The Search for Truth on the Path of Reason: a review

Cross-posted to Goodreads here.

Dr Aleksei Il’ich Osipov’s book, The Search for Truth on the Path of Reason, has just become one of my favourite books on applied Orthodox theology in modern times for several reasons.

First, he showcases the ways of Western philosophy going back to Leibniz and Spinoza (but also including figures like Kant, Hegel and Schleiermacher). In each case, he shows how these philosophers’ conceptions of God differed—sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes in ways not so subtle—from the Christian witness to the Incarnation and its ramifications for how we should relate to God. The ‘search for truth on the path of reason’ is one which cannot be brought to a successful completion in itself, because the reason is darkened to the incomprehensible reality of God… and yet, as he shows with several examples, those who follow on that path may come to realise that the end of their journey lies along a different one.

The second noteworthy point is the deft and penetrating critique of scientism he provides. While he acknowledges the remarkable achievements and advances of knowledge that have come from the natural sciences, Dr Osipov nonetheless openly scorns the idea that science is at odds with religion (noting that the vast majority of scientists throughout history have been religious), and also shows that the attempts to make a comprehensive doctrine out of science—bear in mind he was writing this at le nouvel athéisme’s peak of popularity, in 2009—are woefully misguided and ill-fated.

There are several dimensions to Dr Osipov’s criticism of scientism. Most importantly, science does not and cannot prove or disprove religious maxims, because science is methodologically tethered to the realm of material causes and effects. The Christian thesis of a Creator cannot be subjected to empirical testing, because the ultimate reality to which the question of first causes belong is not amenable to such testing.

Following from this, he emphasises that the practice of science itself relies on a guiding hand which gives it a leading set of values and morals, and which determines the possible scope of its use. Osipov notes that although science has given us miracle cures for diseases, telecommunications and clean and cheap sources of energy—it has also given us biological weapons, echo chambers of distraction and outrage, and nuclear bombs. Being neutral towards questions of value, the natural sciences and the technologies which follow from it can be turned either to marvels of creativity and construction and wonder—or else to cataclysmic destruction and untold human suffering. This isn’t a particularly controversial point anymore, but Osipov makes it precisely in rebuttal to those who think science is capable in and of itself of providing the values by which it can be controlled.

Despite this, Osipov makes several strong arguments for acknowledging the reality of biological evolution, and notes that several saints—including Saint Seraphim of Sarov and Saint Theophan the Recluse—have noted that evolutionary theory is not at odds either with Scripture or with Christian practice… provided that it does not deny God.

Lastly (but not least) is his critique of religion. Dr Osipov identifies several strands within religious life which are deserving of critique: paganism, mysticism and immanentism (though he doesn’t use this last word himself). Paganism, which in his view is the identification of the supreme reality with the experience of a particular race or nation of people, he cites as spiritually harmful because it leads to various forms of pride and a rush after ‘food and shows’. Mysticism, a term by which Osipov comprehends a number of different strands of religious experience from the Dharmic religions to some forms of Protestant Christianity, places the locus of religious striving on the sensory experience of the believer. I’m using the word ‘immanentism’ here to encompass Dr Osipov’s critiques of Catholicism and Judaism, which are separate but share a common theme. His view is that both of these religious traditions place an over-emphasis on building paradise in this world, or awaiting a this-worldly Messiah who will deliver comfort and joy within this life.

The vital piece of his critique of religion is the emphasis he places on humility as the core virtue which is applicable to Orthodox practice. For this, he relies particularly upon the witness of modern Orthodox holy men, in particular: Saint Seraphim of Sarov (1754-1833); Saint Theophan the Recluse (1815-1894); and especially Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov (1807-1867). All three of these luminaries of Orthodoxy emphasised making oneself humble and acknowledging one’s spiritual poverty and reliance on God as the cornerstone of any sort of spiritual striving—from the very beginning even to the heights of ascetic perfection. (Speaking of asceticism: if done without humility or love of Christ rather than self, Osipov clearly demonstrates how it can bring great harm to the ascetic and to others.)

Dr Osipov brings to the forefront the Orthodox tradition’s deep scepticism of ‘signs and wonders’, and the steadfast reluctance to trust with which these saints and others in the tradition approached them. This reluctance was not born of any materialistic or atheistic idea, but instead from a deeply-felt sense of humility before God. There is a bit of a polemical emphasis here, which directs a certain degree of criticism at Roman Catholic visionaries like Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux, whose eagerness for and reliance on visions and sensory ecstasies of God’s mysteries are treated as delusional.

However, Dr Osipov is not averse to directing these same critiques of other religions against certain aspects of contemporary popular Orthodox practice. In particular: he sees evidence of ‘paganism’ in the hyperdox over-reliance on the external forms, rituals, canons and typikons of the Church; ‘mysticism’ in the popular but dubious occasions of exorcisms (particularly mass exorcisms) and myrrh-streaming icons; and ‘immanentism’ in seeking after ‘spiritual fathers’ who exert cults of personality over their followers. The basic underlying point about treating such visions and miracles and teachers with a healthy degree of wariness in the knowledge of our fallen senses should be well taken.

I highly recommend this book—if for nothing else, than for directing the reader to the witness and spiritual wisdom of the Christ-loving Saints Seraphim, Ignatius and Theodore. There is a great deal of value within Dr Osipov’s work, value which I hope more Western readers come to appreciate.

Osipov on science and religion

I’m currently reading the Orthodox apologetics book The Search for Truth on the Path of Reason by Professor Aleksei Il’ich Osipov. Now, I’ve read a fair bit of apologetics literature—including most notably the English classics by GK Chesterton and CS Lewis—but, with the honourable exception of Saint John of Damascus’s Exact Exposition, it’s one of those genres that I’ve kind of been turned off of due to over-exposure. There’s something slightly unseemly about the debate-club tactics of too much of apologetics writing, attacking opposing views where they’re weakest and concealing one’s own flaws. However, I’m finding this book to be interesting in several ways.

I’ll give one modest example here. I will have more to say about the book later, I’m sure: Osipov is both profound and well-read, and he has a number of interesting things to say on a wide variety of topics in the history of philosophy and the history of religion. But I did want to touch on a couple of specific things he says about the relationship between Christianity and science.

Osipov seems to have a solid background in anthropology and the natural sciences—something that seems to have been held over from a Soviet education. (Many of the scientists and expert authorities he quotes were Soviet.) What’s more, he doesn’t take a straightforwardly-oppositional view to the sciences, even though the bent of his overall argument is strongly opposed to materialism and atheism.

Osipov accepts as given the timeline proposed by Soviet anthropologists regarding the emergence of the human species: dating it back 100,000 to 150,000 years ago. He is markedly more sceptical about the links directly relating human beings to the various pithecine species, but no more so than most evolutionary biologists. It’s still an open question in biology at what point the divergence into the genus Homo occurred, and what position the pithecines occupy in our extended family tree, so to speak.

Furthermore, Osipov sees no contradiction whatsoever between accepting the scientific evidence about the date and nature of human emergence on the one hand, and belief and trust in the God of the Scriptures on the other. Indeed, he sees the archaeological evidence of the presence of religious belief (such as ritual burial practices among the Neanderthals) to be confirmation that the presence of God has been felt and intuited even by our distant ancestors—and as an argument against the various atheistic naturalist and sociological theories of religion:

Religion is much more ancient than class societies, older than social oppression… [religion is] about 30 to 40 thousand years old. The general presence of religion throughout humanity is one of the most impressive facts of world history. Such a phenomenon could not be the result of chance, of someone’s fantasy or fears. It should have its own cause in something fundamental, or be rooted in man’s very nature, in the very essence of being.

This position is fully consistent with Osipov’s later-expressed view on the limits of science, which is essentially an endorsement of Stephen Jay Gould’s position of non-overlapping magisteria: ‘Natural knowledge, as a whole, studies the visible world. Therefore, the foundation of religious truth—the existence of God—cannot be subject to scientific refutation.’

And again:

Religion and science are two essentially different realms of human life activity. They have different points of reference, different goals, tasks and methods. These spheres can touch each other, intersect each other, but as we see, they cannot disprove one another. At the same time, Christianity preaches the two-hypostatic nature of man’s existence, the undivided unity in him of spiritual and physical natures. Both answer God’s plan for man; and only the harmonious integration of their activities gives man’s life a normal character. Such a life presupposes the need for the ‘bread’ of technological development for his body, and the spirit of religious life for the soul. Just the same, man’s guiding impulse should always be his moral-reasoning, spiritual impulse.

Christianity sees science as one means of obtaining the knowledge of God (see Romans 1:19-20). But first of all, Christianity sees science as a natural instrument of this life, which must nevertheless be used with caution. Christianity regards science negatively when this two-edged sword wielding such terrible power acts independently of the moral principles of the Gospels. Such ‘freedom’ corrupts the very purpose of science, which is supposed to serve for the good—and only the good—of man (as the famous Hippocratic Oath says, ‘Do no harm!’).

The overall aim of Osipov’s book, as is clear from the title, is to showcase the paucity of Western rationalism (the ‘path of reason’) for answering the deeply-held questions, and for satisfying the deeply-held wants of the soul, before showing how these needs and wants are met by Christianity in general and by Orthodox Christianity in particular. But he is not anti-West. Much like the Slavophils whom he admires and whose thought he seeks to build from (particularly Khomyakov and Kireevskii), he sees within the West a vast and brilliant exploration of the potentials of the human mind—but an exploration which has hard limits and an unfulfillable end. Likewise, even though he faults scientific advances for producing ‘acquisitions in the field of microphysics, microbiology, medicine and military-industrial technology’ which have potentially world-ending consequences, he does not fault the discipline itself and sees much good which can come from it.

The compatibilist position which Osipov takes, therefore, isn't only—or even primarily!—about ‘following the science’ (a phrase which now fills me with utter annoyance at its insipidity). More to the point: it’s about doing religious investigation properly. Christianity is not, when correctly understood, at war with the knowledge of nature that the natural sciences provide. Christianity is, however, very much at odds with its misuse, and at odds with misguided attempts to turn the methodological naturalism of science into an ideological naturalism posited as a ‘comprehensive doctrine’.

What lies behind Singaporean educational success?

Interesting news from the educational realm in Singapore. Singapore’s educational system is widely regarded as one of the best in the world, and its students routinely outclass other nations in test results on standardised international assessment tools like the PISA exams.

Intriguingly, Singapore has ceased standardised testing entirely for primary 1 and primary 2 students, and also switched to giving whole-point test scores and GPAs for students in older grades in order to de-emphasise competition. Singapore’s Minister of Education (now Minister of Health), Ong Ye Kung, has even stated that ‘learning is not a competition’ and therefore the system should not encourage students to think of it as such.

Why is this important? Well, for one thing, it’s a surprising volte-face for a country whose education system has, until fairly recently, been incredibly keen on high-stakes standardised testing. And Singapore’s education system, despite its high outcomes, is not to be considered perfect. Students in Singapore’s school system often report high levels of stress, and mental illness sometimes results from this stress. But there are still a number of other things that Singapore’s educational system does well that we could stand to learn from.

For one thing, greater attention has been paid to the STEM subjects in Singapore than in many other countries. From an early age students are trained to think mathematically and approach problems from a practical point of view. Students are encouraged to retain their curiosity about the natural world by gaining experience in hands-on experiments and projects. This actually helps them to think more creatively across the board. I don’t agree with the late lamented Carl Sagan on everything (to put it mildly), but I do agree with him on this, which he was saying back in 1994: unfortunately, this retention and encouragement of curiosity and wonder in students is something that is being neglected in Western educational systems.

I will also note, to anticipate a possible objection to this, that Singaporean classrooms are infamous for their strictness, marked by demanding uniform codes, emphasis on teacher talking time, lots of drills and memorisation, and even corporal punishment in schools. Now, I’m not a big fan of corporal punishment – or of learning-by-rote, for that matter. However, it is worth remembering that strictness, per se, is not incompatible with cultivating curiosity. In order for experiments to yield results worth observing, a highly-regimented formal procedure and cautious painstaking observations, often iterated over a considerable period of time, are necessary. Curiosity requires, and thrives off of, discipline. The two are not necessarily at odds.

In Singapore, all teachers employed by the Ministry of Education are represented by the Singapore Teachers’ Union. The unionisation rate for teachers in Singapore is virtually 100%: a proud distinction they share with that other high achiever in international education metrics, Finland. The median income for teachers in Singapore is about $8,000 a year higher than in the US, despite American GDP per capita being $4,000 per year more than Singapore’s. In general, teachers who are unionised are better-compensated, better-supported and happier, which leads to higher achievement and more consistent outcomes for students.

The other thing that Singapore does well – and the thing which seems to receive the least attention in English-language media on Singapore’s education system – is the fact that there has been a sustained, decades-long push for collaborative educational models in Singapore. The recently-voiced sentiment of Mr Ong Ye Kung that education should not be a competition actually has long standing and precedent in the city-state, as the collaborative model was first introduced around 1985 and has been elaborated upon ever since. Students are encouraged to work together in groups to solve problems rather than compete against each other or hide their results from each other.

The cohort of kids that took the test this past year were raised from primary 1 in an environment that encourages teamwork, collaborative problem-solving, and the understanding that ‘I do well when we all do well’. This is important because the PISA exam, as well as having questions formatted to gauge individual performance, also has a collaborative problem-solving section. But the results would seem to indicate that even on the individual questions, the collaborative problem-solving model of approaching science, engineering and math enhances the results. Human beings are social creatures – and children are no exception! We are often at our best when we are able to learn and discover together, as part of a team. And our experiences with team learning can often help us frame or approach questions creatively even when we’re left on our own to answer them.

To reiterate: Singapore’s school system has definite problems. However: the cultivation of scientific curiosity; the insistence on student discipline; the high unionisation rate and strong collective bargaining stance of teachers; and the strong emphasis on collaborative problem-solving – these are all things that the American school system should learn from and try (within reasonable boundaries) to emulate. Particularly the latter two: strong teachers’ unions and collaborative learning.

The billionaire class and the quest for man-godhood

Evidently, we now know that Jeff Bezos consults with psychic mediums. Elon Musk has a strange fascination with the eighteenth-century occultist and alchemist Giuseppe Balsamo. Peter Thiel and Larry Page have a long-standing association with modern-day occultist and alchemist Ray Kurzweil. What does this all mean? Is it simply that GK Chesterton’s observation is true, that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing but rather believe in anything?

This may indeed be part of it, and a very significant part at that. However, I’m not fully convinced. The behaviour of the billionaire class indicates that they do indeed believe in something: the acquisition of more and more material wealth and resources at the expense of everybody else. They already own so much of it that their continuing efforts to grab as much of the capital, as much of the real estate, as much of the infrastructure as they can is not an exercise in mere greed. It is rather an exercise of power and political control. But there’s even more to it than that. The willingness with which our hypercapitalist tech elites – Bezos, Page, Thiel, Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg and I’m sure quite a few others as well – have for over 20 years now been investing heavily in cryonics (Alcor), consciousness transference (Neuralink), private space travel (SpaceX, Blue Origin), virtual realities (Meta) and aging reversal through ‘biohacking’ (Altos Labs) is indicative of something else. They are using that wealth that they are sucking up in such great quantities, in an attempt to achieve the goals of mediæval and early-Renaissance alchemy: transmutation and immortality.

The West Coast has been something of a hotbed for New Age spiritualism and occult esoterica since the late 1960s, which shouldn’t be surprising given that it rose out of the counterculture that had its epicentre there. Esalen, Druid Heights, Green Gulch, the Waterkin, Soka Gakkai (at least in its US bulwark) and – yes – the Church of Satan, all have their establishment in California, with a significant portion of those being based in San Francisco. (One should also note that this spiritual and social milieu also produced Fr Seraphim Rose; take that as you will.) So it shouldn’t be too surprising that Silicon Valley as a whole has imbibed that same spiritual atmosphere. After all, it’s fairly common knowledge that the æsthetics and design philosophy of Steve Jobs were highly influenced by Zen Buddhism.

The ‘performance artist’ Marina Abramović in her collaborations with Microsoft supporting their innovations into ‘mixed reality’ is something of a case-in-point. Microsoft did pull down the ad with Abramović in it. And Abramović was evidently baited by the ‘conspiracy theorists’ into fervently denying ever being a Satanist. (Honestly, I believe her. I think she’s genuinely a performance artist, doing an act that sells. It follows that she is not likely to be a very happy or balanced person.) But that is really a distraction from the main point. The entire project of ‘mixed reality’, the blurring between what is real and what is virtual, and the idea that human beings will act as their own demiurges, crafting themselves as homunculi in this new pseudo-reality, is very much still a concern. Witness Zuck’s new project Meta, in all its insidious glory.

That’s really what this is about: it’s the choice highlighted by Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. The desire to transcend death is part of the human condition. But the choice before us is this: in seeking after that transcendence do we turn to the living God of the living reality, and the God-man who appears to us in the flesh, embodied within the stuff of our own everyday material lives? Or do we instead attempt, by means of power, wealth, and all the alchemy and extension of life/consciousness they can buy with it, to become as far as possible ‘little gods’ – to become man-gods? This choice is heightened, to almost apocalyptic terms, by the growing grasping control over the reality by the few, and the accessibility (and desirability) of the illusion by the many. As Berdyaev himself put it:

Today the soul of man no longer rests upon secure foundations, everything round him is unsteady and contradictory, he lives in an atmosphere of illusion and falsehood under a ceaseless threat of change. Evil comes forward under an appearance of good, and he is deceived; the faces of Christ and of Antichrist, of man become god and of God become man, are interchangeable. A large number of contemporary people have “divided minds.” They are the sort of folk whom Dostoevsky displayed to us…

If it’s an affectation, the occultism, esotericism and attraction to alchemy by our ruling class is certainly an odd one. To be absolutely clear on this, I do not think (pace QAnon) that the occultism and esotericism and alchemy-dabbling of the ruling class is wilful and orchestrated (at least on the human level). After all, Ayn Rand influenced Anton LaVey, not the other way around, and therefore logically must have preceded him. The cupidity of the elites preceded the interest any of them had in spiritualism and esoterica. When one is driven by the lust for greater and greater degrees of wealth and control over the means of production, the desire to become ‘like gods’ becomes that much more powerful.

Berdyaev—and, by extension, Dostoevsky—must be given his due on this question, though. We are faced with the choice between occult (that is to say, metaverse and mind-hack, a technological illusion of power and control, a façade of freedom from necessity); and the freedom that comes from paying respect to reality on the other. It is increasingly clear what choice many of the ruling class (Musk, Bezos, Thiel, Page et al.) will ultimately choose to make, and we should take care that they don’t make that choice for us.

Based and redpilled: China’s war on decadence

The Communist Party of China has been busy lately, to judge from the headlines of late.

Late last year, they not only firmly rapped the knuckles of Alibaba multibillionaire Jack Ma over his complaints about regulatory oversight, they broke up Ant Group and forced its holdings and consumer credit operations to incorporate separately.

This broadened into a more comprehensive crackdown on big megacorporate malfeasance, particularly online businesses and social media groups. Alibaba was fined $2.8 billion by the Chinese government, and thirty-four ecommerce and social media corporations were called to the carpet and slapped with heavy fines for violating Chinese antitrust law: including big names like Tencent, Baidu and Meituan. Private equity firms, online insurance companies and stock traders have also not escaped the wrath of regulators either.

While here in the United States renters are still struggling with things like evictions, expropriation and sexual abuse at the hands of their landlords for failing to meet rent during the coronavirus, China has been busy heavily curbing the power of landlords and preventing such abuses from taking place. Beijing instituted a law recently forbidding landlords from demanding or retaining excessive deposits, and forcing online property vendors in Beijing to comply with the same guidelines as traditional landlords.

Workers’ rights and wage rises have been a major focus of China’s policy recently as well. Xi Jinping promised earlier this year that the state would step up its defence of ‘key groups including college graduates and migrant workers, and the protection of the legitimate interests of truck drivers, couriers and food delivery riders’. He seems to have delivered on this promise, at least partially: express delivery companies have instituted a fee change at the government’s behest, specifically to benefit their couriers. China has also instituted several strong regulations on the ‘gig economy’ in order to prevent predatory collusion, ensure data security, control prices and prevent abuse of providers. The most recent move by the Chinese government on the economic front has been to institute a systemic ban on cryptocurrency trading and mining, which distort markets in actual currency, cause systemic risks to the economy and degrade the environment.

In the interest of getting the rich to comply with tax laws, China has also blacklisted several high-profile celebrities and models who were either implicated in the Kris Wu statutory rape scandal, using their privileged positions to evade taxes (like Fan Bingbing, Zhao Wei and Zheng Shuang), or who promote far-right political positions (like Zhang Zhehan and Lin Xinru).

There has been an increasing effort, as well, to promote the welfare of children and the desirability of having families. This has taken several forms. Firstly, China has been instituting structural reforms to its educational sector. In order to curb unhealthy trends in housing speculation and cutthroat competition for placement in high-end state schools, the Chinese government is attempting to delink school placement from place-of-residence. It has also introduced stringent regulations on private tutoring programmes, forcing them to register as not-for-profit companies by the end of the year, causing some of them to go out of business.

The government is also trying to promote children’s vision and emotional health. One official newspaper referred to online gaming as a form of ‘spiritual opium’ – a rather dire charge for some rather obvious historical reasons. Shortly afterward, the government instituted some fairly reasonable limits on the amount of time and money that minors can spend on online games: 90 minutes a day on weekdays; 3 hours a day on weekends and holidays; none after 10 PM; and no more than $57 a month per user on digital content, DLCs and paid add-ons. Chinese parents are, on the whole, delighted. Additionally, China is promoting additional physical education for young boys in order to get them outside and promote bodily health. On Twitter, these initiatives are called the ‘Touch Grass Campaign’.

China has also been cracking down hard on celebrity worship and idol-based fan culture. After videos surfaced of idol fans dumping massive amounts of milk in order to meet promotional goals for their preferred candidates on a reality show on iQIYI, government pressure forced iQIYI to cancel the show and issue an apology. The government has also shut down several websites and fan groups on social media, including several related to K-pop idols, and put the kibosh on online popularity rankings.

Under particular fire are xiao xianrou (slender and pale young male models catering to a female gaze) and niangpao (male idols who use lipstick and eyeliner, wear earrings and sexually-suggestive clothing, and use effeminate language and mannerisms). Three years ago, Xinhua published a jeremiad against such ‘sissies’, for degrading the culture by promoting ‘vulgar taste’ and a ‘deformed æsthetic’. The government followed up earlier this month by publishing an eight-point guideline for broadcast media that curtail such performances and promote a healthier masculinity and healthier cultural output in general:

1. Boycott illegal or immoral personnel. When selecting entertainers and guests, radio, television and internet platforms should not employ people who have an incorrect political stance, break laws and regulations, or speak or behave against public order and morals.
   
2. Boycott “traffic only” standards. Idol selection shows cannot be shown, as well as shows starring the children of celebrities. Shows should strictly control voting, cannot induce and encourage fans to shop or buy membership in order to vote for their idols.
   
3. Boycott an overly entertaining trend, promote traditional culture, establish a correct beauty standard, boycott “sissy idols”, boycotting daunting wealth, gossip or vulgar internet celebrities.
   
4. Boycott high pay in the entertainment industry. Strictly regulate payment for guests, encourage celebrities to participate in charity shows, punish fake contracts and tax evasion.
   
5. Regulate showbiz staff. Enforce licensing television hosts, provide professional and moral training. Entertainers should not use their profession and fame to gain profit.
   
6. Promote professional commentary in the entertainment industry, insist on correct political direction and values, criticise the fake, ugly and evil values.
   
7. Entertainment associations should provide more training and establish mechanisms for industry regulation, as well as criticise bad examples.
   
8. Regulators need to be more accountable, listen to the people and respond to their concerns, fill public space with positive and mainstream shows.

Perhaps the most promising development of the lot, though, is that China’s leadership is finally wising up to the threat of transhumanism and the gradual instrumental technologisation of ‘human capital’. Recent guidelines on data use are aimed at combatting the use of algorithms in tracking consumer data, protecting privacy, protecting minors and protecting workers from excessive oversight managed by computers. If they are serious about tackling this in a systemic way, then this is something absolutely to be welcomed, particularly since China had previously been in the forefront of exploring the uses of AI in surveillance. Here’s hoping that China is willing to subordinate the Algorithm to the merely-human across the board, not merely in the private sector.

So what does this all amount to?

My understanding of it so far, is that these economically leftist measures on behalf of workers and families, combined with the more conservative cultural measures meant to bolster traditional masculinity, stave off the transhumanist ‘alchemy’ and promote positive cultural output, are both part-and-parcel of a broader war against decadence in China. These outward-facing, public initiatives appear to follow naturally from the earlier work of Xi Jinping’s government to combat corruption and waste within the government specifically. They also seem to be part-and-parcel with Xi’s fondness for the Classics, and make a certain degree of intuitive sense given his own family’s harrowing experiences and suffering during the Cultural Revolution. Speaking personally, I have my doubts about how some of this broad volley of initiatives can succeed, but the aims seem to be correct and laudable ones.

Bumer: a slice of the Russian nineties

Cat (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), Killa (Maksim Konovalov), Rama (Sergei Gorobchenko) and Burnout (Andrei Merzlikin) in Bumer

Following up on my reviews of Brat and Brat 2, I decided to take a look at the Pyotr Buslov film Bumer [«Бумер», or Bimmer], which was billed to me as thematically similar to Balabanov’s Bagrov saga, and as enjoying a similar cult status. It was similarly also shot on a relative shoe-string budget – not nearly as barebones as the original Brat, though – and had an acerbically critical, satirical view of Russia in the 1990s under Eltsin. Long story short: the film does not disappoint.

It has gritty road-movie stylings, but I would call this film a black ‘tragicomedy’, sometimes bordering on farce. The storyline is fairly simple, and it won’t be spoiling too much to lay it out in the broad strokes. It’s a movie about four ‘brothers’ in the same gang – low-level street criminals in Russia who steal a black BMW. They get in over their heads when they come for revenge against some slightly higher-level street criminals who trashed and then stole their previous Mercedes – and mistakenly kill an undercover FSB agent. Suddenly on the list of Moscow’s most wanted, they flee into the countryside in their stolen car and try to lay low. However, the main characters’ greed, their desire for ‘prestige’, and their acculturation into street-tough behaviour, always manage to catch up to them no matter where they go. It doesn’t help that much (but not quite all) of the society around them is as venial, as grasping, and often as eager for violence as they are.

The main characters are Konstantin, nicknamed ‘Cat’ (Vladimir Vdovichenkov); Dimon, nicknamed ‘Burnout’ (Andrei Merzlikin); Lyoha, nicknamed ‘Killa’ (Maksim Konovalov); and Petya, nicknamed ‘Rama’ (Sergei Gorobchenko). It is telling that the ‘brotherhood’ that these four young men forge with each other is the strongest social bond in the entire film – but it also arises practically entirely without context. It is irrational. It is also (self-)destructive. There is a certain touching element to the fact that these four ‘have each other’s backs’ and that their relationship isn’t purely transactional.

That separates this relationship from practically all of the rest of the male relationships shown on-screen: the ‘shock doctrine’ capitalism has torn all previously existing relationships to shreds. The symbols of the old Soviet state which we get to see and hear, the slogans of togetherness and camaraderie, are all faded, impotent, in the background – tossed off as a joke, almost.

But given the lawless, dog-eat-dog social environment they live in, there’s little left for them to bond over but ripping off, extorting, cheating or stealing from everyone else. There is a sado-masochistic element to their relationship: they don’t know any other way to demonstrate care for each other than by acting tough and daring each other to new heights of criminal recklessness. There is a tragic element to this, because it causes Cat to fall out with his girlfriend (Anastasiya Sapozhnikova), who moves out on him when she realises she can’t compete with Cat’s ‘brotherhood’ (and understands perfectly well that it will mean visiting him in prison or mourning over his grave). It also causes Petya to leave a village girl, Kat’ka (Yana Shivkova) – who ends up pregnant with his child – after making promises to return to her (which it turns out he can’t keep).

But if the rôle of women in this film seems to serve only as passive observers or as victims of the cruelty of men, then it is telling that older men seem to have no rôle to play at all. This is a film without fathers. Kat’ka has only a mother, Sobachikha (Lyudmila Polyakova), who serves as something of a Greek chorus in the film, delivering prophetic pronouncements and wise advice which the protagonists cannot or will not heed. We are shown that Kat’ka’s child grows up without a father. The young boy whom the four young men meet at a gas station is shown to have no father. And none of these young men are shown as having fathers of their own. It is a generational deprivation which is as glaring and conspicuous as that shown in Tuǵan jer or Igla.

By comparison, the significant relationships that the main characters have, seem to be primarily with technology: guns, cars, mobile phones. But the point gets driven home time and again. Every time they rely on technology to help them, it fails. Dimon’s gun fails to shoot, and the wielder gets stabbed in the gut with a screwdriver. The truck driver who stabbed Dimon with the screwdriver throws a willing, topless woman out of his cabin into the snow when she touches it. She curses him that his truck cabin will fall on him and kill him: this happens. A radio comes on at just the wrong time for a message (called into a pop music DJ) to reach its intended recipient. A cellphone keeps ringing – a musical motif throughout the film – but the owner (Cat) is never around to pick it up, and when he seemingly comes to his senses and tries to reach his girlfriend on it, he finds out she is gone. And of course the eponymous BMW is a never-ending source of trouble for the ‘brothers’. They can’t get rid of it since they need it to escape Moscow, yet it betrays them – to the police, to the local protection rackets – at every opportunity. Ultimately it gets abandoned in the woods, with the headlights left on until the battery dies. There’s something almost Biblical in the way that the characters’ possessions and tough-guy status markers always seem to turn on them.

Again, this film was shot on a (comparatively) shoe-string budget, and it shows. The lighting is dim, the sets often feel cramped and the camerawork is mostly flat and static. But the filmmakers themselves actually use their technological limitations to great effect, whether for deadpan comic and black humour moments (of which there are more than a few), or else for a shot framing which has a particular symbolic significance. This isn’t a Tarantino or a Scorsese movie – even though we can see some tip-of-the-hat homages and stylistic references to both directors in the film. Even so, it’s a worthy entry into the Russian gangster film genre, and it’s easy to see why this film continues to enjoy its cult following.

Hidden motives?

Well, it seems I got quite the response on social media to my last ‘political’ blog post here. Much of it was… let’s just say, uninspiring, but predictable. Allow me to quote some of the responses here, verbatim and unedited, to give my readers some idea of what they entail and the general tone and intellectual quality – or rather, the distinct lack thereof – of their contents.

Seems like you simply suffer of the reveres [sic] of Trump derangement syndrome.

Did I just catch a nauseating whiff of someone’s positive opinion of Donald Trump?

No. Of Putin.

So you’re saying that those of us who have witnessed Trump’s deference to Putin on TV and who have been told of his silence on Russian aggression and the payment of rewards for the killing of American soldiers in Afganistan [sic] are just intellectually lazy and basically gullible fools? I say, sir, what are your hidden motives here? Do you believe that the Orthodox Church in Russia is the servant of Putin, in view of his being the untitled Czar of Russia? Are you one of these people who believe that the Church should walk in lockstep with the Emperor, no matter what his title?

Practically all of this is utter rubbish. One needn’t dig very far into my writings, either here, or on Silk and Chai, or on Facebook, to understand that, to put it mildly, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of the current president, that I did not vote for him, that I have criticised ‘leftists’ who did support him, and that I have no intention of voting for him this November. And the fact that even a passage like this, in the piece of writing in question:

A historical connexion with Orthodox Christianity does seem to correlate to a certain hostility to capitalism of the sort that Trump represents, although that anti-capitalism cannot be said to be causally linked to the corpus of Orthodox doctrine or Liturgical practice (which is a shame!).

… can be taken as evidencing any sort of warm feelings or latent sympathy for Trump is so far removed from reality or even basic reading comprehension that it rather beggars belief. Particularly when my opposition to everything Trump stands for – greed, corruption, capitalism – is so clearly stated; and particularly when the Caucasian gentlemen proudly evincing such a lack of even the rudiments of basic English rhetoric are soi-disant fans (and one actual family member) of noteworthy English-language rhetorician David Bentley Hart. I’m not entirely sure what that actually says about how Dr Hart interacts with his family and his fan base. Suffice it to say that the most charitable tack in this case would be to not pass any comment at all.

And with regard to the last quote, again, even a modest perusal of my comments on church-state relations on this blog – both in general and specifically – evidence that I give a rather strong answer, and much the opposite of the one the author of the last comment assumes, to the question of: ‘Do you believe… that the Church should walk in lockstep with the Emperor?’ My answer is, quite simply, no. Allow me to direct you, sir, to my following pieces of commentary on church-state relations in Russia, which form a rather consistent thread going back over eight years:

• Where stands the Church?
• More silliness: the theological orientalism of SoJo
• Defending Russian Orthodoxy as Orthodox and as Russian
• More thoughts on Orthodoxy and nationalism
• (In)vested interests
• Americanism and intégrisme: theopolitics abound
• China, the Vatican and the Open Church
• Mechanöcephäly
• The Moscow Patriarchate and pension reform
• Why the worldview of Patriarch Kirill matters now
• Theopolitical questions abound

As you can see from a brief perusal of these posts, the common thread that unites them all is an equal-opportunity suspicion of all neatly-hierarchical configurations of the relations between church and state – including all three of papocæsarism, cæsaropapism, and sæcularism. Even with regard to Russian politics in particular, I am very far from being an uncritical supporter of Putin. In fact, I acknowledge and celebrate the instances in which the Russian Orthodox Church does support the civil rights of Putin’s domestic critics and those who protest his policies, as well as the instances in which clerics themselves do this. I am more than happy to see, for example, the Church speak out on behalf of Russia’s social safety net, or on behalf of the unborn, or on behalf of Russia’s indigenous ethnic minorities – and it usually has to critique state policy in doing any of the above. I am more than happy to see the Russian Orthodox Church speak truth to power, and it actually manages to do so far more often than the American churches collectively do with all their much-vaunted (and largely taken-for-granted) supply of freedom from state interference.

A bit more troubling, though, is that it seems that anyone who stops to examine, or seeks to question, the dominant Blob-driven media narrative surrounding foreign affairs in the United States – even doing so from the standpoint of wanting to preserve peace – is taken as having sinister ‘hidden motives’. In fact my motives are quite open. I don’t want America and Russia to go to war. I don’t see anything productive, or useful, or positive in the current frozen conflict, and ‘hot’ proxy conflicts, we seem to be in, all around Russia’s rather broad and wide front porch. I truly do not believe that Russia is intrinsically any worse than any other large nation-state with its own values, its own history, its own path dependencies and its own interests. I truly do believe that war is a racket that hurts ordinary Americans, and that consent is continually manufactured to keep that racket going, whether in Afghanistan or in Iraq or in Syria or in Yemen or in Somalia or anywhere else. Those are my motives; judge them as you please.

And so, in a slightly more civil vein, addressing this comment:

Hmm, I get the sentiment that the media harped on Russiagate to the point of absurdity but I’m not sure why you seem unwilling to admit that, per the senate committee, there seems to certainly have been in regular secret communication with state actors and utilized the intel they received…

I’m not sure what polling data tells us either… I don’t think anyone cares whether or not the majority of babushkas like Trump or not, nor do I think the claim was that the Russian public was helping or something.

Seems obvious that a country we’re (still) a global competitor with would benefit from a bit of chaos and destruction of our trust in our political apparatus (even if that doesn’t make them uniquely evil and the system was already in bad shape).

First of all, I think there is a bit of a double standard here, in the form of a motte-and-bailey fallacy. Russiagate is an archetypical Big Lie in the sense that it posits Trump as a literal asset of the Russian state, and it operates the way most Big Lies do, in simply making elliptical references to this position without ever explicitly articulating it in its most overt way. Repeat it often enough and people will believe it. Take, for example, that recent billboard in Manhattan telling people to ‘VOTE’ – for Biden, naturellement – ‘Because Russian lessons are expensive.’

It’s smarmy. It’s a snarl. It actually works on the same level as Trump’s own allusions to Mexico or to Muslims. That is to say: the authors of this billboard know that what they are saying is literally indefensible. If Trump wins reelection, he isn’t going to force us all to speak Russian, nor is Russia going to annex America at Trump’s behest. But by making the insinuation that he will, they are tapping into a broad web of innuendoes that was assiduously built up in the wake of the 2016 election that Trump is actually a Russian asset. It is also subtly making an inference about Russian language, or about Russian culture, that runs under the semiotic surface. Saying ‘Russian lessons are expensive’ in this pejorative context is almost to call Russian-speaking people – not the government, the people – frauds and cheats. It’s to look on the language as dirty, on the culture as dirty, on the people as dirty. Because the people who put up this billboard are, without a doubt, nice lily-white northern liberals, any response to an insinuation of bigotry on their part will be met with a chorus of craned necks, rapid disavowals, fervent hand-wringing and voluble umbrage of various sorts. But there is simply no avoiding the fact that at its root, Russiagate apologias of this sort are an expression of base, ugly, knuckle-dragging xenophobia. So, yes, sir. It is a materially-important fact that the ‘majority of babushkas’ have no love for Trump, have no use for Trump and have no desire to see Trump elected. Because that is the level of discourse we are at right now, sad to say.

But this is what Russiagate apologia looks like at its most kneejerk, scattershot and intellectually-lowbrow: its ‘motte’ form. The ‘bailey’ form of Russiagate apologia – that is to say, the most intellectually-defensible form of the Russiagate myth – is the continued prosecution of the DNC email hacking scandal of 2016. To refresh my readers’ memories, the story goes like this. A hacker, or group(s) of hackers, supposedly working on behalf of the Russian government, managed to access nearly 20,000 emails from a server operated by the Democratic National Convention, and submitted this email archive to WikiLeaks which then published them on its website. This was done, supposedly, with the collusion of certain members of the campaign to elect Donald Trump, with the express intent of discrediting Hillary Clinton and materially compromising her chances of winning the election.

Even at its most intellectually defensible, Russiagate is still a total fiction. As I pointed out before, and as a number of reputable journalists of the American left (such as Matt Taibbi) have pointed out repeatedly, the Mueller investigation turned up nothing and went home. The problem is that that hasn’t stopped the political class from making hay of it for the purposes of distraction. So, when the investigation has already been done, found nothing, and thrown in the towel, it really doesn’t mean that much that the DNC has opened a new lawsuit (after having lost one already) or that a Senate Commission has issued a statement that contravenes much of what the actual investigation it is based on has said or failed to say. At this point, further harping on an already spectacularly-poor showing by the Democratic Party in a national election does little but point to the pathetic impotence of said party: its creative bankruptcy, its lack of ideas, its moral impotence and its abandonment of any semblance of responsibility for its own failures.

Let Trump’s record on Russia speak for itself – it’s voluble enough, and there’s little in it for a peacenik like me to like. Trump has, according to the Brookings Institute (no friend of the administration or of Russia):

• identified Russia and China as America’s ‘adversaries’
• restricted exports to Russia
• repeatedly issued sanctions against individuals in the Russian government
• authorised provision of lethal weapons to the Ukrainian government
• bombed Russian and Syrian forces in Dayr az-Zûr (2017)
• expelled Russian government workers in New York, Washington and Seattle
• unilaterally withdrew from the INF treaty limiting nuclear armament buildup
• sanctioned Russian banks providing aid to the Venezuelan government

Saying that Trump is somehow an agent of the Russian state when he continually attacks Russian state instruments and economic interests, often with far blunter instruments than Obama did, is rather ludicrous. That more than anything else, is why I commend the ‘babushkas’ of Russia, and the people of East Germany, Bulgaria and Slovakia, for not buying the cockamamie that the American intelligence community keeps pumping out, for not buying the pusillanimous self-pitying sob stories of the American Democrats, and also understanding that Trump is not their friend. On all points, in consideration of the available evidence, I happen to agree with them.

Chi Zijian’s The Last Quarter of the Moon

A family of Evenki reindeer herders

The Last Quarter of the Moon, or in Chinese The Right Bank of the Argun 《額爾古納河右岸》, Chi Zijian’s 遲子建 multigenerational epic of one extended family or band (urireng, or obshchina) of Evenkil as narrated and viewed through the eyes of a nameless elderly Evenki woman, a ‘long-time confidante of the rain and snow’, is an engrossing and moving read. It’s a panoramic view of life and death on the Chinese northeastern taiga – hunting, foraging, herding, cropping horns on the reindeer, trading furs for supplies, striking camp and moving, making rock paintings, smithing tools, weaving clothes, dancing, making love, rearing children, healing, performing ‘wind burials’ for the dead – across the nine decades of the narrator’s life: from the decline of the Qing Dynasty through ‘reform and opening’.

The language of the book may come across as rustic, and I wonder if something wasn’t lost in translation. There is a great deal of imagery of mountains and forests, of water and wind. The reindeer, not merely livestock but also beloved companions and even forest spirits in their own right, are also treated with reverence. We see through the narrator’s eyes that the human world and the natural world and the spirit world weave into each other. The decidedly shamanistic perspective of the narrator lends a decidedly supernatural ‘tone’ to many of the central events of the book. Omens and forebodings come true. Nature and human life are intertwined in profoundly spiritual ways. However, despite the poetry and folkish natural imagery, the traditional lifestyle is presented without adornment. It is done without papering over, romanticising or anæsthetising how tenuous and fragile that human life was. There is no idyll to be seen here: the urireng is not without plenteous regrets, suffering, sorrows, grudges, even all-consuming hatreds – not to mention sickness, stillbirths, amputations, mental degeneration. Modern medicines, when they come, are greeted with decided enthusiasm: not least because they lift a great burden off the shamaness.

At the same time, she takes a dim view of the coming of modernity and progress: the Sino-Japanese War, the Sino-Soviet split, the construction of roads and townships, the coming of the logging industry, the pull of the young people into the towns. Urbanisation and the decline of the traditional pastoralist Evenki lifeworld is accompanied by a familiar litany of evils: alcoholism, divorce, depression, suicide, promiscuity, crime (i.e., timber smuggling). The disconnexion of the Evenkil from their beloved forests and rivers seems to rob them, in our heroine’s view, of something vital and necessary to their survival. There is an intimation of loss – beautiful, heartbreaking – in the narrator’s elliptic descriptions of the changes that come to her urireng.

Our narrator is a passionate woman, born from a sweet and caring but seemingly ill-fated relationship between a beautiful dancer, Tamara, and a hunter, Linke. Linke’s younger brother Nidu, it turns out, had also pursued Tamara and lost an archery contest for her hand to his brother – and he took up the controlled madness of the shaman as an outlet for his loss. She lives in the shirangju with her parents, her elder sister Lena and her younger brother Luni. Other residents of the urireng are drawn with equal patience, with their characters being illuminated as much by the narrator’s own maturation as by their own decisions and changes in outlook. Ivan, the tribe’s blacksmith who marries a Russian Orthodox KVŽDist former prostitute and fathers two children with her – she leaves him, taking the children, when the Japanese invade; he later becomes a Soviet partisan. Maria and Hase, and their tender-hearted son Dashi. The bitter and caustic Yveline, yoked into an unloving marriage with Kunde by her son Jilende. The brave and gentle Lajide, a hunter from a neighbouring urireng who wins the narrator’s heart. Nihau, the beautiful dancer who marries Luni – but who takes on Nidu’s mantle of shamanism (much to her grief, as her spirit dances cause her to lose her own children).

As the narrator herself bears children, the urireng becomes progressively more shaped by their personalities and perspectives – though her children by Lajide and later Volodya are often ‘echoes’ of their ancestors: particularly their fathers and grandfather Linke. Even though the Evenkil are familiar with the outside through their Russian anda Rolinsky (who sells them tools, sugar, tea, other supplies), the coming of the Japanese causes the outside world of politics and war and technology to break in on the Evenki community in a drastic way.

The Evenki men are conscripted by the Japanese Army – though Ivan runs away and joins the Soviets when the sadistic Japanese commander Suzuki sics the army attack dogs on Kunde for faltering during a marching drill. Their Han contacts change with the coming of the Chinese Communists. Ivan comes under suspicion for his Soviet ties after the Sino-Soviet split. He later requests, out of affection for his estranged wife, a Russian Orthodox funeral rather than a ‘wind burial’. (Many of the Evenki characters possess Russian names, even if they are not of Russian heritage.) Baijiu makes its appearance as a trade good, as a companion at village dances, as a deceptive friend and as a hidden killer. As Han townships pop up, intermarriages occur. Young people leave the urireng and live in the towns – then come back. Modern artworks and attempts at committing Evenki language, song and folklore to writing occur – but are they the preservation of the living embers that Tamara handed down to her daughter, or are they ‘destined to be buried in a grave’? These transitions are ambiguous. They are left hanging over the present-day framing of the narrator’s tale of her past.

Death – whether sudden or lingering, whether it strikes young or old – is a constant presence. And even though we know it and we see it coming, we still feel it, viscerally, when it hits those people whom the narrator loves or comes to love. Small gestures and small actions are given an outsized meaning whenever a parting, however brief or incomplete, might be a final one. In many cases, even characters who are deformed or bitter or who do wicked things, the narrator manages to paint in sympathetic tones based on the losses they suffered. Our narrator is a kind soul – even and especially to those she dislikes. She learns to be so because of her tragic sensibility: her awareness of the proximity and the finality of loss. The collectivism of the Evenki mindset – that collectivism which made them (at first, before Stalin) so amenable to the Soviet system – comes to the surface in this way particularly: even the difficult people are a part of the narrator’s life in indelible ways. It’s one of Chi Zijian’s gifts as an author that we can be made to feel the deaths of even these difficult, wounded people.

The magical realism of The Last Quarter of the Moon – which truly deserves that label despite decidedly not being in the New World, Latin American literary movement which birthed the name – stems from precisely this overlap of the tragic-shamanic (super)natural with blunt portrayals of pastoralist life in transition. Perhaps it would be better to call this genre ‘shamanic realism’. At any rate, this is a bittersweet tearjerker of a novel – but exquisitely written. As far as contemporary Chinese literature goes, it would be very hard not to recommend this one.

Platform: a ground-eye view of uneven development

Recently I watched Platform 《站台》, the third of Jia Zhangke’s 贾樟柯 full-length films. Following a group of young musicians from the death of Mao through the era of ‘reform and opening up’ and into the reign of Jiang Zemin, it offers us an unvarnished, unfiltered and unapologetic view from ground-level of how China’s new reforms impacted one rural performance troupe in their everyday lives, as they confront vast Faustian new social forces of birth control and boom-boxes, privatisation and pop music.

The film follows the personal and professional lives of four members of a song-and-dance group in rural Shanxi Province, Cui Mingliang (Wang Hongwei 王宏伟), Yin Ruijian (Zhao Tao 赵涛), Zhang Jun (Liang Jingdong 梁景东) and Zhong Ping (Yang Tianyi 杨天乙) – during China’s transition to a market œconomy and greater degrees of sexual licence. In the beginning, their troupe plays mostly ‘official’ songs, glorifying Mao Zedong and the Communist Party, and they wear the traditional uniforms; however, as the 1980’s go on they start performing covers of pop songs and calling themselves the ‘All-Stars Rock, Breakdance and Electronica Band’ from Shenzhen. The young men grow out their hair and start wearing denim and leather jackets; the young women turn in their Mao suits for spandex. The relationships between the characters are also ambiguous. Mingliang has a painful romantic interest in Ruijian from the start, but Ruijian rejects him – in significant part because her father disapproves of any relationship they might have. On the other hand, Jun and Ping are thoroughly in love, suited to each other – but because they’re not married, their relationship is disapproved by their work group and by the authorities.

First off, let me get this out of the way first: I watched the abridged version of Platform (a 155 minute runtime instead of 195 minutes) and I still found the pacing of the movie to be downright glacial. Long stretches of the movie pass in street scenes or road scenes without any dialogue. In many cases this adds to the emotional tension, as though Jia is trying to press home to us the powerlessness of his main characters before the forces of the age. Cinematographically, Jia Zhangke has a decided liking – very similar to Sergei Dvortsevoi, for instance – for long still takes where the scenery, the architecture or the social surroundings of the main characters are the focus rather than the characters themselves. The actors, who are usually placed off-centre and dwarfed by the masonry and scalloped roofs or the dry dusty hills behind them, drift in and out of view of the camera while we the audience remain sedentary. Much of the decisive action takes place – in a Chekhov-like way – off-camera, and what we are left seeing is the build-up or the aftermath of that action.

Of course, I can understand why Jia made these directorial decisions – both for thematic and for æsthetic reasons. Speaking from experience here – rural Shanxi may be dry and rocky, but it is gorgeous. But the film is not interested solely in the rugged beauty of China’s rural locales; equal if not greater attention is lavished on the elder architecture and the newly wire-lined streets of rural Shanxi towns, as well as on the rickety tarp-covered trucks, paper lamps, dusty-windowed storefronts and other realia of rural Chinese life, which still seems stuck despite the upheavals brought by Western clothes, Cantopop, colour TV, birth control, discotheques, sex education and private markets. The one innovation that the film unambiguously celebrates is infrastructure development, specifically rail: in one scene the singers and dancers run along the new rail line after catching a glimpse of a freight train, laughing and exhilarated.

The other thing is that Jia Zhangke seems to have his finger firmly on the pulse of the time. The attitude of the film and the filmmaker to the entire period of ‘reform and opening up’ is profoundly ambivalent to negative – and that’s in part because we get to see it from a ground-eye view. We have the ‘Red’ songs and slogans get replaced by rainbow flags and praises of the one child policy. The troupe starts listening to Dschinghis Khan and Teresa Teng. The ladies experiment with perms and cigarettes. But we also see Zhong Ping, pregnant and distraught, being hounded by three men (including her boyfriend) to get an abortion while the fate of the Gang of Four and praises to Deng Xiaoping blare over the clinic radio. We see the leader of the troupe sell out his stake and strike out on his own. The band struggles to stay relevant in painful ways – with the two girls at one point doing a modern dance routine on the back of a truck on the side of the road as an uninterested public drives by. Nor are the struggles relegated merely to the youth. Cui Mingliang’s mother and father have a strained marriage – tormented by money problems and poor communication – that neither of them feel they can leave. By the end of Platform, Jun is jaded and miserable, and Ping has dropped out for good without a word to anyone. Ruijian, too, has left the troupe and gone home to Fenyang, taking up a new job in local government – though she gets a slightly happier ending: she kindles up a romance with the still-interested Mingliang.

Zhong Ping – who by the end of the film is MIA – is the one most viscerally affected by these changes. She gets a perm, starts smoking, strikes up a relationship without the approval of her danwei 单位. She tells Zhang Jun she just wants to be his wife. But Jun – who worries about his parents’ disapprobation and simply doesn’t want to commit – breaks down and confesses their still-illicit relationship to the authorities. Ping is the one who suffers the consequences. And yet, when it comes to expressing their grief and anger, Jun and Ping – heart-wrenchingly and awkwardly – find themselves unable to do so in any other language but that of the pop music that they’ve been imbibing all this time. And the two of them drift apart without resolving anything. ‘She’s impossible,’ Ruijian later says of Ping as she lights up a cigarette with Mingliang.

Jia Zhangke seems to have a bit of a reputation as a leftist, but his movies – at least the two that I’ve seen so far, The Pickpocket 《小武》 and Platform – are deeply conservative in their political sensibilities, insofar as they give voice to Grantian intimations of loss. (Of course, the perpendicularity of Chinese politics renders such a position sensible.) Jia romanticises neither the Maoist period nor ‘reform and opening’. But his attention is primarily on the wreckage wrought on human relationships and psychology produced by the unloosed and uneven forces of free markets and sexual ‘liberation’ – which arrive in rural China, it seems, as a package deal. Even though Ruijian and Mingliang are free to marry without her father’s approval and have their state-approved one kid by the end of the film, the collateral damage wrought on the relationships of their friends and family along the way is considerable. The film is a bit too interminable for me to recommend without qualification. But there are flashes of deep and valuable insight into how modern China was shaped over the course of the eighties.

Early maps, space and the post-colonial Western mind

In my recent attention to matters Old and English, I haven’t been focussing on hagiographies to the exclusion of all else – though my piecemeal calendar-driven re-read of Bede has certainly lent itself well to that purpose. But I recently came across an Old English map. A map of the world, in fact, dated to a couple of decades before the Great Schism and perhaps as many as four decades before the Norman Conquest. This is a digitised image of that map here:

Anglo-Saxon Mappa Mundi, ca. 1030

Several things strike me immediately about this map. The first is that the Old English placed the Eastern Mediterranean at the centre of the map. As is still more clearly evident in a Psalter map from the late 1200s, the centre of the world was held to be the city of Jerusalem. (For the benefit of the wags – not literally, of course: Bede, as did all mediæval minds, held the world to be a globe.) The second is that, because ‘east’ is ‘up’ on the map, the British Isles are all the way down at the lower left-hand corner.

Psalter map, ca. 1290. Note the iconographic depiction of Christ at the top.

This map orientation may look odd to us moderns, but it makes sense. Jerusalem was the site of the Temple, and Golgotha – just outside Jerusalem – the site of Our Lord’s Passion. It makes sense that a mediæval European mind which places God at the centre of the cosmos would adopt an Incarnational logic that places the life and place of Christ at the centre of her understanding. Additionally, it fully makes sense that a mediæval European would regard ‘east’ as ‘up’ or ‘forward’. Think about the way Orthodox and historic Roman Catholic churches are built – which direction is the altar in, and which way do the people face the iconostasis? How do we set up our prayer corners? We pray to the east because that is the direction that Scripture indicates the Second Coming will happen, and also because that is where the Holy Fathers direct us to pray. That is also where the sun rises. And this is also according to Classical logic and mindset. The name Yemen – from the Arabic al-Yaman اليمن and the Hebrew Teyman תימן from whence also comes the name Benjamin – refers, as Dr Paul Tarazi informed our Hebrew class – to both the right hand, and to the cardinal direction south. Hence, Yemen is ‘the South’, and Benjamin is bin-yamin, the ‘son of the right hand’! Which way do you have to be facing for the south to be on your right hand? Our very word ‘orientation’ itself derives from the Latin root for ‘east’: to the Classical mind, when you are orienting yourself you are literally ‘finding east’. For a culture like that of the Old English that was transforming itself in the Church, steeping itself in the wisdom of the Holy Fathers, a map orientation that relegates your homeland to the lower left corner of the world map was not only perfectly acceptable but sensible.

Gough Map, ca. 1300

It’s noteworthy that, as the Psalter map (and the contemporary Gough map) makes clear, this ‘east-up’ map orientation survived the upheavals of the Great Schism which severed Rome from Jerusalem (and Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch). However, it did not survive the age of conquest. As mapping became a more technically-intricate process to meet the needs of navigation and maritime trade, the portolan chart replaced the classical mappa mundi. The first portolan charts were drawn in the mid-13^th century in the same Italian city-states that were busy laying the mercantilist foundations for capitalism: Genoa, Venice, Florence, Pisa. Starting ca. 1375, these portolan charts directed the user, not east or towards Jerusalem, but instead north – because they were designed to be used with a compass that pointed to magnetic north.

Portolan chart of Europe by Grazioso Benincasa, 1470

This might sound like just a harmless technological innovation, meant to better aid sea travel. But ‘north-up’ maps were also a mark of egocentricity. The focus had shifted away from God, away from the Creator of the fabric of space which the map was meant to serve – away from the east, in other words (at least from the perspective of the European). Instead the entire fabric of space and its understanding was fitted to suit the cartographer, the navigator, or whoever was reading the map. This is a very similar æsthetic and philosophical development to the rest of sæcular Renaissance art – painting, sculpture, architecture – that was crafted to honour not God but rather some wealthy mortal patron. The map serves the technological works of human hands, and thus the [European] human subject himself. No longer is Jerusalem, or Christ, to be found on this map. Instead the portolan chart is just bare fact, with no universal referent. North is the direction of orientation because that is where the iron points. The portolan chart is pure ideology, and that ideology is nominalism.

Del Chierico map of the British Isles, 15^th century.

The error of the overcorrecting ‘south-up’ proponents of nowadays is that they mistake this nominalism for Eurocentrism or white supremacy or some later ideological formation. And even here, they are very close – but not close enough – to being right. Of course this nominalist turn (literally!) in cartography was ultimately linked to the ideologies of conquest of man and nature that characterised the age. By the 1400s Florentine cartographers like Francesco del Chierico had introduced ‘north-up’ oriented portolan charts and less cumbersome maps to England and France, where they were used by both navigators and land-based generals to wage the last stages of the Hundred Years’ War. The use of these early ‘north-up’ maps was undoubtedly linked to the early growth stages of nationalism in both countries – but not in as neatly-packaged and idealistic a way as the ‘south-up’ maptivists would like to make it.

The ill-uses of religion in the service of nationalism happening around this time, under the revolution in military technology of which cartography as a discipline was a significant part, are probably worth not passing over in silence. The irony, for example, of that Thespian-immortalised slogan ‘For God, Harry and Saint George,’ invoking a Palestinian saint in an English national cause, was born at this time – and even then, that Palestinian saint was invoked last, after the English king! To minds as sensitive as Shakespeare’s to the Classical ordering of reality, this slight inversion of human and divine agencies would have been significant: it essentially creates an equation of the earthly sovereign and realm with the sovereignty of God which to the mediæval mind would have bordered on hubristic. And the English were not alone: just think of the rather sordid ideological purposes the French put that poor delusional young country girl before the English put her to the stake. Of course her canonisation by the Latins in the age of World War and nationalism at its highest fever pitch is not accidental either – let alone blameless.

Still, it seems fairly hard to deny that the egocentrism of this cartographical convention had some relation to later nominalist developments. If space has been reoriented to the comfort, convenience and mastery of the cartographer or navigator or general rather than to Christ, of course it becomes far easier to rationalise conquest within that same spatial fabric.

But what is interesting to me is this: as long as the Old English had been under the tutelage of the Church, they were – in a very real sense – crucifying their egos on a collective basis, in a way that should be instructive for us. In accepting a God who had taken on a human Incarnation in Palestine, they had accepted that they did not occupy an exalted or central place in the world. This is a very far cry from later centuries, when intoxicated with their own imperial pride the British people placed themselves not only on the top of the map but also in the very centre, with the longitudinal prime meridian running through Greenwich Village on every standard map of the world. When the imperial centre of gravity shifted to Washington, certain map projections placed the North American continent instead in the top-central position.

I am not, of course, advocating for the maptivist ‘south-up’ position or for a retro-mediæval ‘east-up’ position; at this point, even that inversion would be something like vanity, and in any event it wouldn’t solve the underlying problem. We live in an age where, in the wake of imperial hubris, a kind of spiritual egotism has been allowed to fester and deepen and darken. For multiple generations now, we, particularly white, Americans of all political stripes have been taught – whether by indulgent parents, by school administrators and college deans, by the legal system, or by films, books, talk radio, cable news, presidential candidates or the omnipresent corporate advertisement – that we are the centre of the universe and that the universe owes us. We are taught we are owed comfort, security, high living standards, the starring rôle. This is culturally every bit as much ingrained in us as the idea that ‘north is up’ on a map. But of course, reality refuses to oblige, and that same egotism that we are taught embitters us. It leads us to stubborn denials of our past. It leads us to an empty and morbid fascination with preserving, as if in formaldehyde, the physical material outer remnants of ‘Western civilisation’. It leads us in some cases, as seen from recent news, to inward darkness and outbursts of homicidal violence.

Those of us who go to church are also taught to put Christ at the centre of our lives, but the vast majority of us have no conception of how to do this. Unlike the Old English, our removal from the cultural context of the Incarnation has convinced us that Christ is merely an abstract reflection of us: a liberal-individualist, white, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic. Speaking from personal experience, this is an incredibly tough and painful intellectual habit to break. The most useful way to do this, still (and this is not something I remotely pretend to be good at), is to find the least of our brothers and sisters near us, and look to them to point us to Christ. That’s probably a surer way than relying on any map to tell us, even subconsciously, where the centre of the world is.

Such reflections may sound harsh, but they are necessary for those of us who are not anti-Western at heart. Indeed, if we love the West we need to seek its return to a more humble and less œcologically- and sociologically-taxing way of life. And the contours of the Old English worldview – still flavoured by a Teutonic heathen heroism, yes, but also shaped by Benedictine monasticism and an openness to Greco-Syrian, North African, Ægyptian and Palestinian spiritual influences – point a possible way out.