Pictures from a Revolution

Edited April 25, 2017

The gates of the Shanghai Conservatory opened, and the cacophony of loud noise engulfed the spectators.  A lorry moved slowly through the gate, blasting revolutionary songs  through a bullhorn installed on the driver’s cabin.  On the open platform of the lorry stood a young man dressed in the army-like uniform with a platter-size lapel pin showing the envisage of Chairman Mao.  The zeal in his eyes expressed nothing but unflinching faith in the words he was shouting through a bullhorn held in his hand.  Behind the lad stood several older men dressed in grayish uniforms, their heads bowed, and large posters pinned to their chests and backs.  “Who are they” I asked my Chinese guide.  “They are the enemies of the people” she resolutely replied.  “And what do these posters they are wearing say?” “That they followed the old path of the imperialist culture.”

Shanghai During Cultural Revolution

As it turned out, the older men were the faculty at the Shanghai Conservatory hauled away by members of the Red Guard.  Their “crime” was their teaching of classical music, which the Cultural Revolution hack propagandists labeled reactionary and imperialist.  In my two-year stay in China in my youth during the peak of the Cultural Revolution I have seen this scene repeating itself in endless iterations – Red Guard lads publicly judging, condemning and reprimanding their teachers for espousing old reactionary ideas which the Communist Party apparatchiks deemed harmful to the people.

Red Guard - as Depicted in Cultural Revolution Propaganda Poster.

These scenes, which I vividly remember even though, or perhaps because, I was unable to record for the fear of severe consequences that my parents could face for such acts of “espionage,” come to mind today when I witness political discourse in the United States today.  On the one end of the political spectrum, you have the guardians of the conservative orthodoxy and the unflinching faith in the market and "liberty."  Any opinion deemed incompatible with these dogmas are immediately attacked by these guardians in the most vicious and vile way.  No substantive arguments are being offered, invective and name calling suffice, of which "socialist" is the most serious.  This is mirrored on the other side of the spectrum, where the guardians of the liberal, or rather neoliberal, orthodoxy attack unorthodox views in an equally vile and vicious way, using terms such as "racist" or "fascist."   If you are foolish enough to engage these self-styled guardians of the orthodoxy, you are told to move to another country by the conservatives, or to grow up by the neoliberals. 

Red Guards Fighting Caricatures

Of course, this zealous defense of the orthodoxy is not new.  As HL Mencken observed:

“It was Americans who invented the curious doctrine that there is a body of doctrine in every department of thought that every good citizen is in duty bound to accept and cherish; it was Americans who invented the right-thinker. The fundamental concept, of course, was not original. The theologians embraced it centuries ago, and continue to embrace it to this day. It appeared on the political side in the Middle Ages, and survived in Russia into our time. But it is only in the United States that it has been extended to all departments of thought. It is only here that any novel idea, in any field of human relations, carries with it a burden of obnoxiousness, and is instantly challenged as mysteriously immoral by the great masses of right-thinking men. It is only here, so far as I have been able to make out, that there is a right way and a wrong way to think about the beverages one drinks with one's meals, and the way children ought to be taught in the schools, and the manner in which foreign alliances should be negotiated, and what ought to be done about the Bolsheviki.”

What I find far more interesting, however, is that this phenomenon is spread not among people lacking  education, but among those who have college credentials.   One would think that having a college degree makes people think more critically and rationally, yet the opposite seems to be the case.  Many otherwise intelligent people turn themselves into propaganda tools of the establishment ideology, be it the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution in China or the Republican or Democratic Party lines in the United States.  Why?

Several hypotheses are possible. The first hypothesis, often heard in certain segments of the sectarian Left is the supposedly corrupting role played by the educational system itself, especially the academia.  Schools are reactionary institutions, this argument goes, whose main role is to instill ideas, attitudes and behaviors that are instrumental to the interests of the ruling class.  Therefore, graduates of the “elite” educational institutions form the phalanx defending the established status quo in cultural wars.  I find this explanation trite, boring and unconvincing.  Suffice it to say, that a mirror version of this argument is heard on the right accusing academic institutions of being bastions libertine ideas corrupting the minds of the youth.  It is clear that both arguments are caricatures of academic institutions that cannot be taken seriously.

Another possible explanation is self-selection.  It is well known that certain institutions tend to attract people exhibiting certain personalities.  Thus financial investment institutions tend to attract greedy unscrupulous bastards, religion and political parties tend to attract demagogues and shysters, the police and the military tend to attract sadistic and violent types, and so on.  By this logic, academic institutions, especially of the elite variety, tend to attract sycophants who love sucking up to authority figures, be it the faculty or rich and powerful people in the so-called real world.  While there might be some truth in this argument, it certainly does not tell the whole story.  Certainly not every elite university student is a sycophant eager to serve the rich and the powerful, and not every sycophant in the academia becomes a stooge of the regime.  I strongly suspect that most of the latter end up as middle managers meandering through the corporate landscape by keeping a low profile and sucking up to their bosses. 

The third possible explanation, which I find quite interesting, is that academic training trigger certain social role playing that often leads young people to stomping on the faces of others, seen as the enemies of “progress” or other bigger than life ideal.  This explanation was suggested by the Czech writer Milan Kundera  in his novel “The Joke” – whose protagonist was betrayed by his comrades and expelled from a university in the Communist Czechoslovakia.  A keen social observer, Kundera wonders why so many talented and intelligent youth threw their support behind the Communist regime in the post- World War 2 Czechoslovakia.  Some of them, like one of the characters in the novel who backstabs the protagonist, were opportunistic sycophants changing their faces to win the graces of powers that be.  But most other did not fit that mould. 

The reason suggested by Kundera is that education, especially university education, infuses young people with a cognitive illusion that they can achieve anything they want and change the world.  It encourages them to think that the knowledge they are acquiring uniquely positions them as agents of social change and transformation of the world of ignorance that they inherited from the past.  This is why, according to Kundera, so many bright students (the prominent Polish intellectual Leszek Kolakowski comes to mind ) were attracted to communist parties in the post WW2 Eastern Europe.  The ideology professed by these parties offered them a vision of a new society based on rational ideals, and an illusion that they can be agents of change implementing this new rational vision.  Given the wide-spread disillusionment with the pre-World War 2 politics and the devastation caused by the war, this was enough to attract significant following. 

One of the darker aspect of this "can reach the stars" mentality is hostility to social tethers that may hold the aspiring young star from achieving his (it is mostly males who fall for this delusion) goals.  Hence their propensity to attack the "old."   Oftentimes this hostility toward the old is manifested by the rejection of “old” aesthetic values, destruction of their cultural symbols, and espousing of the new avant garde culture.  When this is limited to the sphere of cultural representations, this can be very creative and rejuvenating.  However, when this creative zeal is manipulated by political interests to attack their enemies it becomes dangerous. 

This was certainly the case of the entrenched rear guards of the China’s Communist Party, who launched the Cultural Revolution  to purge the party reformers trying to modernize the backward rural economy.  They managed to capture and direct the zeal of millions of China’s youth to take on their teachers and prominent intellectuals who posed a threat to the ossified Party elite.  As a result, the country’s development was thrown back by decades. 

Youth for the Powers That Be.

   

Likewise, the “Reagan Revolution” in the United States unleashed a similar process, albeit far better greased than the Cultural Revolution.  The young and ambitious people that they are on the verge of creating a brave new world unlike anything before – the new economy, the new technology, the end of history as we know it.  They are the rising stars in the making of this new world order.  However, the prospect of success is threatened by the entrenched interests of the “old” as designated by the Republican Party apparatchiks – the unions, the teachers, environmentalists, labor lawyers and “liberal elites.”  

Democrats - always followers, never thought leaders - finally caught up with this trend during the 2016 presidential election.  Anyone who doubted the virtues of the glorious leader Hillary Clinton was viciously attacked as "racist", "sexist" , "brocialist" (the neoliberal version of the right wing invective 'socialist'), a Russian troll, or simply an immature and childish person who does not have enough common sense to grasp the self-evident truth of the Democrat party line.

Like in Orwell’s dystopia 1984, the Party apparatchicks designated enemies of the people, and the these otherwise smart and educated people followed the cue and led the charge against them. So here we are – intelligent, educated, and idealistic youth turning, under the watchful eye of the Party into the Hitlerjugend, Komsomol, Red Guard, Republicans or Democrats and stomping on the faces of people conveniently designated as enemies of the Party and the people. 

Back to the future of America: Permanent Cultural Revolution