The Rule of Law and China

A great article in the New York Times about the Chinese legal system.

Some pertinent highlights for what I want to talk about:

'As with the school collapses, the milk scandal involves a web of complicity linking company executives to government officials. Those connections make sorting out responsibility a delicate political task. Rather than allow the courts to weigh in, officials prefer to press complainants to take compensation, said Teng Biao, a lawyer in Beijing who is collecting material for a possible class-action lawsuit. “Traditionally in China, politics is always higher than the law,” he said.

“To protect Sanlu is to protect the government itself,” he added. “A public health crisis like this not only involves Sanlu. It involves many officials from authorities in the city of Shijiazhuang up to the central government. It involves media censorship, the food quality regulatory system and the corrupt deal between commercial merchants and corrupt officials.”'

'Many lawyers find it hard to ignore the entreaties of provincial judicial bureaus or lawyers associations, which they are required to join. Those groups are controlled by the Ministry of Justice, which ultimately makes the rules for licensing lawyers.'

'There was no outright ban on class-action lawsuits, but the association put in place onerous rules, including a requirement that lawyers report conversations with clients to the judicial bureaus[.]'

When I talk with people about China, and they mention democracy, I always say that it's a long way off, and far from the most important thing at this moment. Democracy, as we have seen in Iraq, is not a cure for what ails ya, it is a structure ensuring stability that can be functional only after many props are inserted for it to rest on, and one of the most important, and the one I always mention to people, is the Rule of Law. Rule of Law, basically, is the idea that no one is higher than the law, and that everyone respects the decisions of the law and of due process.

The law has to be basically respectable, of course, or no one would follow it.

As the above quote makes clear, this is definitely not the case in China. Things in China run on a personal basis, not an impersonal one, and the Law, if it is to be effective, must be impersonal. No one above it, and no one below (an ideal the West still has not entirely mastered.) I have written about this before, here.

A student and I discussed this a week ago, and, astoundingly to me, the Chinese reaction to the crisis is, "we should trust the government to handle it and to do what's right." Seeing as how the government is largely, though not entirely responsible, this struck me as foolish. Without a recourse to change, of course, there's little the Chinese people can say. Still, the reaction isn't so much, "we're powerless to do anything, we have to hope the government can help out," it's still "the government will do what's right." There's little sense in China of government ever being the problem, even with people who agree that the Mao years of Communist rule were devastating to the country.

There's also a sense that the government, as monolithic as it may appear in the west, is actually made up of fairly separate entities, and that the local government may not be on the people's side, but the central government will still do what's right, and that's the case here as well. Along with an increasing openness in the media and what's allowed to be reported on, it gives Chinese people the sense of progress.

How long will it continue though, until something bursts? Will the government ever really be able to put the law above the party, or, say, turn the army over to the country, instead of having a private Communist army? Watch and learn.

A way of thinking about Dennett's theory of consciousness: a vote, and decision making.

I was just thinking about an article I wrote about here when I thought of a much better (and topical) metaphor for the way consciousness works in the human brain according to Daniel Dennett.

For the non-clickers:

(From Dennett:)

'"I claim that consciousness is not some extra glow or aura or "quale" caused by the activities made possible by the functional organization of the mature cortex; consciousness is those various activities. One is conscious of those contents whose representations briefly monopolize certain cortical resources, in competition with many other representations. The losers—lacking "political clout" in this competition—quickly fade leaving few if any traces, and that’s the only difference between being a conscious content and being an unconscious content."'

(From myself:)
"Basically, there is no "little man" of consciousness sitting in your brain, editing what comes in and then sending it up to "you," a separate medium, to become conscious content. It is the sum total of the activities of the neurological system that is consciousness itself."

It was the term "political clout" that got me thinking about this, along with a few weeks of staring at polls every day, and a metaphor popped into my head, more helpful perhaps than the negative example of the little man in explaining what (I think) Dennett means: the vote for president.

What Dennett is saying, with this analogy, would be, "the final determination of who becomes the next president of the United States (the outcome of the process, or "consciousness,") is not some extra capital "V" vote, (quale or aura,) it is the activities of millions of voters voting. This may seem like no more than a tricky accounting method, but the distinction is important. It is also fairly obvious when talking about a vote, but perhaps not so much when talking about our own consciousness. There is no president in your head, no controlling piece that decides what to do and what to show, what becomes conscious and what not, but millions of separate components all clamoring for attention (millions of voters with their own individual preferences and requirements.) When they reach a critical mass, they "monopolize certain cortical resources," and you become aware of something.

In fact, when we choose a president we are basically doing what everybody intuits we are doing
and what Dennett says we are precisely not doing: putting a "little guy" in charge of it all at the top of the head who makes the decisions. We choose an arbitrary point (the first Tuesday in November on a four-year cycle) to gather the input of all these little contributors, and then, ceremoniously and ritually assign, for the next four years, the one person that was able to align himself most broadly with the contributors, the voters, to the job of "decider."

There is some feedback, in terms of media and public opinion polls, but for the most part this is not what is happening in our brains: it's what we think is happening. What is really happening, according to Dennett, is more as if there were a constant election, not for a representative but on issues of state, and whenever a person decided to throw his or her vote in a different direction, her or she would do so, and whenever a voting level reached some critical threshold, it would be enacted, or changed, say, at 65% approval a new law would be passed, or at 30% disapproval something would be revoked.

In this way, the brain is a tyrannic democracy.

Some other random thoughts that sprang from this idea:

In this light it becomes much more apparent how ritualized government is, how we try to approximate power and make it more practical and benificial to the most people, and how that changes over time due to the evolution of social and religious (ritual) beliefs, as in how a King, standing in for God, makes decisions that are the best for everyone in the kingdom in aggregate top-down, versus how a president, standing in for a symbolic unity of the country and the opinions of the people, makes decisions informed by the will from below (the people) and not imposing them from above (this is an ideal, obviously a certain current president feels somewhat more like a king according to this way of thinking, at least at times.)

Similarly, what we call the "ego," is no more than a fiction we put in place as a shorthand way of understanding the millions of little bits of information inside, outside, and created in the relation between inside and outside. As noted in my earlier blog, this is why I think buddhist philosophy would be quite comfortable with Dennett's work.

This is why government is ritualistic, the ultimate power is never coming from it, it is legitimized only in so far as it reflects the will of God, or the will of the people, the ultimate powers. What we call the ego is a puppet standing in for the real thing, standing in for "will," (wherever you think that is coming from, an entirely different discussion) acting out ritually as if in a play. It is, first and foremost, an abstraction.

This idea of a threshold being met that changes everything is rather prevelent in nature, and seems to be one of the key ways in which things work. (Chronicled from a slightly different angle in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink.) Neuron firings are a good example. Neurons constantly exchange ions coming in and out of their cell bodies, and electrical gradients are constantly changing, without triggering a change in the cell. But as soon as a critical charge is reached, as soon as the electrical gradient is overwhelmingly positive, for example, the electron fires.

Anyone who has watched a baby grow or learned something new him or herself (especially as an adult, when you tend to be more aware of these types of things) would likely be familiar with this as well. Practice (as discussed in the book Mastery) alternates between brief periods of incredible progress, followed by long plateus where nothing seems to change. I have noticed this playing the guitar, and also learning Chinese, as well as in practicing tai ji/ qi gong. Every day for four months it seems like I can't string two freaking sentences together, and then, as if by magic, two weekends ago, I'm babbling along without stopping, my accent got better exponentially, and my accessible vocabulary improved. I had, of course, been working on all of these things the whole time, but they didn't show any tangible improvement, or any steady improvement, until they all did all together all at once.

Think of it this way, perhaps: you are on a certain "level" of your practice, and there are 100 buttons. You need to push 70 of them to move on to the next level, but you also need to learn a certain technique to push each one individually, and learning each takes time and practice, and the buttons only stay depressed a certain amount of time. As you get better and better at pushing certain buttons individually, more and more stay depressed, until finally it "clicks," you've gotten 70 of the buttons depressed simultaneously and suddenly you're in a whole new world, you're on another level, and you have to start all over again exploring from here. Of course, on this new level, the options open to you are much much wider. And, of course, this is a only a silly analogy, though there may be some truth to it.

The worry about global warming stems from this idea. People aren't concerned that gradually, over the next hundred or two hundred years, things will change. Those concerned are worried because in a comparative instant, thousands of species will go extinct, the earth will become five degrees warmer, sea levels will rise in the meters, and floods will inundate lands. Again, not in isolated and separate incidents, but basically all together. The havok that this will wreck on civilization is one thing, but it may knock out the whole species. We just don't know, we don't know what will happen after the moment of change.

There's a variety pack for you to chew on.

Shining

The above is the best video I've seen of a band that I saw last Thursday night in Beijing that blew my face off. They were absolutely revelatory, and I mean that literally. The best part in the video, I think, comes around 5:22 seconds in and lasts for twenty or thirty seconds. I've just been watching it over and over again.

Chinese Nineties Kids （九零后）

I had an interesting conversation recently with an old-china hand about the kids growing up in China today, and his opinion and mine match pretty well: they suck.

Now, some of this may just be crotchety-old-timerism, as he is older than I am, and I myself am a generation removed from these brats, but of course, as my opinion, I think some of it is warranted.

I've written a couple of things about these kids before since I find them fascinating, here, about some of my students and how they don't have any time of their own, and here, about the phenomenon of having a country of single children.

The way my conversational partner put it was that "if you were born in the 40's in China, you had a fascinating life [though not always a great one], if you were born in the 50's (60's, 70's) you're living a fascinating life, even if you were born in the 80's you'll live a fascinating life, but if you were born in the 90's, your life is shit!"

That's in quotes but is certainly not verbatim.

The charge against the kids is that they have no roots, care for nothing but money and personal comfort etc, etc, and as far as I can tell this is true. They are pampered more or less by their elders (sometimes two sets of grandparents and of course their parents) but have little of a real emotional connection to them, are given complete free reign to do as they please within rigidly defined boundaries (you should see these kids in restaurants it's terrifying, but, of course, when seven am rolls around they're off to class lock-step,) grow up isolated from any historical sense of their culture other than what is purely sentimental (of course, sentimentalism seems to be the common thread of modern Chinese culture, a harsh but only slightly exaggerated comment) part of which is that the concept of hardships is really no more than a concept. (We are talking mostly about urban lower-middle class to upper class kids, of course.) There's much more here that I won't go into depth about but, basically, these kids suck. The above, of course, are just theories as to why, you'd have to actually see them and their behavior to really understand what I'm saying. Those of you who have seen them probably agree. I actually give them some slack, I think they're growing up in a real twisted environment. My girlfriend (Chinese) is harsher on them than I am.

On a hike on the great wall, I saw some chalking done by some (obviously) 90's kids that said, basically, "there is no love, there is only fooling people." This is a typical sentiment, I feel, from them. Of course, seeing the culture they've grown up in, it's hard to argue that, from their point of view, it could appear any other way. More later, perhaps.

But this is where it gets interesting.
Apparently, according to the old-China hand, the PLA (People's Liberation Army, which would be the Army of China if it didn't belong exclusively to the Communist Party, a distinction only a naive foreigner would make) commissioned a study some years ago about what the effect of China's rise would be in the world, undergone by the intellectuals, and freed of any official pressure (the warping effects of pressure are applied after the study is published,) that found that China's rise into the world order would start seriously conflicting with other countries in the late 2020's and the 2030's, right at the time when these twits would be taking over the country. After this period, China would be an established world power, and the balance would be restored, but during the period of troubles, the idiots would reign.

Because of the arch-conservative nature of the central party, I am hoping this will not entirely turn out to be true, but certainly that generation will be the ascendant one during this time period, which is just great for everyone concerned.

I just can't wait.

Conservativism and Liberalism

The following article was sent to me by a friend a few weeks ago, having had an interesting and busy few weeks I have not had time to reply to it, but I finally have some time to sit down and hammer this out. The article is by Stanford economist Thomas Sowell, and its basic point is that liberals are dreamers who are unwilling to see the world for how it is, and that the more experience one has with the world, the more conservative one becomes, barring the sort of buffers (judicial/ academic tenure, trust funds) that keep one from actually facing the real world.

Here is a David Brooks column that came out around the same time I received the Sowell piece, coincidentally. Brooks basically (and oh so gently) says that Sarah Palin is a bad idea, and actually unintentionally provides an argument that McCain would not be a very good man to have sitting next to the big button. More on that below.

Firstly, though, I think the Sowell argument has a terrific number of holes in it, the main one being that the article somewhat assumes that the world is static. While there may be certain unescapable realities, (like the need to defend yourself and country, at least for this millenium) the world has changed quite a bit in, say, the last hundred years, and Sowell fails to take into account that most of these changes a) have been overwhelmingly positive and b) would never in a million years have been allowed if conservatives ran everything. Just as one particularly relevant example, take civil rights. Sowell is a black man, and a hundred years ago, there'd be no chance in hell that he would be able to express his opinion in such a manner.

There is, of course, the argument that the economic progresses spurred on by conservative policies is what ultimately led to the country's social progress. While partially true, this argument misses several things. Firstly, broad social progress was made in many countries without the type of relatively laissez-faire economic system the United States has. Secondly, many of the tangible and legal gains made socially occurred before the Reagan administration and only later started to filter into becoming mainstream culture, and thirdly, even with economic progress, there have still been fights over social equality, it's not like it just happened smoothly or magically.

I will admit that without economic stability much of the social progress we've seen would have been impossible, and yet this is far from a cause of the effect.

Liberals may tend to imagine that things can change overnight, and that human nature is entirely dependent on circumstance, both true weaknesses, and they have a tendency to believe that inequality is simply a matter of reapportioning, which is also extremely dangerous and mistaken. But there are very few mainstream political liberals in America who still subscribe to the above, while there are quite a few conservatives that subscribe to an equivalently extreme ideology in power in the country.

Sowell ignores in his examples maybe the one best popular figure who was sheltered from experience, someone who got through college and then graduate school, and even business life, on the wings of his family: Dubbya. As if. As if being a trust funder would make you automatically liberal, as if most of the people who have to work themselves to go through college and had a tough life automatically would be conservative because of their experience in "the real world," as if experience automatically meant disappointment, or that the harder the life, the more conservative the fellow. All of this is garbage.

If we take (as I think Sowell does) conservativism to mean the political trait of steady-as-it-goes-ism, and liberalism as being the trait of using the engine of government to effect change in society, than there's good reason why the older one gets, the more conservative one gets beyond wising-up (though certainly this does happen.) As I've mentioned before, change is generational and not as often individual, that is, change in society doesn't come because most people want it to, it happens naturally as new generations are born into different circumstances, and the more different their circumstances the faster the wheel moves. This can be disquieting when one can't get a grip on their own society, it can feel like one's lost...(like, say, certain older people writing letters instead of email.)

The above definitions are necessary because we do not live in a static world. Certainly Sowell is not defending the 1750's brand of conservatism, what were called the loyalists in the revolutionary world, right? Saying that conservatives stand for slow change effected by people may seem to take the burden off of this argument, and while there is a strain of conservatism that believes, perhaps heartily, in this, in fact the vast majority of people who are culturally conservative don't advocate any sort of progress towards equality in opportunity but are more likely to react (hence reactionary) against it violently, tipping their hands off as to how they really feel. (See ex-Majority leader Trent Lott's comments about Strom Thurmond being elected president and how that would have kept so much of today's "mess," from ever happening. While again theoretical conservatives are more likely to say that change is a slow process coming from below, in practice this is simply not true.

Experience may well make you examine your beliefs, or disappointment, at least, but that does not mean one will necessarily become conservative, or that those who are conservative have, on average, more of this kind of experience than everyone else. Some kids are idiots, and idealistic, but often kids are stupid in the opposite direction from the left. Kids are blind, but sight does not necessarily improve with age, and one can be blind and walk in many directions.

Another reason people "become" conservative is that as they get older, and have to take care of themselves, they become less concerned with the state of society and more concerned with their own house, not because they've changed their mind about anything fundamental, or because the experience of paying bills every month has made them realize that poor people are lazy, but because things that seemed important earlier in life just aren't so much anymore. It's not becoming conservative so much as losing a system of beliefs never acted upon in a change of situation. Again, this experience is not of the "oops, I made a mistake" variety, just the "oops, I don't actually really care that much about what happens outside of my door as I used to think I did because everyone else did." I think this is probably the line of thinking closest to Sowell's, and yet I see no need to label this process "experience" generically, nor do I imagine that leaving college equals, somehow, disappointment, and that the result is a more mature, wise, realistic adult.

The biggest problem with the Sowell essay, beyond the specific argument, and with others of its type, both on the left and on the right is that, as we've seen time and time again over history, in the last hundred years, and even recently, no side or party is ever right about anything, since an ideology carried forth to its extreme basically always brings the worst things possible. This is what the generation in college (or me, and others informally polled near my age) was so excited about at the beginning with Obama. There is a way that includes certain things that Thomas Sowell would undoubtedly agree with that the die-hard liberals of his age would not that have been shown to be effective, that also includes age-old talking points of the left, and this way is inaccessible from either side exclusively, which has been the promise of Obama, whether or not he can carry that through. In a way, this could ideally be the pinnacle of American government, the compromise between two competing ideas that makes everyone better off. Brooks' article brings up an even more interesting point about the ability to bring conflicting views into agreement and take action.

And this is also basically the best argument I can think of for transparency in government. Transparency creates more record and more fact, and less spin. The more secrecy there is, the more is kept hidden or obfuscated, the easier it is to distort what's happening, in any circumstance.

Prudence is one of the qualities Brooks talks about, but how surreal is it that the candidate who fits Brooks' bill as displaying "the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation... [the] ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events — the things that go together and the things that will never go together...the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight" is clearly Obama? This is Obama's strongest point as a potential president, and his weakest as a candidate (or at least it ties into his weakest point as a candidate: being unable to boil it down simply, quite likely a structural impossibility.) I've been saying the whole race that this critical ability, so clearly lacking in our current president, is what's needed and what this man has. He may not have governmental experience, but he certainly has this trait of being able to take in multiple points of view and reconciling them. Brooks' words are so similar to some of the profiles of Obama that they could have been cut-and-pasted from them. Clearly, either Obama has experience or prudence does not necessarily come from it. The candidate with the type of experience Brooks talks up has become brasher and even more impulsive the longer the campaign has gone on, taking leap after leap only to come back a few days later and leap in the other direction.

Another side note on this, I've been getting mail lately that's pointing out how much of a disadvantage Obama is running with, partly, though not entirely, due to race. McCain is running with some baggage that would have destroyed any black man immediately (like, say, graduating at the bottom of his class, divorcing his first wife, having a wife who approproiated painkillers from her own charity, Palin's unwed teenage daughter, etc.) while Obama's life story, tacked onto a McCain type character, would be an instant president-maker. Just imagine how different the news organizations and the far right would have reacted if it were Obama's daughter and not Palin's who was pregnant. I don't think anyone with anything like an objective point of view would be able to say with a straight face that it would be able to be turned into a positive in the almost farcical way it has for Palin. This is bullshit, pure and simple, and, for all their experience, it is not likely to be something a conservative today would care too much about bringing up as an issue, or as something that might need to be examined in our collective psyche. But it does.