Thoughts | Muninn

More on the Nation-State

I have arrived in Korea after spending a wonderful week in Tokyo. Language classes begin next week so I have a few days to settle down into my small apartment near Naksŏngdae station, a short bus ride from campus, and review material from last summer.

As most who have been reading anything from the Korean media or its English language weblogs know, there was just a major set of local elections here recently. It wasn’t terribly exciting as everyone had expected the conservatives to sweep the elections in all but a few southwestern strongholds. However, it was significant in that it was the first local election in Korea to allow permanent foreign residents the right to vote. Read an interesting posting by Skindleshanks, who discovered this fact. Although due to a requirement related to the length of residency, he thought he might have been ineligible, he has reported that materials regarding the election were all delivered to him and he voted successfully in the election. Yesterday in The Korea Times Kim Rahn reported on the participation of foreigners, almost seven thousand of which qualified to participate, most of which were apparently citizens of the ROC (Taiwan).

This is wonderful news and allows me to make another rambling follow-up on my recent anti-nationalist rant.
Continue reading More on the Nation-State

Common People

While struggling character by character through a particular difficult assignment for Chinese docs class today in Cafe Gata Rojo this afternoon, I got suddenly and completely carried away by a fascination with a song playing in the cafe called Common People (iTunes link), originally by the group Pulp. In this case, it was performed by the bizarre but unusually effective combo of William Shatner’s spoken voice (Yes, that William Shatner) and Joe Jackson singing. Nothing terribly original or deep in its contents, but I guess I was in a thoughtful mood today. The song is about a extremely wealthy woman who “loves learning” and says

“I want to live like common people,
I want to do whatever common people do,
I want to sleep with common people,
I want to sleep with common people,
like you.”

The song tells of her failed attempt to truly experience life as a “common person” partly because she can never experience the mental state that accompanies a life severely limited in opportunities by financial and other restraints.

But still you’ll never get it right,
‘cuz when you’re layin’ in bed at night,
watching roaches climb the wall,
if you call your Dad he could stop it all.

Her desire to bridge the unbridgeable is not appreciated by the “common people” either,

‘cuz everybody hates a tourist
Especially one who thinks
It’s all such a laugh
And the chip stains’ grease
Will come out in the bath
You will never understand
How it feels to live your life
With no meaning or control
And with nowhere left to go
You are amazed that they exist
And they burn so bright
Whilst you can only wonder why

I especially love that first line, “‘cuz everybody hates a tourist, especially one who thinks it’s all such a laugh.” Isn’t this something all of us who have been “tourists” of other cultures and communities either as students, anthropologists, or as scholars, are guilty of at some time or other? When we stand on the outside, feeling so detached, but unknowingly tied to something we think we have left behind, we can find so much we see to be silly or comical.

While I was prompted to think about cross-cultural experiences, the same goes for the cross-class element emphasized by the song and the deep contradictions of the politically active intellectual. I’m reminded of the Japanese intellectual historian Victor Koschmann’s summary of Sartre’s take on the intellectual’s inevitable contraction of Hegel’s “unhappy consciousness,” which he says is ultimately a “perpetual inner conflict between what the intellectual is—a petit bourgeois—and what he or she aspires to, which is truth and human emancipation.” (see his essay “Intellectuals and Politics” in Postwar Japan as History for more on this)

Weblogs and the Codification of Thought

Perhaps this is just common sense but I feel it worth mentioning that I am really beginning to feel the benefits of my blogging notes and thoughts on things I read and hear. I have made similar comments before but I’m now quite positive that writing on this blog is helping me remember ideas and information in relatively more organized and well-formed units that I can then produce in my conversations and later writings.

To repeat myself in less abstract terms: when I blog my ideas about something, say, my ideas about a collection of readings, a talk I went to, or some conversations I had with friends even, I am essentially writing a “response paper” of the kind that many of my classes have required, or do what one of my professors always suggested we do whenever time permitted: write “notes on notes.” This extra step of taking our notes or free-floating thoughts and reformulating them into a complete or relatively well organized compact exposition in writing offers considerable benefits.

I have found now that in some of my conversations, I am able to be more concise in my explanations of certain ideas or my narration of a certain anecdote because I’m actually regurgitating a blog entry. This occasionally leads to embarrassing results when you are speaking to someone who actually reads your blog as you notice them sigh with boredom.

Of course, by fixing the “relevant” ideas, placing them in a particular sequence, and drawing connections between them, we are in some sense “codifying” an experience or collection of thoughts that might otherwise have a more flexible and changing nature in our minds. Like history itself, our communication to others is of course not just about retelling facts from the past. We are constantly re-narrating and re-formulating our experiences and positions, so this occasional “codification” that writing on a blog or in a diary represents may actually create a small degree of friction in the continually evolving processing of our thoughts and memories. However, I would think it difficult to argue that this increased likelihood of our “jumping back” in a conversation to the most recent “codification” of an anecdote or written exposition of our thoughts is by necessity a problem. Essentially the same thing happens without writing (albeit more slowly), in cases where we retell the stories of our life with any great frequency – the memories and the narration of the events will gradually approach fossilization, even if they never stop evolving, until either death or some “shock” forces us to reformulate it (“Granpa, that isn’t the way it happened, you were one who started the fight with him!”).

On the contrary, when it comes to thinking about my study of history, for example, I find this compact writing practice especially important given my relative inability to synthesize large quantities of information on the fly. I have met many brilliant students who don’t share this weakness, but alas I’m not one of them. This process, whether it take the shape of simple “notes on notes” or a diary or a weblog, etc. allows people like me to more eloquently and efficiently share our thoughts with others during classes, conferences, or casual conversation in a compact “format” that is more conducive to eliciting useful responses and criticism.

千字文: The Thousand Character Classic

You know that “Thousand Character Classic” you see in books about Japanese history (that is where I have seen it most, I guess it comes up in Korean and Chinese history as well). It was used as a basic text to teach children how to write Chinese characters.

I finally looked it up today to see exactly what it looks like. Ouch! While there are many basic and frequently used characters (in our own contemporary times) I can’t say that many of these 1,000 characters would have made the cut for teaching elementary school…

You can buy your own wall chart version of the classic here. And in case you want to know how to pronounce those characters in the Hakka dialect visit this site (Big-5 Encoding).

Rorty Review

There is an excellent review by the rebel pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty in the LRB about Scott Soames two volume history of analytic philosophy (Soames’ response is here). Having come out of (and largely turned my back on) this tradition, I found it especially interesting.

I got the link from one of the best academic group blogs on the net, Crooked Timber, where the analytic philosopher Brian Weatherson concedes Rorty’s point in the review that Soames has underemphasized the importance of epistemological debates about correspondence theories of truth. Rorty’s own anti-correspondence pragmatism and interaction with “continental” philosophers outside the English-speaking world has made him unpopular, if not a total outcast. However, I think if anything it is admirable that he has maintained as much interaction with the world of analytic philosophers, with whom I find it more and more difficult to converse, the further I wander astray.

Populating the Past

I have recently finished a fairly close reading of David Harlan’s The Degradation of American History and some articles by Thomas L. Haskell on “objectivity” in the practice of history. Below are some of my own comments and criticism on them. Because the article is around ten pages when printed out, you can also download a PDF version of this essay here.
Continue reading Populating the Past

Sagwa: The Chinese Siamese Cat

I watched an episode of the cartoon “Sagwa: The Chinese Siamese Cat” today on PBS while eating lunch (shǎguā 傻瓜, meaning “fool”). Aimed at kids aged 5-8 years old, it is perfectly targeted to keep me entertained. When watching anything these days, I always feel my critical knife want to go into attack mode but I must say I thought the cartoon was very cute and it prompted me to visit the PBS homepage for the show.

The cartoon follows the adventures of the mischievous cat 傻瓜 and other characters. The show is deeply engaged in ethical education and multiculturalism, and according to their site each episode is dedicated to: 1) Modeling strategies for dealing with the personal and social issues children face as they grow into a variety of new roles. 2) Exposing children to elements of cultures other than their own and showing that children all over share many of the same interests and emotions. In other words there is a clear universalistic Enlightenment approach here combined with an appreciation for cultural diversity.

I’m not sure how much influence they have on children, but I certainly remember all sorts of warm and fuzzy lessons that learned from watching the Smurfs and Care Bears as a kid. Ok, so one of the Care Bear artists (writers?), Kathy Bostrom, is also author of “Little Blessings: God Loves You” and is perhaps the same Kathy Bostrom which was a previous president of the Presbyterian Writers Guild. However, I’m happy to see one author find that, “The occult images found in the Care Bear series are extremely subtle. On the surface, the Care Bears teach the children to express their feelings, especially those of love, to others. At first, these sound like very good ideas, but, they are Humanistic principles, which are in contradiction to God’s teachings. Magic and Eastern religious ideals also are prevalent in this series.” (Cited here from Phillips, Phil: Turmoil in the Toybox).

What I liked most about the Shagua/Sagwa cartoon, which is apparently based on a story by the bestselling author Amy Tan, was that unlike many cartoons that show aspects of cultures that are unfamiliar to many of its viewers, this cartoon actually tried to slip in a variety of cultural material which goes beyond the regular standard images. Sure, it had really stereotyped images in some scenes, but I liked how simple Chinese words constantly slipped into the dialogue (kinship terms, greetings like zaijian, food items like baozi, instrument names, and other daily words). Of course, many of the characters act in strangely Western ways, and promote entirely anachronistic values, but a child watching this will be exposed to a host of new cultural images, and vocabulary. After a word, for example is introduced, it is often simply referred thereafter by its Chinese name. I would love see more multi-lingual cartoons out there, even if this just means that we call baozi a baozi, and not a “steamed bun”!

As for the moral education aspects of the cartoon, looking over the list of “messages” in each episode, I liked how we start with an episode which mocks slavish obedience to authority! The question the site suggests parents ask children, “Ask your child to think of a rule that he or she believes is unfair. What could be done to change the rule?”

Rory Litwin: Critique of the Google Library Project

My sister just passed on to me a scathing critique of the new project to digitize some or all of the contents of several major research libraries by Google (my own posting on this here). Rory Litwin‘s article, entitled “On Google’s Monetization of Libraries” has almost nothing positive to say about the project and fears that this will spell doom for librarians and the enterprise of truth and knowledge. I found the article completely unconvincing, even if it seems to be motivated by a healthy progressive librarian’s skepticism for mammoth corporations like Google and the darker side of capitalist markets. I address some of his specific points in this entry, but the article’s biggest weakness comes from an assumption that the libraries have sold their books and souls to Google and that this demonic internet giant can now proceed with the destruction of mankind’s common quest for truth.

I believe he is wrong on almost every count, although a final verdict on my own response will have to await more details about the specific agreements between the major research libraries involved and Google. He fails to fully recognize the fact that Google has not muscled its way into the stacks of Harvard, U Michigan, and others to rob them of their treasures – even if, as he says, Google’s “back-room deal” was “not worked out in cooperation with the [broader] library community”. It wasn’t, but it was worked out with a select number of huge libraries who are extremely protective of their holdings. These libraries are powerful agents in this discussion, and at least in Harvard’s case, hardly paragons of democratic virtue. Their key future role in this project are not sufficiently addressed by Litwin.

Overall, I think the article represents the last gasp of a bitter and dying breed of specialists who are either unwilling or unable to adapt to both the technological changes of our time, and on the theoretical level, the problematization of the Enlightenment project of progress and knowledge production. I’m sure that many others in the library community, or more broadly information and knowledge specialists, are more willing to recognize their own failure to enlist the massive public support and financial resources needed to digitize their holdings and confront the significant changes to their profession that a digital information world entails.

What gets lost in Litwin’s article, in which the shadow of a deeply commercialized and inequitable world of knowledge hangs over the pursuit of “truth”, is the fact that we already have a deeply inequitable world of knowledge. As a student at Harvard, but a former student of Columbia, Western Washington University and frequent visitor to Stavanger and Bartlesville libraries I can personally attest to the huge gap in access to resources, both digital and traditional. Harvard’s libraries have exceeded all of my expectations but I am only a very temporary guest at the table of its highly restricted library system. I feel a deep sadness that these resources are not available to everyone. I am delighted that Harvard and other similar institutions are opening up, and if it takes a massive corporation to help them take the first step, then I welcome it with open arms.

I seriously doubt that Harvard and the other libraries have signed away control to the eventual digital collections that result, and that we will likely see competition between commercial companies to provide access under some sort of licensing agreement, and potentially, a non-commercial public-supported alternative once the extremely expensive process of digitizing is complete. I believe that hosting such resources is less expensive than the massive investment of digitizing them, and it will be easier for the library community to mobilize behind a more modest public solution to the former (for public domain materials), than the latter. There will then continue to be room for commercial services which add additional features, for-pay access to copyrighted materials, and so on, as well as room for libraries to continue providing free access to those copyrighted materials they cannot legally host online.

As a side note, my own radical opposition to the current regime of intellectual property law also gives me hope that this will advance the revolutionary cause of copyright reform or, should that fail, at least the rise of a massive underground P2P market for huge databases of books and archives.

The appropriate response to the Google project is not a luddite call to arms, but reflection on why the library community could not launch a huge project like this themselves, followed by serious debate about how librarians can ensure that their considerable skills and knowledge will help guide the future use of these new digital resources, in whatever form they take.

Librarians have won incredibly important legal battles to protect equal and public access to (public library and archive) collections. Though some may not see it in these terms, they are in fact the guardians of a deeply socialist conception of knowledge as a public good. The sooner we get all of them on board for the next generation’s war to implant these values in the digital world and establish the legal foundations to protect them, the less likely that the commercialization of most human knowledge will become a real threat.

Since this posting has already grown a bit long, I’ll address specific points by Litwin in a future update to this posting.

Koreans in Korean Textbooks

My 2nd year Korean textbook has this flattering view of Korea in its “culture” segment:

Koreans, especially women, are very sensitive to fashion. With seasonal changes, Koreans change their clothes (and shoes, in the case of women), conforming to the most fashionable trends. In the workplace too, men and women like to dress in a more or less uniform way. The quest for fashion and the wearing of similar formal attire are ubiquitous in Korean cities, perhaps because of Korean’ culture of uniformity and formalism.

Although diluted to a certain extent by the American culture of diversity and pragmatism, Koreans still place a considerable value on traditional uniformity and formalism in social interactions. In general, a Korean’s mind is tied to his/her immediate family, organization, and community. Koreans are very much concerned about how others are behaving and what others think about their behavior.¹

Am I the only one who finds this description, designed to introduce foreigners to Korean culture deeply problematic? These kinds of generalizations, which I was only happy to make when I first started studying Japanese and Chinese years ago now totally disgust me and I find them totally unhelpful. As evidence, the picture shows a bunch of Koreans walking down the street in business suits. Exactly how is this different than any business sector in Asia, New York, London, or anywhere else? And can anyone tell me a culture where we can not find people “conforming to the most fashionable trends”? I’m also amused by the use of the term diluted by American culture.

1. Cho, Young-mee et al Integrated Korean: Intermediate One (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001) p. 49.

Charles Maier: The Question of Meaning

I’m really excited about starting my history PhD. I’m sure the misery and loneliness of grad school will hit me eventually but not yet. One of the professors who I hope to learn a lot from is Charles S. Maier, a professor of modern European history. I knew him from the introduction to a book on the historiography of the Nanjing Massacre and a book called The Unmasterable Past on the German historiographical debate of the 1980s called the Historikerstreit.

Since I’m meeting him soon I have been reading up on his other stuff. In an opening essay in an old 1978 book called The Origins of the Cold War and Contemporary Europe he writes about the debate between “revisionist” left leaning historians who have been motivated by the horrors of the US involvement in Vietnam to reexamine the US role in the origins of the Cold War and more traditional historians. While I don’t like a few of his terms that much, he actually has a much more balanced approach than the use of that word might imply.

He concedes several points to the “revisionist” scholarship even as he critiques it, but more importantly, I think that his article, which might otherwise be considered quite outdated in its portrayal of the field now, can be used with almost exactly the same terms to describe one of the central points of contention between “empirical” or “positivist” or “traditional” history on the one hand, and more theoretically framed, self-reflective, but perhaps more ideologically charged history that might be said to descend from the very group of scholars he is talking about here. Here is how he frames the two approaches in the case of Cold War historians of the late 1970s:

For those who stress history as bureaucratic process, all questions of historical responsibility can appear ambiguous and even irrelevant. Foreign policy emerges as the result of a competition for fiefs within governmental empires. Bureaucratic emphases can produce a neo-Rankean acquiescence in the use of power that is no less deterministic than the revisionist tendency to make all policies exploitive in a liberal capitalist order. But what is perhaps most significant about these alternative causal models is that they are addressed to different questions. The non-revisionists are asking how policies are formed and assume that this also covers the question why. The revisionists see the two questions as different and are interested in the why. And by “why?” revisionists are asking what the meaning of policies is in terms of values imposed from outside the historical narrative. The revisionists charge that the historian must pose this question of meaning consciously or he will pose it unconsciously and accept the values that help to uphold a given social system. History, they suggest, must serve the oppressors or the oppressed, if not by intent then by default. The historian who wishes to avoid this iron polarity can reply that social systems rarely divide their members into clear-cut oppressors and oppressed. He can also insist that even when one despairs of absolute objectivity there are criteria for minimizing subjectivity. On the other hand, he must also take care that the history of policy making not become so focused on organizational processes that the idea of social choice and responsibility is precluded.¹

When Professor Maier quotes the “revisionists” as claiming, “The historian must pose this question of meaning consciously or he will pose it unconsciously and accept the values that help to uphold a given social system,” I think he has really struck on one of the central points here which is just as much an issue today. I would also go so far as saying that not only “traditional” history but also the field of Political Science in American universities today apply when he says, “The non-revisionists are asking how policies are formed and assume that this also covers the question why.”

What I’m getting here at is that one more obvious element of the clash between the kind of history which, in my understanding, has dominated the field for some time now, and the theoretical crisis that many find it in today, is not that there is an iron polarity between necessarily serving oppressors or the oppressed. However, I do think there is a growing consensus around the idea that there isn’t a way to just skip the “question of meaning” all together. This is something, I think Professor Maier hints at in the last line of the quote and one he goes into more detail in his work on German historians debating the historical relevance of the Holocaust.
Continue reading Charles Maier: The Question of Meaning