Uncertainty and Instability

A conversation worth the drive in, with uninterrupted view out on the dusk from high above the city’s northeast corner.  It started with politics.  My friend felt that the current trade disruption with the U.S. was great for China.  I took exception.  He clarified that the next five years would be hard but China would come out stronger, because it would force reform.  Now we were more closely aligned.  This is going to put great stress on the coalition behind the façade of unruffled Party leadership.   What emerges may be stronger.  But for now there will be great pain on the inside of the political body, away from any bruises we can detect on the skin.

Change, reform or otherwise, will be forced.  President Xi is under-performing on one of his key performance metrics:  Management of the U.S.-China relationship.  It’s unclear who in the world, just now besides Kim Jong Un is managing a relationship with the Trump administration well, but clearly, China is not.  The Party founded on revolutionary rhetoric is up against our institutionally revolutionary representative democracy that lately has been especially unpredictable.  Waxing then, the great Chinese anathema, which the Party is pledged to control: uncertainty and instability.

My friend wanted to assert that China would fill the vacuum of moral leadership that the U.S. was ceding.  I didn’t agree.  I don’t think China is ready to or indeed, wants to fill that void.  I think wise Chinese leaders largely want stability to grow richer without disruption.  China has a market and an economic narrative for the rest of the world to engage with.  But at present, China is not interested in converting anyone to Chinese-ness.  Chinese-ness is not exportable.   Chinese-ness before 1850 meant a uniquely differentiated civilizing beacon that all other peoples undeniably acknowledged.   That ain’t on the menu in the next century.  The China-dream beyond it getting rich and not interfering in other people’s affairs is not a fulcrum for imperialism or conversion.   If America continues to cede that role something will necessarily fill it.  But let’s hope, for China’s sake most of all, that this isn’t Chinese-ness.  Inchoate national chauvinism will rise back up emetic, spat out from any of the “uncivilized”, forced to feed on it.

Brilliant red autumn clouds alight as the sun made its final descent over the capital and we moved, as I knew we would from intellect to spirit.  Why feed our egos with knowledge that is pointless before unknowable consciousness?”  He wanted to know and I thought of the pleasure and the utility of knowledge acquisition.   I didn’t have a good answer. 

I mentioned the “Homo Deus” thesis that a hybrid intellect, a post-human capacity to think will be the new repository of faith.  We don’t know, but AI increasingly knows better than our mere minds can.  He took exception.  Consciousness is ineffable, beyond our or anything we creates’ ability to conceptualize or replicate.  “What defines you?  If you listed all the attributes your ego associates with you and suddenly removed them, one by one, would the ‘you’, that is you, still be you?  If I cut off your finger would you still be you?  And if I removed every part of you, one by one, until there was nothing left but awareness, would you still be you?” I visualized the single, solitary stem left after all else had been removed.   “And that consciousness, that sole bit remaining, by your own definition is finite, isn’t it?  When it’s gone, it’s gone.”  “Neither you, nor I, nor anything we ever create, will ever know.”

Darkness of a sort.  The lights of the city mapped a pathway off towards the airport, beyond the density of the grid.  “If I could give you perfect happiness or I could give you twenty-million dollars, which would you choose?  I, like you, would choose the twenty million dollars, even if I could show you, unquestionably, that it would not make you happier.  Why would we be both make this choice?  We are sating our egos and repeating illusory patterns over and over.   Why wouldn’t we choose to sit in the gutter, happy, with nothing else to our name?”  I considered the reality of a two, with seven zeros after it in my bank account and the abandon of joy in the gutter and gnawed for a bit on the two destinations, reluctantly.

Absorb the quiet.  Consider our fate.  Let’s visit the buffet to sate some of this not-so- illusory hunger.  Dining now, we smile.  We are both ready to finally discuss how we are going to make some money together.  

Thursday, 10/11/18