Intellectual Underpinnings: or, You expected a revolution without firing squads?

Slavoj Žižek. Political radical, celebrity philosopher, and the Elvis of cultural theory. Photo: Andy Miah [CC BY-SA 2.0].

On Practice and Contradiction by Mao Zedong

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am often critiqued for conflating ideas.

<conflate>

I am fascinated by founding documents of social movements, political ideologies, and nation-states, and I also enjoy protest music, particularly the folk variety. Maybe this is a contradiction, in that one can be fascinated by the founding documents while supporting radical music designed to upset tradition. I don't know. 

But I do know that Australia's Constitution is suitably a bureaucratic administrative document that doesn't mention citizens, free speech, or human rights. This is a country that banned a Bob Dylan song.

China also banned Bob Dylan from performing in 2010.

(Did you know that the Government of Utah in the United States still kills people by firing squad? The last time was Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010.)

Yet China is a republic forged from revolution. It is strange how pervasive conservatism can become. Especially when one considers these foundational philosophical writings by Mao Zedong. 

</conflate>

When reading Mao's book of quotations, I become interested in reading more of his historical writings. When teaching political ideologies, I have always included Mao's development of communist theory to incorporate peasants (who were technically not part of the proletariat, and certainly were not to be trusted, according to Lenin and Stalin). 

Yet today we have the next global super-power - displaying all the hallmarks of a capitalist industrial behemoth - still evolving out of what will soon be the world's longest experiment with socialism (the Soviet's lasted 74 years, the People's Republic of China is approaching its 70th birthday next year). Socialism, albeit with Chinese characteristics. 

But where did the ideas come from and what theory guided China's implementation of socialism? 

This work provides at least some of the answers. The introduction is by "the Elvis of philosophy", Slavoj Žižek, someone whose ideas I have grown fond of over time. I note with a little surprise that many suggest Žižek's introduction does not add much, but after reading it twice, it is clear that Žižek knows what he is talking about. 

In terms of theory, Mao suggests that the "negation of negation" is simply the bigger fish consuming the smaller. But Žižek points out that this is a critical mistake for Mao Zedong's thinking. For Žižek, Tony Blair's Third Way incorporated Thatcherism - you know you have really won not when you have destroyed the enemy, but when the enemy begins speaking your language. 

There is much more to discover in Žižek's short introduction, but it is certainly worth at least two readings. As for Mao's writings, there is so much to cover it is clear that he was a genius, with an enormous intellect. It is interesting that the United States, the most liberal (individualistic) country in the world, had a group of "founding fathers", whereas China, with its socialism with Chinese characteristics and its sense of filial responsibility, had an individual "founding father". Again, contradictions. 

Mao also writes of the eleven types of liberalism which must be combated. He also gives words to an idea I have when I observe my dogs eating. If you give one dog something to eat, it will sneak off to enjoy its meal individually. But the other dogs, seeing one has something and the others do not, will insist on equality (in terms of food distribution). For Mao (p. 105), combating liberalism is important as it is like a cancer on Marxism:

...they talk Marxism but they practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves.

The book includes a critique of some of Stalin's economic work (and some of Mao's critiques of Lenin) and outlines rather substantially Mao's ideas about overcoming contradiction, right analysis to bring the universal to the particular and back to the universal, to discover the essence of contradictions, and so on. All brilliant thinking. 

Mao also speaks of his pedagogy. Interestingly, this echoes Theodore Roosevelt's The Strenuous Life, but with more of a focus on working the land with the peasants to not only harden oneself, but to actually be the proletariat, to join in the struggle. 

A disturbing perspective, which other commentators see as the rationale for so many deaths during the Great Famine (and following the Great Leap Forward - clearly, there is a difference between theory and implementation), relates to Mao's view of the Atom Bomb. In effect, China's millet and rifles would surely overcome the United States' planes and atomic bombs.

We have two principles: first, we don't want war; second, we will strike back resolutely if anyone invades us... The Chinese people are not to be cowed by US atomic blackmail.

Mao justifies this stance through the historical processes of socialism: The First World War increased the number of socialists (via the Soviet Union); the Second World War increased the number of socialists again (via the People's Republic of China); and thus the Third World War will increase the number of socialists yet again, and so on until we all live happily ever after. 

But Mao does what all good philosophers do (from the time of Heraclitus), and maps out his understanding of physics, biology, the universe, and so on. No philosophy is complete without an understanding of the world. And herein lies the historical value of the work in this book. Mao was a prolific author, and, although Mao's former comrade Deng Xiaoping, undid all of his work in the space of a few years, Mao remains revered in mainland China. 

Later, when the victors control the past, Mao's cult status can only increase. 

But that hasn't stopped one New York Times reviewer of Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, suggesting: 

If Chairman Mao had been truly prescient, he would have located a little girl in Sichuan Province named Jung Chang and "mie jiuzu"-- killed her and wiped out all her relatives to the ninth degree. But instead that girl grew up, moved to Britain and has now written a biography of Mao that will help destroy his reputation forever.

And this is the general tone of the reaction of most of the commercial world to Unknown Story. 

Nevertheless, the academy responded with Was Mao Really a Monster? The Academic Response to Chang and Halliday’s Mao The Unknown Story, and basically tore it to shreds for dodgy research and re-purposing evidence to achieve an agenda (is this negating the negation?).

The things is, and despite the problems cleverly identified and articulated in Žižek's introduction, Mao's philosophy is comprehensive, and provides a systematic approaches to understanding society, for better or worse. 

I intend to study Mao more seriously as a result of this book and hope to read my copies of Mao: The Unknown Story and Ross Terrill's Mao: A Biography in the near future.

I am also fascinated by the link Mao makes between contradiction and identity (p. 94), and how this relates to the idea of identity and contradiction outlined by Joss Whedon in his 2013 Wesleyan Commencement Address.

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This isn't writing, it's just typing...

Jack Kerouac Alley, San Francisco. Photo by Beyond My Ken [CC BY-SA 4.0] via Wikimedia.

Doctor Sax by Jack Kerouac

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I finished this book and thought to myself, "What the hell was that about?" I still don't know. It is poetic in the sense that it has a distinct rhythm, not as hectic as the rhythm of On the Road, but a rhythm nonetheless. I read this book over a few days, and my dreams were haunted by visions of my childhood. Not that my childhood compares with Kerouac's, in many ways he seemed to have an enjoyable childhood with many friends. But his childhood recollections of creativity and games and imagination allow one to recall a time long past. As I read the book, I wanted it to finish as soon as possible. I couldn't stop reading it, but I wanted it to end. When it ended with:

Written in Mexico City,

Tenochtitlan,1952

Ancient Capital of Azteca

I was convinced Kerouac was completely off his nut when he wrote this work. So I looked to The Guardian and The New York Times to see what it was all about. In The Guardian, Lettie Ransley suggests that Kerouac was using what he:

...came to refer to as his "spontaneous prose" method: incantatory and insistent in its rhythms...

One can certainly feel the rhythm, much like an ebbing tide. But David Dempsey (1959) of the New York Times was closer to how I feel about the work:

"Dr. Sax" is not only bad Kerouac; it is a bad book. Much of it is in bad taste, and much more is meaningless. It runs the gamut from the incoherent to the incredible, a mishmash of avant-gardism (unreadable), autobiography (seemingly Kerouac's) and fantasy (largely psychopathic).

While I am reluctant to say it was bad, I am none the wiser as to why one might read it, other than for historical study purposes. Dempsey tells me that Truman Capote said of Dr Sax:

...this isn't writing, it's just typing.

Capote might be close to the truth, but I find it difficult to accept that the little I have read of Finnegan's Wake is somehow art while Doctor Sax is something else. So while I must appreciate it for its historical merit, and I while I have not lost anything from reading it (it has forced me to think and to recollect forgotten moments from childhood), I find it hard to say this is a good book, and I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone other than the student of literature. I enjoyed Maggie Cassidy and On the Road, but I have struggled to commit to Kerouac's Wake Up. All I can say is that after this book, I think Jack and I need a little time apart.

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Lessons from Camus' The Plague: or, Doing one's duty in the present moment

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain at Tate Modern. [Public Domain, photo by David Shankbone, London].

The Plague by Albert Camus

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This literary work by Albert Camus might be rewarding if read simply as a novel. But to comprehend the work in the context of his philosophical "book-length essays", The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel (which I am yet to read), and his other famous novel, The Stranger, requires an understanding of Camus' philosophy of the absurd. While Camus refused the label of existentialist philosopher, it is clear that he develops a philosophy of the absurd in the three of the above works I have read thus far. 

I suspect that a reading of The Rebel and also Nuptials will provide further insight into his ideas, but much like reading Nietzsche, I think one could develop a sense of Camus' ideas no matter where one starts. I enjoy referring to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy when trying to comprehend philosophical works, but I follow Mortimer Adler's advice to read the work first, so as to form my own impression, before immersing myself in the interpretations of others'. This particular edition of the novel is helpful in that it contains an afterword, rather than an introduction, by the late Professor Tony Judt.

Whenever I think of absurdity, I tend to think of the Dada Movement. But the ridiculousness of Dada served the purpose of mocking the bourgeois, so it does not relate so much to the absurd in the philosophical sense as it does "absurd" in the sense of "ridiculous". What I gather from my reading is that the absurd relates to the absence of any meaning of life. It is irrational in that you cannot reach, by reason, the meaning of life other than that you live and then you die. 

There is an element of Nietzsche's "God is dead", too, in that Camus attacks religion, no, challenges religion, in its attempt to provide meaning to life (or the after-life). As the title suggests, this novel is a fictional story about the plague striking Oran, Algeria, and the lives of a group of men who are caught up by the inevitable quarantining of the city. In his afterword, Tony Judt tells of how Camus relied on his personal experience of Nazi-occupied France (Camus was a reluctant hero of the French Resistance) as a basis for his story, and how as soon as the tragedy is over, people simply pick up from where they left off and seem to forget the lessons learnt from the trauma.

Without giving too much of the plot away, nor the interesting use of the narrator, the non-religious protagonist simply does his duty. In doing so, we see a human Sisyphus at work. It probably didn't help being sick myself while reading this, and wondering if each time one of the pets scratched themselves I might be in for a dose of the plague, but like all of Camus' work I have read thus far, it leaves me with a strange sense of resignation. I was going to say hope, but this is where Camus disagreed with Sartre and the existentialists: he saw them as "deifying" the knowledge that there was no god (or God or gods), and turning existentialism into its own form of religion, much like the anti-religionist non-scientist science-lovers do on social media these days.

Something that strikes me with Camus is the absence of hope. If one doesn't like it, then one can always end it. And here I draw parallels with the Stoics. There is always that macabre option. But if we choose to live, we can only live for the present moment. What appears again and again in The Plague is a sense of duty. Not so much for a cause, but to do what one does because that is what one does. To live in the present moment, for the future is death, and the past is beyond our control.

Yet this doesn't mean we adopt a hedonistic approach to life, but rather that we do our duty, in accordance with our nature. Of course, these ideas are difficult to comprehend without a thorough reading of Camus, Nietzsche, and the Stoics; even so, it is still difficult to articulate the concept. Camus' use of the novel to explain these concepts is powerful, in that through metaphor, we can come to understand his non-philosophical philosophy.

Rather than attempting to find meaning in life (which is absurd because there is none), we can exist in the present moment and do our duty. And while this may sound nihilistic, there is a sense of peace one can gain by acknowledging that all we can control are our impressions of external events, and then how we react to the things we cannot control. As Camus observed in The Myth of Sisyphus (p. 64):

...integrity has no need of rules.

It would seem that there is some relation to Stoicism, in that personal decision and choice is a central theme. 

But that is just my take on it. If you would rather just read an excellent novel, then this is it. If, of course, you can not wonder about the absurdity of it all after reading it.

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