I am self-absorbed as a thinker. By that I mean that most of my thinking comes as a result of my reflection on my own mind and feelings, and I’ve flirted with solipsism, a defensible philosophical position perhaps but nevertheless one that I believe only relatively self-absorbed minds could engage with. Maybe most people consider the idea of “self-absorption” to be a bad word, meaning the same as selfishness or callousness. But to be absorbed in the study of the self is a deep, endless pursuit, dear to most great thinkers, and no self can be better known than one’s own. Perhaps, after all, only one’s self can be known at all, or not even that, but then we come all at once back in the direction of solipsism. In any case, while philosophers use and abuse in some cases the idea of “introspection” as the last sacred activity that can privilege them as a distinct discipline in the face of competition from science, I don’t want to present inner reflection as the last hope of an academic discipline that has lost its moorings, but as a balance to a mental landscape increasingly dominated by pseudo-scientific behavioralism.

In the last three decades, as evolutionary thinking has increasingly permeated the culture and neo-Darwinism has replaced Marxism and Freudianism as a Big Idea that faded humanities departments can hitch their star to, maybe it was inevitable that someone would concoct an idea like “Darwinian literary studies,” which sounds like some Sokal-like nightmare concocted by a random terminalogy generator. In fact, symbolically it seems like a welcome gesture of receptivity in the field to a certain amount of rigor and empirical thinking. The mistake, however, is the same one that theorists have been making for decades in taking literary texts as illustrations of whatever economic, psychoanalytic, sociological or ethnological theory ambushed them on the way to a doctorate. People don’t read novels or poems because they’re the same as an economic analysis of the corset trade or a study on the mating strategies of fruit flies, but because they’re different. The attention to language is (presumably) greater, and the aesthetic effect holds the primary interest. When you’re reduced to plowing through “Pride and Prejudice” to discover that, like praying mantises, among whom the female frequently devours the head of the male during sex, often not a lot of trust exists in relationships between and women, it seem clear that you’ve been reduced to obvious nuggets by focusing on the broad strokes of behavior that are common to most all animals. I call it sledgehammering: invoking an unnecessarily authoritative source to belabor an obvious point. One of the all-time champions is Dostoyevsky for his little chestnut “if God does not exist, everything is permitted,” a drearily banal canard, not to mention blatantly untrue (as anyone who has been to China can attest), but, while a common sentiment, invoked ad nauseam in that particular form for the sole reason that Dostoyevsky’s name gives it a certain heft. Invoking Darwin to contend that people are often selfish follows a similar pattern. Which is not to say that there are not innumerable interesting and non-obvious insights to be found by investigating the common themes in animal behavior. But literary scholars are generally not trained scientists, and their understanding of evolutionary biology often seems to lack a certain sophistication. And even if they were, evolutionary biology is still a behavioralist field, not in the skinnerian sense, but in the sense that it’s predicated on the study of behavior, not conscious thought. Finding parallels between people and praying mantises cannot be based on shared thought processes, because we don’t know what the thought processes of praying mantises are, or even whether they exist in the human sense of the term. Similarities in behavior and physiology are about all that’s available to compare. Of course a lot of neurobiology work is investigating the correspondences between conscious thoughts and brain activity in humans and then extrapolating to similar correspondences to animals, but none of this would make any sense without conscious reflection. I mean that not just in the obvious sense that conscious thought is the medium for all of these theories, but also in the sense that much of the data on brain activity doesn’t make any sense except with reference to our thoughts and feelings as we’ve defined them internally. There is no neutral ground outside of subjective conscious thought from which to view the world: to that extent the division between the ‘view from the inside’ of introspection and the ‘view from the outside’ of scientific investigation is to somewhat illusory. So while of course measuring the physical traits of thinking is very interesting and useful, it wouldn’t be wise to relinquish the immeasurable depth of internal mapping of the mind, especially if you’re not a scientist with the expertise and the grant to do the measuring.

Science directly challenges only theological doctrines, not belief in God. Whether that means that it does or not does not constitute a threat to religion I suppose depends on one’s definition of religion. It’s true that for some people it represents a justification for atheism, like Richard Dawkins, but for others, like John Polkinghorne, it simply means a more intellectual, articulate appreciation of God’s works. There may well be more that drift towards atheism with a growing understanding of scientific theories than go the other direction, but it’s not a question that lends itself, or at least has not lent itself in the past, to objective proof or refutation (except in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, where God’s Final Message to His Creatures is written in huge letters on a cliff face), it ultimately comes mostly comes down to temperament and personal inclination anyway. Some might claim that’s because it’s fundamentally rooted in a simple emotional response to everything which lies beyond the scope of discrete analysis. In any case, the religious impulse can and does take root in any soil imaginable.

Scientific theories ultimately challenge not the idea of God but of previous explanations of divine workings. One can posit a God at the root of a relativistic, quantum universe as well as of a Ptolemaic one, but reconciling it with the story in Genesis is a lot harder. Still, the devoutly religious tend to be teleological, regarding the beliefs that people have as more important than how they arrived at them, whereas scientists at least purport to be procedural, investing value in the scrupulousness with which they investigate before arriving at conclusions, whatever those might be. Interestingly, one of the greatest religious thinkers of the modern era, Kierkegaard, was also somewhat of a proceduralist, although, from the perspective of a rationalist, somewhat perversely. He thought the grandeur of faith arises from the very fact of its resistance to doubt. This may not be a very social view of religion, but it has the distinct advantage of actually being buttressed by intellectual assault. So if the religious took this view of things, not only could they reduce secular thought from the level of a legitimate intellectual challenge to a mere temptation, they could even comfort themselves with the knowledge that its increasing predominance in the world could actually make them better believers. Not a bad result for everyone involved.

I don’t know if it’s a good sign to feel nostalgic about one’s life two years ago, but reading the piece linked to below about “bio-centrism” really reminded me of my state of mind then, when I was intent on proving the non-existence of time as a discreet property of the universe. The conclusion I eventually I reached was that time is a frame of perception, like space. The thing is, though, this was essentially Kant’s conclusion before mine. The author of the article, Robert Lanza, also offers this answer, but of all the names he brings up in support of his theory, Kant’s name is rather conspicuously missing (as is Bishop Berkeley, for that matter).

The problem is there’s an unstable oscillation at the center of the theory. Because while the contention that space and time are frames of conscious perception rather than discreet phenomena seems very plausible to me, that’s not the same as claiming that they don’t exist. Space and time are definitely phenomena of conscious perception; trying to then claim that don’t “really” exist seems to be an illegitimate attempt to reclaim a standard of objective material existence or non-existence outside of the purvew of subjective perception. If something exists as a perception, and perceptions are all, by what standard can one claim that it doesn’t really exist? In fact, by this logic the reality of space and time should be more firmly established than almost anything else. Just like one’s field of vision: objects can come and go from it, but the boundaries of the field of vision are more constant than anything within it.

The term “bio-centrism” also seems slightly misleading: my brother’s (or whoever’s) labelling of it as “the new idealism” is much more appropriate. Again, the prefix “bio-” evokes biology, a field in which materialism may be losing its sway but which is still predicated on a basic belief in the objective externality of the phenomena it is studying, not the idealism that Lanza is trumpeting. The term “bio-centrism” had me anticipating a theory based not on demolishing all the certitudes of chemistry and physics but simply on a claim for the autonomy of living things from their material physical properties. Because it’s true that living things at some level don’t seem to be reducible to their physical properties: they behave differently than other material things. For instrumental purposes this seems like a more useful starting point than vague idealist talk about the subjective construction of the universe by the perceiver, although I’m certainly not opposed to that on a philosophical level.

I’m certainly not yet willing to to concede the ontological premise that human minds are no more than manifestations of physical processes in the brain. I’m even a little afraid of the picture of the mechanical dog that the materialist Daniel Dennett has on his website, becaue I’m suspicious that he looks at people and sees the same thing. But for purely instrumental purposes, it has proved to be an extremely useful hypothesis to grant for the current wave of neuroscience. Which is what makes the recent broad assault on the whole notion of a scientific understanding of the human mind and behavior by Theodore Dalrymple rather bizarre. Granted, this is a man (or more precisely nom de plume of a man) who always reminds me of what Principal Skinner once said to Mrs. Krabappel: “I admire your ability to be personally offended by broad social trends.” But when he says:

“Those who say that we are on the verge of a huge increase in self-understanding are claiming that enlightenment will suddenly be reached under the scientific bo tree. The enlightenment will have to be sudden rather than gradual because, if it were gradual, we should already be able to point to an increase in human contentment and self-control brought about by our already increased knowledge. But even the most advanced societies are just as full of angst, or poor impulse control, of existential bewilderment, of adherence to clearly irrational doctrines, as ever they were. There is no sign that, Prozac and neurosurgery notwithstanding, any of this is about to change fundamentally.”

it’s really quite strange, given that earlier in the article he mentions that some scientists have discovered that when people see someone they claim to be in love with an ancient lizard part of the brain (literally) gets activated. Is that not a significant growth in knowledge of the human heart and mind? Well, some of us cynics would claim it’s more just a confirmation of an intuition, but still an important one. He also mentions the amazing before-and-after videos of people being treated for Parkinson’s and Tourette’s syndrome. That doesn’t constitute an “increase in human contentment and self-control”? Whatever, it’s impossible to argue with the kind of people that dismiss any claims to progress in human history because the occaisonal war still breaks out. It’s shall we say a rather anecdotally-based view of the world. He also complains: “The fact is that, however many factors you examine, you cannot fully explain behaviour, not even relatively simple behaviour.” So? Even if it is true I see that more as a healthy sort of modesty about the limits of knowledge than a discouragement to future research and investigation. It’s like proclaiming that quantum physics is worthless because it can’t pinpoint exactly the location and motion of subatomic particles simultaneously. Well, actually some people do claim that, but still. Again, I certainly don’t think that one need accept all the claims of neuroscience as absolutely true, but working within that framework has been very fruitful in recent years. And just as it’s starting to get off the ground to complain that it hasn’t already arrived at some ill-defined ultimate goal of total self-knowledge is like bitching about medical science not having made people live forever yet. Even if it has already vastly increased the understanding of human behavior there’s no reason to think that that knowledge would have diffused throughout the population and ushered in a golden age of self-understanding, since most people don’t know the first thing about neuroscience. And the weird assertion that perfect neuroscientific understanding of the human mind would necessarily take the form of a scanner that could read everyone’s thoughts seems anachronistic even in its premises, since one of the most provocative current areas of research is the study of how the mind deceives itself even in its inmost thoughts for evolutionary purposes. And sure it is (at least in my own experience) that people spend a lot of time constructing elaborate principled rationalizations for what they do in their own self-interest. Again, I’m not sure that any of this is ready to compete with 42 to explain Life, the Universe and Everything, but at least give it some time.

I would feel worse about working as a teacher while lacking any teaching qualifications if I had seen any evidence so far that there was anything to teach. Maybe the notion of really teaching English to students who have already been studying it for the better part of a decade is already a bit of a stretch, although there is always an infinite array of amusing expressions like “playing with myself” to be eradicated. But even if you accept that your only purpose is to stand around practicing the language every week, the possibility of actually trying to engage students with any ideas while you’re at it always seems to end in slightly baffled disappointment, like trying to rough-house wih a camel kneeling on the ground just patiently waiting to be loaded up. It passes for a cliché among the foreign teachers that the students are all smart and motivated, and I suppose they are, but they for the most part seem to conform to that pack animal-like lack of initiative and confinement to fulfilling mechanical tasks. I haven’t seen American students from the perspective of a teacher, so it’s hard to truly say how they woud compare; however, the lack of any sort of perceptible intellectual culture is proving to be a recurring theme in China, and the elite universities seem to be the vacuum-like exemplars of this.

Which is especially disappointing because, although I knew that the economy garners the most attention and success, somehow I expected the dynamism of all the new money and opening-up to spark a mental outpouring as a side effect, like spit flying out of the mouth of an over-excited speaker. Instead much of the coursework of the students at my university seems to consist memorizing 40 page long passages, rather than reading a wide variety of different texts and analyzing ideas. Plus, at least at my university there really don’t seem to be many places to meet up and talk. All the dorms monitor visitors heavily, and I believe most of the restaurants on campus are illegal, since supposedly they’re a distraction to students who shouldn’t be tempted away from studying by, say, regular meals. There are a few coffee shops (which I guess bribe the police better), but they seem to be mostly full of people playing mah jong or girls haranguing their boyfriends for not buying them more clothes. All of which may seem a rather abstract complaint when half the students are presumably children of peasants and the state of whose teeth alone shows something about the conditions they come from. But copying/stealing technology from more advanced nations only goes so far, as does temporarily raising wages by cornering the market on low-paid manufacturing labor. Forcing foreign companies to hand over their proprietary technology and enter into “partnerships” with local companies to get into the market is never going to get the country out into the lead of anything. That can only come from developing some creative ideas independently, and for that you need a culture that cultivates creative minds. It could happen here, but it still seems a long way off.

Being as usual lazy and as usual not being able to get functional photo resizing software (until recently), here finally are photo galleries from my travels this year in Shanghai, Tianjin, and Beijing. Tomorrow I’m leaving for a month-long journey all over China during the Chinese Spring Festival (which is probably the worst time to travel in China, since Chinese workers don’t get flexible vacation time, just the official holidays, when 1.3 billion people stampede across the country, but let that be for now), so no doubt I’ll soon have lots of new photos, but these will have to suffice for now.

“The Hard Problem [of consciousness] is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one’s head–why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, “That’s green” (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn’t reducible to anything else…Many philosophers, like Daniel Dennett, deny that the Hard Problem exists at all. Speculating about zombies and inverted colors is a waste of time, they say, because nothing could ever settle the issue one way or another. Anything you could do to understand consciousness–like finding out what wavelengths make people see green or how similar they say it is to blue, or what emotions they associate with it–boils down to information processing in the brain and thus gets sucked back into the Easy Problem, leaving nothing else to explain. Most people react to this argument with incredulity because it seems to deny the ultimate undeniable fact: our own experience…And then there is the theory put forward by philosopher Colin McGinn that our vertigo when pondering the Hard Problem is itself a quirk of our brains. The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours. Our brains can’t hold a hundred numbers in memory, can’t visualize seven-dimensional space and perhaps can’t intuitively grasp why neural information processing observed from the outside should give rise to subjective experience on the inside. This is where I place my bet, though I admit that the theory could be demolished when an unborn genius–a Darwin or Einstein of consciousness–comes up with a flabbergasting new idea that suddenly makes it all clear to us.”

Thus saith Steven Pinker describing the general outlines of the current scientific debates about consciousness. Personally, I’m not even quite sure what it would mean to understand rationally something like color in a way that really captures the subjective impression of it.  It seems to me that the so-called “Hard Problem” is at root a search for an objective, rational explanation for subjective conscious phenomena. But plenty of “objective correlaries” to subjective conscious experiences have already been found. Color, for instance, has been measured as a certain wavelength of light that penetrates the eye in a certain way and gets processed in the brain a certain way. Of course that doesn’t capture the essential subjective experience of “greenness” or “redness” or whatever, but the whole point of subjective experiences is that they’re subjective and impressionistic. I get the feeling that those who expect an objective description that fully encapsulates the subjective element are looking for a synthesis between two realms that are by definition mutually exclusive. Scientific analysis can only elucidate phenomena insofar as they are objective and shared. It’s not inconceivable that the issue might submit to a higher rationality, but I find it more likely to be doomed not only to failure but to incoherency, because any attempt to explain subjective phenomena scientifically seems to me already lodged within the realm of the objective, and thus to some extent incommunicable with the very different subjective mode of perception. I think this is similar to Dennett’s point of view, though he seems more inclined to dismiss the subjective entirely than to explain the root of the disjunction.

When I decided to come to China I have to admit that the idea that my romantic prospects might be somewhat less dim than back home was not the most insignficant factor in my decision. But perhaps so as to make it impossible to forget that, as an ad for a Martin Walser exhibit that I saw in Munich once informed me, “Nichts ist ohne sein Gegenteil wahr”, I’ve really had a lot of drama this year, although I suppose it’s more exciting than none at all. I met one Chinese girl with whom I wound up having a messy break-up even though we had never actually gone out. She tended to criticize everyone in sight, but the worst was her ranting about the “dumb shits Americans,” how the southern Chinese are all shifty and untrustworthy and how she wished America and China could be physically joined by squashing Japan in the middle. She also claimed that relationships between Chinese people and Americans couldn’t work because of cultural differences, even though she asked me out when drunk one night. Say what you will about political correctness in America, but anything that makes one reflexively hesitant or cautious about making cultural generalizations left and right can’t be all bad.

I also managed to step right in the middle of another messy break-up between a Chinese girl who’s a friend of mine and an American teacher by breaking down and telling her about his continued dealings with a previous girlfriend. I had to choose in favor of honesty and the person that I respected more, but the bearer of bad news in those situations is never popular. Not to mention that they got back together a week later, so the net result of my intervention for them was practically nothing. And finally, another American teacher asked me out after New Year’s despite knowing that I already had a girlfriend. She also apparently regards relationships between Westerners and Chinese people, specifically between Western men and Chinese women, as bad news, claiming they’re inherently unequal and borderline-predation on the part of Western men, since apparently no Chinese women could possibly turn them down. I pointed out this was fairly condescending to Chinese women (which admittedly doesn’t by itself make it untrue), and furthermore that at least one Chinese girl has told me flat-out that she will only marry a Chinese man and that most of the others I’ve met are deeply suspicious of the prospect of a relationship with Western men. I’m in fact dating one of the few that isn’t, or at least hasn’t expressed any such feelings, and in a perhaps not unrelated story is probably the one least prone to cultural generalizations. Nevertheless, I know cultural differences deeply divide those they affect, and I’ve noticed a couple myself, although it might seem hypocritical now to point them out after criticizing the generalizing of others. In any case, couples, particularly girls, in China seem to find it much more socially acceptable than in the West to dramatically pantomime the state of their relationships in public for all passers-by to see. I’ve seen girls sitting on park benches with their boyfriends but fully turned away from the guys, who try to grasp their hands and plead. One time I saw a girl biking along and sobbing, which looked very sad and touching until you noticed that she had a full cup of something in one hand and was steering with the other, quite a feat of balance for someone so carried away by emotion. It’s apparently customary for boyfriends even in college to pay for most of their girlfriends’ clothes and expenses, to the point where a survey on the spending habits of college-aged men found that the number one expense, taking up more than 50% of the total, was girlfriends. To me this seems likely to lead to an inherent imbalance, setting up men in a quasi-indulgent-parent role, with women as their spoiled children, which might explain some of the self-dramatization. It’s hard to say (for what it’s worth, my own girlfriend is against this practice).

So I certainly don’t deny that cultural differences exist, although I think one must be careful to remember that social customs vary but personality traits and types, as well moral quality, seems to recur and distribute themselves pretty evenly everywhere. Cultural differences are not, however, insurmountable, nor are they the only important difference between people. Because they are but one of the vast array of differences in personality, background and comprehension that we surmount every day in reaching beyond ourselves to make connections with others, or fail to and founder in isolation.

When you’re a cheapwad student you don’t necessarily make a direct approach to the country you’re traveling to. Which is why I set off to Russia from Paris two years on December 19 in the direction of Glasgow. I don’t think I much resemble a terrorist making twelve stopovers in Africa on his way from London to Palestine (I was frisked in a supermarket once though), but since my final destination, St. Petersburg, was neither the the city I was currently standing in nor the next stop on my itinerary, the inevitable obese, snaggle-toothed customs agent (actually I don’t think he was obese or snaggle-toothed, but that’s the enduring image that remains to me from British airports and attaches itself like mildew to any specific recollections) naturally asked me if this was really the quickest way to get there, to which I replied: “It’s the cheapest.”

Since Ryanair, the discount airline par excellence in Europe, as a regrettable but probably necessary symptom of its laudable effort to offer airline tickets for less than $20, doesn’t seem to offer any flights between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., I spent the next seven hours after my early-morning flight sitting under a neon tribute to Robert Burns and trying to write the first three pages of an explication de texte for my French literature class that somehow had to be done by the end of the holiday break. That and be outraged by the “Scottish breakfast” which actually cost more than my plane ticket and represented the only available form of food in the airport. Followed by the evening flight to Stockholm, where I temporarily lost my backpack and became cautiously optimistic regarding my apprehensions as to how damn cold it was going to be for the duration of my stay in the sub-Arctic (answer: not as cold as Chicago in January).

Although following the Paris-Glasgow-Stockholm-Helsinki-St. Petersburg route is mainly a concession to tight-fistedness, the Stockholm-Helsinki ferry is almost a worthwhile trip for its own sake. It’s apparently known as the “vodka boat” and is full of drunken Finns and Swedes loading up on liquor in international waters where it’s cheaper than buying it from the governmental liquor store monopolies in their home countries (apparently Scandinavian teenagers actually like to take the ferry one way on Friday night and back on Saturday night). And singing weird folk songs in the karaoke bar. And if that becomes boring, you can, at least in the summer, always go out on the deck on the top of this 150 ft. tall tankard that you can’t even feel moving (my friend actually plowed right through a hurricane or tempest of some sort on the way back from this trip on the ferry and barely noticed the deck shaking) and watch the sun sort of almost set before coming back up again. Anyway, we bought a bottle of Grand Marnier for my friend’s grandparents with whom we would be staying and contented ourselves with a bottle of cheap wine, a six-pack of Carlsberg and a Toblerone bar.

After arriving in Helsinki and meeting up briefly with a Finnish guy we knew from high school, our adventures on the wonders of Russian public transport began. On a previous trip to Russia, a Finnish conductor had threatened to confiscate my rail pass for not having gotten it validated on the day I started using it. We joked about getting the same conductor again. Then we did. And naturally he wound up threatening to confiscate my friend’s pass for some minute date-entering error. However drinking 40 oz. bottles of Baltika in the dining car eased the pain.

Not a great deal happened our first few days, although at our arrival dinner my friend’s grandfather started drinking the Grand Marnier by the shot, which we calculated worked out to about 1 euro per shot. But my friend spent most of his time at the airport picking up other friends and family who were arriving separately, and I tried rather unsuccessfully to write my paper. It was entertaining watching he and other members of his family setting off to the garage/shed two miles away from the apartment, where they kept their car, with graphite pencils and a blow torch to thaw out the locks, in order to drive to the airport and pick up his mother, and returning six hours later (the airport was no more than 20 miles away). And we did experience some of the usual traveler’s rituals in Russia: standing on the frozen river, being chased across the bridge over the river by a band of mustachioed gypsy women, watching a bear tied to a stake outside while its owner huddled in his car nearby, and so forth. Somehow even the men selling Christmas trees near the Metro station looked vaguely underworld-ish (“businessman” is basically a euphemism in Russia). I came to see the bright side of lack of commerce regulation, though. When I lost my contacts, an optometrist’s office opened its doors for us after its closing-hour and sold me a fresh pair of lenses without a prescription. And we didn’t even have to bribe them. On the other hand, one of the saddest things I’ve even seen was the sight of old women and children barely tall enough to pull the levers pouring change into a bank of outdoors slot machines. I’m not sure which was worse: that they were playing in the freezing cold and falling snow, or that the money was probably that night’s dinner money for some of them.

Anyway, Christmas passed with barely any notice. I remember going to a bar where a very angry-looking Indian kicked on the door when I was in the bathroom, yelling at me to get out in bad Russian. Later, since he was wearing a Yankees hat, my friend asked him what part of New York he was from. The Indian then spent the rest of the night making throat-slashing gestures at us. On New Year’s eve we enjoyed a thoroughly soused dinner with the family (you can see our preparations here) in which I drank at least 10 shots of vodka and distinctly remember someone toasting Soviet housing. Next we headed to Dvortsovaya ploshad (Palace Square), the main square in the city, where we somehow managed to get to the front row of spectators by midnight even though we left the apartment, on the other side of the city, no earlier than 11:15. Then we spent the next hour weaving hazily down Nevsky Prospekt, the main boulevard, and shouting “S novim godom” (“Happy New Year”) at everyone we saw. I also clearly remember peeing on the side of a building, then looking up and noticing by the gilded window frames that it was actually a palace. And apparently I fell asleep doing it, or at least slumped prone against the building for several minutes. I would feel like more of a barbarian regarding the whole episode if I weren’t mainly amazed by not having been accosted by the bribe-taking, drunkard-beating Russian police. Since I was leaving on January 2 early in the morning I assumed this would be my last night on the town, and up to that point I had been very disappointed about, unlike previous trips, not having gotten any girls’ phone numbers (actually I gave mine to one instead for some reason that I no longer recall, but she never called me). So that night, after we had decided not to go into any clubs, since they were generally demanding about $20 cover charge, I remember feeling very sad and inexplicably crying myself to sleep. And then waking up eight hours later fully dressed. At least I was in better shape than another friend from New York who had fallen asleep upright in his chair with his cell phone in his hand while text-messaging his girlfriend.

As it turned out, my Russian friend had met a girl, who subsequently dumped him for the drummer in one of the most popular rock bands in Russia, and he wanted to go out the next night to meet her. Of course, since I had a 7:30 train the next morning, after that night I had just enough time to walk back to the apartment, collect my backpack and go to the train station. But I did meet some girls and get their phone numbers, which I subsequently lost, so it was all worthwhile in the end (at least psychologically). Then I slept for the next four hours straight on the train, simply holding out my passport without even opening my eyes the first time I heard a voice speaking Russian, and then holding out my empty hand to receive it back the second time. And then I wrote half of my explication de texte in the Helsinki airport (I flew back to Paris from there). I even got an 18 out of 20 on it (14 is roughly an “A”). All in all, a trip well-spent.

Not to join in on the Wikipedia-hating fest, but here’s a not-exactly new article from last May about what the author, Jaron Lanier, calls the “digital Maoism” latent in the collectivist nature of Wikipedia and online enterprises of a similar nature. The inaccuracies of Wikipedia, like the mediocrities of American Idol and the inanities of electoral politics, are well-known, but these often do not subvert the ideological commitment to the wisdom of the liberated masses even on the part of libertarians who may not trust mass political movements at all but are willing to indulge a similar impulse under the guise of imposing the “free-market” model anywhere and everywhere.

But the goal of Wikipedia and the free market are not the same. I had some experience with this on a personal level last year, when the president of of an organization of which I was a member was attempting to make some of the more technical positions, like archivist, treasurer, etc. non-elective and filled by his appointment (I think there was to be some group veto power built in). He didn’t succeed, but I agreed with his position. And I even came to feel that really the only area where collective will or the wishes of the majority represents a superior criterion of determination is where, somewhat tautalogically, the wishes of the most people is itself the issue and the goal. The market is one such area: since the goal is to give the most people possible what they want, letting them decide seems to be the best way of doing so. Where another standard determines value, there are probably few areas where a single intelligent and well-informed individual could probably not choose better than a popular vote. An encyclopedia is such a case, since its goal is offer accurate, relevant and objective knowledge. Popularity doesn’t have anything intrinsically to do with this ideal.

On the other hand, the idea of a meritocracy is often confused with that of collectivity. The process of breaking down discriminatory barriers to the flow of information, so that everyone’s ideas have access to a general public and can shine on their merits, may superficially resemble a collectivity in that a lot of the currently existing distinctions and boundaries between people would cease to exist, but it’s not at all actuated on the same principles. A collective is predicated on the idea that no individual ideas or people are better than any others, and a meritocracy is predicated on the contrary view. And while I’m not as wedded to the importance of individual “personality” in web content for its own sake as the author seems to be, the anonymity of something like Wikipedia certainly seems prone to lowering the sense of responsibility for one’s words on the part of the content generators and uncritical acceptance of the source on the part of the readers.

In defense of Wikipedia, I have to admit that I often use it (though not here in China, where it’s blocked), because it has the same innate appeal that encyclopedias have always had, namely convenience. An entry will usually have at least one or two pertinent bits of information, even though often as not it’s just the spelling of a name in Russian or Chinese that I’m after, and it’s still quicker than sifting through even an average Google search. And it should also be said that the likening of “digital Maoism” to real Maoism is rather hyperbolic to say the least. Even at the structural level mass political movements are significantly different than the anonymous “hive activity” of sites like Wikipedia. As much as I disagree with much of the analysis in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, she does suggest convincingly, whether intentionally or not, that 20th century totalitarian movements came as close as perhaps is possible to true one-man rule. Through constant terrorization and destabilization of the population and government the totalitarian dictators managed essentially to destroy all other previously-existing centers of authority or power and to prevent any new ones from forming, thus rendering every other member of society relatively powerless. This is why totalitarianism can never be enshrined into the abstract form of the government, since any law decreeing the form of government would itself limit the personal prerogative of the dictator. This is what makes it so baffling that Arendt believes the dictator in a totalitarian system to be eminently replaceable, when history suggests just the opposite.

In any case, Wikipedia ostensibly has no dictatorial figure setting it in motion and directing it, largely because, probably, it has no real power. In any organization where real power is at stake, the hive will inevitably fall under the control of those who want that power most. So if anything it is not the model of but the model of the precursor of tyrannical collectivism.