Solovyov and the problem of the (post-)sæcular

Over at The Dorothy Option I recently wrote a guest post critiquing the political doctrine of intégrisme slightly (and I do mean that; the true point of difference I have with Josias-form intégrisme is embedded in the third sentence) from its left, borrowing in particular from the theopolitical themes of Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov. The central point, I hope, is clear. Post-liberalism either will become, or already is, a semi-permanent feature of our current blown-apart political life. We can see this given the rise of various nationalisms, populisms, fundamentalisms and cults of personality throughout the world. Given even the recent history of illiberal ideologies in the twentieth century, mistakes in articulation can prove to be enormously costly: not just in terms of body count, but in terms of our collective and individual souls.

This, and this alone, has been my concern in writing about intégrisme so critically. Particularly because I share so many of intégrisme’s concerns about the inward falsity of liberalism – namely, that individual human projects and destinies are not so easily disentangled from public life; and that both the material and intellectual-emotional concerns of people are wrapped up in questions of policy in an intimate and messy way – at one point I came very close to an intégriste position. This position was challenged by life. I became intimately involved in communities – the Antiochian Church in particular; but also Saimasai, which included both Russian Orthodox and Hanafî Sunnî Muslims – that had been subject to religious persecution by illiberal régimes whose theopolitical vision was not entirely unlike the intégriste one.

And yet, these communities themselves were not liberal. Despite a certain degree of commitment to pluralism and tolerance of beliefs in tension with each other, the community in Saimasai was in many ways deeply traditionalist. On questions of gender rôles, sexual ethics more generally, dress, hospitality ethics, insider-outsider distinctions, trust of religious authorities, relationship with the state – Saimasai was markedly different from the standard American conception of the public space. I found the same thing quite true with the Antiochian Church in Pawtucket. Despite it being a very American immigrant community, and despite their being open and welcoming beyond my wildest expectations to an outsider like me, the internal norms among the parishioners were very different from my Anglo, crypto-Quaker upbringing. Again, at Saint Mary’s there were very different, and far more traditional, norms regarding family obligations, sexual ethics, hospitality and politics.

The history of these communities has also affected my thinking. All three of the præ-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet histories of the Qazaq people and of Kazakhstan generally have impressed on me the precariousness of the hard-won (and sometimes not-so-stable, riddled with tensions and bigotries) modus vivendi between Russian and Qazaq there. That’s not something to be lightly brushed aside.

The same feeling holds true with my second-hand experience of Arab nationalism. (I was in the same parish as Michel ‘Aflaq’s niece. Listening carefully, I did notice that several of the parishioners had ties to or sympathies with the SSNP, the PFLP or the Ba‘th Party. One could say I absorbed much of my sympathy for Arab nationalism by osmosis.) For a long time Arab nationalism was the only viable way in which Christians in the Middle East could participate in public life without either: adopting Ottomanist mannerisms; affecting an outward passivity in the face of Islâmic dominance; or resorting to preëmptive sectarian violence. On the negative side, the options available to the Orthodox Christian communities of Palestine, Syria and Ægypt were remarkably limited; on the positive side, even nationalists who were not Christian understood the overlap between Christian concerns and Arabist ones in the Middle East.

These and several other observations from my life in China both impressed on me the dangerous fallacies of liberalism in its attempts to circumscribe and flatten the deep community lives I witnessed, and also the equal danger of ‘flattening’ that life in the other direction by yoking state and Church (or state and mosque) into a master-slave dialectic. Deep-reading Russian, Arabic and Qazaq history and political philosophy – along with Orthodox theology – has put me on a very difficult tightrope to walk: a tightrope that, granted, involves reappropriating some aspects of socialism and even Marxism into my worldview.

But walking that tightrope is necessary for a Christian to do, because to do otherwise is to court (self-)deception and the temptations of ideological idolatry. In following Christ, no Christian should put themselves into an easy alliance with Pilate and Herod, and reach gladly for the ‘glaive of Cæsar’. But likewise no Christian should go the Essene route and reject the state in toto, in a world where functioning state or para-state structures are often the only thing standing between earth and a not-so-figurative hell for ‘the least of these’. No Christian should be a Sadducee and wish for a Sanhedrin to govern all aspects of our ritual and public life, figuring that this life and the next are of the same kind. On the other hand, no Christian should become a Zealot and seek to bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth by the ‘shortcut’ of messianic violence. Our Messiah came to conquer the kingdom of death, not to rule by it.

The Gospel message is not one of otherworldly comfort and consolation. It is a message of metaphysical, and therefore political, radicalism. We are called upon to behave as though not only our beloved friends and neighbours, but even our enemies, will partake in the Resurrection with us. We can, and we should, stand in solidarity with the rejected and crucified peoples of the world, just as our Lord was crucified between two ‘thieves’ (i.e. Zealots); but we are not to adopt the methods of Barabbas. Even in conditions of violence and war (which we are told will be with us even to the end), there is simply no room in the message of Christ for eliminationism of any sort. Because we are partaking in æternity, also: the anarchist temptation to ‘wipe the slate clean’ and start afresh, to recapture an Adamic existence in this world, is to be firmly resisted – even when that temptation is offered from an admirable purity of heart and a holy desire for heaven.

The intégristes are absolutely right that we (Christians especially) should not be easily able to discuss politics without thinking about our ultimate End. However, the most dangerous and most subtle temptation comes when we are clear about this fact, but less so about the nature – that is to say, personal character – of that End. And that is precisely the point on which the new intégristes are fuzzy, leading people like Ahmari to embrace personality-cult politics. This is why, in these discussions on the theopolitical turn that Americans are currently making – as in the Ahmari-French debate – I find my mind turning more and more toward specifically Russian apocalypticism.

Berdyaev had some rather backhanded praise for Vladimir Solovyov’s Tale of the Antichrist. Solovyov’s earlier suave, polished and meticulous ethical philosophy, which was essentially erotic poetry with a German inflection. On the other hand, Berdyaev commented that the Tale was not only dark and ominous, but carried a crude quality. It was sketch-like. It was left unfinished. I would personally add to this that it carries a distinct whiff of racist paranoia which should be neither condoned nor passed over in silence. But the Tale, as Berdyaev recognised, was perhaps one of the most enthralling and disquieting things Solovyov ever wrote. It represented Solovyov’s return to a distinctively-Russian style of apocalyptic, and it was all the more discomforting for the fact that it marked a turn away from Solovyov’s earlier optimistic winged visions of a liberal-theocratic utopia toward which human society was bending.

In the broad strokes, the Tale of the Antichrist narrates the life of the titular Antichrist, who is portrayed as a veteran, a wealthy capitalist and proud philanthropist, a ‘thinker, writer and public figure’ who possesses a keen and deeply spiritual mind. He is raised in an intellectual milieu of syncretism, born out of a devastating world war which pits Asia against the West. He is a practising ascetic; he opines convincingly on many of the world’s problems; he appeals at a deep root level to the human longing for spiritual fulfilment, creative freedom and unity. After his transforming rejection of Christ and his self-offering to the Evil One, he authors a book called The Open Way to Universal Peace and Prosperity, which, in Solovyov’s words:

united a noble respect for ancient traditions and symbols with a broad and daring radicalism in socio-political questions, joined a boundless freedom of thought with the most profound appreciation for everything mystical.

Using this book, the Antichrist proceeds to position himself as the leader of a ‘United States of Europe’, to deliver the human race everything it ever wanted – its spiritual longing for mystery and miracle, and not merely bread. All this, with the purpose of turning the human race towards him, and away from the person of Christ.

What is notable and indeed a bit disquieting about Solovyov’s Antichrist is that he can be read, as Berdyaev indeed interpreted it, as something of a self-criticism of his earlier work – or at least one possible interpretation of it. After Solovyov’s Antichrist is made President of Europe, he offers the world every possible physical need, every possible liberty, even every possible spiritual consolation. This includes the consolations of liberty, authority, tradition, asceticism, heroism, philosophy, scholastic accomplishment: but entirely without Christ. (What is further troubling about this story is how many Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Christians are won over to his side by these explicitly spiritual blandishments.) What Solovyov’s Antichrist offers is, in fact, a reflection in significant part of Solovyov’s own vision of social-liberal theocracy: devoid of Christ.

It is this last feature which is most important. Christians of all traditions must be especially on guard against ideologies and social fixations, including even those fixations which don’t look like fixations (asceticism, tradition, authority, liberty et cetera), which are offered as ends in themselves instead of as reflections of the personal truth of Christ, who for the love of all died and rose again.

In America it is all too easy for Christians to make an idolatrous fixation out of liberty. This is in part because our national mythos has set up the false goddess of political liberty as a rival to Christ. But hæresies have a striking tendency to arise in opposing pairs. As the failures of liberalism highlighted by Ferrara become ever more apparent, the temptation of the opposite hæresy becomes stronger. Dostoevsky and Solovyov both intuited that the hæresy which opposes liberalism will be an anthropological hæresy which emphasises the spiritual potentials of man, which seeks to attend to his desires for mystery and miracle and hierarchy. It distresses me deeply that our current crop of intégristes – led by Ahmari and his cohort in this country, against the liberalism of French – have this anthropological fixation, rather than a devotion to the only Theánthrōpos.

Shıza: a very Russian crime drama

Shıza (Oljas Nýsýppaev) in Shıza

The first Sergei Bodrov film I ever saw was his delightfully-hammy and gloriously-terrible 2005 historical epic Kóshpendiler, a highly-fictionalised account of the early life and career of the military and diplomatic genius Kazakh prince Abylaı Han, which I absolutely will revisit sometime in the near future. Later, as part of the Russian language class I took at Rhode Island College, I saw his 1997 war drama Kavkazskiy plennik, which in my memory stands as a much better film on a much smaller scale, and which I may also go back and revisit at some point in the near future. The film of his that I just watched, the 2004 crime-thriller and coming-of-age drama Shıza (also titled Schizo or The Recruiter in English), co-written and directed by Gulshat Omarova, comes far closer in spirit to Sergei Bodrov’s earlier work than his later. Even though it is set in Kazakhstan, features a Kazakh directress and sports a cast of mostly-Kazakh characters, it is at heart a very Russian story.

The film centres on a fifteen-year-old high-schooler named Mustafa (Oljas Nýsýppaev), who on account of his reluctance to speak and his apparent slowness is given the cruel nickname of Shıza (‘schizo’) at school, and then expelled for getting into a fight. His poor mother (Gul’nara Eralıeva) takes him in to see a Russian doctor who accepts eggs, fish and homemade smetana as payment, who finds nothing physically wrong with him but suggests he may have some developmental abnormalities. He gives him a prescription and a referral to a specialist. Shıza doesn’t want to go back to school, and so his mother’s boyfriend Sakura (Eduard Tabishev) takes him under his wing with the prospect of earning some money. It turns out that Shıza’s job is to scout and recruit ‘fresh meat’ for an underground boxing club, but when Ali, one of the fighters Shıza scouts, dies in the ring, leaving his young son Sanjik and his girlfriend Zinka (Olga Landina) in the lurch. Shıza tries to make it up to them by supporting them financially, but finds himself getting further and further involved in the black-market gambling circuit and its attendant violence.

The setting of the story clearly reflects the recently-gone ‘lawless nineties’, with the bling-laden, open-shirted and sport-blazered, Mercedes-driving criminal lifestyle of the owners of the fight club being a stand-in for the cutthroat grasping of the oligarchs, and the blood-drenched boxing ring itself is something of a metaphor for the anarchic laissez-faire market œconomy, taking its toll on human flesh. These boxing matches are rigged, and unfairly bet on seasoned professionals to beat up on common working-class stiffs – adding an additional layer of realism and meaning to the cinematic metaphor for shock therapy. It also gives you reason to cheer like mad when one middle-aged electrical worker goaded into the ring manages to take down a hulking youth a head taller and nearly double his weight. There’s a certain ‘gangster æsthetic’ that is both sported and mocked in Shıza. The self-awareness with which the fifteen-year-old Shıza starts wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses and steals Sakura’s cigarettes to smoke tells you a lot about the way it was seen to be imported.

More broadly, this is a Kazakh film in which the scenery doesn’t consist so much of the wide open steppe with either its bleak desolation or its romantic potentialities, but instead: heavy industry, switching yards, coal heaps and smokestacks, cranes, factories, concrete slabs, walled bazaars – either that, or half-pre-fab houses with worn wooden fences and outdoor latrines and showers. This is neither the hardscrabble Kazakhstan of a remote Tengri past, nor the swashbuckling era of Kazakh freedom fighters from Dzunghar persecution. This is the post-Soviet society I saw in 2009, which the film presents without sentimentality and treats with an unvarnished realism. (I admit to feeling a trifle nostalgic.) The cinematography actually helps to accentuate the plight of Shıza and his family: Omarova seems to have a liking for high-angle shots that dwarf individuals and even crowds of people against the gigantism of rusting industrial machinery and architecture. The one element of the cinematography that I didn’t particularly like were the plentiful first-person POV shots, which felt comical when the mood called for more serious choices.

I say this is a Russian story, but that’s really owing to the fact that – despite having a Kazakh name – Shıza is an archetypically Russian protagonist. In fact, he mostly speaks in Russian. He sometimes comes close to the загадочная русская душа, the elusive ‘Russian soul’. Despite this being a very modern story with a realist angle, in some ways Shıza is patterned on the Russian мужик of mediæval folklore. He’s quiet, slow, and his speech is often curt and ‘simple’. Many of the other characters call him an ‘idiot’ or a ‘fool’. Like a good Russian protagonist, he cares a lot about his mother and uncle, has an unflappable sense of fair play, and has an instinctive love for orphans and widows. The reasons he’s after money are not selfish. His motivations are fairly transparent, and at times we worry that he might be a bit too naïve for the sorts of work he does – lining himself up to get sold out or backstabbed at some point. But at the same time, Shıza is fairly cagey and observant, and other people tend to underestimate him. He clearly understands more than he lets on about the situations he is in, often times better than the ‘smart’ characters do. In fact, a significant part of the plot involves the way he manages to get one-up on the crime bosses he works for.

The relationship between the young Shıza and the cynical older Russian Zinka is worth commenting on a bit as well. It won’t be spoiling too much to say that the growth in their interactions is handled with remarkable subtlety and grace. Despite Zinka’s first brusque and distrustful meeting with Shıza (‘I don’t have any friends like him’) and her seemingly cold attitude to her foster-son, she is not insensitive to his having gone out of his way to keep his word to her dead boyfriend. She naturally opens up to Shıza, despite the youth lying to her at first about Ali’s demise. She tells him of her dreams of moving to China, getting better wages, settling down with a nice Chinese guy… Handled by anyone else, Zinka might have come off as a crass and caustic character. But Olga Landina’s acting chops are superb, and we get to see convincingly that her character really does have a sweet and kind heart beneath her rough edges. Shıza notices this quite quickly, though, and the romantic turn their relationship takes seems natural and unforced. Ultimately, it’s Zinka he trusts with his mother’s life and his own.

Given that I’m treating Shıza as a Russian crime drama, however, it deserves to be judged as one. If there’s one real flaw I might find with the film, it would be how it wraps up. A lot of time is spent on Shıza’s ‘descent’ into the underworld boxing and his subsequent involvement in progressively bigger transgressions. He does have a redemptive arc, however, and this unfortunately gets a bit short-sold – added almost as an afterthought. Though we do get to see and hear what he does to atone and why – mostly through a sequence between Shıza and Sanjik and later through a voice-over narration – it might have been worth spending a few extra minutes with Shıza’s interior life after the film’s climax and how he deals with what he has done.

Even so, Omarova put out a sterling piece of cinema here, and I would commend it sincerely to the age-appropriate audience. It is, after all, a movie about illegal boxing, so there’s some violence, blood and rear-end male nudity. I do tend to enjoy ‘underdog’ movies generally, and this one has the favourable distinctions of being solid, gritty, well-paced and heartfelt.

Where we live, there is our land

Part 1 of my Here-hood Saints series

I am an amnesiac. I am an American. The two go together, and not altogether on account of the alliteration. And it would go together with being a son of Adam, for that matter – poor bloke got tricked into eating a fruit and forgot what good and evil were. My amnesia gives me a double mind; it is not the cause of my guilt, but I am guilty of it anyway. Věra Danzer Cooper – the Jewish grandmother I never knew, and never knew I had until high school – has been something of a haunting presence in my life: more so than I would have thought possible at the time. The sweet and smiling face in the yellowed photographs, almost the double of my younger sister’s, somehow ‘clicked’ something in my mind. Separated as we were by generations (but not by gæography, she also a Wisconsin girl planted in Rhode Island!), she made certain abstractions concrete. She sparked in me a fascination with genealogy, which in turn led me to discover certain rhymes and patterns in my own family life. Blood is thicker than water. Water evaporates. Blood leaves marks and scars. Both flowed from the side of Christ, pierced by a Roman spear at the behest of my kin. Tertullian talked about the ‘blood of the saints’ as the ‘seed of the Church’. There’s a truth in that, but we’ll get to it later.

Blood links me indelibly to Wisconsin and to Rhode Island – both of them my childhood homes; both of them my Jewish forebears’ homes. The blood of my working-class Moravian-born immigrant great-grandfather was spilt, probably in France, in order to seal that link forever. ‘דאָרטען, װאוּ מיר לעבען, דארט איז אונזער לאנד. Dorten, vau mir lebn, dart iz aunzer land.’ Alfréd Danzer may not have been an ideological Bundist, but he lived and suffered like one. How strange it is, then, that I should be a migratory bird, a weird and hopelessly-fragmented kind of pilgrim, an assimilated-apostate Jew wandering in search of Christ on the wrong end of another continent!

So there I was in Qazaqstan: a nervous wreck and a broken failure on the verge of washing out of Peace Corps. I went to the hram of Saint Aleksandr Nevsky looking for… I don’t even know what it was anymore. Father Valery (Shurkin), the rector of that parish where Saint Aleksandr was the patron, welcomed me as warmly as if I were another Russian. And he asked me if I was Orthodox; I replied in my broken survival Russian that, no, I belonged to a ‘peace church’. He replied to me, gently, in paraphrase – though I didn’t and couldn’t have known it at the time – the wisdom of Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco:

The closer we approach God, the closer we approach each other, just as the closer rays of light are to each other, the closer they are to the Sun. In the coming Kingdom of God there will be unity, mutual love and concord.

That the Kingdom of God is only as ‘close’ as we are to each other, and functions as a kind of inverse-square law bringing people closer as they draw near the source of that radiance, made a kind of intuitive sense to me. It also, I realise in hindsight, authorises a spiritual directive to ‘be where you are’: the light reaches everywhere; you do not have to, and should not, pack up and leave to find it. ‘Dorten, vau mir lebn, dart iz aunzer land.’ (The irony is that I had to travel to Qazaqstan and China to figure that out.) Saint John was a Russian-speaking ethnic Serb from Khar’kov; not a Yiddish-speaking Jew from Kiev. And yet even that propinquity is not an accident; as God sees it, nothing can be. If Jewish Bundism was a political reaction to a bloody kind of settler-colonial imperialist impulse on the part of our own people, then here is the spiritual mirror of that belonging. Orthodox Christianity, too, is a church of empire that doesn’t have to be.

To be a church of empire or a church of the crucified: that was the choice that the princely Saint Aleksandr, the patron of that little hram in Saimasai, had to make. He had cultivated the habits of ‘here-hood’ in his early life by attending closely to local administration in Novgorod and Vladimir, and settling disputes between merchants and craftsmen and boyars. He is most famous, though, for his military victories: winning Davidic battles against the Teutonic Goliaths on his Western frontier – the Swedes at Neva; the Germans and Balts at Peipus. Saint Aleksandr’s military prowess is commemorated in the legendary Sergei Eisenstein film bearing his name, but this is not the most important aspect of his life or character.

When it came to a true choice between worldly glory and Christ-like humility, he opted for the latter, the way of nonviolent resistance and self-abasement over the way of triumphalism. He has never been wholly forgiven for it since (and particularly not by Western-looking Slavs nor by cold-war liberals). The louder the schismatics cry out in false umbrage that he is a proto-Stalinist, the more intensely his example of sublime meekness in the spirit of Saints Boris and Gleb puts the lie to their canards and calumnies. Saint Aleksandr made a prudential decision to surrender his independence to the Khan of the Golden Horde. He gave over vain promises of imperial glory and even his state’s independence from the Tatars, in order to save the lives of his people and the spiritual character of his country. He had to put aside any illusions or delusions of grandeur he might have entertained, and make a decision here and now. He decided in that moment that ‘dorten, vau mir lebn, dart iz aunzer land’, and not some other. He didn’t have to travel to France and fight to seal the link to his home in blood. He did it merely by refusing to run, by refusing to fight, by bowing his head and bearing the Cross where he stood. To that heartsick ‘peace-church’ stranger standing in his temple, somehow he drew close: a ray of light pointing toward the Son.

At the time, the importance of my visit to the hram of Saint Aleksandr had not made itself particularly strongly felt. It was only with a certain distance of time that the full effects of that ‘fragment’ came. But the saint was ‘here’.

In the sense I’m using it, all saints are ‘here’, insofar as they are in Christ. As Saint John says, all those who have drawn close enough to God to be so glorified have, by so doing, drawn close to those here on earth as well. Grace knows no worldly borders. Rather, Christ and His saints draw near to those of us who are in need of grace. Christ’s blood is indeed a seal upon us, linking us indelibly to the Heavenly Kingdom in the Eucharist, no matter where we are. ‘Dorten, vau Dir lebn, dart iz aunzer land.’ The Crucifixion and Resurrection are historically- and gæographically-particular events that themselves shatter the logic of history and gæography. It is only we, limited as we are, who are in need of particularity and mediation. In that sense the blood of the saints truly is a seed. It falls to us to cultivate it.

I am tied to my homeland – the Upper Midwest, broadly – in a way which is completely belied by my peregrinating youth and young-adulthood. Bundism is in my Jewish-American heritage even if my amnesiac double-mindedness ‘forgets’ it, strives and rebels against it; though it belongs to a non-Christian tradition it nonetheless informs my Orthodoxy. And there, in that space where the local and the universal dissolve, there are some voices and some faces that figure with greater prominence. The humble Saint Aleksandr of that Qazaqstani temple is one. The others may be familiar to readers of this blog. Some, like Saint John of Riga, drew near to me in my wanderings abroad. Others, like Saint Alexis of Wilkes-Barre, were waiting for me at journey’s end. The examples of these saints, already remembered eternally by God, can help me – an ignorant slave, like Meno’s – to remember what I have forgotten.

Memories of a duck hawk

Nine years ago I started this blog specifically as a Peace Corps journal named Matt’s Existential Musings, and it’s kept me company in various forms throughout the years long after I left Peace Corps. Going back and reading my first entries from the MEM days, some of them strike me as painfully naïve. I’m not entirely sure that the ‘me’ of nine years ago would recognise the Matt Cooper writing these reflections now. Of course, there are some threads of commonality and some repeated themes that run through my writing even from then to the present time; and these have been refined and honed with deeper reading and learning, but more importantly through experience.

Anglican hatchery; German flight

When I started off out of college, I was primarily influenced by the works of liberal, latitudinarian Anglican and Episcopalian divines like Charles Gore and Frederick Denison Maurice who contributed to Social Gospel Protestantism. This was a result of having studied religion under Dr Gary Dorrien in college. After Dorrien left Kalamazoo for Columbia, I transferred to the philosophy department and began studying continental philosophy under Dr Chris Latiolais. The thinkers that I latched onto most heavily during this time were, of course, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, although my senior thesis was essentially a Hegelian / Marxist defence of the communitarian ideas of Dr Michael Sandel, whose work on justice continued to be influential on me after college.

Again, I look back now and I view my collegiate work as hopelessly naïve, incomplete, one-sided, detached from lived reality in a way which makes that same work’s fixation on lived realities seem all the more ironic and existentially-pathetic. But the same drive, the same desire to understand justice at a deeper level than that offered by the ubiquitous Lockean liberalism that makes up so much of American political discourse – that has never left me. Part of the reason I ended up joining Peace Corps was to make real those values which I had given voice to – but life hits you harder than you first expect.

A strong Eastern wind

Studying at Kalamazoo College, I took full advantage of the study abroad programme they offered there. The Chinese language very quickly became a passion of mine, thanks to the now semi-retired Dr Madeline Chu, though I had taken an interest in Chinese history since my high school area studies class on the subject, and also through the novels of Pearl S Buck and RH van Gulik. I decided to take a year abroad in Beijing, studying at Capital Normal University.

Once there, through Dr An Yanming, I encountered the philosophical traditions of Buddhism, the Zhuzi Baijia and – most importantly – Confucius. The ideas of Confucius as presented to me in the Analects appealed deeply to me – here was a man for whom justice (yi 義) in its full depth, was everything, and for whom the question of justice could not be detached from its social moorings – particularly ritual (li 禮). Only through ritual could justice be attained, with the final flower of that justice being love (ren 仁). Even though I understood that Confucianism and the Social Gospel Christianity in which I’d been brought up were two very different worldviews and religions, I couldn’t help but be impressed by their similarities and potential synergies. In one way or another, I have been approaching and grappling with these synergies throughout my entire intellectual life.

It pains me somewhat to own that for all its advantages, Kalamazoo College was only of limited help to me in pursuing these synergies. Even though the study abroad programme was truly a blessing and even though my professors did encourage me to take full advantage of it, when I came back it became clear that there was no space for Eastern philosophy to be had on campus. I had to go back to the religion department if I wanted to continue studying Confucianism and Buddhism with any degree of seriousness (which I did). I have never, however, stopped taking Confucius seriously on his own merits rather than filtering him through the lens of the German-idealist canon.

By the Silk Road back to a green England

Again, when I left college I sought after some form of real-life service, and I found it in AmeriCorps and Peace Corps. It was in preparation for Peace Corps that I first discovered the Orthodox Church – in fact, the same church in which I would become a member after coming back from China the third time: Saint Mary’s in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. I also picked up a thin old cloth-bound volume at the Providence Athenæum, by a man who would come to be one of my foremost intellectual influences in life ever since. The book was The Russian Revolution. The man was Nikolai Berdyaev. His religious, personalist approach to the continental tradition of philosophy blew my mind: it was only on reading him that I came to understand Marxism as a religious heresy; through him and only through him, my rarefied undergraduate Marxism was transformed into something more clearly, self-awarely and cogently Christian again, something more human. He impressed me with the importance of the creative impulse even in considerations of the grand scale. He started me on the long and arduous process of holding my philosophical convictions up to life as a whole and seeing if they worked – a process I’m still on, by the way. Poets began having importance for me, too. Particularly the Qazaq Muslim poet Abai Qunanbaiuly, whose open and creative spirit in the Book of Words seemed to rhyme with what Berdyaev was saying philosophically.

I washed out of Peace Corps; partly a victim of my own bad habits, and partly a victim of bureaucratic CYA on Peace Corps’s part. I’ve got enough distance on it now where I can keep from beating myself up about it, and where I can acknowledge both my own failures and points at which the American government could have done more to help me succeed. Still – failure kicked my arse hard, sent me into a downward spiral. Reading Kurt Vonnegut helped. I didn’t do much intellectual work at all in the years to follow, even though I went back to school and took a few courses in œconomics and mathematics. I continued to delve into the moralistic Anglicanism of yore: I read William Laud and Richard Hooker and Hugh Latimer and Samuel Johnson and Ken Leach. I continued to be shaped by Gore and Maurice. I became an admirer of Newman and Pusey and the Oxford Movement. It was a beautiful socialism I wanted, a socialism fragrant with red roses and incense, a workers’ and families’ movement that bowed only before Christ the True King, and which would leave no man or woman behind, no matter how unfortunate – and sweep them all up into a glorious Renaissance polyphony of praise and thanksgiving to the Creator of All. I confess: that’s still a winged vision that I cherish.

Rebel without a class

My faith in that socialism would be deeply shaken by graduate school. I was still very much a do-gooder at heart, and I longed to be in a place where other do-gooders planned to do their good. And that place, as it turned out, was the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. (Yes, they encourage you to spell it all out that way on your résumé. I should have known then what I was getting into.)

I made close friends with the international students – the Chinese students, yes, of course, first and foremost, because I spoke Mandarin. But I also got close to Korean, Japanese, Indonesian, Bengali, Senegalese, Kirghiz and Nepalese folk in Pittsburgh – mostly grad students like myself and, to top it off, mostly fish out of water themselves. But for the most part I was withdrawn into my own shell. I studied hard. I began reading George Grant, John Ruskin, Wang Hui, Jiang Qing and Peter Viereck, and my socialism began taking a hard consciously-conservative turn. I began to distrust the élites with whom I went to school, not least because I couldn’t start to tell with most of them where the self-promotion ended and where the actual work began. My rebellion was unconscious at first, and only became conscious when I started to realise that I was basically training to become my own public relations agent. I threw myself instead into the academic side of things – like a crazy man, I undertook both a capstone project and a senior thesis (even though GSPIA only required one of the two from me). The senior thesis marked a kind of distributist turn: I wanted to turn political and social power back to the neighbourhoods, back to the black communities that the ‘big planners’ and ‘urban renewal’ types had taken so much from, and I wanted them to do it using public, common spaces.

Problem was, I was turning out to be a ‘big planner’ myself. I couldn’t help it. I had an inkling of it while I was there, but the school was essentially designed to crank out three types of people: spooks, sophisters and superintending fussbudgets. I certainly wasn’t going to be a hitman for the CIA; I’d be damned before I became a promoter of laisser-faire and ‘markets cure all’. And as for the fussbudgets, well… I almost became one. It was only Viereck and his suspicions of the bourgeois bureaucracy who largely held me back from it. As grad school ended, I had a pregnant girlfriend on an expired student visa and no medical insurance. I did the only decent thing: I married her, and I followed her back.

The perpendicularised expatriate

So, there I was. In the birthplace of Lü Bu.

Teaching English to the students of farmers, living in a Soviet-era brutalist apartment complex on the edge of the Gobi Desert in hands-down the strangest boom town I’ve ever experienced, fuelled by a heady mix of rare earths processing and consumer electronics. Listen: it was a place that, like Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, had come unstuck in time.

Sinicised ethnic Mongolians from Yuan-era families answered to English names in my classroom as they followed the soap-operatic lives of Korean comic-book characters in their textbooks. Cafeteria-quality pizza and fried chicken were served at fancy cafés with red curtains and lacquer tables, but the good food was served at the street stalls run by people from every other possible part of China. Brand spanking-new hospitals built like skyscrapers dispensed prescriptions for traditional Chinese herbs which, as often as not, worked better than the ‘scientific’ Western remedies. My daughter was happy, bless her. My wife wasn’t, bless her too. We survived mostly because we didn’t drink the damn tap water. I still get otorhinolaryngological infections from my bout with pneumonia there. But China changed me. It’s probably better to say that life changed me, because it kicked my arse. No wonder I turned into a metalhead.

China was a different country where the politics and the philosophies and the assumptions that I’d been raised with didn’t seem to apply in the same ways. I suddenly found myself with this very odd, very fierce conviction that China was screwing up, but she should be allowed to screw up in her own way. She shouldn’t have to take dictation from us, we clueless Americans and expats, who didn’t know up from down or left from right, but had still managed to delude ourselves that we knew best. Partly because I myself was so disoriented, and partly because I’m a contrarian and wanted to show myself off as clever, I began defending all of my egalitarian convictions in the language of reactionary high tradition; and my distrust of democratic liberalism with all the revolutionary stridency of Mao Zedong. How was all that supposed to work? Damn if I knew.

The people who made the most sense to me were the ordinary people. My in-laws. My students and their parents. My co-teachers, especially Vivian, whom I’ve mentioned before. China was upside-down, jumbled-up, mish-mashing its most venerable of traditions with the crassest and most gaudy possible approach to development. And yet somehow the people I worked and interacted with at the face-to-face level were sane; they were human, even in the face of these things that should not be. How? Dare I say it? Was this beauty? Was this… hope?

It may seem strange, then, but it really makes a kind of sense to me, that somehow Berdyaev should come back to me in China, smiling wryly beneath his moustache and bringing under his arm copies of Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, War, Progress and the End of History and On Spiritual Unity. Vladimir Solovyov and Aleksei Khomyakov soon joined my list of philosophical influences, and all because of what I beheld in Baotou. Somehow the apophatic spiritual politics of the Slavophils and the apocalyptically-inflected Platonism of Solovyov were able to speak wisdom to me about this perpendicularised public sphere, this orchestrated chaos that was my life – but it was a wisdom that wasn’t their own. And that was how I sought out and found Mitrophan Chin in Boston, who introduced me to Fr Sergiy Voronin at the Russian Embassy in Beijing and… well…

The Heavy Anglo-Orthodox was born out of the chaos. Queue the theme of Lü Bu.

Old faith in the old capital

I moved schools, largely for personal reasons. I became a schoolteacher at a public middle school in Luoyang. My wife was happier: we were within daily reach of her parents, and they helped us so much in raising Ellie I can’t possibly thank them enough. (The elder Chinese wisdom of the multi-generational household is old, and wisdom, for a reason – though I have to admit, at the time I was more than a bit of a freeloader.)

I was left quite a bit to my own devices in following the dictates of my conscience and adapting myself to the faith that had suddenly visited me. Mostly, those dictates involved watching terrible B-movies and playing Smash Bros. with my next-door neighbour and best friend in Luoyang. I got good at playing several characters, but was still most comfortable with Marth. I took on a prayer rule. I fasted. And I read Russian Orthodox authors. Saint Filaret of Moscow; Saint John of Kronstadt; Konstantin Pobedonostsev. I became an insufferable traddie for a little while, and annoyed everyone with the fasting rules I tried so hard to keep. It was not the best of foundations to build on, but I tried my hardest to build on it with what tools I had to hand.

For the time being, I was philosophically stagnant. Philosophy wouldn’t save me; I had to put it aside. I didn’t cease being interested in œconomic or political questions, though – I read some works by Fr Sergey Bulgakov, and also some by my father’s old friend and colleague, the late Dr Jaroslav Vaněk, about the heterodox political œconomy of Yugoslavia, and came away with a newfound interest in gæopolitics wherein I found myself more and more often taking the side of the victims of empire and the resisters of neoliberalism, wherever they happened to be. A rather ironic position to be in, for a Henan nüxu 河南女婿 living in a city of peonies, the very heart of what was for much of human history the most powerful empire in the world. But neoliberal – Henan is not. My father-in-law is a businessman and entrepreneur, but (as I came to learn during my time living with him) he’s got opinions which occasionally range well to the left of my own on questions of œconomy and gæopolitics.

My son Albert was born in Henan, same as his sister Ellie. I got to see him and hold him for a couple of weeks before I had to return to the United States, which I did in advance of my wife.

Homeward bound

I returned home in the middle of 2015 and began looking for work. This would begin one of my long stretches of unemployment where it was pressed firmly home to me, just how little I’d learnt from graduate school these seemingly all-important lessons about being a self-promoter. (I’m not one.) I attended Saint Mary’s Antiochian, and befriended several people there – one of whom hooked me up with an internship at a policy research group: the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council; later I would get a job at EAB, which is how I ended up in the Twin Cities. I gush about Arabic hospitality, but I really could stand to gush quite a bit more than I do. It is really only owing to the efforts of the wonderful, caring people who worship at Saint Mary’s Antiochian – particularly Fr Elie Estephan and his contacts in the legal world – that my wife is living with me in the United States now, and that we are once again a united family. To him and to the Saint Mary’s family as they prayed for me and supported me both spiritually and materially, I truly owe a lifelong debt.

Intellectually, I sustained myself on history: the history of agrarian movements in Eastern Europe; the history of third-party politics at home. Movements of language, cultures and peoples fascinated me. I became consciously interested in the people living in the margins, at the crossroads, on the borders, between the cracks. The crucified peoples of the world. It became a desire of mine to stand with them and to share their suffering, in however small a degree. I got my wish. Not in the way I would have hoped, but I got it all the same. I was fired. Some bare six months after my family had come here.

Unemployment sucks. Even for someone like me, who understands all the pitfalls of our meritocratic mythology and of Lockean contractarianism, being unemployed feels like a failure of manhood. The literature which could best give voice to my pain was proletarian and immigrant: the novels of Carpatho-Rusin immigrant Thomas Bell, who understood all too well the slow dehumanisation that takes place for the unemployed. The consciousness of being an object of pity. It was through this unemployment period that I came to sympathise far more strongly and in a far more visceral way with the plight of workers. Before, in my Marxist phase, I had considered them only in abstraction. Now I was among them, one of them. Material conditions suddenly mattered a great deal more; when you don’t have money, worrying about anything else seems like a luxury. The working-class Rusins who had come here from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a people truly marginalised and between the cracks, had understood this. They found strength in their faith, but they still organised and fought. And suffered. And died. And those who lived, and were literate, wrote through their suffering. In this writing I found consolation, and a will to fight.

The Platonic machinist

I’m still processing from my year of reading Plato, which began when I was still employed at EAB. Actually, I began reading Plato in part because I felt it necessary to understand the historical reasons behind the rise of a certain political figure. But I found that Plato wasn’t necessarily as interested in history as he was in the same questions that drove Confucius: what is justice? What is the Good? What do these things look like (and act like) in the human being? And he had a way of approaching the question which shook all my certainties and made me feel completely, philosophically inadequate to the task.

I also found that the Plato who wrote and left his Dialogues was a very different Plato than the Plato of the public imagination. The Plato of the public imagination is a great abstracter, a kind of proto-Gnostic – someone more concerned with the realm of the ideal than with the demands of life here and now. But the Plato of the Dialogues was very much this-earthly; he was very much concerned with how we are to behave in the here-and-now, with how we justify ourselves and our actions, with how we deceive ourselves with various approximations of the truth which are not actually the truth. For Plato the Forms are not their own end, but a practical exercise which we use to approach and measure ourselves against the Good. He used a gæometric exercise – that is, he used Forms – to convince Meno’s slave that what he thought he knew wasn’t actually true, and to prompt Meno’s slave to figure out for himself (or rather, to ‘remember’) how to reason for himself toward the truth. Though Plato may have been an élitist, his emphasis on knowing led me to a new appreciation for manual labour. There is no shame in it when I became an hourly wage-earning machine operator here.

I didn’t abandon interest in history, though. In our current gæopolitical mess, I found I had to become interested in China’s Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, in which Chinese thinkers had to grapple with the behaviours and problems of states in an environment of international anarchy. It’s not surprising, given my reading of Jiang Qing, that I would turn to the Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals; what did surprise me was how realist it was, in spite of (or maybe because of) its eschatological fixations. It charted a kind of grand-historical ‘fall from grace’, and it drew careful distinctions between what was laudable, what was acceptable, what was possible and what was outright wrong. Only suddenly, at the end, are we treated to a kind of flashing eschatological hope – the arrival of the qilin, a prefiguration of the intrusion of Christ into history.

Dong Zhongshu, the great interpreter of the Gongyang Commentary and the father of an entire philological-hermeneutic tradition that would include He Xiu, Gong Zizhen, Wei Yuan, Lin Zexu, Kang Youwei and Jiang Qing, became another great philosophical influence on me. He took the philosophy of Confucius, and – applying it to history, seeing the outworkings of Tian in the historical records – transmogrified it into an intense, demanding form of personalism, a witness to the Heavenly personality of persons, a personalism which had definite political ramifications. This again brought me back to the personalism of Berdyaev.

The unlikely places

Alien Qazaqs were my dear friends;
Chaotic China my sanity;
Wise Greeks my cloud of unknowing;
New England Arab refugees my anchor;
Stateless Rusins my consolation.

Hatched east of the Mississippi,
Migrant to the seaboard,
My whole life I looked east.
Further and further thence I flew in my search,
Only to roost on the western bank.

I think I’ve done a fairly good run-down here, of where I’ve been the past nine years – and, incidentally, drawn up a decent list of my more important intellectual influences and guiding spirits along the way: Plato, Confucius, Dong Zhongshu, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, John Ruskin, Karl Marx, Aleksei Khomyakov, Abai Qunanbayuli, Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, George Grant, Wang Hui and Jiang Qing. Gathering up all the fragments, perhaps there is a pattern to be seen there. Or perhaps not. Even if there isn’t a pattern (or rather, better to say, there is a pattern but it is for God’s eyes and not for mine except in the fullness of time), what I’ve seen of life, even the ugliest and hardest parts of it, is still beautiful and still to be cherished.

A few brief words on Heimbach

The recent beating on Bright Monday of a protester by a new convert to Orthodoxy with a wooden three-bar cross is a matter of deep shame and deep reflection for the whole of the Orthodox Church, and several people have written already about the incident, such as Inga Leonova here and Maria McDowell here. I can only say that they have responded firmly, graciously and with the sort of gentle, introspective reflection I have come to respect and admire amongst my Orthodox brothers and sisters.

In truth, I can’t really improve on what they’ve already written and do not have much more to add myself, except to reply with a story, really the only one I feel I am fully equipped to tell.

In 2008 and 2009, when this blog was just beginning, I was still very much an ‘angry young man’; angry with Bush and angry with an economy and society that I had the nagging suspicion was fast leaving me and my peers behind without a second look back. I had the good fortune of stumbling across the writings of Nikolai Berdyaev (whom I now consider one of my most formative religious and philosophical influences), who introduced me to a completely different and persuasive way of looking at the ideologies I’d been exposed to in college, and indeed at my own religion. Later on, when I joined the Peace Corps, my anger and dissatisfaction turned inward. In the Peace Corps, I was the outsider to everybody. I didn’t trust my co-workers, I felt I was consistently on the examination table of my supervisors, and the strain of it alienated me from my host family in ways I still feel very bad about. My greatest solace came from the church of S. Aleksandr Nevsky in Saimasai. I fear I treated my visits there much too casually, but Fr Valery was incredibly understanding even as I sputtered and hemmed and hawed in my survival Russian, and the church service and meal afterward were some of the few times in Kazakhstan when I truly felt most at peace.

The non-Russian. The heretic. The wayfaring outsider. The strange and sick in mind and heart, trusted by no one.

I could not, of course, take communion there, but Fr Valery and the matushka of the church made me welcome at the meal after the Liturgy and afterward as well. It took a long while for the impression to sink in, but sink in it did. I kept looking for what I had found there, and Orthodoxy kept beckoning me back.

In light of this, I emphatically do not want to heap hatred or judgement upon the young man who shares my Christian name, or his reasons for converting. Angry, self-disillusioned and sick in mind as I was five years ago, but for the grace of God, there might I also have gone. I can but join my own prayers to those of Ms. Leonova and Ms. McDowell that Mr. Heimbach will open himself to the healing of the Holy Spirit through the baptism he embraced.

It is true that Orthodoxy is a traditional and apostolic faith, and that in its Russian expressions particularly it did stress loyalty to right belief, to autocracy and to the nation, or narod. (Narod more accurately being a concept of ‘the people’ or ‘the masses’ that has historically had more in common with ‘left’ ideologies - as in narodnichestvo - than with ‘right’ ones, but that is another debate entirely.) But Orthodoxy at its best always welcomes the outsider in, and even the Slavophiles (like Khomyakov and Kireevsky), who so cheerfully and zealously proclaimed the special mission of the Slavs and of the Russian nation in the world, took special care to emphasise the brotherhood of all believers in sobornost’. Orthodoxy does not proclaim, at its core, racial distinctions or separations: the Patristic consensus, after all, draws upon Abba Moses and Abba Macarius as well as upon S. John Chrysostom!

Anyhow, these are just my own loosely-organised thoughts on the issue.

UPDATE: The All Saints Antiochan Orthodox Church in Bloomington, Indiana has released a statement regarding Matthew Heimbach, asking publicly that he recant the heresy of phyletism and submit to a period of penance before being readmitted into full communion. Please pray for Mr. Heimbach, for the victim of his beating and for All Saints Church.

Still her true character

Over the ten-minute break between classes, I was having a conversation with a fellow teacher at Baotou Teachers’ College, Vivian, which managed to be quite broad-ranging. We started off discussing student behaviour in class: though a number of my classes are quite well-behaved and attentive, this one in particular is rather… shall we say, ‘active’. This being still basically my first month, we still need some time to get used to one another, though this certainly isn’t as fubared a situation as Peace Corps was for me. Vivian remarked that when she was a student, they would still treat the teacher with some measure of the deference due to age and status, but that that respect was slowly disappearing. I remember saying that it was a similar situation in the United States, where teachers were often, in spite of having a very difficult job (a fact which it took me entering and leaving Peace Corps to truly appreciate), blamed for all of their students’ failures and underappreciated for having supported those same students’ achievements.

We ended up talking about labour rights in both countries. Vivian remarked that although in China all teachers do have the benefit of union representation, the union system does not really work in favour of the teachers. I told her that the situation in the United States was better in some respects but not in others: teachers’ unions are under concerted siege in the popular press, and their legal rights are being steadily eroded. Moreover, the welfare of teachers, students and families varies widely from district to district – you can have a perfectly functional, healthy district situated right next to a district where the union, the administration and the parents are at each other’s throats. Vivian indicated that such a system might still be preferable, given that the unions actually do something, but was nonetheless appalled that teachers might be fired at the drop of a pin, despite having taught for most of their adult careers, on the basis of their students’ rote performance on a standardised test.

And then we talked about the nature of education, at which point I made a reference to how Confucius would not necessarily have endorsed the culture of standardised tests and rote learning, whether in China or in the US (the Analects has it that 「誦詩三百，授之以政，不達；使於四方，不能專對；雖多，亦奚以為？」 - ‘Though a man may recite three hundred Songs by heart, yet if when trusted with a task of governance he cannot achieve it; or if he is sent to any of the four corners of the world, but cannot reply without assistance; though his learning is great, what real good does it do?’ [13:5]), and she was surprised (as a number of my colleagues are) that I was familiar with the Analects. She noted that in spite of all of the recent changes, most Chinese people still respect and appreciate Confucius, and hold to traditional ways, particularly in Baotou. In Beijing or Shanghai or Guangdong, she said, people might be ‘a little more cosmopolitan, a little more “open-minded”’ (I could hear the quote-marks), but most of China still espoused (at least publicly) a far more traditionalist ethic. At that point our ten-minute break was over and we went back to class.

Much is made of how China is changing. Much more is made of how terrible the Cultural Revolution was. Let us not deceive ourselves – it was indeed a terrible tragedy for Chinese culture and education, let alone for the Chinese people. But as Mao himself acknowledged, he only managed to change Beijing and perhaps the areas around it through the Cultural Revolution – and Mao was nothing if not determined to change China’s institutions. So, indeed, were his successors Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, who were determined to ‘modernise’ China by adopting all of the norms and vices of gangster capitalism. But have they succeeded in winning minds and hearts, either the old laoban or the new? In Beijing and Shanghai and Guangdong, perhaps. But if what Vivian told me is to be credited, they have faced an uphill battle in China’s countryside these past sixty years – a battle which it seems has yet to be won or lost.

Confucianism promotes an ideal of education which produces virtuous people: in that, it is comparable to the classical Greek ideal of paideia, of liberal education; and stands opposed to the functionalist techne ideal which sees education as merely a toolbox of skills to be acquired (on the cheap, if necessary). Confucianism also promotes an ideal of moral economy: in that, it is comparable to the radicalism of Catholic social teaching when it insists upon fair wages, strong unions, just regulations and opposition to monopolistic business practices; and stands opposed both to Marxism and to neoclassical economics, both of which discount any role of moral behaviour in the marketplace, and both of which reduce the human being to homo oeconomicus. And the true character of the Chinese people in places like Baotou is apparently still very much sympathetic to these ideals, despite all that they are taught by their own media and by the behaviour in their own public spaces to believe otherwise. I do not deny that there are still massive hurdles to overcome in creating a civic space in China, but I am not an unshakeable pessimist about the moral state of Chinese society; far from it.

There is yet quite a good deal of room for hope.

Just for the record…

Matt Damon is awesome. If you haven’t seen the video, you should. Mr Damon is, in spite of his use of colourful metaphors - quite voluble and articulate on the subject and gets at the very heart of the Christian idea of vocation. Teaching is a profession which, by its very nature (and particularly in our anti-intellectual society, which tends to treat them like dirt) attracts those driven by caritas - even though they do enjoy living and must, like the rest of humankind, eat, they aren’t teaching just to collect their next paycheck.

Matt Damon is right here in more ways than one. The education problem in the United States is a lot more systemic than just bad teachers. Part of it - a large and substantial part of it - is the cultural expectation (on teachers and on students!) underlying the viewpoint both the Reason.tv reporter and cameraman express here. This expectation demands that education prepare students for ‘the real world’ - meaning a highly bureaucratised, technocratic and impersonal system which looks for a certain set of commercially applicable skills, among which is not creative, broad or moral thinking. Modern American society doesn’t want creative students or creative teachers; it wants cogs in a capitalist machine. Our society overvalues the knowledge-ideal of τεχνή (tekhne, from which comes our word ‘technical’) as a model of education and undervalues παιδεία (paideía, from which comes the English ‘encyclopaedia’) - learning for its own sake, particularly in the liberal arts. I tend to think of the scorn that is regularly heaped upon college English majors, or (in the United States, not so much in China) the awkward silences, looks of puzzlement and comments of ‘so what do you plan to do with that?’ that accompany my pronouncement that I studied philosophy in college.

A paideia ideal of education for its own sake won’t fix everything, naturally. What I hope it can do - as with many other believers in a liberal education - is open up people’s minds and hearts to the idea of vocation: of not just a skills-focussed ‘job’ interchangeable with any other, whose only end is making money. Vocation is a committed labour one undertakes to the greater glory of humanity and - ultimately - of God; though most teachers in American public schools are likely alien to such language, I argue that they are on a similar path. It is not a job, as Mr Damon notes, to which people flock because they envy the pay or the benefits. And, with a few notable exceptions, the teachers I had the good fortune of working with as part of my Peace Corps and AmeriCorps service in both American and Qazaqstani public schools did have the best interests of their students at heart. (The administrators, on the other hand, were a notably mixed lot.)

Here is the original video of Matt Damon cussing out the cameraman:



And some Holy Moses for good measure! \m/

Free music - Education

A kill-switch for intellectual integrity in the humanities

It is incredibly rare that I read a New York Times article that sends cold shivers down my spine the way no horror movie can, but the recent one about how the Wikipedia model might be changing the rules of peer review in academic journals made me literally cringe.

When I think back on my post-high school career, and how differently I thought as I left high school from when I left college, and how AmeriCorps and even Peace Corps changed even those views as I was continually exposed to more and deeper knowledge in communities of people who were struggling with the very same questions and issues (even if I completely disagreed with those people), I’ve come to understand how vital it is from a purely intellectual point-of-view to form those connexions. The sciences and the academic disciplines function similarly – you present a piece of work to your peers: people who have both experience with and an interest in the academic question or the scientific hypothesis you are posing; people who know your real name and who are willing to give you criticism (constructive or otherwise) under their own real names.

There are downsides to the process, naturally. Egos get involved. Academic battles and enmities arise. Though I do not know the specifics of the debate in geochemistry in which my father is primarily concerned, his views are immensely unpopular within his own circles and have extreme difficulty gaining traction. But the downsides of having academic debates contained within communities of people who have an understanding and a material interest in the field are vastly outweighed by the benefits. Criticisms are civil, for the most part. Criticisms conform to accepted standards of logic and reasoning. Criticisms are based in fact and according to the best understandings we have within the field.

Transferring these academic debates out of peer circles and onto the Internet is thus a monstrously terrible idea. Perhaps Dr Cohen, the George Mason University professor interviewed in the article who advocates such measures, would care to instruct himself in the subject beginning with this public service announcement (provided by a group of entertainers with a very clear and cogent understanding of how the Internet works to promote civility, rationality, community and factual debate).

A number of good points to be made here. Wikipedia editors are free to edit anonymously – with some exceptions, they don’t even need usernames, just IP addresses. The only reason Wikipedia is not a total wasteland is because they have bots and an active and dedicated team of professional editors who keep it relatively sane by reversing malicious edits and refereeing flame wars between interested parties on their discussion pages, but even Wikipedia is not really reliable for anything more than the most superficial information on any given subject, unless it is extensively sourced – and if you’re going to keep a dedicated team of professional editors who do just such selection of criticism, you might as well give them a break and keep your articles peer-reviewed anyway.

The deeper issue, though, is that of academia willingly subjecting itself to creationists, global-warming deniers and other such ignoramuses. Thankfully, the article was referencing only a certain number of journals in the humanities (the sciences so far seem exempt, and it is my sincere hope that they are wise, secure, sincere and self-aware enough never to attempt such a misguided stunt as this), but it is troubling all the same. The humanities are ostensibly academic disciplines which pose questions about what it means to be human; God help us all if we allow authority over such questions to fall into the hands of people who are insecure enough in their own humanity to spew vitriol and ignorance anonymously over the Internet.

Дос жылатып айтады, душпан күлдіртіп айтады

It’s a saying in Qazaq: ‘дос жылатып айтады, душпан күлдіртіп айтады’ (‘a false friend will make you laugh; only a true friend will make you cry’). I think it’s actually a very good saying – the friends you can trust are the ones who won’t be afraid to correct you when you do something wrong, even if it hurts you.

This is difficult for me to write about even now. I was invited to Nurgül Täte’s house for Courtney’s birthday party, but I was in an emotional shambles that day – my lesson had gone very poorly, and I had gone into a tailspin trying to plan my following lesson, and my host nephew and niece were trying to pick the lock on my room with a spoon. When I arrived at the house, I was on the verge of tears, and I tried to calm myself down in another room, but this caused everyone there to start worrying about me. In hindsight, I should not have gone there at all in that state, since it was offensive of me to be arriving at a birthday party when my emotions were not good – I was spreading my bad mood onto everyone else. Indeed, I had offended my host sister so badly she would hardly speak to me at all for the next two days (when we finally sorted it out). Asem and Nagima had to take me aside later and tell me bluntly that I needed to change my attitude completely if I wanted to work effectively (or at all) in Qazaqstan, that I needed to change my attitude toward my fellow Trainees and in general be more flexible.

It wasn’t easy at all to hear. But I’m glad they were honest with me – my trainers, and indeed all of my fellow Trainees, are far truer friends to me than I gave them credit for. They aren’t afraid of telling me what they think. It was good of my trainers to tell me that I need to learn to take their criticisms more gracefully, and also to have more human grace toward my fellow Trainees in general, because they are good people, every bit as good as the people in AmeriCorps, and I had been misprising them severely. They are undergoing the same trials I am, and they are dealing with them in different ways – they deserve what support I can offer. I had been holding them and myself to an impossibly high standard, and to be perfectly blunt, I needed a good slap in the face from my true friends to realise it.

Since then, I’ve been taking their advice to heart, without being overly hard on myself. I had a good discussion with Laura Marshall (whose blog site, ‘The Central Asian Times’, has some link-love in my volunteeroll to the right – visit her! If she writes half as well as my discussions with her have gone, you won’t regret it!) about how to handle cultural differences and how to manage my own stress. I’m still learning, and I should treat myself as such.

Alright, let's try this again.

Hub Day lunch break. I've got two hours - let's see what kind of photos I can upload today.







From our trip to Talghar on 18 September. It was a short hike, but a stunning one - some more adventurous Trainees (and current Volunteers) went into the waterfall for a brief shower; good thing it was a warm day.



My wonderful host family (clockwise from top left): Quanysh, Bota, Dauyr and Dana. The picture doesn't show it, but Quanysh is actually a pretty tall drink of water - he's 185 cm (about 6'1").

That's all I have time for at the moment. Көріскенше, my gentle readers.

Bring it on

Alright. It’s the fifth of October. I’ve got three classes to deliver today and two more team-teaching lessons to prepare for Wednesday. All unit lessons must be planned by the end of the week. Activities to choose for Game Fair and Health Day tomorrow. Site placement at the end of this week, plus intensive preparation for language testing next week. Welcome to PST in earnest. Bring it on.

I’m sorry I haven’t been to Ecik in awhile, and that my blog posts have gotten less frequent as time has gone on, but I simply didn’t have time this weekend to get up there – hopefully sometime before site placement I will be able to upload these posts from our favourite Ecik internet cafe (which is a basement, by the way, below a store, with five computers on mounted desks on the walls). It’s 300╤ an hour ($2.00), but man, is it ever worth it on the weekend! Ecik itself is a pretty cool town – I actually enjoy Ecik more than Almaty, since you get the benefits of being in a city (like a downtown, a bazaar, flush toilets and internet access) without the massive pollution. And the scenery is nice, too (not that it isn’t from Almaty, of course – just that it can’t always be seen).

I talked for two hours with my entire family yesterday, which was awesome (thanks, Skype!). Dad’s birthday was yesterday – I sang John McCutcheon’s birthday song. Mom’s birthday is on the same day as both Halloween and the Peace Corps swearing-in ceremony, so on the one hand it will be really hard to forget and on the other hand it will be really hard to contact her with everything that will be going on.

My full day of teaching three classes is over; it tired me out, but not as much as I thought it would. Two of the classes went well, one went very poorly. I am in the unfortunate habit of assuming the students know more than they do, and as a result one of my classes (for 8th form) was unreasonably and unrealistically difficult – based on a Robert Lewis Stevenson poem in Step 10 of our unit in the Kuznetsova textbook, with a lot of bookish vocabulary and weird constructions – and I was asking them to do critical thinking exercises based on their own feelings and experiences, which they weren’t yet ready to do (in English or in Russian!). Emiko suggested that it might have made a good university-level lesson plan, but not a good idea for 8th form in a Qazaqstani school; that lesson plan definitely goes in the mental recycle bin (it also didn’t help that I was teaching two groups instead of one and that they were being rowdy and noisy throughout). But I did learn a few things from that class (the first of which being to choose level-appropriate material for lesson planning, and not from the local textbooks). My other classes went okay, though – they were level-appropriate and the activities were good, but I still need to work on making my instructions clear for the activities I do. Today is Health Day and Game Fair, and I’ve got my activities prepped and ready to go. I’ll be monitoring Health Day activities and taking pictures at Health Day for the counterpart presentation during teacher training – hopefully I’ll post some of them on this blog. The same group of students who were at English club are likely to come to Health Day – and it’s entirely likely that Health Day will turn out to be a slight variation on English club, but I’m sure it will be fun all the same.