History for indifferent youth

One sunny afternoon during my last few months in UK, a book caught my eye in an Oxfam. Since it was in the same section with Lenin and Marx, combined with the fact that nothing else about that day’s selection particularly appealed to me, I purchased this 600 page brick of a book by Eric Hobsbawm with a cover of Hitler holding up a giant globe, not knowing at the time who the author exactly is, nor exactly what the book will bring me.

It is worthy to note that the only history book with non-trivial event analysis I’ve read is American history, a.k.a a thousand page of colonialism and imperialism. Almost all other aspects of history I have learned from Chinese schooling system in grade 8. ( I stopped going to school after that) So this will not be a scholar review, maybe not even a high schooler’s semester essay, think of it as someone who was extremely ignorant of what happened before they were born finally getting that recap, which is also just common sense to most other people born before this millennium.

The first striking impression was how vital the economy is as an element of modern civilization.  From the First World War onward, the engine that propelled almost all events on big scale to take place has been from economic grounds. For example, Hitler got into power in Germany because as part of the losing party — the Axis, discontent of the Versailles Treaties and nation-wide declining economy brewed internal antisemitism and class conflict. The Great Depression was not due to any nature disaster but merely a built-in cycle of market economy.  I used to, like most of my peer from China who never had a subject called Economics in school, think that the whole business of economics was for people who wish to make money on a very large scale. It wasn’t before I met one of my flatmates in uni who studied Econ that I realized, Economics is a serious study of the distribution of resource and wealth which is essential to a society bonded together by market, division of labor and cooperation. I have previously taken the extremely idealistic stance, perhaps out of sheer naivety, that the study on economy, history, ethics, political philosophy or even just anthropology need not base itself on a few assumptions:

1. That men need to depend on one another to survive.
2. As an implication of 1. a social structure and economy will inevitably form.
3. Central decision making and the necessity of government.
   Anarchism challenges one or more of these assumptions and has thence always been perceived as a synonym of utopianism. I will write more about what I see as a way out for people as a scientist in another blog post, where I will also elaborate my view on political ideologies and their assumption of a collective human nature.
   This brings me to my second point, ideologies.

The clash of ideologies has been a major issue in the later half of the 20th century, most starkly manifested in the Cold War between US and Russia, along with their client countries. When I was a kid, I used to confuse the idea of capitalism and democracy all the time. It wasn’t obvious to me at that time that this confusion stems from direct propaganda of the US scattered around the internet ( Youtube, Twitter…etc. were not banned when in China when I was a 12 year-old) and it took me a lot of history education to erase that connection from my head. Capitalism does not imply democracy and neither does communism inevitably lead to totalitarianism. Animal farm and 1984 are profound fables but not rigorous political philosophical analysis of communism. One thing I find interesting is how much emotion and national sentiment could be incited by a few simple buzzwords and yet how little proportion of those who feel it can even spell out a sentence full of their definitions. Of course one may say that to make any actual impact politically one can’t afford to go into complete semantics or even philosophical analysis of language itself in a Wittgenstein manner. However, eloquence can disguise itself as true knowledge and deceitfully drive those with power to take action. All the wars, hot or cold that took place in recent history to me feel like complete hysteria of charming leaders and swayed masses.

I do not believe in the existence of a collective human nature. It is however the most all-encompassing assumption underlying most societies on earth. The theory of free market assumes such a nature, so does the whole of 21 century identity politics. I think that there are statistical consensus of a group of people that could be extracted by democratic voting, however, there could never come the moment that the collective decision made based on majority voting will eradicate all conflict within the society. This is also why I am never going to be a supporter of violent rebellions nor military coups. The process where one or more individuals first assume that they are in a society in which they themselves share a certain bond with other inhabitants and then believe that certain knowledge they have, either in form of a theory or just a hunch could bring benefit and change their lives for the better is the cause of changes ever made in history. This process started the Second World War, put Stalin and Hitler to power, fuelled the 1789 revolution...as well as germinating the worst massacres on this planet. Of course this process has also brought independence to previous colonies, incited universal suffrage, stopped racial segregation and gave some percentage of women a proportion of men's rights. The problem with changes made in this fashion is that their own verdict can only happen after everything is over and can only then be told by historians.

On the same note I found myself a historical explanation for racism. Racism was something I learned in history and geography class and heard in the news specifically from the US as a kid. Racism is not something built in to a society, for why should people dislike one another just because they look different? On the other hand, xenophobia is, in archaic times already manifested itself in territorial behaviors like tribal conflicts. The fear of unknown has always been with humans since the period of tribe settlements, but in most modern societies stabilized and insured by law enforcement, people have very few reasons to be overly alerted and skeptical of foreigners.  Having lived in both UK and mainland Europe, I gradually came to understand it. Antisemitism stems from direct individual migration instead of large secluded racial settlements. When immigrants are granted less rights than citizens and have to work extra hard to stay, they give employers a much easier choice to make between them and citizens. In post Thatcher UK, an economy whose stability relies on social welfare cannot support the steadily increasing so-called underclass, when legal and illegal immigrants take the jobs that they have to compete for, as well as when hard-working minorities become, very likely, their superiors, mass and popular racism finds its ignition. Whereas in Germany, a country with hard-working as a traditional merit, a longer history of racial diversity and perhaps a hint of fear of the repetition of history, racism is much less infiltrated into each class of the society. Racism is a flavor of societal class conflict that is exacerbated by the labor division between the first and third world.

The way the West narrate the story is nonetheless obsolete. My friends back in UK, whether consciously anti-China or not have made textbook comments about it. “How is your social credit doing?”.  If communism as an ideology is what they are afraid of, there is no reason why the whites are more welcoming to Russians, or for example, Cubans, actually, maybe even the French Maoists should beware too. It is quite common knowledge that China is in most senses of the word no longer communist, just like USSR is no longer a threatening superpower.

The relation between gender inequality and economy is another issue history shone light on. Before I read more in detail what the USSR regime entailed I have already heard from my passionately communist friend that the one of the only country with absolute gender equality written into constitution was USSR. She also recommended me to The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Engels, which includes the speculation of origin of gender inequality in light of the division between the sexes under modern economy. Class conflict is gender conflict. An economic regime that aims to constantly transform itself to always serve the purpose of eradication of class conflict as a byproduct eradicates gender inequalities.
To what extent this argument goes beyond just the economic aspect of gender inequality, I can’t say for sure, but one thing I know is that in a society where women are the child bearer, such equality will never be reached as long as the common societal inter-individual bond is still being assumed as part of human nature.

I used to believe in a mathematical approach to life. When I was lost in this world growing up, I found constants in a few axioms. The topics of epistemology, ethics used to confuse me, because the theories seemingly developed out of nothing, so many points were made yet no convergence of opinions was to be found among all the schools of thoughts. I liked the concept of choice making as well as the debate over human nature in French existentialism. In a way it is itself a practical phenomenological school of thought that does not delve into doctrines or dwell on metaphysics. For a physicist like me, adopting a definition of choice making does not enable the action itself. This is where I decided for myself the axioms of life, the rest follows. My axiom is itself pretty simple: I choose what I choose. It sounds like five words of absolute no meaningful implication. But it gives the freedom of choice to myself without any complication of ethics nor epistemology. What is deterministic about life is its chaos and ineffability. I used to fall into melancholy in a fashion of Einmal ist Keinmal. To quote a movie that triggered a depression episode of mine: Every happiest moment in one’s life there is an invisible knife hovering on their head. It is the question of, if we are all destined to die once and for all, what is the point of living once at all? What is the point to love, to be hurt, or to try?  It took me a while to finally start living in a way, to not question what is the point of my action, why I choose to do it one way over the other. It is perhaps part of one’s growth. In Time must have a stop by Huxley, the saint scholar said:

Men of genius express their knowledge of reality, but they themselves rarely act on their knowledge…They are concerned with writing, not with acting or being. But because they are only concerned with writing about their knowledge, they prevent themselves from knowing more.
—Aldous Huxley, p.223

Up to a point of thinking about life one must start living. Existentialism was created to save an era of chaos and the lost. It serves the time that hatched it. And once known how one wishes to live they must live it. History taught me what philosophy couldn’t tell me. It showed me the world I actually live in and what the people were up to before I was born. It allows me to separate phenomena from the cause. It wasn’t being told by boys that girls would just struggle more studying science that made me a feminist, it is the history and stories told by other women that share the same social gender as me that made me a feminist. To me, knowing I share a belief does not dictate how I wish to act upon it.  And to how I wish to act upon it myself I will turn, in my future blogs.