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.

Are they really that bad?

This has been puzzling me for sometime.

The picture to the right is of two of the posters for the Paralympics in Beijing, like the posters for the olympics, placed in the subway. The one on the left is of a wheelchair basketball player, obviously, and the one on the right, though at first it looks like there might not be anything wrong with the judoists, shows two blind people squaring off, which you can tell if you look closely at the one in blue's eyes. All well and good. There are about eight of these, give or take, and they're all mostly like this: clearly disabled folk, sporting. There's one of a sprinter with only one leg, one of a fencer in a wheelchair, etc. etc.

And then there's this:

Since my usual pace through the subway is so quick that I don't have the time to rigorously investigate every advertisement, I just assumed for a while that there must be something wrong with this guy's arms, or something. After a few days of spot-checking as I raced past it, though, it was clear that nothing was wrong.

I have since found out that deaf and blind people play soccer in the Paralympics, but does that seem like a good thing to represent visually on a poster?

In anycase, since China's soccer team is absolutely terrible, the fact that the man on the poster looks normal begs the question. Are they really that bad?

The Paralympics, and "Cultural Difference."

The paralympics have begun!

Interestingly enough, "para-" in paralympics does not stand for paralyzed, or paraplegic, as I'd assumed before looking it up on Wikipedia, "para-" instead coming from the Greek, and meaning, "besides." So, it means, basically, an athletic competition to take place besides the Olympics (as in, next to.)

Of course, this was just quick thinking. Originally it did stand for "paraplegic," but the inclusion of people with other disabilities made this unsuitable. That's a pretty lucky coincidence, or it would be if the root of "para-" in paraplegic were not the same. But it is.

Anyway, from the official hooplah here you'd think that the Paralympics were as much of a big deal as the Olympics. (I don't mean to be dismissive, I am merely noting that in spectators, number of sports, number of participating athletes, number of advertising dollars spent, etc. etc., the Olympics overshadow their disabled brother.) I have no recollection of this being the case in Atlanta, and of course, there are basically no news stories about athletes or television coverage, what have you, in the western newspapers, unless a story makes a headline for a different reason (say in an article in the Times recently about the benefits the Paralympic athletes get as opposed to those the Olympic athletes get from the USOC.)

At first, I just thought this was China, well, being China, going graciously over-the-top as a host. They are, after all, trying to win us over. (And win over us, but that's a different matter.)

But, as I've been thinking about it, though the above is certainly still a part of the reason for the overwhelming coverage (the games are on T.V. and are similarly unavoidable on the newspapers and newscasts, plus, in Chinese, the Olympics aren't over yet, by which I mean the Olympics and the Paralympics are considered as one big event rather than, as in English, two entirely separate, if related, ones) I've come up with some other possible reasons.

China, as I've mentioned, is trying basically to pull itself one-hundred and fifty to two-hundred years forward in a generation, plus maybe a half. Part of process is acculturation. Party Elites have to do quite a lot of tugging in many different arenas to do this, since it is so drastic, and one of the areas is in manners, basically. There has been a significant improvement in the spitting all over the place, though you still see some egregious examples, like while walking in the subway tunnels, or (not kidding) hocking one up and spitting it out on the inside of the subway car door. That, of course, doesn't count on the streets, where I am far less grossed out. Lining up, too, is a fraction better than it is in Shaoxing, though mostly, still, the line is a foreign concept, and I usually just wait until everyone else is on the Subway before getting on, since, as I am accustomed to waiting for everyone to get off before I get on, I wouldn't get on before everyone else anyway. (Figure that one out, and you should chuckle.) So, I actually half-agree with the statements of the Director of the Paralympics for China below, when he mentions "cultural difference."
Beijing withdraws advice on disabled
The Associated Press
Thursday, May 29, 2008

Olympic organizers said Thursday that they had withdrawn parts of an English translation of a guide for volunteers because of "inappropriate language" used to describe disabled athletes. Zhang Qiuping, director of the Paralympic Games in Beijing, did not offer an apology and attributed the problems to poor translation. "Probably it's cultural difference and mistranslation," Zhang said.

The Chinese-language version of the text remained online and was nearly identical to the English, using essentially the same stereotypes to refer to the disabled. A section dedicated to the disabled says: "Paralympic athletes and disabled spectators are a special group. They have unique personalities and ways of thinking." To handle the "optically disabled," the guide advised: "Often the optically disabled are introverted. They have deep and implicit feelings and seldom show strong emotions." It added, "Try not to use the world 'blind' when you meet for the first time."

Regarding the "physically disabled," the guide said: "Physically disabled people are often mentally healthy. But they might have unusual personalities because of disfigurement and disability." It went on: "Some physically disabled are isolated, unsocial and introspective; they usually do not volunteer to contact people. They can be stubborn and controlling; they may be sensitive and struggle with trust issues. Sometimes they are overly protective of themselves, especially when they are called 'crippled' or 'paralyzed.

The bit about "mistranslation" is pure crap, and usually "cultural difference" (you have no idea how often this comes up) is a desperate excuse for, say, why it's perfectly appropriate to arrest two women in their seventies for "disturbing the peace" when all they had done was apply for a permit to protest during the Olympics. (If you haven't been following that story, they were released a week after being sentenced to a year of "labor reform," with no further penalties, which also probably includes being under surveillance to a greater or lesser extent for the duration of their natural lives.)

But in this case, strangely, I actually think the guy's actually right. In the mad rush to modernize, the culture (which always lags behind the edge of innovation and social change) has been scrambling to figure out what's going on. One of the biggest changes in the west over the last two-hundred years is the changing relative importance of intellectual and physical labor. Two-hundred years ago, all you needed to be a worker was a strong back and a stupid mind, which of course favored young men. As work became less and less physically oriented, it opened up opportunities for older people (I mean, late-thirties and up,) women, and the physically disabled to enter the workforce, and, as they became more valuable to society, mistaken notions about these groups of people's intrinsic value began to change. But, in the west, this has taken a few hundred years, and lots of fighting. China still has not reached this level, either in percent of workforce engaged in mind work and not manual, or in valuing those who are not "the man," in this case, Han Chinese men.

The gap between most people's thoughts (let alone the more rural part of the population) and the guide for volunteers, then, is still rather large, and the document, even if somewhat infuriating to westerners, actually represents some sort of progress along these lines, even if it's hard to believe that as a westerner. The document, in a way, splits the difference between the cultural mind of the West and the East. Of course, since people have fought for so long to elevate the cultural conception of the disabled in the west, having an official document like this come along and enshrine stereotypes feels like regression. Again, though, this is mostly the effect of juxtaposition.

Having said that, one of the preparations for the Olympics was getting all the cripples out of sight. When I'd first gotten here it was rather common (like a few times a day) to see horribly disfigured people, some who'd obviously had work-related accidents, others with birth defects, pan-handling on the streets. So, obviously, enlightenment is coming slowly. It's another mind-numbing Orwellian contradiction, that is, that a McDonald's could have a poster outside advertising specials and marking it as a Paralympic sponsor, where just a few months ago a man who had his face burned off by something was begging for the equivalent of less than two pennies on the bench next to the store. Where did they go, exactly? I'd really like to know.

They haven't come back quite yet. But the workers have. They're pretty unmistakable. And their camps, say, next to the light rail tracks, are also rather obvious.

To be cynical, the blitzing news coverage and hangover news about the Olympic Champions and all gives the almost straight-forwardly government run news the opportunity to talk about this and relish in the distraction rather than move on to other things, like the fact that the central government just admitted that "maybe" some of the schools that fell over in the SiChuan earthquake only fell over because of "possible" faulty construction, (though no mention of corruption and why those schools were so faulty. It was blamed on the lightening fast growth.) So China's changing after all. "Maybe."

I had a conversation with one of my students recently about Sarah Palin recently that led to some of the above. In some ways, it appears as if there's been progress, and in others it's the same old China.

My student was amazed that Sarah Palin was warmly supporting her daughter (obviously she is not very familiar with the American political process) instead of being visibly angry with her. I tried to explain to her that support is exactly what this young woman needs at this point, and getting angry at her would help no one, leading to bitterness etc. at the perfectly wrong time. In China, she said, a seventeen year old would be kicked out of school immediately for this, along with the boy who got her pregnant. I was trying to get her to see the point of view that that's a terrible terrible punishment, taking away their only means of bettering their lives and supporting their child, and I think she understood that, but the dominant feeling was still, they've done something terribly wrong, they have to pay for it.

Again, very Chinese. Everyone is one huge happy family. But if you step out of line, even a little bit, you're thrown to the dogs.

My girlfriend, when I laugh about people spitting in the subway, always says the same thing "they're definatly not from Beijing," and she, modern as she is, holds a fair amount of contempt for anything not Beijing (or QingDao recently, because of a vacation we took there that was great.) Family matters stay in the family, city matters stay in the city, and country matters stay in the country. If you're in, we love you, but if you step the littlest bit out of line, you're an outsider, and you're never getting back in.

I don't necessarily advocate high-schoolers having sex (not since I graduated highschool, anyway) but they do it. It takes the most draconian of social controls to keep this from happening commonly (it still does happen in China, though it's about as hush-hush as possible) and there's always a trade-off.

So the question is, what are they losing by denying this urge?

Personal and Impersonal relationships, and cultural development

I was talking today with one of my students when I realized something I think is rather interesting, and it opened up something I've been saying about the differences between China and America.

There's a well-known phenomenon among people doing business in China, which is, basically, they have to meet with the Chinese groups that they're doing business with several times a year, having a few meals together and going out on the town, to keep up and maintain a relationship, where in the West a once-yearly conference would be sufficient to maintain a healthy working relationship. It's also well-known that Chinese people put a great emphasis on "guanxi," which means "relations," or "connections," but in a very different way. Put simply, it's basically what we would call nepotism, or preferentialism, times a thousand or so. You do something for me, I'll do something for you. The legal system, and business, basically runs on a series of bribes.

People write this off as just being a feature of "Chinese culture," but I disagree.

I had asked my student to write me a short story and tell it to me for class as homework, and she chose to relate a problem she was having. She had recently bumped into an old college professor, and they had a pleasant conversation, at the end of which they said they'd see each other again to have dinner, and exchanged information, and her professor said he'd call her to arrange things further. But he still hasn't.

This bothered her, as it was not behavior she understood, or could tolerate. At the end of her short story, she said that this was just an example, and that it was becoming something very common in modern day China, and also asked me how to deal with people like this, and how to deal generally, when (in her words,) "society needs the trust of people and honor people."

As I began to explain to her it dawned on me what the problem was here, and it's not "Chinese culture."

Traditionally, Chinese society has been very closed, but not merely to foreigners. It applies equally as well within Chinese society. You belong to a village, and know everyone in the village, but someone from the next village might as well be from Mars. In this system, everything, business and all, is run on the basis of personal relationships.

In the modern world, though, this is basically impossible. You simply interact with too many people on a daily basis to have a personal relationship with them. Most relationships are impersonal, in the sense that you could exchange one person for just about anyone else with the same basic results. A waitress-client relationship, for example (or, a more extreme one, the relationship between a customer at McDonald's and the cashier) is entirely impersonal.

But this is not a difference between western culture, which prefers an impersonal business relationship, and China, which prefers a personal one. All relationships were personal before the modern age, before the age of the rule of law. Western villages and towns, and even cities, relied much more on personal relationships than we do today. The problem, or the only problem, is that China is trying to move their whole society from operating entirely on the personal level of relationships to the impersonal level as quickly as possible (or rather, introducing the idea that a relationship with a person need not necessarily be a personal one,) where the west has had hundreds of years of this experience. While much has already shifted in the direction of impersonality, there is still a clinging to an outmoded way of doing things, which is reflected in the croneyism and bribery necessary to move up in the country. For this, and for so many other reasons, China is fascinating as a whole country of people are pulled forward at lightening speed. Rather than a (not always, of course) smooth transition between two very different value systems, and ways of handling social interaction, it is as if China is taking the two and placing them directly next to each other, an awesome social experiment.

One of the things holding this back is the relative paucity and non-existent tradition of rule of law. In the west (as an ideal) the law applies equally to all. China's society is much more dependent on the unwritten undercurrents of society, and success is still often a case of currying favor with the right people. You cannot impeach a Chinese president.

And, of course, judging people based on connections and relationship works in some circumstances, and has worked for the majority of the history of civilization. There's a reason this is the "Chinese way." Under a certain system (that is, when you can reasonably assume familiarity with everyone you interact with, and when there's no impartial framework of law under which to work) it would be stupid to hire strangers you don't know or have any reason to trust to work for you, or, say, to head to the next town over for a bowl of noodles.

Personal relationships, it should be noted, have not been destroyed, and this is part of what complicates things. It's just that their scope is circumscribed. Normally, if you and your son have a fight, you're not going to call the police or hire lawyers. If there's a falling-out with friends, say, if a friend steals another friend's laptop, the problem is likely to be handled on a personal level, with friends taking sides, and having, possibly, someone or the other shunned from the group, something that was very common in Chinese practice traditionally. The worst punishment possible was being banished from your village. Famously, there is no room for an outsider in a Chinese village. It was, more or less, a death sentence.

In the west, I think we are "facing," a different sort of problem. We've gotten so good at doing things in this way that, in large numbers, people don't have enough personal relationships, or their personal relationships aren't satisfyingly deep. We are coming to understand that we must treasure and work to maintain these relationships with the people that matter to us, even though we would certainly not revert to a society based entirely on these relationships. Notice, of course, that it's basically impossible to jump from the older model to the post-post-modern model immediately. You need to establish rule of law and a healthy impersonal society before you begin to face the problems with impersonality. The Chinese are just starting to embrace the strengths of doing things this way. We have done things this way successfully for a long time, and are just starting to address the problems.

Of course, none of this excuses the behavior of the professor, it only points out that western people don't really see this as a problem which causes a great deal of angst. The professor simply gets placed in the lump of people with whom you have an impersonal relationship with, or in other words, in the group of people with whom you are not going to expend energy to keep up a good personal relationship with. In modern society, there are too many people to interact with to have a personal relationship with everyone, and so one chooses who is "in" and who is "out." Chinese people are only starting to learn (in a cultural values sense, obviously certain Chinese people are adept at this, and of course the level to which one's relationships are personal is dependant on the individual person) that not every relationship need be a personal one, and this, though more natural than it may appear, will take some time to set in.

But it will. The doors have been opened to modernity, if only (as I would argue) slightly, and eventually those that won't, for example, hire the best candidate because their cousin's son is also a candidate, are going to fall behind to the companies that hire based on skill and talent. But, no matter how fast China is trying to do this, it takes time, because power always prefers itself.