Home over the summer, I picked up a used copy of “Out of the
Cool”, Gil Evans 1960 release. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_the_Cool Driving home in my mom’s car, compromising her speakers, enjoying long charging
vista of “La Nevada” for the first time, I was savoring that first day back
home when even suburban America can seem exotic. I got to the house and put the disc on the
home stereo. I had a look at the liner notes.
Over on the side table was a book in blue: “Eichmann In Jerusalem” by Hannah
Arendt. http://www.amazon.com/Eichmann-Jerusalem-Penguin-Classics-Hannah/dp/0143039881
I’m not sure why I was immediately drawn to pick it up. There is never any shortage of books and
magazines cast about that room. Certainly the hapless picture of the bespectacled,
career bureaucrat, peering out white from a tear of metallic blue immediately gets
one’s attention. Unfathomable evil
orchestrated by someone, whom appearances and Ms. Arendt both suggest was, as
Lenny Bruce might say, a “schlub.”
Lenny’s haunting bit about Eichmann from that time, in an eerie German
accent “I vas a soldier . . . ”,
certainly came to mind as well as the story of how Mossad kidnaped Adolf from
Argentina and flew him to trial the same year Gil Evens orchestrated his “Out
of the Cool.” It was not because a major
motion picture has recently been made. I
was oblivious. Though I would certainly
be interested to see it, now that I’ve finally finished reading the work, this past week.
With time, rather than in the heat of the trial, many writers
seem to suggest that Arendt got the big picture right, but the details about Eichmann,
as a man, wrong. Subsequent diaries, and
other findings suggest he was more cunning and calculating than he let on,
during the trial. Regardless, the
fundamental questions remain: is there
something unquenchably human in any of us that would assert itself if the
entire world around us began to normalize madness. Would we be any better? I wonder as my powers of “normalization” are
rather well tuned despite all the nifty human bits I adore and try to
cultivate.
Is everyone born with the potential for good? Can we strive for universal benevolence? This is what Mencius would say. 仁民爱物[1]. He uses the classic story of the child at the
well to illustrate what is innate and benevolent, within. If you were to see a baby playing on the edge
of well, your instinctive action would be to reach out to save it. You may not actually take that action. But the impulse is, for Mencius, an innate
good and part of what makes us human. Everyone
has the incipient seeds of gentlemanly behavior, some people cultivate the
seeds, and others do not.
In “The Seven Deadly Starbucks” (7DS) manuscript, during the
chapter on Avarice, I’m looking at what the future holds for Hong Kong. Is the SAR population fated to behave a
certain way, or are the incipient seeds of something rather different from the greedy,
commercial stereotype, lying there waiting to be cultivated. Simply wrought, there is no modern precedent
for a voting population in the PRC. If
Hong Kong citizens are allowed an (albeit compromised, conditional) voice, with
popular suffrage in the 2017 election for Chief Executive, that will be a
significant milestone in modern Chinese development. Here’s why:
The Chinese Communist Party knows it must learn to become
more representative. Pluralism may not
be on the agenda but neither is “status quo for the foreseeable future”,
tenable. Can they secure the candid,
public feedback from a segment of the population in a way that is not a mortal
threat to centralized order? Hong Kong
will be the place that this happens first.
This speaks to the Confucian tradition as much as it does any tradition
of representative democracy. Confucian,
(therefore native and potentially more palatable to Beijing) because the entire
population, will offer courageous, unfiltered, and sage-like advice to the
ruler. Confucian as Beijing probably
won’t have to take the advice, but having been “memorialized” to, on the throne, for all to
see, they will ignore this counsel, at their own peril.
Assuming Beijing is willing to listen, it will call upon the
Hong Kong people to articulate leadership in a way that has otherwise never much
mattered since the founding of the former colony. They will have a vanguard role in teaching
the entire nation, how to have a safe, candid, democratic dialogue. Yes, I realize that by keeping it “safe”
Beijing will taint and compromise this articulation. But it is, nonetheless, a step towards a potentially dramatic shift in the way the PRC governs. When else have they ever
sought, much less made use of public opinion on matters of governance?
So what would the majority of Hong Kong people voting,
actually offer for “counsel” to Beijing?
The Cantonese people have always tended towards ambitious risk
neutrality given their lengthy history at the periphery of the realm and its’ enforcement. Under British rule the Hong Kong people were
colonized and neutered politically. Left
to focus on commerce they flourished, wildly. Once again back under Beijing’s
rule, citizens of the SAR now live under governance they have neither created,
nor have the ability to change. If the population
is finally given a voice, what will they say?
Cultivated, which direction will the seeds of leadership drive
towards? I think there is good reason to
watch this dialogue between Beijing and Hong Kong closely. Regardless of what
people may say about Hong Kong’s fate, or its stereotypical greed, a chance may
well be presented for the SAR to actually lead, the whole nation, by means of a
brave, intelligent, and public exchange with Beijing.
I want this experiment to work and lead to a better Hong
Kong and a more flexible adaptive China.
A flexible, learning, central government has a better chance of
innovating a power share with the United Sates, as she grows. Only a flexible, learning China will be able
to chart the ‘peaceful rise’ of Party rhetoric.
The alternative, alas; is a rather clear possibility, and the
consequences will be dire.
Eichmann and every person in Germany had incipient seeds of
noble, decent behavior within them.
Collectively, Nazi Germany was strikingly effective at scalding these
seeds, wholesale. I certainly don’t
believe that this characterized something essentially German. Deadening human decency is human
possibility.
What if the world around us once again begins to normalize
madness? I worry about the future
between a China and the U.S. where the currents of distrust and suspicion rise,
for one reason or another, to become the predominant meme. Can you imagine if loathing jingoism rises to
a pitch that makes McCarthyism seem tame?
I think I can. Distrust and hate to
define the default between the two countries and the only publicly acceptable
position is one of absolute scorn.
It won’t play out like it did during the Cold War and it
certainly won’t play out like it did in Europe under Nazi occupation. But intense, mutual hatred between the U.S.
and China, could easily wax, insane. And
if it does, what a hard world that will be for any of us who cannot deny, at
least to ourselves, the basic humanity of the other people. For everything, and everyone, will insist
that we join them in hate, or be cast as one with the “enemy.”
Is there something unquenchably human in my heart that has
been cultivated with sufficient care in me and in my children that it would
assert itself, in the face of such insanity?
And if you are so bold as to assert the basic humanity of, for example,
Chinese people, in the face of a broad, banal, collective voice of evil to the
contrary, when the jingoism if full flush, what then becomes of you? No doubt you’ll be silenced or interned or
deported. At that time, if you have the courage to speak, you’ll know something
of what German gentiles, with seeds of human decency were like, when they either
silenced themselves and accepted the banality and complicity of collective evil
or faced the terrifying consequences of behaving as decent human beings.
No comments:
Post a Comment