so long as these are not too large, and we should be wary of wishing for full-scale violent revolution, which might only bring a new dictatorship); their worst nightmare is a situation in which every person, beginning with intellectuals and the other notables who speak in public, is able to ignore material inducements and begins to refuse to utter lies. Even to say nothing, even just to remain silent, would be enough, so long as no lies are repeated and everyone agrees to stop living off the telling of lies. The system would choke. (296) ...more
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