On my mind

Lucian Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics

Very much an old-school book, much of it reading like someone pontificating after dinner. Opening its pages randomly, I find the final chapter starting:

Why does China thwart, frustrate, and even embarrass those who try to help? For all who befriend China, the story is the same: high hopes then disappointment.

Or how about this from the other end of the book:

The Chinese have always felt profoundly uncomfortable, dissatisfied and threatened whenever their politics has not been characterized by a dominant hierarchy and a single ideology.

Or how about this from somewhere in the middle:

In the Chinese civilization, the basic themes of social, political, and philosophical life all tended to converge in accentuating the importance of the collectivity.

Originally published in 1967, in the edition read with a chapter added in 1991, post-Tiananmen, and one dropped, on communes, Pye’s book is strong on assertions, especially ones offering psychological assessment of Chinese people, but offers little in the way of evidence. I found myself repeatedly muttering “Really?” as I turned its pages, long before the end seeing it as a product of its time (though maybe more the 1950s than the 1960s) rather than a serious effort at trying to grasp what made Chinese politics distinctive.

Not how to democratise AI, but use AI to boost democracy.

As Henry Farrell writes:

The current Silicon Valley approach to AI is profoundly problematic. It reinforces hierarchy and subordination to the vision of the CEO, rather than enabling individual judgment.

Ma Jian, Red Dust

Like Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain, Red Dust is an account, set in the early/mid-1980s, of someone who after leaving Beijing to avoid political persecution travels around China, depending on their wits and dubious official documents to get by. Both books also include problematic encounters with women that confuse their respective protagonists.

Both books capture the weirdness of much of China at that time. Gao’s touches more on the people who survived the political upheavals of the previous thirty years – daoists, ethnic minorities. A recurring theme of Ma’s is just how poor many people are. Maybe Gao’s book explores more bigger, existential themes, while Ma’s is more personal.

But whereas Soul Mountain is billed as a novel, albeit one that draws on Gao’s experiences, Red Dust is described as an account of Ma’s travels. I’m not sure if that distinction matters much.

To the East Kowloon Cultural Centre to watch The Godfather again. What a great and terrible piece of work. It’s fantastically made and acted, but those values – you really don’t want to live in a society built around them.

I’m far from the first person to see the film as a tragedy built around Michael, but surely his father’s a hero? Whereas Michael could always choose – he didn’t have to lie to Kay towards the end of the film – Vito was forced to make the calls he did, which is why he’s allowed to die peacefully, chasing a grandson around the garden, in and out of the tomato plants.

Michael, though is living in another time – where those values will, we know, eventually lose out, to the blander ways of legal systems not vendettas. And that is, I’m afraid, what we want. Coppola knew this I’m sure. One could admire that way of life when viewed from a certain angle, but you don’t really want to view the lives of Sonny and Fredo that way, let alone Tom Hagen, the film’s true anti-hero. (His hands might have been clean, but he was the one who arranged the magic that conjured the horse’s head into Jack Woltz’s bed.)

There’s the shitty lives of women throughout – Carlo’s brutal beating of Connie; the lies they have to live with. And what’s the film’s denouement? From the violent streets of New York to the tawdry sleaze of Las Vegas, and the drugs that the old school said (unbelievably) they wanted to avoid.

To the M+ cinema to see Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale. I saw it back in 2000 when it was released and remembered the barest outline of what happens – a bunch of school kids let loose on island and told to kill each other. Apart from that, I couldn’t remember anything much about it.

I must have been shocked then, but I was even more shocked now. It’s a great movie – so well made. But it’s also a terrible one – why make this film, I found myself asking repeatedly, what made Fukasaku choose this theme?

Maybe he told us in an interview somewhere, but from the film itself it’s hard to draw an answer. Some of the 41 characters are malevolent, but not all of them. Some try to cooperate but then die unfortunately. Three try to figure out a way of hacking their way out and blowing up the command centre; a bit of bad luck and they fail.

Society’s failings? He sort of sets things up a bit in this way at the start, but doesn’t carry that through. Instead, the key figure is the teacher who was abused. But this isn’t his scheme – it’s one that’s carried out nationwide.

Marge Piercy, He, She and It

Here from 1991 is an AI novel, not quite right for today, but not so far off either. Piercy sets her story of cyborg in a post-apocalyptic Jewish settlement against the story of a golem in 16th century Prague. Both save their communities but cause problems for their creators – are they citizens? Are they Jewish? Can they have feelings? Can they have meaningful relationships with people?

For me, it almost worked. Joseph the golem carried off his end of things – made with incantations and magic out of clay, he never quite got hold of his consciousness, which was right and why he had eventually to be returned to the earth. Yod, though, was not quite so convincing. Made by a man and programmed in good part by a woman, he was overly conscious.

Ricardo Lopes Coelho, What Is Energy?

What is energy? The answer, says Coelho – it’s a concept. Certainly, it’s not a substance, but rather, “the question of the discovery of energy is ultimately the discovery of a given way of interpreting phenomena.” It’s a way of showing that one thing is the equivalent of another, or, more precisely, that it’s a way of being able to describe an abstract physical quantity. As Richard Feynman seems to have put it, basically it’s a maths thing.

For me, this was a great book, oddly but most logically presented. Coelho wheels out one piece of evidence after another – all the comments on energy of several 19th century scientists, with some examples of experiments some of them conducted – before concluding that while people don’t agree on what energy is, that’s because it isn’t anything real (it’s not something like a piece of cheese, he quotes someone as saying). My interpretation of all this – it’s basically an accounting mechanism.

I wondered if the book was really a set of lecture notes. It is very sparse and has some odd sentences like this one: “This interpretation had no basis on the author who created these characteristics of energy.” But it made sense throughout, helped by Coelho showing how what one person said about energy was followed by another, then another, and so on, until with all his evidence in place he was able to point out the only logical conclusion.

I love this piece of Canto marketing that Fairwood sent me yesterday:

Vincent Deary, How We Break

Maybe because I’ve been thinking about phenomenology since reading Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café, but Vincent Deary’s How We Break felt very phenomenological from the start with its tales of people caught up in endless batterings of their perceptional and mental apparatus.

It’s a framework that runs through the book – and a useful one, not only for those who end up feeling/being overwhelmed. Surely, Deary suggests, it might be possible to handle these differently by thinking about them differently, by identifying them as perceptual and then asking how we want to perceive them, even for pain.

I can see why, as Deary concedes at one point, this would have been a difficult book to write. You can only come to his conclusion after you’ve thought about it and tried it and seen it work. Otherwise, it’s just an interesting idea, but probably not so useful if you’re feeling that you’re on the way to breaking.

Shi Nai'an & Luo Guanzhong, The Scattered Flock: Part Five of The Marshes of Mount Liang

So that’s that. The last volume of John and Alex Dent-Young’s translation of 水滸傳 and the first part of my read-all-the-big-Chinese-classics project completed.

The English across all five books is very readable, but I would love to have had more notes, explanations and commentary. The academic baggage that comes with Anthony Yu’s translation of Journey to the West is invaluable – pointing out stuff and references I would never have been able to guess at or even see. So I suspect there’s a lot of that in The Marshes of Mount Liang, but that you will never be able to see in this text only rendering.

I also can't help wondering what liberties might have been taken to make things more readable. When a sentence such as “What good will his fucking magic do him when I've chopped the fucker's head off” pops up, I wonder whether I can assume that the demotic was chosen over the literal.

I'm also guessing that the father and son team went for speed – you don’t want to hung up over individual sentences when you’ve 2,000-plus pages to get through.

As to the book itself – it’s a work of scale, not finesse. Countless people are killed. Its values of its subjects are different from mine. The relentless stream of victories of Song Jiang and his fellow outlaws gets a little much. Look at the corruption and dishonesty of the imperial court, where everyone is pulling the wool over the honest emperor’s eyes. Look at how upright those bandits are – never behaving badly when they go out on campaigns.

But I can put up with all this. The book’s not only big, it’s foundational. I liked its slow pace of change – that things happened over time, as they must do when you have all those pages to get through.

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, The Narrow Corridor

I found this book simultaneously annoying and useful. Acemoglu and Robinson’s history of countries and their efforts to find themselves with the right mix of state and society power so that governments do the right things that people need to enjoy liberty is very just so-ish. There’s a lot of country X found itself in the position it was in because various people did Y. Well, yes.

But redeeming this is the notion that actually countries should want to get into this narrow corridor because that would benefit them. At least I think that’s what A&R want to argue, but they’re never entirely explicit about this because a lot of their explanations are about why countries do the wrong things, which leaves the problem of how could they possibly do the right things?

What I guess is going on here is that A&R don’t want to be too explicit in saying the West’s way is the best, but they want people to draw that conclusion. After all, who has done the best at getting into that narrow corridor? Scandinavia and the UK, at least in their account.

They give China short shrift – it’s never been interested in allowing freedom, they say. The US is also seen as problematic – too much private interest, not enough state involvement, so too much inequality. Almost everywhere else – Latin America, Africa, India – is written off. And from the facts (many of them) they provide, you wouldn’t disagree.