Genealogy of Normals

Why do we talk about genealogy and what do we mean by it? "We" here are humanists, ostensibly the scholars furthest from disciplinary engagement with biological science where genes and descent are discussed in literal terms.

I'm considering this question because of something I said offhand without really thinking about it. The other day in discussion section I found myself describing the 19th century mass extinction of social and cultural forms. Continuing the prehistory motif, I think I mentioned the Permian-Triassic extinction event, the "great dying" around 250 million years ago. I wanted to explain a massive reduction in diversity in a familiar way and to convey a sense of objectivity to it. What had been a massive and complicated array of life-forms was reduced hugely, and one particular strand, your diapsid reptiles if you will, would become dinosaurs, diversifying to rule in the Mesozoic age.

To take the example of political thought, I suggested to the class, one could at the middle of the 19th century define very different kinds of public or collectivity particular to Islamic, Confucian, and Western liberal traditions. In the 19th century, the last model triumphed, and within a hundred years it filled every evolutionary niche, and all political situations are judged as successful or failed nation-states with better or worse legal codes. There are references to sharīʿa in the constitutions of Muslim countries; there is the sign of the supreme ultimate on the South Korean flag, but these are phenotypes belying the common genotype of the nation-state. The genetics presented in statist forms of partisanship, bureaucracy, and nationalism is of a new kind. Perhaps non-Western nation-states have exclusively Western formal features, perhaps they reflect a blend of hegemonic and local forms, but they are definitively new.

How is this the common sense account? It is handy, meaning it was at hand, and I used it because I wanted to borrow the authority commonly associated with sciences. When I'm just talking, and not thinking about things in the writerly way, I associate science with clarity. So, I wanted to borrow one of the clearest depictions there and that's a dominant metaphor of modern power: that of evolution. For the students I was talking to, I don't think I gave them something too irresponsible. But the evolutionary genealogical model isn't the fittest for more intense forms of discourse.

There are two reasons for this: 1) I don't know evolution, not really, and 2) gene-flow doesn't capture the interface between knowledge and power that's at the heart of meaningful modern intellectual historiography.

First, evolution: what is that? My understanding, like quite a lot of humanities and social-science types I know, is a collection of 19th-century tropes like the Darwinian struggle, meaning a justification of the ways of power already in place conveniently located in a racialized discourse at hand.

Second, this limited reception of Darwin can't capture a lot of what transforms in traditions as they flourish or fail. What metaphor of parentage or adaptation explains the relationship of fertilization and mutual transformation between the Buddhist and indigenous Chinese traditions in the 7th through 11th centuries? Perhaps sophisticated bio-ecological understandings like scientists today might have could do this, but nothing in the theory-shorthand many of us do.

So, if this isn't the best, why is it hard to resist? I think that has to do, at the very least, with Nietzsche and Foucault. However, I want to suggest that both forms of genealogies leave a lot of room for rethinking for intellectual historians.

In sum: Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals was an act of violation, defaming the sanctimony of liberal and Christian values in associating them with slaves, with slaving, with the shame and self-loathing inflicted by those impotent in violence. Foucault took this de-elevation further in locating the agents of development in microphysical processes, the reorganizations of space and time hour by meter that are commensurate with modern power. Both are valuable, but we need more to come to terms with the thought structuring, responding to, and obscured by our world.

The problem with even those genealogies point to origins, to points and processes of speciation, to concretes of historicity of which we need to be more critical than we have been before. In difficult environments, life forms change over generations or they die, and this modern environment is particularly hostile to certain forms of self-formation and communal mutuality.

However, to understand forms of spiritual or intellectual sustenance in the margins of public society or among vulnerable people, we will need an idea of tradition or continuity between life and death, in suspense. Understanding what might become of Confucianism or Anglicanism, or the much more complex case of sharīʿa jurisprudence, need to account for how living forms might become more porous and plastic than they have been before. In this, the questions of influence or heritage to which the genealogical explanation incline us are limiting rather than opening. 

Nevertheless, the fact that the genealogical or genetic model is the model at hand for a lot of us is significant in and of itself. It after all is an immanent product of the processes we are trying to come to terms with.

Can Xi Jinping Save the Humanities? Part 1: Sprouts of Learning

What's Xi Jinping 习近平 to do? By that I mean, what could the leader of country with the most people and cash do to help us humanists? The humanities are in trouble, and he's a seemingly randomly chosen benefactor, so what could he do? Should he swap out the power suit for an old blazer with a beat up Beckett paperback in the pocket to meet the gang at the campus dive so we can complain about all the philistines who get to pay their rent? 

No. But seriously, I do want to think about the relationship between the revival of Confucianism and other traditions in official discourse in China and the liberal arts in the West. The recent idea of Confucianism coming back bears some note first.

As much as American conservatives are seeing a war on religion, Confucianism represents a religious tradition that has practically died very recently. For a hundred years, it's been socially and politically out of the picture in Asia for all but the barest rituals and resown social theories. 

The most important recent Confucian Astroturfing goes back to Lee Kwan Yew 李光耀, the long time leader of Singapore. Lee argued that flipping the value-judgments of racial caricatures Western Darwinians gave to East Asians to write off imperialism could today be used to explain the capitalist successes of Japan, Korea and the Chinese micropoles. Passivity becomes deference, submissiveness becomes altruism, self-efacement becomes willingness to change. So 19th-century Oriental obstacles became 21st-century Asian values. 

The reaction in mainland China has been faint but generally positive. Lee appealed to Communist leaders, who since the 1980s have lacked any formal program for understanding and expression of their style of authoritarianism and vigor in the market. So, from this comes the claiming of Confucius as a Chinese legacy to UNESCO in 1994, the Confucius Institute, and these political-intellectual social fashions are said to appeal particularly to Xi. Insiders I know only expect the role of the Confucian classics to grow in primary and secondary education in China, and the state is heavily promoting scholarship on Chinese humanities as only Taiwan had recently before.

This is the official story: dry, bureaucratic, still hinting at the colonial moralities even if reworked; it's banally clear in its ambitions of justifying authoritarian nationalism. But, it binds up a history that has a great deal in it to inspire, that of the New Confucianism of the 20th century and today. For a long time, I have been interested how a sort of Confucianism survived in such environments as the philosophy department of Peking University in the first decades of the republican period.

However, John Makeham is surely right when he describes this as a deracinated thought experiment among cosmopolitan intellectuals, all elite men who have almost all found homes in places like Hong Kong, Taichung and Boston.

As much of a challenge as Tu Wei-ming 杜維明 or Jiang Qing 蒋庆 presents to the bland conservatism of an official, curated Confucian revivification, it would be difficult to see them in the mold of the Benedictine scholars of the Western middle ages. In the imagination of traditionalists like Alasdair MacIntyre, these monks not only preserved the content of Aegean and early-Christian thought in a time of isolation and chaos, they wrote a rule for life, a devotional method inspired by classical virtues to the new end of scholarly discipline. If Foucault and Charles Taylor are to be believed, we can see the roots of the altruism and disciplinary austerity of modern society in places like the medieval monasteries. Though Jiang might see himself in this vein, I don't know how this kind of intellectualism and devotion could  influence and thrive in a modern political society.

So though Professor Tu in my view is an inspiring and provocative public intellectual, it's President Xi's thoughts on the Confucian curriculum in state schools that will have the biggest impact on the future of patriotic subject-formation among the college-bound and not in China. In the next post I want to think about this contrast in coordinated ways: what space for the critique or mutuality, the big humanistic subjectivities, might there be in this proprietary culture? That, as opposed ours of course.

Style

Finally! The definitive review of the hooks and hang-ups of Taylor Swift's 1989! Alas no. Here I want to put out a few style notes to those of interest. According to Facebook, the number of people willing to shout across the Internet about the minutiae of usage, at least in English, is considerable, so fire away if you're interested.

First, I find myself these days really only able to use the dry, sometimes elliptical academic prose I read all day. There is one convention that's always attracted me to The New York Times, The Economist and so on, and that's the bougie frisson of titles, the deferent and fancy use of Mr. and Ms. But, this is too forced and old-timey even for me.

As for proper nouns and special terms of foreign languages, most will probably be in Arabic or Chinese. For Arabic, I follow the ever-handy standard of the International Journal of Middle East Studies for transliteration of any premodern Arabic personal name, but I'll use the familiar Anglicized names of places like Cairo and Damascus. Why do we do this? Something to do with the British empire I'm sure.

I think I'll also use common Anglicizations without diacritics and so on for modern people's names like Hosni Mubarak and Muammar al-Qaddafi. I likely won't write "Ḥusnī Mubārak" though this is more precise to the standard Arabic because of the (Eurocentric) commonplace ways of referring to such prominent people. I have noticed an effort on the part of some people in the Gulf to bring transliterations in line with academic protocols, so Hijaz is now preferred to the familiar Hejaz, and before long we might be more comfortable seeing Makka instead of Mecca. As this is a choice of the users themselves, we are to stick with them just as with the renaming of Mumbai from Bombay, Kolkata from Calcutta.

Similar problems stalk English use of Chinese. For references to Chinese before about 1900, I'll use the standard Hanyu Pinyin transliteration without tone-markers for people's names, with traditional characters on first mention: Wang Yangming is 王陽明, easy. After 1959, I'll use the same transliteration but with simplified characters for people most associated with the mainland, so Zhou Enlai is 周恩来. For Taiwanese, Hong Kongers and so on, I'll have to stick to the gawky and somewhat inconsistent Wade-Giles as that's tradition, and no one really refers to Taiwan's president as "Ma Yingjiu". The traditional characters will hopefully clear everything up. As with any language, I'll try to use special terms like li 禮 sparingly and always with translation, but the characters are almost always needed to clear things up so we know we don't mean li 裡.

And what else is there? I suppose I'll stick to the commonest conventions only qualifying to say I have problems with capitals. Do we need to capitalize the names of types of political formations after the proper adjective? You see the French Republic, but not the Icelandic Republic, not for the Viking one, that is. And what about churches, do we need to accept that Catholics have basically purchased capital-c Church, viz the Church? Aren't the Eastern churches just as old, prestigious and universal in their ambitions, might the Amharic or Coptic churches be older in some sense? And what about historical periods, brands or movements? How is the Civil War the American one, but there's the Congolese civil war, the Northumbrian renaissance versus the Italian Renaissance? I don't know, and might not be consistent as a result.

I suppose I won't be up to much cussing unless I can't fucking stop myself or it's really fucking pertinent to the expressions due. And the same goes for improvisational forms of expression current in new media. But sometimes, they're irresistible and I can't say no. Because Internet, I literally. can't. even.