The people that walked in darkness

Marcus Anthony speaks in a recent video blog (http://22cplus.blogspot.com/2010/05/other-side-of-hong-kong.html) about the beauty and tranquility of Hong Kong’s outlying islands, and how few citizens are willing to unplug themselves long enough to explore them: Shopping for clothes or the latest electronic gadgets is a much more popular Sunday pastime than hiking in those lush and soul-healing green hills.

But then, in order to acknowledge their need for that healing, people would first have to acknowledge that they have souls – that they’re not just biological gadgets, wired up and ready to serve the global corporations that constitute a kind of nightmare distortion of the benign world government that futurist thinkers dreamt of 100 or so years ago. And there’s an exact parallel between those soul-extinguished Hong Kongers and the tepid, slow-motion response of Americans to the Louisiana oil spill catastrophe – as if that black, sticky, toxic ooze had somehow got into people’s minds and hearts as well as destroying some of the country’s finest landscapes and killing millions of innocent fellow-creatures. (It will probably start to affect Florida – America’s no. 1 holiday playground – soon.)

It’s true that President Obama has reacted with characteristic restraint and caution to a situation which probably didn’t call for either of these qualities, but we can’t expect our leaders to feel the passion and reverence for life on our behalf that we’re not willing or able to manifest for ourselves. The problem is, as I mentioned in a previous blog, we’ve sold our souls for oil, and we can’t claim them back at a moment’s notice just because we’re feeling a bit queasy about the bargain – all those hocked souls are in safe deposit, well locked away.

The two most valuable corporations in America are, appropriately enough, Exxon and Apple: oil and gadgets, at over $225 bn. each of market capitalization – if the combined value of those corporations was shared equally among all Americans, every man, woman and child would have $1500 worth. But of course the value isn’t shared equally, or anything remotely like equally: a tiny number of people derive stupendous wealth from them, and the rest of us little or nothing. Only the negative effects are shared out equally: the oil when it’s spilled spills on everyone and everything, while the negative social effects of IT addiction are down to “society” as a whole to deal with.

It doesn’t look like a great bargain for what we’ve given away, does it? Maybe it’s time we started to reclaim our souls, even if we have to make do with fewer gadgets and less oil. We can only become wholer, saner and happier in the process.

The Wounded Heart of China

You’re familiar, I’m sure, with those times when you’re suffering inside: You know you need to stop, go inwards, check yourself out and be present with whatever’s happening – but instead you almost brutally pursue whatever practical tasks are uppermost, as if you could seal up the pain and never have to touch it, or as if it was simply less real than your everyday practical tasks and goals.

Now imagine a whole country which operates on that basis, and you have something like modern China. People have to deal with a level of competitive pressure unimaginable in the West, and are offered as role models characters such as Lei Feng (left: a Maoist icon of self-sacrifice refurbished in recent years). Self-sacrifice isn’t really the correct term: it’s as if there was never a self to sacrifice in the first place – identity is still largely mediated through collective symbols and activities, certainly throughout formal education.

So the self that starts to emerge in the pursuit of material success which characterizes today’s China is a raw, unformed self which doesn’t really know how to speak of its interiority, of its pains and frustrations – which generally wishes them away or if it expresses them at all, does so in the most spasmodic and unconscious way. Such, for example, are the recent terrifying and near inexplicable attacks on children (which Marcus Anthony has written about in a very illuminating post: http://22cplus.blogspot.com/2010/05/killing-bliss-in-china.html).

And of course China’s wounds themselves are both individual and collective: not only is it much harder for a Chinese person than for a Westerner suffering from inner anguish to find any useful way of addressing it or external support in doing so, but the immense suffering inflicted by the Cultural Revolution and more recently by the Tiananmen Square events has been explored, if at all, only on a superficial and factual level. The tools to deal with such experiences are not generally available in China and in any case their use would threaten the Party’s monopoly of historical interpretation – as official ideology doesn’t distinguish between experience and interpretation, any individual testimony which appears to contradict the officially sanctioned account of events is instantly ruled inadmissible.

There is a way out of this crazy-driving impasse, as I wrote in my previous post; and I was interested to read that the managers of the giant Foxconn company which assembles iPhones and iPads in Shenzhen has actually called in monks from Wutaishan to help deal with a spate of suicides by employees. It may or may not be relevant that Foxconn is a Taiwanese company.

A turning towards spiritual practice is a notable feature of modern China, but it’s a matter of concern that the public debate about this is so impoverished. No serious discussion of anything resembling “superstition” is possible in the mainland media, while all but the oldest generations have been brought up without any kind of appropriate conceptual framework.

Unless the Party is willing to start progressively loosening its control of public discourse and interpretation, these individual expressions of intolerable anguish can only become more frequent, eventually coalescing into collective outbreaks which will become harder and harder to explain away.