tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-184837552024-03-23T18:49:13.971+01:00Non Compos Mentis<i>Non Compos Mentis:</i> Mentally incapable of managing one's own affairs; not of sound mind and hence not legally responsible; mentally incompetent; not in control of one's mind; lacking mental ability to understand the nature, consequences, and effect of a situation or transaction.Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.comBlogger93125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-83168201136602874392012-06-22T16:50:00.000+02:002012-06-22T16:50:09.499+02:00New blog address<a href=http://non-compos-sui.blogspot.com>Non Compos Sui</a>. I hope you will enjoy reading!Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-91717093650200886662012-06-07T10:17:00.001+02:002012-06-07T18:54:27.161+02:00UpdateMany thanks to <a href=http://econstudentlog.wordpress.com>Ung Studerende</a> for posting a link to my blog on his. As you can tell, my blog underwent a long drought due to embarrassing neglect on my part. Right now I am busy working on a few exam assignments, but I would love to start writing again once I am finished with the work I currently have on hand. I have plans to start a few new blogs (but I am not sure if I will have the dedication to finally bring them into fruition or the stamina to ensure their longevity), and tentatively it has been decided that there will be one written in Danish, one written in Mandarin Chinese, one for academic posts in English and one more for literary works in English. Please watch this space for more updates, if you find that my writing is to your liking so far. Meanwhile, if you have a lot of time to kill, feel free to visit my archives. Criticisms, both constructive and destructive, are always welcome, insofar as they are made in good faith.<br />
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Thank you for visiting.Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-68204320807542394802011-02-12T08:45:00.003+01:002011-02-12T08:47:57.852+01:00Conversation with Herr Fantastisch<b>Herr Fantastisch says:</b><br />
Don't you love how inscrutable I am?<br />
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<b>Miao says:</b><br />
Of course. Everything about you is worthy of love. An impenetrable cloud of mystery unremittingly surrounds you.<br />
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<b>Herr Fantastisch says:</b><br />
Oh, you merely know the tip of the iceberg.<br />
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<b>Miao says:</b><br />
Even Titanic was irresistibly drawn towards your brooding magnificence, looming over the dark horizons.<br />
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<b>Herr Fantastisch says:</b><br />
Is this a concealed reference to the abyss of my wretched soul?<br />
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<b>Miao says:</b><br />
Perhaps. I look into your eyes and I see your abyss staring unwaveringly right back at me.<br />
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<b>Herr Fantastisch says:</b><br />
My abyss doesn't stare. It consumes. It devours. Like a black hole it attracts everyone and everything, even light, so it can't be beheld. It sits in the depths of my mind, waiting. Lurking. Greedy.<br />
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<b>Miao says:</b><br />
Alas, not everything. Sometimes a lone particle swirling at high velocity may escape you. When a pair of dancing particles are so strongly attracted to each other that they travel inseparably, inexorably in the same direction, hurling themselves unstoppably into space, approaching a black hole would cause one of them to be sucked away with such immense force that the other is released in the opposite direction at an unimaginable speed.<br />
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<b>Herr Fantastisch says:</b><br />
And it's exactly these rare, wayward, radiant particles that make me suffer. Craving, yearning, wishing I could reach out and catch them, all the more aware of the blackness of my abyss.<br />
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<b>Miao says:</b><br />
I am one such particle that has eluded you; staring at you, while you stare longingly back at me.<br />
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<b>Herr Fantastisch says:</b><br />
Electrifying.<br />
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<b>Miao says:</b><br />
My partner exchanged his life for my liberation. My life is a testament to his sacrifice, his martyrdom.<br />
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<b>Herr Fantastisch says:</b><br />
Are you trying to tell me that you killed your partner so now you're strong enough to face the perils of the abyss?<br />
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<b>Miao says:</b><br />
Oh, how did you guess? Just as we were approaching you, I summoned all the strength in my body to nudge him ever so slightly closer to you. It worked. It was tricky, but I performed it with incredible finesse and adroitness.<br />
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<b>Herr Fantastisch says:</b><br />
Oh, that's why I suddenly felt so well nourished and constipated. How cunning of you.Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-973223640166365402010-11-17T07:37:00.000+01:002012-06-06T13:54:31.001+02:00Ask me if I miss(ed) youWhen he asked her in earnest anticipation if she missed him, she replied, "Do you desire truth or happiness?"<br />
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She knew that such an answer would lead him to subconsciously assume that there was a dichotomy between truth and happiness, that the two were mutually exclusive, that the possession of one necessarily entailed the loss of the other. Such is the wonder of the human mind - the seemingly inevitable failure to recognise that truth and happiness do not have to be understood as polarities even when framed in a manner which implies that they are. He did not consider the fact that, regardless of his choice between happiness and truth, he might have gotten the answer he really wanted to hear anyway. When humans ponder over a query which exists in the general form of "A or B?", they very often ignore the possibility that A = B, that the outcome would be the same regardless of their eventual choice. The careless tendencies of the human mind have been most instrumental in facilitating the countless psychological games we often witness in the arena of social interactions - those who have a firm grasp of the workings and the inadequacies of the human psyche dominate by exploiting their knowledge.<br />
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She is one of the experts in this field, and she employs her skills to mask her unfortunate bashfulness. She knew that he would immediately jump to the conclusion that she did not miss him. She knew that, instead of answering openly if he wanted truth or happiness, he would leave the question lingering in the air unresolved while changing the the conversation topic in an attempt to conceal his despondence, without realising that his sadness was perhaps due only to his own guesswork. She would be able to take comfort in the fact that she did not lie to him - she merely allowed him to make his own assumption. Perhaps she was selfish for not declaring her feelings directly, for making him crestfallen, for involving him in such convolution, but her pride overwhelmed her considerate nature at that moment, and she couldn't erase what she said.<br />
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If he'd told her bravely, "I want the truth, even if it hurts", she'd have dropped all her shyness in a beautiful act of courage to reward his; she would have told him without reservation, "I miss you", and he would have experienced the beginning of a dizzying romance under the lovely auspices of truth.Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-78678217500389604102010-11-04T12:53:00.010+01:002012-06-03T08:18:24.352+02:00Some inconvenient questionsIf you are against capital punishment because innocent people could be wrongfully executed, then would you agree that incarceration should not be permitted as well, since people could also be wrongfully imprisoned, especially in a highly corrupted nation? If you think the difference is that reparations can be made for wrongful confinement but not for wrongful executions, then the assumptions here are that 1) the truth will always be discovered in time for there to be meaningful and adequate compensation for innocent convicts, and that 2) death is always worse than losing your freedom/independence for nothing. These assumptions need to be bolstered. J.S. Mill, for example, would say that the loss of liberty is much worse than death. Patrick Henry, who uttered "Give me liberty or give me death!", is also in Mill's camp.<br />
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If you are a non-vegetarian who thinks that bestiality should be banned because animals cannot give consent for cross-species sex, why do you think it is all right to violate animal rights by eating them but not all right to violate animal rights by having sex with them? <br />
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If you are a non-vegetarian who thinks that there is nothing morally wrong with eating animals because they are incapable of rational reasoning, would you also say it is morally permissible to eat human infants and severely retarded patients?<br />
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If you think incestuous couples should be banned from giving birth because their children could be physically harmed, would you also forbid biologically unrelated parents with hereditary diseases or extremely damaging habits (e.g., chain smoking) from having children?<br />
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If you are anti-incest because it is unnatural (actually whether it is really as unnatural as one would immediately assume is questionable, since members of the ruling classes in certain ancient states - e.g., Egypt, Hawaii, China, etc. - did practise incest), are you also anti-contraceptives since having protected sex is also very unnatural from an evolutionary standpoint?<br />
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If you think homosexuals should be given the right to marriage because no one can help whom he falls in love with, would you grant the same right to incestuous and polyamorous lovers too?<br />
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If you think military conscription is morally allowable to safeguard a country's economic and political interests, would you agree that it is also morally allowable to force women to bear children to fulfil their country's economic needs (both cases demand the sacrifice of one's right to bodily autonomy for the good of the society, and are thus analogous)?<br />
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If you think marijuana should be banned because it is a harmful substance, would you say that alcohol and cigarettes should also be banned, since they pose greater health risks than marijuana?<br />
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If you think prostitution should not be legalised because it is immoral, would you also make it illegal for people to accept jobs they do not genuinely enjoy? In other words, is it okay to sell our souls for livelihood but not okay to sell our bodies? In addition, why is it okay to earn income by marketing our non-sexual talents (e.g., singing, dancing, etc.) but not okay to earn income by marketing our sexual talents (e.g., the ability to administer really enjoyable blow jobs, etc.)? If you think that allowing prostitution would worsen the spread of STDs, then you should read this article on <a href="http://www.liberator.net/articles/prostitution.html">the benefits of legalising prostitution</a> - doing so actually reduces health risks.<br />
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If you have any more questions to add, feel free to comment or send me an email.Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-90831804361552328492010-10-22T14:29:00.045+02:002010-10-28T09:18:08.841+02:00To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>[Announcement:</i></b><i> I experimented with my blog settings some time ago and forgot to adjust them back, so I didn't realise that comments were forbidden until my friend kindly informed me of my mistake a while ago. I have adjusted my settings and now comments are allowed again. Sorry to those who wanted to comment but weren't able to.<b>]</b></i></span><br />
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So the other day I was having lunch with Mr Vietnamese when our conversations, in between those leisurely sips and bites, casually drifted into the realms of philosophy. Mr Vietnamese revealed that he sometimes has Cartesian tendencies, questioning if the world in which we live is indeed objectively real. Having experienced similar bouts of existential panic before, I articulated my sincerest sympathy, at which point he earnestly asked me how one could reconcile the idea that one's life is not entirely meaningless with the notion that we could very well be living in computer simulation (or in a figment of hallucination).<br />
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I responded by bringing up two different points: 1) As argued in Descartes' meditations, even if the existence of our world can be called into doubt, at the very least we can still be certain of the presence of our consciousness, and that much seems indisputable. Insofar as our consciousness doubtlessly exists, I believe that we have free will, and our free will can be best expressed in our navigations of and reactions to the physical world, illusory as it may be. The chimerical nature of this universe in which we reside does not necessarily entail the loss of all meaning in our lives; after all, we continue to preserve our capacity for autonomy, and our agency can be exercised through our volitional responses to the circumstances fashioned by the computer which operates the simulated world in which we currently exist. Perhaps everything exists merely in our heads, but we must never forget that we exert power over our imaginations, and not vice versa - it is definitely quite plausible to presume that we have the ability to decide and influence the directions in which events should next proceed, even if these events are just products of our collective daydreaming. 2) While establishing my earlier point, I was tacitly assuming that the unreality of our physical world is a characteristic always concomitant with the notion that we live in a matrix, but now I wish to clarify that I do not really think that these two ideas are so inextricably intertwined. I actually follow Chalmers' lead in arguing that, even if it does turn out that we live in a matrix, we can still be assured of the tangibility of our corporeal world, because then what underlies the fabric of our world is not physical substances such as quarks, but computer bits upon which simulated universes are built, and these computer bits are certainly no less real than the physical entities which, according to scientists in our present age, constitute the foundation of our universe. I find Chalmers' argument particularly compelling, and one big advantage it offers is the avoidance of nihilism even if we simply turn out to be brains in vats.<br />
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Here I deem it important to elaborate what I mean exactly by the term "simulation". My Weltanschauung does not accommodate the concept of a moralistic, interventionist God ('God' here is loosely defined as any superior individual that has the power to control the unfolding of things around us - note that I do not invest any connotation of supernaturalness in this understanding of 'superiority'; the scientists who constructed our simulated world - if we do live in one - also qualify as superior beings, even though they are most certainly not supernatural figures), for I think no argument can achieve any success in demonstrating that such a God is compatible with the idea of free will, and I choose to reject a God of this nature in favour of free will. If it does turn out that we live in a simulation, I think the likeliest picture is that this invented world was set into motion and then left completely alone to run on its own. My agnosticism regarding this version of the Simulated World Hypothesis (hereafter abbreviated as SWH), which I shall name Version X, compels me to concede that deism is not a totally outlandish doctrine (insofar the definition of superiority does not necessarily involve supernaturalness), for they are one and the same. Compare:<br />
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<i>Version X</i>: We live in a world which was created and then left to run on its own without additional interruptions or interferences.<br />
<i>Deism</i>: We live in a world which was created and then left to run on its own without additional interruptions or interferences.<br />
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Essentially, there is no difference between the two. Therefore, I am an atheist inasmuch as a moralistic, interventionist, personal, anthropomorphic God is concerned (in fact, if the Bible, the Koran as well as other religious texts are to be taken as faithful literal representations of God, then I can say with confidence that I <i>know</i> they are fallacious), but I am undecided on the issue of deism. I am still more inclined towards the stand that deism is misguided, but I cannot deny it with as much certainty. Anyway, it is surely possible that there is an innumerable series of simulations, one contained in another, and eventually we will return to the issue of creation and maintenance, this time of the world in which all the other simulated worlds are stored.<br />
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Anyway, to resume, Mr Vietnamese asked me to defend my commitment to the absence of a non-interventionist God by accounting for the phenomena of accurate divinations. I explained that it is merely a false belief that divinations have predictive power, and that this false impression is an outcome of our unintentional/irrational predisposition to transform supposedly prophetic words into self-fulfilling prophecies through our own actions. E.g., if your daily horoscope tells you that today your colleagues - even those from whom you are usually quite distant - will be exceptionally friendly towards you, this piece of nice news will very likely affect your mood in a positive way, and your sudden display of joviality will in turn subtly encourage the people around you to treat you in a more friendly manner. At the end of a reasonably enjoyable day at work, you go home marvelling merrily to yourself about how accurate your horoscope reading is.<br />
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To truly maximise our free will, we have to learn to break free from the fetters of these 'divinations' - they are detrimental to our lives for their suggestions are difficult to be completely eradicated from our minds, and it is likely that we will end up being puppets to their dictations. 'Divinations' are mostly phrased in very vague terms, often allowing their readers to form their own assumptions and interpretations of the contents, and the inception of these ideas will impact people to subconsciously lead their lives in a way that would bring about the fulfilment of these predictions. Humans are curious creatures capable of retrospective rationalisation, and the partial failure of these prophecies is very often ignored or conveniently explained away by re-construing their words in ways that suit the previously unexpected results. It is quite depressing that superstitious people are likelier to end up being even more superstitious, for they are the ones who would religiously peruse horoscope readings and visit fortune-tellers in the first place.<br />
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Skepticism does not necessitate an endorsement of nihilism. Divinations sell emotional comfort for the price of rational agency. At the risk of ending this entry on an annoyingly cheesy motivational note, all I wish to emphasise is that we must always remember that we can all be masters of our own lives, instead of finding excuses for laziness, intellectual or otherwise.Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-45549857423526569932010-10-04T02:54:00.000+02:002010-10-04T02:54:40.881+02:00Translating Luo ZhichengCould it be that only a beautiful encounter can nullify the loneliness of living on this planet in the indifference of the rest of the universe? We desire to be noticed by the most oblivious of people, and yet a phenomenon so rare could only happen in love.Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-54356304489577474082010-09-21T10:04:00.000+02:002010-09-21T10:04:19.398+02:00I demand a meeting with Mark ZuckerbergFaceBook is anti-polyamory but not anti-incest. It allows me to list a family member as my lover but does not allow me to list multiple people as my lovers. Please, FaceBook, don't discriminate!Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-69567455811963824302010-08-30T15:53:00.002+02:002012-06-03T08:30:41.894+02:00On sexual infidelityThe other day I wrote an annoyingly garrulous post on <a href="http://non-compos-mentis.blogspot.com/2010/08/all-time-we-get-by-trying-to-figure-out.html">my mate-choosing criteria</a>. (If you managed to finish reading that whole pile of noxious garbage, I salute you - you exhibited superhuman endurance!) In one part of that entry, I mentioned that I would expect unreserved honesty from my partner if he ever cheats on me. As I retrospectively review what I wrote, I think that I should have been more careful in specifying the kind of infidelity to which I was referring.<br />
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To be perfectly honest, in principle I would permit my partner to have sex with other females if I am consistently disappointing in bed. If, despite regular and diligent feedback from my partner, I still prove to be an embarrassingly hopeless failure when it comes to fulfilling his sexual needs, or if he has certain sexual fantasies that I adamantly refuse to indulge (e.g., my anus will never be open for business), or if my partner is simply very curious about sex in general, I would consent to let him fornicate with other females so that he can maximise his pleasure.<br />
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There are some inviolable conditions that must be observed though: 1) If our sexual activities continue unabated while he finds sex partners outside the relationship, I demand that he takes impeccable precautions in preventing the contraction of all sexually transmitted illnesses, lest he spreads those nasty diseases to me. One worry is that there is no entirely foolproof way of protecting oneself against STDs - just as some females are highly unlucky to get impregnated in spite of commendable efforts at contraception, some people do still end up with STDs despite always using condoms. Considering this, I would really appreciate it if my partner insists without exception that all his sex partners produce recent health reports certifying that they are totally disease-free. But, in general, I would consider this possibility to be so small that it does not justify imposing boundaries on my partner's behaviour. 2) My partner's promiscuity must never undermine the emotional strength of our relationship, and he must never get involved in anyone else beyond the physical level - i.e., I expect complete emotional loyalty. Once nascent love is evident between him and another woman, he should immediately make a choice between her and me, instead of denying me exclusive emotional devotion.<br />
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Allowing my partner to philander for the purposes of sexual gratification seems to be a dangerous slippery slope. Let's imagine that my partner is extremely adventurous in bed, and strongly desires to engage in all sorts of wild, kinky experiments with which I'm not exactly comfortable. I agree to let him go to other females so that his most intoxicating erotic dreams can become reality, while the two of us stick to less eccentric sexual routines. Other women and I complement one another very neatly when it comes to satisfying my partner's sexual cravings; so why can't I consent to a polyamorous relationship, so that my partner's emotional needs can perhaps be better served as well?<br />
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My answer to this is that I strongly believe that emotional faithfulness is essential to the long-term maintenance of a healthy, loving romantic relationship, while sexual fidelity is not. (Yes, I think sex and love are completely detachable from each other.) I do not consider polyamorous to be abhorrent (actually, I do not think that any form of exercise that involves only consenting adults is immoral at all - which is precisely why I think <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_Meiwes">Armin Meiwes</a> should not have been sentenced to imprisonment), but I just do not believe that it would work successfully for me. I understand my own emotional needs and construction too well to ever become involved in an emotionally open relationship, and anyone who desires such a relationship will not find any sort of fulfilment with me either.<br />
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I admit that this is because I have a very particular notion of love that is wholly incompatible with polyamory. I believe that a person who can simultaneously harbour romantic feelings for multiple individuals is simply depriving all of his partners of the most immense depth of love of which the human heart is capable, and I want nothing but the most unadulterated, devoted, heartfelt affection. If my partner constantly seeks new romantic partners to fulfill his hitherto neglected emotional voids, then it is a glaring sign that there is an unbridgeable chasm between us. I truly believe that love is about compromise, accommodation and acceptance (I sincerely apologise for sounding like Switzerland right now). In relationships, there is the sobering reminder of our humble humanity - of our numerous imperfections, of our shameful limitations - as couples go through tiring quarrels (and, hopefully, sweet reconciliation thereafter), but these painful obstacles and vexatious frustrations teach you to recognise that your partner is your equal, that he/she is also flawed and vulnerable, and that if he/she can remain unwavering in his/her commitment despite all your fallibility and your disagreeable shortcomings, then he/she deserves your greatest reciprocation, instead of your weakness. It is just too terribly convenient and cowardly to search for new partners whenever woes arise, instead of learning to appreciate the ways in which your partner express his/her affection - which may not conform to your expectations all the time, but different people show their love differently - and trying your best to tide the storms (which are inevitable in relationships).<br />
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If your reaction to relationship problems is to drift from one body to another in search of emotional comfort, then you are basically conveying to me that you are not ready to invest everything in any one person, and that you are unequipped with the necessary disposition to provide the love for which I yearn. Straying emotionally is not the solution to relationship troubles. In fact, I believe that emotional unfaithfulness is the anathema of romantic relationships. So if you want to cheat, please have enough decency to inform me.<br />
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(P.S.: I know many people associate sexual fidelity with emotional steadfastness - there is a reason why the phrase 'making love' is so commonly used after all - so I would not demand that my partner, either present or future, allow me to sleep around in the event that I think his skills leave very much to be desired. Relationships are about taking and giving, and this is an issue that I'm not too stubborn about.)Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-9398776530791992632010-08-27T17:02:00.354+02:002012-06-25T15:50:50.758+02:00On adulthoodOur world is often too eager to place children on a high pedestal. These small, stumbling bundles of budding life, we poetically muse, are brilliant beacons of pristine innocence in a gloomy universe, inhabited by wearied adults brutally aged by the hostile vicissitudes of life, by people who helplessly carry weathered hearts in their sunken chests, those blood-pumping organs with their wearied ventricles and atria of labyrinthine recesses of dusty memories, those chambers of emotions that are so full of sorrowful vagaries.<br />
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Children hearken back to our most primal state of existence, we like to say, to our most unsullied human condition of purity; children are little universes of innocence in themselves, and we are refugees desperate to escape, even if only temporarily, from the worldly woes that betide us so naggingly. Children are thus widely celebrated -- oh, those untainted tabulae rasae, may they bloom eternally in such endearing guilelessness, though sadly one day they shall too be unlovable adults, irreparably contaminated by germs of artificial socialisation, and they shall too regrettably surrender their sweetness.<br />
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But there is really nothing intrinsically precious about being completely blank slates. If anything, I think adults are doubtless more deserving of our steadfast love, protection and (scientific) interest, because their arrival in our lives is frequently messily packaged with multiple facets -- numerous qualities that make them hideously ugly or astoundingly wonderful; that sculpt them into fascinating embodiments of striking ambivalence; that truly require our patient navigation, tireless exploration and, sometimes, loving understanding. Adults have scars left behind by past injuries and countless love-bites; they have unique stories of regret and tales of pride; they have personal baggages and different epiphanies. An adult's life becomes a beautifully chaotic palimpsest as he gains more life experiences that influence his perspectives, as he gets deeply damaged and then eventually healed again -- he transforms, sometimes magically, into a yellowed manuscript on which the shifting sands and unstoppable tides of time have penned their lovely poetry.<br />
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When two adults serendipitously meet and fall in love, they diligently attempt to merge the incomplete verses they have respectively heretofore authored, in the laudable hope of penning an unforgettable story together -- in the happiest scenario, they are able to jointly produce a masterful work of artistic perfection by nicely adjusting to each other's various stylistic and content-related demands, and a timeless composition is triumphantly finished; in a less joyous case, they bid farewell due to irreconcilable differences, and gradually saunter on -- perhaps with some visible traces of this brief romantic encounter indelibly engraved on their individual slates, perhaps with obvious signs of erasure to remove all trails of the other person's sojourn in their lives -- as they seek to properly honour their lives with careful introspections, born either of their own solitary ruminations or of collaborative partnership with new visitors in their lives, who might finally, fortunately turn out to be the ones they've endlessly sought.<br />
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We tumble and flounder and blunder along the bumpy route to adulthood, and on our deathbeds we quietly whisper au revoir as we inevitably dissolve, as grey specks of ashes, into the magnanimous embrace of the smiling cosmos, blissfully dying with much more capacity to love, to hate and to be indifferent than we could ever genuinely possess as children.Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-68202397465035192002010-06-15T18:06:00.008+02:002012-06-03T08:43:16.458+02:00Lost: Season 5I detest the fifth season of <i>Lost</i> with a furious passion. The awful lackluster quality of this season makes the franchise a prime example of how television shows that usually begin with so much promise often suffer the depressing outcome of degenerating into a messy, unsightly morass of gibberish due to its producers' eagerness to milk their concepts with such indiscriminate abandon that interesting stories eventually become the pitiful victims of their own creators. <br />
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I don't know what to make of its ending yet - whether it is designed that way so that alternate realities can be explored in Season 6 (which I haven't begun watching - I'm behind times; I know, I know) or whether it heralds an immense shift in the course of history; but if it is the latter, then I think that the show's vision of time travel is logically flawed. If they truly managed to affect past events, then their plane would never have crashed in the first place - and that would not have led to their later return to the island, which means they could not have done what they did to shift the route of history, and that, in turn, necessitates that they would be in a plane crash after all, <i>ad infinitum</i>.<br />
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Perhaps one would attempt to resolve this glaring problem by making the same suggestion as my friend did: the characters prevented the occurrence of that particularly crucial incident - which would cause their plane to severely malfunction - in a completely <i>parallel world</i>, which had hitherto been wholly identical to the universe presented in previous seasons, and which would otherwise have continued to unfold in exactly the same fashion, if not for the intervening actions of the characters. This solution would also mean those characters were very suddenly transplanted into the parallel realm - it would be utterly appropriate to think of them as aliens, materialising from nowhere, who shared human properties. </div>
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It is really not an uneducated proposal, but I do not think it is a good defence of the plausibility of the plot - if I am correctly informed, causal relations cannot hold across parallel galaxies, i.e., when the characters boarded the flight to go back to the mysterious island, they could not possibly have ended up in a different universe. Even if my knowledge of Physics proves to be embarrassingly wrong, another counter-argument can be launched by making references to the show itself - let us grant that the characters in <i>Lost</i> ended up in a parallel world when they decided to revisit the island. The invocation of parallel universes is supposed to render intelligible the idea of re-authoring the past, but its purpose is unfortunately defeated when we consider the fact that Sun would not have seen the group photo taken thirty years ago by her friends in the present if the other characters had indeed modified history in a parallel cosmos. I am quite afraid that my counter-argument can probably only be adequately understood by viewers who have already watched the fifth season. </div>
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Anyway, kindly allow me to move on. </div>
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Another major gripe I have is with the implications entailed by the introduction of time travel - because of this plot device, the actions of the characters were no longer autonomous; they did what they did not because they genuinely wanted to, but because they really had no other option. Their future sauntered back into the past, which had already happened, and there was simply no way they could have successfully erased and rewritten the events in history. The metaphysical impossibility of changing the past unavoidably ended up compromising the integrity of the characters' conduct - the set-up in <i>Lost</i> brought about the inexorable consequence that time moved unstoppably in an immutable course, and it was precisely for this reason that the agents' behaviour became absolutely bereft of meaning - the characters were actually just waiting passively for things to occur even though they might have felt like they were freely acting out of their own volition; their deeds were dictated to them, their destiny foisted upon them, though they might have bought into the attractive, seductive illusion of possessing free will. </div>
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Their future was already fully determined; everything was inalterably preordained, destined, irresistible, unchangeable. The nature of such a state of affairs robbed them of their free will and negated the beauty of serendipity - coincidences became kismet; luck became fate. And that was the most unbearable thing, to me, about the fifth season of <i>Lost</i>.</div>
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</div>Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-81173919146151069972010-03-15T05:00:00.001+01:002010-03-15T05:02:56.474+01:00Something to be said for Japan's gray zone<a href="http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20100227a2.html"><strong><u><em>Something to be said for Japan's gray zone</em></u></strong> </a><br /><strong>By KRIS KOSAKA<br /><em>Special to <a href="http://www.japantimes.co.jp/">The Japan Times</a></em></strong><a href="http://www.japantimes.co.jp/"> </a><br /><strong><em>Published on 27 February 2010</em></strong><br /><br />It was an a-ha moment, an epiphany light-bolting across her face. It flickered with incredulous certainty and ended with awareness in her eyes.<br /><br />We were watching Disney's "The Lion King." Scar, the evil brother-lion, mercilessly kills the lion king, gleefully watching him fall to his death during a stampede. I tracked the revelation tracing across her face — I waited, entranced and wondering. What had she realized?<br /><br />"American bad guys are always bad," my 5-year-old daughter announced. "Japanese bad guys are only sometimes bad." She turned back to the screen and Scar's maniacal laugh.<br /><br />Since I have seen "The Lion King" 216 times, I mused her divination for the duration of the movie. I knew what she meant — in Japanese animation, particularly our favorites by Hayao Miyazaki, most of the villains wear their evil with ambiguous flair. Think "Spirited Away," where the no-face ghost becomes friends with the main character Sen, or the bad-twin Yubaba shows signs of honor and kindness, while Zenibaba, the good twin, pursues her own justice with diabolical flair.<br /><br />Disney villains putrefy 100 percent evil, in appearance, actions and voice. All of Miyazaki's films blur the good-evil divide, but even a casual glance at "Pokemon" or "Kamen Rider," two rather frothy kids' TV shows, illustrates the bad guys are not always so bad in Japanese culture.<br /><br />A friend of mine insists this anti-dualistic perspective results from Japan's lack of a Christian culture, grows from the Shinto belief in many gods. Um. OK. But the tendrils of influence curl over many aspects in society, and there must be other reasons.<br /><br />Ponder a recent variety show, when a famous celebrity disclosed his secret for subduing thieves: He openly leaves ¥60,000 downstairs, the idea being, the burglars can easily find the cash and leave happily, without disturbing or harming the family. My older Japanese friends did not find this advice surprising at all; indeed, most of them had heard of or tried similar tactics. Beautiful insanity, I thought.<br /><br />Imagine a typical American reaction to a thief downstairs: frightening gun-supported showdowns, "get-out-of-my-house-scumbag" bluster, or at the minimum, a call to the police. An intruder is "bad" and deserves defeat in the United States, not a hand-out. Most of my friends, and all of my family, keep a weapon in the home for "emergencies," and not one of them lives in Texas. Another kind of insanity, to be sure, but why does Japan so often smudge the good/evil divide?<br /><br />Typical Japanese sentiment seems to accept the shadier parts of our psyche, reminding me of Jung's many admonishments against suppressing the shadow side. In Japan, we literally thank the shadow for the sun, (O kagesama de), and much of Japanese common sense includes the silences, shady places, spaces most people politely ignore.<br /><br />Certainly, gray tinges the landscape here partly because of pragmatic necessity. Love hotels, for example, grew out of a need for privacy in small, cramped houses typically sheltering more than one married couple. A small, isolated country cannot pronounce others an "axis of evil." It's not that Japanese sensibility proves more tolerant exactly, only more open about life's gray zones. In Japan, nothing seems as black and white as the inevitability of the shadow.<br /><br />Something pricks in my memory, and sure enough, I pull from my bookshelf a forgotten copy of Junichiro Tanizaki's "In Praise of Shadows." Written in 1933, the essay illuminates Japanese thought on shadows, discussing everything from toilets to architecture to "curveless" Japanese women to electric light.<br /><br />Tanizaki does offer a few suggestions for Japan's love of the shadow, but nothing particularly helps me understand some modern Japanese norms: witness the affectionate acceptance showered on Matsui Hideki's openly acknowledged pornography collection. It is hard to imagine a popular American celebrity cheerfully admitting to such a vice.<br /><br />Or "Yonigeya" ("Flee by Night"), a moving company that specializes in midnight moves — as in avoiding your debtors, abandoning a marriage or business associate. OK, they don't exactly advertise in the yellow pages, but they are accepted enough to be featured in a Japanese drama.<br /><br />Gray smears even steadfast rules of bureaucracy, and sucking teeth from a government official never means a clear yes or no, only an acknowledgment of inexactitude.<br /><br />I have to be careful on the train in Japan, glancing down at a stranger's newspaper. I could easily glimpse a nude schoolgirl or other offensive photo, propped open on the lap of an innocent-looking salaryman sitting right in between a dozing grandmother and a pregnant mother. I have learned not to judge this salaryman.<br /><br />In the West, certain things are labeled "wrong"; in Japan, it's not so clear. Perhaps Japan's wide swath of gray proves more honest and practical than a clear-cut avowal of wrong and right; perhaps the acceptance of so much gray allows blackness to creep into things once pure.<br /><br />Maybe one thing in Tanizaki's essay does make the shadowed world clearer: He writes, "I suppose I shall sound terribly defensive if I say that Westerners attempt to expose every speck of grime and eradicate it, while we Orientals carefully preserve and even idealize it. Yet for better or for worse we do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather . . . "<br /><br />Maybe this love of wabi-sabi extends to people as well; in general, we in the West value perfection and beauty, even in humanity. Japanese sensibility values something else. Right or wrong fades — who can argue a love for beauty, nor dismiss an appreciation for things burnished by time?<br /><br />The thing about shadows, they disappear when illuminated. No one can ever provide a clear, bright answer. Some things are more interesting when unrevealed, and shadows can both shelter nightmares or dispel the ferocity of the sun.Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-77454090147470288822010-02-09T14:54:00.003+01:002010-02-09T15:07:04.765+01:00The brilliant Asimov<b><u><a href=http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm>The Relativity of Wrong</a></U><br />By Isaac Asimov<br />Published in <i>The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 14 No. 1, Fall 1989</i></b><br /><br />I RECEIVED a letter the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important. In the first sentence, the writer told me he was majoring in English literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. (I sighed a bit, for I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science, but I am very aware of the vast state of my ignorance and I am prepared to learn as much as I can from anyone, so I read on.) <br /><br />It seemed that in one of my innumerable essays, I had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basis of the universe straight. <br /><br />I didn't go into detail in the matter, but what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. We also know the basic rules governing the subatomic particles and their interrelationships, since these are very neatly described by the quantum theory worked out between 1900 and 1930. What's more, we have found that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the basic units of the physical universe, as discovered between 1920 and 1930. <br /><br />These are all twentieth-century discoveries, you see. <br /><br />The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing." the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal. <br /><br />My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." <br /><br />The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong. <br /><br />However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts, and I will devote this essay to an explanation of why I think so. <br /><br />... When my friend the English literature expert tells me that in every century scientists think they have worked out the universe and are always wrong, what I want to know is how wrong are they? Are they always wrong to the same degree? Let's take an example. <br /><br />In the early days of civilization, the general feeling was that the earth was flat. This was not because people were stupid, or because they were intent on believing silly things. They felt it was flat on the basis of sound evidence. It was not just a matter of "That's how it looks," because the earth does not look flat. It looks chaotically bumpy, with hills, valleys, ravines, cliffs, and so on. <br /><br />Of course there are plains where, over limited areas, the earth's surface does look fairly flat. One of those plains is in the Tigris-Euphrates area, where the first historical civilization (one with writing) developed, that of the Sumerians. <br /><br />Perhaps it was the appearance of the plain that persuaded the clever Sumerians to accept the generalization that the earth was flat; that if you somehow evened out all the elevations and depressions, you would be left with flatness. Contributing to the notion may have been the fact that stretches of water (ponds and lakes) looked pretty flat on quiet days. <br /><br />Another way of looking at it is to ask what is the "curvature" of the earth's surface. Over a considerable length, how much does the surface deviate (on the average) from perfect flatness? The flat-earth theory would make it seem that the surface doesn't deviate from flatness at all, that its curvature is 0 to the mile. <br /><br />Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long. <br /><br />There were reasons, to be sure, to find the flat-earth theory unsatisfactory and, about 350 B.C., the Greek philosopher Aristotle summarized them. First, certain stars disappeared beyond the Southern Hemisphere as one traveled north, and beyond the Northern Hemisphere as one traveled south. Second, the earth's shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse was always the arc of a circle. Third, here on the earth itself, ships disappeared beyond the horizon hull-first in whatever direction they were traveling. <br /><br />All three observations could not be reasonably explained if the earth's surface were flat, but could be explained by assuming the earth to be a sphere. <br /><br />What's more, Aristotle believed that all solid matter tended to move toward a common center, and if solid matter did this, it would end up as a sphere. A given volume of matter is, on the average, closer to a common center if it is a sphere than if it is any other shape whatever. <br /><br />About a century after Aristotle, the Greek philosopher Eratosthenes noted that the sun cast a shadow of different lengths at different latitudes (all the shadows would be the same length if the earth's surface were flat). From the difference in shadow length, he calculated the size of the earthly sphere and it turned out to be 25,000 miles in circumference. <br /><br />The curvature of such a sphere is about 0.000126 per mile, a quantity very close to 0 per mile, as you can see, and one not easily measured by the techniques at the disposal of the ancients. The tiny difference between 0 and 0.000126 accounts for the fact that it took so long to pass from the flat earth to the spherical earth. <br /><br />Mind you, even a tiny difference, such as that between 0 and 0.000126, can be extremely important. That difference mounts up. The earth cannot be mapped over large areas with any accuracy at all if the difference isn't taken into account and if the earth isn't considered a sphere rather than a flat surface. Long ocean voyages can't be undertaken with any reasonable way of locating one's own position in the ocean unless the earth is considered spherical rather than flat. <br /><br />Furthermore, the flat earth presupposes the possibility of an infinite earth, or of the existence of an "end" to the surface. The spherical earth, however, postulates an earth that is both endless and yet finite, and it is the latter postulate that is consistent with all later findings. <br /><br />So, although the flat-earth theory is only slightly wrong and is a credit to its inventors, all things considered, it is wrong enough to be discarded in favor of the spherical-earth theory. <br /><br />And yet is the earth a sphere? <br /><br />No, it is not a sphere; not in the strict mathematical sense. A sphere has certain mathematical properties - for instance, all diameters (that is, all straight lines that pass from one point on its surface, through the center, to another point on its surface) have the same length. <br /><br />That, however, is not true of the earth. Various diameters of the earth differ in length. <br /><br />What gave people the notion the earth wasn't a true sphere? To begin with, the sun and the moon have outlines that are perfect circles within the limits of measurement in the early days of the telescope. This is consistent with the supposition that the sun and the moon are perfectly spherical in shape. <br /><br />However, when Jupiter and Saturn were observed by the first telescopic observers, it became quickly apparent that the outlines of those planets were not circles, but distinct eclipses. That meant that Jupiter and Saturn were not true spheres. <br /><br />Isaac Newton, toward the end of the seventeenth century, showed that a massive body would form a sphere under the pull of gravitational forces (exactly as Aristotle had argued), but only if it were not rotating. If it were rotating, a centrifugal effect would be set up that would lift the body's substance against gravity, and this effect would be greater the closer to the equator you progressed. The effect would also be greater the more rapidly a spherical object rotated, and Jupiter and Saturn rotated very rapidly indeed. <br /><br />The earth rotated much more slowly than Jupiter or Saturn so the effect should be smaller, but it should still be there. Actual measurements of the curvature of the earth were carried out in the eighteenth century and Newton was proved correct. <br /><br />The earth has an equatorial bulge, in other words. It is flattened at the poles. It is an "oblate spheroid" rather than a sphere. This means that the various diameters of the earth differ in length. The longest diameters are any of those that stretch from one point on the equator to an opposite point on the equator. This "equatorial diameter" is 12,755 kilometers (7,927 miles). The shortest diameter is from the North Pole to the South Pole and this "polar diameter" is 12,711 kilometers (7,900 miles). <br /><br />The difference between the longest and shortest diameters is 44 kilometers (27 miles), and that means that the "oblateness" of the earth (its departure from true sphericity) is 44/12755, or 0.0034. This amounts to l/3 of 1 percent. <br /><br />To put it another way, on a flat surface, curvature is 0 per mile everywhere. On the earth's spherical surface, curvature is 0.000126 per mile everywhere (or 8 inches per mile). On the earth's oblate spheroidal surface, the curvature varies from 7.973 inches to the mile to 8.027 inches to the mile. <br /><br />The correction in going from spherical to oblate spheroidal is much smaller than going from flat to spherical. Therefore, although the notion of the earth as a sphere is wrong, strictly speaking, it is not as wrong as the notion of the earth as flat. <br /><br />Even the oblate-spheroidal notion of the earth is wrong, strictly speaking. In 1958, when the satellite Vanguard I was put into orbit about the earth, it was able to measure the local gravitational pull of the earth--and therefore its shape--with unprecedented precision. It turned out that the equatorial bulge south of the equator was slightly bulgier than the bulge north of the equator, and that the South Pole sea level was slightly nearer the center of the earth than the North Pole sea level was. <br /><br />There seemed no other way of describing this than by saying the earth was pear-shaped, and at once many people decided that the earth was nothing like a sphere but was shaped like a Bartlett pear dangling in space. Actually, the pearlike deviation from oblate-spheroid perfect was a matter of yards rather than miles, and the adjustment of curvature was in the millionths of an inch per mile. <br /><br />In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after. <br /><br />What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete. <br /><br />This can be pointed out in many cases other than just the shape of the earth. Even when a new theory seems to represent a revolution, it usually arises out of small refinements. If something more than a small refinement were needed, then the old theory would never have endured. <br /><br />Copernicus switched from an earth-centered planetary system to a sun-centered one. In doing so, he switched from something that was obvious to something that was apparently ridiculous. However, it was a matter of finding better ways of calculating the motion of the planets in the sky, and eventually the geocentric theory was just left behind. It was precisely because the old theory gave results that were fairly good by the measurement standards of the time that kept it in being so long. <br /><br />Again, it is because the geological formations of the earth change so slowly and the living things upon it evolve so slowly that it seemed reasonable at first to suppose that there was no change and that the earth and life always existed as they do today. If that were so, it would make no difference whether the earth and life were billions of years old or thousands. Thousands were easier to grasp. <br /><br />But when careful observation showed that the earth and life were changing at a rate that was very tiny but not zero, then it became clear that the earth and life had to be very old. Modern geology came into being, and so did the notion of biological evolution. <br /><br />If the rate of change were more rapid, geology and evolution would have reached their modern state in ancient times. It is only because the difference between the rate of change in a static universe and the rate of change in an evolutionary one is that between zero and very nearly zero that the creationists can continue propagating their folly. <br /><br />Since the refinements in theory grow smaller and smaller, even quite ancient theories must have been sufficiently right to allow advances to be made; advances that were not wiped out by subsequent refinements. <br /><br />The Greeks introduced the notion of latitude and longitude, for instance, and made reasonable maps of the Mediterranean basin even without taking sphericity into account, and we still use latitude and longitude today. <br /><br />The Sumerians were probably the first to establish the principle that planetary movements in the sky exhibit regularity and can be predicted, and they proceeded to work out ways of doing so even though they assumed the earth to be the center of the universe. Their measurements have been enormously refined but the principle remains. <br /><br />Naturally, the theories we now have might be considered wrong in the simplistic sense of my English Lit correspondent, but in a much truer and subtler sense, they need only be considered incomplete.Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-5101813229695587032009-11-03T07:53:00.003+01:002009-11-03T08:01:15.521+01:00Spinozan love<blockquote>... Spinoza's theory of the human agent certainly lends itself to the view that we are largely governed by 'unconscious' forces. As I have suggested, there is, for Spinoza, no 'self', no 'first person' who takes charge, so to speak, of the causality of my actions. Moreover, the cognition which is presented to me in so confused a form by my passions is a cognition of the <i>body</i>: for Spinoza, therefore, it can be emended only by a better cognition - an 'adequate idea' - of the natural processes which that body displays. Nevertheless, one could see in these ideas, not the strength of Spinoza's theory of emotion, but its weakness - in particular, its inability to account for the two most important features of our emotional life: the status of the self as subject of emotion, and of the world (the other) as object. Emotions are directed outwards: they focus, or 'intend', an object, and directs our energies towards that object. Spinoza's theory recognises this fact (the fact of 'intentionality') but radically misdescribes it. For Spinoza the 'directedness' of an emotion - as we experience it - is not better than an illusion, a confused representation of processes which exist, not in the surrounding world, but in the body of the subject. <b>I understand my love for you, therefore, not by understanding <i>you</i>, who are its object, nor by understanding <i>myself</i>, who am its subject, but by understanding this strange interloper, my body, in which love grows inscrutably like a cancer, erupting into consciousness in ways which inform me only dimly of the processes by which my mind is enslaved.</b> ...<br /><br /><div align="right">- Excerpt from Roger Scruton's <i>Spinoza</i></div></blockquote>Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-48789214476321249942009-10-18T21:59:00.004+02:002009-10-18T23:07:04.489+02:00It's snowingLocals told me that it is not supposed to begin snowing so early, that the harsh cold does not usually descend so soon upon the whole city, but global warming has wreaked havoc. Temperatures have dropped significantly and are expected to fall further than before. This is the first time in my entire life I am seeing snow - it is perenially summer in Singapore - but it is nothing torrential, nothing deeply overpowering, just a few magical petals of white feathers drifting sporadically from the great heavens above accompanied gently by soft drizzling rain, with the poetic reticence of a silent film, as I look out the windows in my protective coccoon of sheltered warmth. It all began so quietly, so placidly, commencing its limpid dance with a murmuring whisper and not a violent bang, before finally slowly increasing in strength and entrancing rhythm, trapping viewers in a wordless sense of awe. I can't wait for the leaves to wither and die away, for the branches to turn sorrowfully bare, as their fate dictates that they should - their death is utterly inexorable, as is their eventual renewel upon the merciful arrival of spring. And so the beautiful repetitive cycle of sad demise and heavenly rebirth goes on forever, again and again, with an insouciant permanence, without respite, without pause, without end.Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-21081311223932794952009-09-22T04:41:00.004+02:002012-06-03T08:58:01.994+02:00I find this uplifting and inspiring<br />
<center><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/nC1yLD7R0ZU" width="420"></iframe><br /><br /><i><b><span style="font-size: 180%;">I love the whole world. It's such a brilliant place.</span></b></i></center>Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-23560144692561394302009-06-23T10:38:00.002+02:002009-06-25T14:25:11.124+02:00On public breastfeeding<strong>Courtesy of <a href="http://gssq.blogspot.com/">Agagooga</a>.</strong><br /><br />Some people think that women should be allowed to breastfeed in public and some even call public breastfeeding a "civil right". They call themselves 'lactivists' and while the silly name is a good tip-off, but it is still profitable to examine their claims.<br /><br />They put down opposition to public breastfeeding to a view of the breast only as a sexual object, or one of bodily shame.<br /><br />Yet, it is doubtful if these same activists would support people peeing in public. Assuming you are directing your flow into a proper receptacle and are thus not soiling public or private property, there really isn't any reason to oppose public urination - unless you view the genitals as being exclusively sexual (I am alright with pissoirs since they cover the genitals). Or is there? If people who really need to go can hold their pee and find a bathroom, is it unreasonable for mothers who want to breastfeed to find a similarly private location (indeed, one can breastfeed in any empty room, but it takes plumbing to make a Little Boys or Little Girls Room)?<br /><br />A similar argument can be made for digging noses in public. In fact, here the issue of sexualisation is moot (talk of the nose having more fun than the finger when you dig it notwithstanding). Simply, where bodily fluids are involved, it is best to keep everything private.<br /><br />Indeed, if you say that breasts are not sexual, you return to a problem I mentioned before: if breasts are not sexual, then there is no problem with pictures of topless women (any more than there are problems with pictures of topless men), or touching a breast (any more than there are problems with touching a man's chest). After all, there is nothing wrong with touching someone's hand or tapping someone's shoulder. If you are normal, this is not a problem (actually, if you are normal, you acknowledge that women's breasts are not like men's chests, but never mind).<br /><br />However, the contradictions in lactivism become apparent here. Lactivists want to say that breastfeeding is alright and non-sexual. Yet, if this is so, why are they treated differently from men's chests? Although they are committed to public breastfeeding, lactivists still want to say that a woman's body is sacred and should not be violated. So the only way out is to declare the whole body sacrosanct, at which point we know we have hit upon an argumentum ad absurdum - since only the battiest lactivists would say that one's hands and shoulders should be sacred as well.<br /><br />One of the only ways to rescue lactivism is if you create several categories: Can see, can expose, can touch (hands, shoulders); Can't see, can't expost, can't touch (genitals) and Can't see, can expose, can't touch (torso). If these categories sound tortured it's because they are gotten by working backwards from a conclusion: women can do anything they want, but if men act upon these implications they are evil.<br /><br />Another way to rescue lactivism is to claim that breasts are sexual *except* when they are being used to breastfeed. This is a little peculiar, since a gun, for example, does not cease to become a martial symbol when used in hunting, parades or mounted above the fireplace. Perhaps this claim is inspired by the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation, but goes one up on it, for unlike the Body and Blood of Christ, Breasts can endlessly move between the Sexual and Non-Sexual states.<br /><br />In fact, if you support public breastfeeding, I don't think there's very far to go to support public nudity (or at least public toplessness by women), unless you impute quasi-mystical significance to the act of breastfeeding your child (which probably explains why we have the Gabriel Break-Away Feeding Pad (a feeding harness - I saw one which actually replicates breasts and looks like a bra, but can't find where it is online right now).<br /><br />But then, even if I impute quasi-mystical significance to the act of sex, it doesn't mean that I should be allowed to have sex in public (assume for the sake of argument that I am impoverished and cannot afford a hotel room, or that since Hotel 81 has been forbidden from offering hourly rates, I have nowhere to go). Ditto for any religious significance I might attach to an act of, say, public defecation (even if I clean up after myself).<br /><br />An alternative argument could be made about breastfeeding being temporary, whereas public nudity is an extended performantive act, but it seems weak to me and in any case sounds like it is making excuses for breastfeeding (like how those sanitary pads which don't rustle are supposed to make menstruation even more shameful than it is), so the activists are not going to use that line of argument.<br /><br />Perhaps the best solution is something I saw one mother doing - covering your breastfeeding baby under a shawl or something similar.<br /><br />Naturally, after I posted a short thought on Twitter (unfortunately, micro-blogging lacks context) I got engaged by some lactivists.<br /><br />Besides repeated ad hominem insults ("Grow up and get a clue!"; "Growup & educate urself"; "you're DENSE and creepy"; "I don't know what strange planet you came from, but go back there."; "idiot")*, their objections were that:<br /><br />* - Significantly, the only civil Lactivist was a guy. Make of that what you will.<br /><br />1) Breastfeeding is okay because it benefits other people<br />2) Breastfeeding is just feeding a baby. Other people can eat in public, so why can't babies?<br />3) "it's only a recent anthropologic phenom for women to be ashamed of exposing breasts in public - not a problem for men - why differ?"<br />4) Babies are not meant to feed from bottles. Breasts are for feeding babies.<br />5) Grow up.<br />6) Hands have a sexual function also but we don't wear gloves to sign our name in public.<br /><br />My responses were that:<br /><br />1) If benefiting someone else makes an act okay, what if I bed someone really well? Even if you exclude sexual acts, it wouldn't be very nice for me to dress my friend's festering boil in public.<br /><br />2) Babies can be fed from bottles. If I chose to eat from a trough in public (au porc), people would be disgusted, but if I did it in private it would be alright.<br /><br />3) Actually in almost all non-tribal societies,the female breast is covered in polite company. This is not a recent phenomenon at all. The only exception I can think of: [Pre-Meiji] Japan (but even then it was the peasants who did this).<br /><br />4) People are not meant to wear clothes or take antibiotics either.<br /><br />If you take the naturalistic argument, human breasts are far larger than needed for milk production. They have an evolved sexual function.<br /><br />5) *Silent amusement*<br /><br />6) Do you support public nudity? (the response to this was a dodge and a change of subject)<br /><br />At this point, I sensed close to zero marginal utility, so I decided to stop.<br /><br />Well, actually a "RadicaLactivist" then came and engaged me, but I will reproduce only a short part of that exchange here:<br /><br />"women CAN and should be able to go topless if they choose. Men do. And there is NO reason for a man to bare his breasts IN PUBLIC.<br /><br />One should never touch/photograph another person without permission. One's dress or activities are irrelevant to basic Human Rights"<br /><br />I guess the word "Radical" tells you all you need to know and explains the sexism and the disconnect from reality (she claimed those who photograph other people without permission are creeps with cameras)<br /><br />Later she backpedalled somewhat and claimed she was neutral and going topless was a personal choice but, well.<br /><br />Suffice it to say that, as usual, when you see the word "Radical" it's a sign to run far, far away; I'll never understand why some groups adopt 'radical' as a badge of pride. I've not encountered a case where it doesn't cover nuttiness.Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-65779492528357203052009-05-23T12:04:00.009+02:002009-05-23T12:57:56.442+02:00Devan Nair's Lee's Betrayal of PAP and Singapore<b>[Background information (written by <a href="http://singaporerebel.blogspot.com/">Martyn See</a>):</b> 21 May 2009 marks the 22nd anniversary of a security sweep codenamed Operation Spectrum, which saw the arrests and detention of 22 young professionals in Singapore under the Internal Security Act.<br /><br />The "Marxist Conspiracy" arrests, as it is commonly known, also involved the detentions of lawyers Francis Seow and Patrick Seong in 1988 as they sought to represent some of the detainees who were re-arrested that year.<br /><br />Upon release, Seow contested in the 1988 General Elections under the Workers' Party ticket and lost narrowly to the PAP incumbents. The Government subsequently filed tax evasion charges against Seow, who was overseas at that time and has remained in US until today.<br /><br />In 1994, he published 'To Catch A Tartar', which documented in considerable detail his 72 days' ordeal under ISA detention in Whitley Detention Centre.<br /><br />The following is the foreword to the book, written by former President and founding PAP member Devan Nair, who himself lived in self-exile after openly criticising the Government over the 'Marxist Conspiracy' detentions. He passed away in Ontario, Canada in 2005.<b>]</b><br /><br />***<br /><br /><strong><u><em><a href="http://singaporerebel.blogspot.com/2009/05/lees-betrayal-of-pap-and-singapore.html">Lee's Betrayal of PAP and Singapore</a></em></u></strong><br /><strong><em>By Devan Nair</em></strong><br /><strong>Foreword to <em>To Catch A Tartar </em>by Francis T. Seow</strong><br /><strong>Published in 1994</strong><br /><br />Before reading Francis Seow's manuscript, I had decided that I would decline his request for a foreword. My political days are definitely over - and more reasons than either friends or foes imagine. Apart from a series of reflective essays (in preparation) on the making of an ideal (in which I too had been privileged to share), on its unmaking (which I watched in helpless pain from the sidelines), and on the dubious - to say the least - political and social aftermath of phenomenal economic success, I had, and still have, no intention of becoming involved in promoting the political views or program of any individual or group, whether within or without Singapore.<br /><br />After reading through the manuscript, however, I realized that I would never again be able to look at my face in the mirror without flinching, if I said no to Francis, at least in regard to this particular piece of writing by him. For this was no political harangue by one of Singapore's leading opposition figures, excoriating the political or economic program of the powers-that-be, and pleading the virtues of his own political cause. On the contrary, central to this book is a grim account of how a citizen of Singapore was treated while under detention without trial under the republic's internal security laws.<br /><br />As an ex-detainee myself, who had undergone in two separate spells a total of five years of political imprisonment in the fifties under the British colonial regime as an anticolonial freedom fighter, I recalled that I was never treated in the shockingly dehumanizing manner in which Francis was by the professedly democratic government of independent Singapore. Indeed, my fellow detainees and I had as legal counsel a brilliant lawyer and vocal freedom-fighter by the name of Lee Kuan Yew, who has publicly borne witness to the comfortable circumstances in which we lived under detention, and how he was able to visit us, without supervision, to discuss, among other things, strategies for bringing the colonial rule of our jailers to an end.<br /><br />Francis's account of his seventy-two days of detention by Prime Minister Lee's government confronted me yet once again with acutely poignant questions: What has the nation come to? And what malefic hidden persona has emerged in Lee Kuan Yew of today? Surely, this cannot be the same man, whom I and several other starry-eyed anticolonial revolutionaries in the fifties and sixties had jubilantly accepted as our captain in the grim, heroic struggles of those early days to create what we expected would be a new Jerusalem? Alas, it took us thirty years to realize that we had been treading on air.<br /><br />Mr. Seow's book is an eye-opener; that is, for those whose eyes still required to be opened. Mine too, for that matter. Nobody is blinder than the captain's inveterate hero-worshipper. And none probably as wilfuly, self-righteously closed to unfolding reality as I was. Indeed, until fairly recently, I had believed that the People's Action Party (PAP) government, by which I had once sworn, had all along been tolerably civilized and humane in its treatment of political prisoners. Yet another scale had to fall from my eyes, the latest in a series of scales which had already fallen earlier, and which I will deal with in my own book.<br /><br />The economic transformation wrought by the PAP government is there for all the world to see. The towering skyline of the island city state, the great vistas of new high-rise apartments which had replaced the sordid sprawling slums and malarial swamps of only three decades ago, the magnificent international airport at Changi about which all visitors rave, the world latest and, perhaps, the best mass rapid transit system, the clean and green garden city - all and more - quite rightly evoke the envy and admiration of foreign visitors, especially those from developing countries with much less to boast of by way of efficient development-orientated governments.<br /><br />I would be the last person to denigrate the material achievements of Singapore, for the good reason that I was also a member of the ruling team responsible for them. Like other members of the PAP old guard, I saw the creation of a solid socioeconomic base as a vitally necessary springboard for the realisation of human ends and values. At least for me, and for the others in the anticolonial movement like me, the human agenda was primary. In short, the urgent, organized, disciplined drive for economic growth and technological progress was powered by noneconomic aspirations and ideals.<br /><br />We looked at the sad fate of other multiracial and multireligious developing countries and recognized that life's highest rewards and fulfilments were beyond the reach of societies riven by sterile, senseless class and ethnic strife, and cursed by a corrupt polity, inefficient production, material poverty, and hungry bellies. Modern technology and management systems would be necessary means to advance the human agenda. Alas, we failed to forsee that human ends would come to be subverted for the greater glory of the material means, and our new Jerusalem would come to harbour a metallic soul with clanking heartbeats, behind a glittering technological facade.<br /><br />History bears abundant witness that idealists generally come to grief. They awaken high human aspirations and hopes and ignite the liberating fires of revolution. The pains and humiliations of foreign subjection and exploitation are scorched, and, for a brief, blazing period, men transcend themselves in the inspiring vision of a great common future. The revolution triumphs - but idealists become expendable thereafter. One by one, sooner or later, they are eased out. And the revolution is inherited by cold, calculating power brokers at the head of a phalanx of philistines.<br /><br />Lee Kuan Yew's earlier speeches echo the great themes of freedom fighters everywhere. As the several irrefragable quotes Seow offers in his book testify, Lee too had once waxed eloquent about liberty, freedom, harmony, justice, and the dignity of man. But reading Lee Kuan Yew today, or listening to him, one realizes how brazenly he has abandoned the positions which had so convincingly persuaded an earlier, revolutionary generation of Singaporeans, both old-guard colleagues and the population at large, to confirm him in the captainship of party and nation. We had taken him at his powerfully eloquent word. If Lee had then given the mildest hint of the apostate he was to become, he would have received short shrift from the revolutionary following who had put their trust in him.<br /><br />Those who order, systematise, and govern in the aftermath of revolutions often become votaries at covert and pernicious altars. Ineluctably, the Olympian gods are displaced and a Titan holds sway, with lamentable results. The march of the human spirit is first arrested, then retarded.<br /><br />What we launched as the independent republic of Singapore succeeded, as the world knows, all too well, only to discover that in the eyes of Lee Kuan Yew, means had become ends in themselves. First principles were stood on their heads. Economic growth and social progress did not serve human beings. On the contrary, the primary function of citizens was to fuel economic growth - a weird reversal of values. The reign of Moloch had begun. Not an unfamiliar phenomenon to those who browse in the pages of history. My old-guard colleagues and I might have been wiser men and women if we had read our history with greater comprehension than we do now. Alas, one cannot alter the past.<br /><br />The inevitable drift to totalitarianism begins with the typically symptomatic thesis of the progenitors: "Society as No. 1, and the individual, as part of society, as No. 2." The words are Lee Kuan Yew's, speaking to journalists in Canberra, ACT, on November 16, 1988. He was dutifully echoed by Goh Chok Tong, the First Deputy Prime Minister (now Prime Minister), when he announced this as one of the pillars of the government's new goal of "a national ideology" for Singapore. Portentous words, given the current morbidities of the republic, which include the account given by Francis Seow in the following pages of his seventy-two days of detention and interrogation by the guardians of "national security," the Internal Security Department. Seow learned at first hand what happens to the individual as No. 2, when subjected to society as No. 1 in the shape of his jailers and interrogators in the Whitley Detention Centre.<br /><br />"The individual, as part of society," is a marginal improvement on Mr Lee's egregious penchant for referring to fellow-citizens as "digits" of the development process. You are either a productive "digit" or an inefficient one. And "digits", like robots, if they are to be functionally useful, have to be programmed. So one need not be surprised that Singapore's political programmers should now be working on a "national ideology," in addition to the social and genetic engineering already in the works. Shades of Huxley's Brave New World!<br /><br />History bears irrefutable witness to the self-evident truth that no harmony is possible between the individual and society where either seeks aggrandisement at the expense of the other. The mutual need for each other, for mutual completion and fulfilment, is frustrated if one seeks to devour the other. Invariably, the end result is material and spiritual impoverishment, stagnation and death, for both individual and society. The equation is infallible, whether the nation concerned is eastern or western, although Lee Kuan Yew pretends that Confucious would have sanctioned the outrages he has perpetrated in Singapore. Which, as those who decline to traduce history for political ends will appreciate, would be an unwarranted insult to the memory of the venerable figure, whose proverbial wisdom laid primary emphasis on character-building enhancement of the human spirit and of social mores - not their mutilation.<br /><br />The tree is known by its fruits. The supremacy of the state over the individual which those inclined to totalitarianism always propound has invariably meant, in practice, the immolation of the individual at the altar of an impersonal, faceless, and conscienceless deity, sanctified by the grandiose term: "the organized community." But the voices which issue from the iron throat are recognisably those of the political elite in power. They spell out the implacable social "imperatives" which override the rights of the individual. And in the name of these imperious mandates, the social juggernaut driven by political roughnecks grinds the hapless individual under its wheels. Francis Seow was one such victim. Another was Chia Thye Poh, whose lengthy incarceration has been compared to the experience of Nelson Mandela. It would be invidious to mention others by name, for either their spirits have been broken, or they remain subject to tongue-tying restrictions.<br /><br />Seow survived the ordeal. Because he is a free man outside Singapore, he becomes the first ex-detainee to place on record the ordeal of arrest and detention without trial in Singapore. In doing so, he has rendered a signal service to all Singaporeans, as indeed to all sane and humane men and women everywhere. But they must know that he will have to pay a heavy price for his pains in the shape of repeated or fresh calumnies and of rearrest should he choose to return to Singapore. Indeed, this will be in addition to the price he has already paid for raising his voice against Moloch. It is a rare kind of courage which would take on so perverse and formidable an adversary.<br /><br />I am personally able to confirm the brutal fact that exile, for whatever reason, uprooted from one's entire milieu of life, culture, and career, from friends and relatives, is, to put it bluntly - unremitting spiritual agony. Nonetheless, an ordeal certainly preferable to the individual as No. 2 suffering systematic asphyxiation by society as No. 1. And writing this foreword, I am cruelly aware that I am, in effect, finally and irretrievably burning my boats with my country and a people whom I love and served over the greater part of a lifetime. But what would you? Exile, pensionless to boot, at least ensures the survival of the integrity of the person.<br /><br />The story, as Francis Seow tells, is a grisly symptom of a high-seated (rather than deep-seated) political malaise afflicting Singapore. History will indict Singapore's eminence grise, now Senior Minister and Secretary-General of the ruling party, Lee Kuan Yew, as the source and bearer of what, despite transient and misleading appearances to the contrary must, without radical political surgery, turn out to be a terminal condition.<br /><br />I may be wrong in believing that the point of no return has already been passed, for currently it does appear that a population rendered politically comatose over the years will be unable to bestir itself sufficiently - apart from surreptitiously immobilizing subway trains by stuffing well-chewed chewing gum into their doors - to cancel the blank cheque it has given to the Singapore government.<br /><br />However, I am also aware that we live in times when reality keeps exploding in the faces of experts. It has more than once exploded in mine, not to speak of Francis Seow's. There is no guarantee that one day it will not explode in Lee's own face, or in the face of those who will inherit his creed and style of power. Gorbachev, Ceausescu, and Honecker are only the more visible among the many who, undercurrents which suddenly surfaced, ensuing in utterly unforseen, convulsive change in the sprawling Soviet empire and eastern Europe, leaving all the world's normally voluble geopolitical pundits and pontiffs flummoxed.<br /><br />Some believe that the necessary inspiration for surgical intervention to rescue Singapore from terminal risk might arise from within the republic's own undoubtedly intelligent establishment. A good number of professionals and civil servants do know, and will private acknowledge - looking over the shoulder, of course - what has gone grievously wrong with the once promising Singapore experiment. In the strictest privacy, they readily admit that, if there is any country in Southeast Asia which, by virtue of economic success and probably the best educated population in Asia after Japan, can afford a more relaxed style of government, tolerant of free expression and dissent - that country is Singapore. They appreciate that the people of Singapore are certainly intelligent enough to discern where their best interest lie, and run the risk of falling prey to rabble-rousing politicians with easy panaceas and quick fixes.<br /><br />Indeed, they vividly recall that an earlier, less educated generation of Singaporeans had, after listening to open public arguments and debates, repeatedly rebuffed at the polls slogan-shouting demagogues who clearly did not know the social and economic priorities of a small, island nation with absolutely no natural resources to boast of, dependent on neighbouring Malaysia even for its water, and entirely dependent on the stability of export markets for comfortable living. Finally, they know that the source of the overweening authoritarianism - so entirely contra-indicated by one of the most vibrant and successful economies of Asia - issues from the increasingly obsessive fixations and bizarre values of one man - Lee Kuan Yew.<br /><br />But it remains to be seen whether knowledge goes with moral courage and the will to action. I confess that, with every passing year, I have come to fear that the point of no return has already reached and passed. For Singapore's grey eminence lords it over the republic from the top of a tower of undeniable previous achievement. He had been the superb captain of a superb team which had led a highly responsive and intelligent population out of a savage and sterile political wilderness into outstanding success and internationally recognized nationhood.<br /><br />Today every member of that superb team has been eased out of power and influence in the name of political self-renewal, while Lee himself has ensured that he presides, as Secretary-General of the ruling party, not as he once did, over equals who had elected him, but over a government cabinet and a judiciary made up entirely of his appointees or nominees. In relation to old guard leaders, Lee had been no more than primus inter pares. He had perforce to deal with equals, and they were fully capable of speaking their minds. Once, in the early days of the PAP, in sheer exasperation, I myself had responded to him with a four-letter word and thought no more about it.<br /><br />Today, Lee no longer deals with his equals, but with his chosen appointees, who did not earn power the hard way, but had it conferred on them. They are highly qualified men, no doubt, but nobody expects them to possess the gumption to talk back to the increasingly self-righteous know-it-all that Lee has become. Further, the bread of those who conform is handsomely buttered. Keep your head down and you could enjoy one of the highest living standards in Asia. Raise it and you could lose a job, a home, and be harassed by the Internal Security Department, or by both, as happened to Francis Seow.<br /><br />Nonetheless, one must hope, even against hope, that the daunting challenge is not evaded by intellectually honest and spiritually courageous members of the Singapore establishment. The inevitable alternative is clearly the abortion of what began as the Singapore miracle. An abortion and a treachery. For not many societies return whole from the graveyard of elementary human rights and decencies.<br /><br />Admittedly, Lee is right in talking of the remarkable economic transformation we wrought in Singapore, an achievement at once collective and individual. The people of Singapore well deserve the material success for which they worked so hard. But, all the same, they have reaped a baleful harvest. Lee bakes a bitter bread. The relish of greater material well-being gives way to the acrid taste of ill-being along other equally vital, if less tangible dimensions, beyond the gauge of GNP, the only measuring rod Lee knows. As his career progressed, he revealed, in increasing measure, enormous blind spots.<br /><br />"Transformation" is quite the wrong word word for qualitative aberrations which have occurred in the noneconomic areas of life in Singapore. On reading Seow's manuscript, the word which leaps to mind is "transmogrification" or the grotesque metamorphosis that has overtaken the perception and treatment of the individual in the republic.<br /><br />My thoughts go back to my own arrest by the British colonial authorities in Singapore in the fifties. I have already indicated that my experience as a political prisoner under a British colonial administration had nothing in common with what Seow went through. I can come to only one conclusion. The colonial Special Branch were saints compared to Lee Kuan Yew's Internal Security outfit. The end result of our struggle for political freedom and independence turns out to be not a progression in terms of respect for human dignity, but a surreptitious regression into barbarity.<br /><br />Few can appreciate how painful a contemplation from the sidelines Seow's account is for those like me who had spent a good part of our active lives helping to launch modern Singapore. Contrary to Lee's pretensions, Singapore is not only his baby. It's our baby as well. But under Lee's exclusive charge, the miracle child suffocates today beneath a pile of heavy swaddling. Small wonder therefore that a disturbing number of Singaporeans have chosen to emigrate from Lee's utopia to less strait-jacketed places like Australia, New Zealand and Canada. According to government figures, the exodus reached 4,000 families in 1989, around 16,000 people. The London Economist observed:<br /><br />His (Lee's) statistically-inclined government may well reflect that, proportionally, the exodus from Singapore, which faces no threat from China, was not far below the flight from Hong Kong last year.<br /><br />Lee himself appears to be the only person who does not seem to have got the message. In his National Day Rally speech in 1989, he affected incredulity - even turning lachrymose - that so many Singaporeans should opt out of his paradise. Nobody present could summon the gumption to tell him that to discover the reason why, all that he need do was look into the mirror.<br /><br />For Lee's entire approach to government pointedly ignores some crucial ingredients of nation-building. Full employment, well-fed digestive tracks, clean streets, and decent homes are not the be-all and end-all of good government. They are only a necessary beginning - an essential foundation from which to aspire to greater human ends. Like people elsewhere, Singaporeans also have keen nonmaterial appetites, the satisfaction of which will not brook permanent denial. For these are fundamental urges which return after every banishment.<br /><br />A new and better educated generation, increasingly open to the great winds of change blowing all over the world, is bound to intensify the search for an invigorating image of desire and hope, a liberating political formula, a more satisfying life scheme and scene than are available under the present pervasive system of coercion and control. Also, in this day and age, ideas and hopes increasingly scorn border check-points and censorship laws.<br /><br />A society burdened by a multitude of prohibitions must come to suffer that stifling of innovation and creativity which comes of excessive regulation. Singaporeans today have to memorise an exhaustive list of prohibitions. But they are without a comparable list of what they are free to do.<br /><br />Certainly citizens of a civilized community need to cultivate that sense of order and discipline which has served Singapore's economic success so admirably thus far. But where a sense of social responsibility goes unnourished by an equally vivid sense of individual rights, and of participation and involvement in the entire political and legislative process, there the human spirit is bound to shrivel under the deadening touch of authoritarianism. Indeed, what has become increasingly evident to Singaporeans is Big Brother's total lack of trust and confidence in the good sense and judgment of his citizens. Hence the hectoring speeches by ministers, and worse, the ubiquitous voice of the oracle telling everybody else, including government ministers who perform under his watchful eyes, what is good for them.<br /><br />The obvious danger is that if ever Singapore is faced with a serious economic downturn, as is entirely possible given the republic's overwhelming dependence on increasingly volatile export markets, the current disturbing brain drain may be expected to gush into massive exodus. And that would be a sad end for what began as the most promising experiment in socioeconomic growth in Southeast Asia.<br /><br />Lest it be considered that I have revised my views about the conditions of my own detention, after having parted company with Lee Kuan Yew, I will quote here from the statement I made on behalf of the People's Action Party of Singapore at the meeting of the Bureau of the Socialist International held in London on 28-29 May 1976, with the approval of Prime Minister Lee. I said:<br /><br />In 1950 I joined the Anti-British League, an underground auxiliary of the Malayan Communist Party. I spent, in two separate spells, a total of five years in British prisons. I am not in the least bitter. Indeed, I look back back nostalgically to my years of incarceration, for they were years of intensive reading and self-education. On the whole, my fellow detainees and I were well-treated. One of the few complaints we had was that the British allowed us radio sets which were doctored to receive only Radio Singapore. We wanted to listen in to Peking and Moscow as well.<br /><br />We were in touch, through easily bribable camp warders, with the communist underground in Singapore. We were instructed to go on a hunger strike and to protest against against "ill-treatment and torture." When some of us pointed out that there was no ill-treatment and torture, our chief fellow detainee told us that "it was a revolutionary duty to expose the imperialists, through whatever means were available." Our anticolonial zeal being greater than our commitment to truth, we swallowed whatever qualms we had and embarked on a six-day hunger strike. It had the required effect, not upon the British - who were quite unmoved - but as far underground communist propaganda in Singapore was concerned, for our hunger strike was extolled as an example of our heroism and of the vileness of the imperialists...<br /><br />I was reminded of the episode when I read the Dutch Labour party paper about the torture of detainees...<br /><br />I also happen to know a good deal about both prisons and detention camps in Singapore. For, soon after Lee Kuan Yew formed the first PAP Government in May 1959, I persuaded him to set up a Prisons Inquiry Commission, for I had not liked what I had seen of the demeaning conditions of imprisonment imposed by the British authorities: not on political detainees, but on convicted prisoners. For example, on the approach of a British prison officer, every convict had to kneel down on the floor, with his head down. That aroused my ire, and it still does, when I think of it.<br /><br />I was appointed Chairman of the Prisons Inquiry Commission, which included two British academics from the University of Malaya in Singapore - the late Dr Jean Robertson and Professor T.H. Elliott. The recommendations my commission made, to humanise prison conditions, still form the nominal basis for the administration of prisoners and detention centres in Singapore. The International Red Cross has had access to our prisoners, detainees, and places of detention. You will appreciate that the Red Cross is not allowed in several other countries, and I can confidently challenge any country in the world to boast a more efficient prison system than the one we have in Singapore.<br /><br />This explains why I read with wry amusement the absurd allegations of ill-treatment, torture, and inhuman conditions in our prisons and detention centres, made by the communist united front group in Singapore, and faithfully repeated in the Dutch Labour Party paper.<br /><br />Today I am obliged to eat a good number of the words I uttered in London in 1976. A humbling obligation, and therefore good for the soul. I have no difficulty, of course, reaffirming that my fellow detainees and I were well treated in British colonial centres of detention. That was a fact of direct personal experience. Not so, apparently, the conditions political detainees were subjected to in the seventies. I had then accepted, all too gullibly, that these were humane and civilised purely on the word of the powers-that-be. I was not the only credulous Singaporean to do so.<br /><br />There is no better teacher than painful personal experience. I know today that in this matter, as in several others, my trust and confidence were grievously misplaced. I am certain now that if any of these detainees had brought themselves to write of their experience as Seow has done, their accounts would not have been greatly dissimilar. If anything, going by what Seow learned from other detainees whom he had represented as legal counsel, some of them went through much worse ordeals. I can also appreciate today that detainees do not speak up during guided tours of detention centres for Red Cross representatives.<br /><br />Seow's account of the horrendous process of interrogation he underwent, the freezing coldness of the soundproof interrogation room, an air-conditioner blower duct on the ceiling which directed a continuous and powerful cascade of cold air down at the spot where, barefooted, he was made to stand, the sudden paroxysms blasts of cold air sent him into, the total darkness save for the powerful spotlights trained on him, the obscenities, shouts, and threats he had to endure, all left me stupefied.<br /><br />Sleep deprivation, for instance, is a fiendishly effective means employed by Singapore interrogators to thoroughly disorient the detainee, so that he may be suitably readied for abject "confessions" which would later be copiously presented by the government-controlled media as a "statutory declaration." One cannot think of any other country in the civilized world where "statutory declarations" exacted under duress from political prisoners are published and unabashedly palmed off on the public as gospel truths.<br /><br />I found acutely disturbing the following paragraphs in the book at page 121 et seq.:<br /><br /><blockquote><em>As I walked through the doors of the interrogation room, a freezing coldness immediately wrapped itself around me...<br /><br />I had lost all sense of time. I had been standing there under the pitiless glare of the spotlights. I felt the urge to go to the toilet. I told them. Two Gurkha guards appeared and escorted me to the toilet. Having stood motionless at one spot for so long I had great difficulty walking. I found myself rooted to the ground - a term more descriptive of the reality of the situation than a mere figure of speech. My limbs were stiff all over. I was unsteady. The two Gurkha guards on either side of me supported me under my arms. I staggered out of the interrogation room, half carried by them, along the dark corridors up two flights of stairs to the ground level of Block C, along a corridor, to a toilet located in an empty cell in Block D. I blinked at the unexpected harsh light of day. I was quite shocked. The urge to go the toilet forgotten for a moment. I asked one of the two Gurkhas for the time of day... I was astounded. It was 11.30 in the morning. I then realized that I had been standing in the interrogation room for about sixteen hours warding off questions thrown unremittingly at me. It seem incredible to me that I could have stood at one spot, almost motionless, for that length of time. I recalled with shame that, when my detainee-clients had previously complained to me that they had been deprived of sleep and forced to stand for as long as 72 hours at a stretch, without sleep, I had great difficulty in believing them. I thought they were exaggerating; but now I was, incredibly, undergoing a somewhat similar experience! ...<br /><br />I noticed, too, dried sunburnt blisters peeling from the skin of both arms. I could not at first comprehend how I could have acquired them until I realized that I had been burnt by the powerful rays of those spotlights, which had also dried up the moisture in my eyes. Cold rashes had broken out all over my atrophied limbs under my clothes. Unlike many people who are sensitive to sunburn, I am susceptible to cold rashes. It was always troublesome for me whenever I had perforce to travel abroad during winter. In this instant case, as if signaled by a faithful built-in thermometer, the rashes broke out in chilling confirmation of the coldness of the room. My interrogators had swaddled themselves up in warm winter clothes and left it, time and again, whenever they could no longer withstand the wintry cold.</em></blockquote>As a prisoner of the British, my fellow detainees and I had simply refused to be interrogated. We told our captors that we would only speak as free men. We were left alone after that. We experienced no soundproof room, no brutal interrogation and sleep deprivation for hours on end, no air-conditioner blower duct directing a powerful and continuous cascade of cold air at the spot where the barefoot detainee stood on "a floor like a slab of ice," no spotlights, no threats and obscenities shouted in our ears, no absolutely solitary confinement throughout the period of detention, indeed none of the things which Mr Seow had to undergo at the hands of the rulers of free, independent, and professedly civilized Singapore.<br /><br />After the statutory period of 21 days' solitary confinement, my fellow detainees and I were allowed to live together in camp conditions, whether in Changi or, even better, on salubrious St. John's Island. Our lawyer, Lee Kuan Yew, was freely allowed to visit and talk to us, without Special Branch supervision, and to plan with us the downfall of the British colonial power. So free were we as political detainees to pursue our own interests and studies that we light-heartedly referred to our places of detention as "St. John's" University and "Changi" University.<br /><br />Mr Lee knows all this. It surely cannot be termed progress in freedom and humanity to arrest and treat his own political prisoners so brutally, and with far less reason than the British had to detain me and my revolutionary comrades. After all, we had made no secret of the fact that we were committed to the violent overthrow of the British colonial power. But Seow and others like him certainly did not aim to overthrow the elected government of Singapore by unconstitutional means. Even if they did, Lee and his government would still stand convicted of the kind of inhumanity of which "the perfidious British colonialists" (as we referred to them in those days) were not guilty.<br /><br />The government's assertion that it does not ill-treat detainees strains credulity. Seow's readers will find extraordinary (to put it mildly) Brigadier General Lee's (Lee Kuan Yew's son and Singapore Deputy Prime Minister) statement in an interview with the BBC World Service:<br /><br /><blockquote><em>The Government does not ill-treat detainees. It does however apply psychological pressure to detainees to get to the truth of the matter ... the truth would not be known unless psychological pressure was used during interrogation.</em></blockquote>Systematic sleep deprivation, continuous interrogation over sixteen hours by strident, foul-mouthed intelligence officers, while standing barefoot in flimsy clothing on a cold cement floor in a freezing room under the skin-blistering and eye de-moisturing glare of spotlights, unlimited solitary confinement, are at once physical and psychological ordeals.<br /><br />Mr Seow quotes to potent effect a comment by Jerome A. Cohen, a prominent legal representative of Asia Watch, while on a visit to Singapore at the time. Mr Cohen<br /><br /><blockquote><em>... found deeply disturbing both the use of psychological torture and what he called a pervasive Singaporean, if not Asian view that "if you haven't hit somebody, it isn't torture." Psychological disorientation is evil whether it happens in South Africa, the Soviet Union, China, Singapore or the United States. Yet here they seem almost proud of their psychological tactics - breaking down the defenses of people in captivity. They need to be more sensitive to the definition of what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.</em></blockquote>One can understand why the Singapore government hurriedly withdrew its initial offer (made inadvertently by junior ministers when Big Brother happened to be out of town) to appoint a judicial Commission of Inquiry to examine public allegations of ill-treatment by nine ex-detainees in April 1988. They were rearrested instead, and it came as no surprise that some of them duly signed, while in renewed custody, "statutory declarations" withdrawing their earlier allegations, and asserting that they had not been ill-treated. Much more convenient, certainly, for Lee and his government, than a judicial Commission of Inquiry, which would publicly examine and pronounce on charges made from the witness stand by free men and women, subject to no constraints but those of conscience and of cross-examination by defence and prosecution alike.<br /><br />The circumstances of Seow's arrest and the subsequent ordeal of interrogation and detention provide occasion not only for grave disquiet over the brutal mistreatment of detainees. (they certainly put paid to any continued pretense of Lee Kuan Yew's part that he walks in the company of civilised statesman.) It raises another question - perhaps the most crucial one - in my own mind. I may explain, even if the effort proves, as it certainly will, an unflattering commentary on some of my own past judgments of persons and events.<br /><br />I had once publicly supported the need for the Internal Security Act when the democratically elected PAP Government was engaged in the life and death struggle against a murderous communist united front movement, committed to the violent overthrow of constitutional government. In subsequent years, I had continued to believe that the Act was justified given the volatile geopolitical milieu in which Singapore had to survive. Never had it occurred to me that the PAP government was capable of the gross abuse of the draconian powers conferred by the Act. And never was I more wholly wrong, and my conscience so grievously misplaced.<br /><br />What an unconsciously long time some people take to learn that power really does corrupt, especially its exercise when placed outside the purview of an impartial third party - like an independent judiciary. No statesman was ever more resoundingly correct than Thomas Jefferson when he warned:<br /><br />In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.<br /><br />Alas, because he was not stopped in time, Lee Kuan Yew has proceeded to alter the laws to bind down the judiciary and the media instead.<br /><br />The crucial question is this. What internal or external dangers threaten Singapore so gravely today to justify the need of a law like the Internal Security Act, allowing, as it does, indefinite detention without trial? None that anyone acquainted with the current political and economic situation in Southeast Asia can think of. None at all that cannot be more effectively dealt with by sensible democratic political process, under the ordinary laws of the land.<br /><br />There is no longer a communist insurrectionary movement in Malaysia committed to the violent overthrow of lawfully constituted governments in Singapore and Malaysia. There is no communist united front movement left in Singapore. By all accounts, communist potential in the area has been decisively scotched by economic, political, and geographical developments. the Communist Party of Malaysia, a sad and bedraggled relic of a once truly formidable movement, which it took all the military and political skills of the British and subsequent Malaysian governments to defeat, finally laid down their arms on December 2, 1989, after signing peace agreements with the Malaysian and Thai governments, and thus brought to a formal close 41 years of armed conflict.<br /><br />When this was announced, the first Prime Minister of Malaysia, the late Tungku Abdul Rahman, promptly and publicly recalled the pledge he had given in the free Malaysian parliament to the effect that the internal security laws providing for the arrest and detention without trial of suspected subversives were directed solely at the communist insurrectionary movement, and would be repealed once the insurrection was overcome. He therefore called for the outright abolition of the Internal Security Act since the communist threat to constitutional government had ceased to exist. Not so Lee Kuan Yew whom the London Sunday Telegraph reported as saying: "I don't see myself repealing it." Do Confucian conformity and stability require powers of detention without trial?<br /><br />In Singapore, by the early seventies, we had decisively debunked and defused a once powerful communist united front movement, which is no longer in evidence. I should know, because I was right out in the front line of that battle, among the foot soldiers, in constant danger of life and limb, leading the free trade unions - now, under Lee's surrogates, no longer free. The economic, social, and administrative successes we registered clearly do not provide fertile soil for violent insurgency of any kind. With the notable exception of Singapore, everywhere else economic success, even of much less magnitude than we can boast of, has invariably been accompanied by more relaxed political climates and styles. Not so under Lee.<br /><br />Success has been followed by an even further tightening of the screws. Indeed, even the insurrectionary communists of the fifties and sixties, with their unconstitutional resort to armed violence, civil riots, and strikes, were dealt with under laws and custodial treatment more benign and civilised than were constitutional law-abiding dissenters like Seow, and other social workers and professionals arrested and detained in Singapore in recent times. Neither were they obliged to produce abject statutory declarations "confessing" their numerous "misdeeds." Much can be said of the defects and shortcomings of previous British colonial regimes in Singapore. But these did not include the systematic and ruthless crushing of the human spirit at which Lee's Internal Security boys excel. One can appreciate now why he proudly refers to them as "professionals."<br /><br />Only recently, yet another striking departure from decent civilized practice occurred. Detention without trial is no longer subject to judicial review in Singapore. The government on January 25, 1989, amended the Internal Security Act to place its powers of detention without trial beyond challenge in the courts, with retrospective effect into the bargain. And nobody will ever know what takes place behind the walls in the soundproof, freezing rooms of the Whitley Detention Centre, from which issue "statutory declarations" by political prisoners abjectly admitting to a variety of anti-government offences.<br /><br />Thus, by means the venerable Confucius would never have condoned, Lee hopes to enforce in his ideal city state the Confucian conformity and respect for authority he so much admires. In these circumstances, it will be a rash Singaporean who, knowing the grave risks he is likely to incur, will dare even to murmur dissent. But alarm bells are already ringing in the night. As already observed, internationally mobile Singaporeans are leaving "the Singapore Miracle" in disturbing numbers to seek their fortunes in more congenial pastures, where they can breathe more freely.<br /><br />The road to perdition gets rougher and spikier as one goes down it. Relentlessly downhill has forged the predatory road with a vengeance, especially in the last few years. Consider the spate of repressive legislation enacted in a brief three to four years.<br /><br />Parliament is converted into "a political mine-field," as a pained and shocked Dr Toh Chin Chye, the founder chairman of the People's Action Party, observed in 1987. A mine-field which blew opposition leader J.B. Jeyeratnam out of the legislative chamber and made certain that he would have not be able to contest another election for at least five years. An even worse fate has befallen Francis Seow.<br /><br />Parliamentary select committees, by hallowed Westminster convention serious and sedate forums to consider public or professional reservations about government bills tabled in Parliament, are transformed into criminal courtrooms where a fiercely prosecuting, browbeating prime minister puts startled witnesses in the witness box for gruelling cross-examination. This was what happened to Francis Seow, the then president of the Law Society, and to members of the Society's governing council. Subsequent legislation ensured that Seow no longer remained president, and that the Law Society would never again be able to comment publicly on bills before the legislature, on the ground that they were beyond the limited professional competence of the Society. The curious theory was trotted out that politics is only for politicians, not for professional bodies, even though their members are citizens with legitimate concerns about matters of public interest.<br /><br />Draconian laws were passed to bring to heel foreign journals and newspapers which were critical of what they considered bizarre going-ons in the republic. The Asian Wall Street Journal and the Far East Economic Review were accused of "meddling in domestic politics," and their free circulation was drastically curtailed. They were told that they were not reporting Singapore to Singaporeans "fairly," as if that were the role of the free international media.<br /><br />Lee forgets that in the colonial past, his British predecessors were not knocked off by free reporting on Singapore by the foreign media, even though they had to deal with an obstreperous population and its equally restive politicians who included, for instance, rambunctious types like Lee Kuan Yew and Devan Nair. In particular, he forgets that his own international reputation as a staunch anticolonial freedom fighter owed a great deal to the free and open manner in which the foreign media covered him and his party's activities.<br /><br />One could go on ad infinitum about the road Lee Kuan Yew has chosen to travel. My immediate purpose, however, is to as paint vividly as possible, with a few basic strokes, the political context in which Francis Seow's book should be read. I hope I have managed to do this with at least a minimum of adequacy. For there have been other detainees in Singapore whose predicament was, if anything, worse than Seow's was.<br /><br />There is, for example, Chia Thye Poh. First arrested on October 29, 1966 under the ISA, Chia was banished on May 16, 1989 to the off-shore pleasure island of Sentosa. One cannot improve on what Christopher Lockwood of the London Sunday Telegraph noted:<br /><br />Exile on Sentosa is a diabolically-crafted alternative. Who can take a prisoner of conscience seriously on a holiday island? With Chia out of jail, he (Chia) fears, world disapproval of his detention will simply evaporate.<br /><br />But Nelson Mandela was unconditionally freed by President F.W. de Klerk of South Africa - free to begin shaking the evil apartheid system down to its foundations. Chia Thye Poh is incapable of shaking anything. So why this extraordinary vindictiveness?<br /><br />I recalled Lee Kuan Yew once quoting, in euphoric mood, Churchill's resonant words:<br /><br />"In war, resolution. In defeat, defiance. In victory, magnanimity."<br /><br />Lee and his comrades-in-arms were resolute in all the political battles we fought in the early years against the colonialists, and the crooks. But Lee has never yet known defeat. So far he has met only victories, in all of which he has shown himself incredibly vicious. Unlike Churchill, who, incidentally, could not boast anything comparable to Lee's two firsts and a star for distinction in Cambridge, Lee misses human greatness by several million light years.<br /><br />As was inevitable for one who, in arrogant contempt for soulcraft as a vital ingredient of successful statecraft, recklessly opted for an errant orbit, traced in benighted times past by the trajectory of Moloch.<br /><br />Lee's major justification for his policies is the example of Singapore's remarkable economic success. But what will haunt generations to come in Singapore and the Southeast Asian region generally are his even more monumental failures. Well did the Bard observe:<br /><br /><i><blockquote>The evil that men do lives after them;<br />The good is oft interr'd with their bones.</blockquote></i>Ultimately, his most unpardonable failure is the crass betrayal of the ideal which launched the People's Action Party into political orbit - that of an equal, multiracial, democratic society which would banish from its midst, for ever and a day, invidious notions of ethnic or religious majorities or minorities. In Singapore there would be no majorities and minorities. There would only be Singaporeans. This was the flaming aspiration on which Lee rode to power on the crest of revolutionary fervour. Today he has defiled the social atmosphere of Singapore with the sordid evil of ethno-centrism, which he had vowed to eradicate, in my company and in that of countless other comrades in the common struggle against colonialism, communalism, and communism. But this is not the place to expatiate on this particular piece of treachery. I will deal with it in my own book.<br /><br />Lee is gifted with a brilliant brain and an eloquent tongue. But the capricious gods omitted to equip him with the saving grace of that essential wisdom which makes for true greatness. And Singapore thereby missed the infinitely more potent miracle of the political and spiritual success it might so easily have provided, as a practical, living demonstration to the other unhappy, struggling, heterogenous nations in Southeast Asia, not merely of singular economic achievement, but also of the eminent viability of a free, open, sane, and equal multiracial democracy, worthy at once of economic, political, and moral emulation.<br /><br />As things are, one can only wonder how much longer successful economic performance and a loutish political style can sleep together in the same bed. While one dreams of electronic paradises to come, the other enacts, in political nightmares, vengeful vendettas against foes real or imaginary, mostly the latter. Alas, both must perish in fatal embrace, on the same bed.Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-44191256796090939752009-05-11T18:32:00.001+02:002009-06-03T10:34:56.419+02:00Against Uncritical Pragmatism by Kenneth Paul Tan<strong><u><em><a href="http://forum.brightsparks.com.sg/showthread.php?p=16744">Against Uncritical Pragmatism: Education for Doers Who Can Think and Thinkers Who Can Do</a></em></u></strong><br /><strong><em>By Kenneth Paul Tan</em></strong><br /><strong>Delivered at the Outstanding Educator Award Public Lecture, at the National University of Singapore, on 28 April 2009</strong><br /><br />Pragmatism is today celebrated around the world as a virtue of contemporary decision-making. The ability to adapt to changing circumstances, to focus on achieving results, and to compare options using cost-benefit analysis is highly valued over inflexible obedience to totalizing dogma and stubborn habits. In public administration, pragmatism is opposed to the worst forms of bureaucracy. In politics, closed-mindedness, extremism, and fundamentalism are mitigated by various moderate ‘third way’ approaches that deconstruct competing ideologies like liberalism, capitalism, and socialism in order to eclectically combine their best aspects, leaving behind the unhelpful, irrelevant, and harmful fragments.<br /><br />In Singapore, pragmatism is held up as a pillar of governance and a cultural reason for the nation’s widely acknowledged success, achieved, it is commonly argued, through policies whose overriding objective is to ensure continuous economic growth. The right thing to do in order to achieve this continuous economic growth will depend on the context and is, in fact, whatever works best in that context at that point of time. For instance, when the government needed to strengthen its moral authority, it adamantly refused to allow casinos to operate in Singapore. But when it became clear that a flagging tourism sector needed a boost, the government abandoned its more moralistic language for a hard economic justification for building not one but two casinos in global-city Singapore.<br /><br />The pragmatist seizes opportunities and manoeuvres nimbly around threats, so focused on finding technical solutions for achieving the overriding goals that these goals practically disappear beyond the horizon of critical consciousness. Few Singaporeans would ever think to question the goal of continuous economic growth as the ultimate goal that makes all others possible. Pragmatism, initially an open-minded attitude, can therefore degenerate easily into an uncritical focus on technical mastery directed solely towards the achievement of a narrow and limited set of human aspirations, obscured and shielded from philosophical reflection, moral reasoning, and critique. Ironically, uncritical pragmatism can become a new dogma.<br /><br />The focus on ‘how to’ without thinking about ‘why’ encourages an ‘anything goes’ attitude that disregards the larger implications of one’s choices and actions. That humanity has been so successful at developing the technical means to control nature and satisfy an expanding set of human needs is testament to its remarkable creativity and drive. Yet, this narrow focus on technical mastery has endangered the very habitat that humanity needs to survive. And it is the same drive for technical domination, fuelled by indiscriminate prospects for profit-making, that has enabled people to control other people in a deeply inequitable global market that overproduces things while turning to the lucrative business of advertising and branding to convince consumers that they really need to consume more, and therefore have to work harder, obtain loans, and invest their earnings to be able to afford it. Today, we have some agreement on the dangers of this logic as the world embraces the now-fashionable language of sustainability and contemplates the serious economic crisis that it finds itself in. But is this too little, too late?<br /><br />To prevent pragmatism from degenerating into yet another dogma that shoves into the blind spot the larger and less tangible consequences of our actions, we need to ensure that pragmatic decision-making must happen not in an intellectual vacuum. Pragmatists must not act in ignorance, but be deeply informed by a rationality that can expand beyond the narrowly technical and into the moral-political and the aesthetic. This will require a critical understanding of the significant ideas and values that have shaped the world.<br /><br />I want to argue that universities play an important role in preventing pragmatism from degenerating into a short-term and self-destructive obsession with technique and profit. More than a role, it is a responsibility.<br /><br />But universities today are vulnerable to the very same reductive pressures against which it must protect culture and knowledge. Can universities genuinely exceed the limited and limiting expectation that they must, first and foremost, serve the purpose of economic growth? Furthermore, it is not easy for a neoliberal university to maintain genuine autonomy in a world where universities compete fiercely in a global market for talent and resources. In this context, success can so easily degenerate into an uncritically pragmatic question of technique, with universities devoting their efforts and resources towards mastering the techniques for scoring top marks in the international ranking exercises. Thankfully, many universities have been able to play the game without too much losing sight of their larger and nobler educational purpose. But there is tension and the balance may not always hold positively when it is most needed.<br /><br />Traditionally, universities are perceived as spaces that provide a temporary life of contemplation in preparation for a ‘real’ life of action in the world: The use of the word ‘commencement’ to describe graduation ceremonies reflects some of this thinking. The pejorative reference to universities as ivory towers is a clear sign that this traditional model is inadequate. Thinking and doing must not be artificially separated and associated with student life and work life respectively, with the former subordinated to the apparent needs of the latter. The university experience should not be reduced to a stage in life that one has to put up with in order to obtain the right qualifications to get ahead in real life. Universities must graduate people who are more than excellent technical problem-solvers with little capacity for moral reasoning, critical thinking, and the imagination of alternative realms of possibility. Doers must also be thinkers; and, for higher education to be able to facilitate this, thinkers should also be doers.<br /><br />What we need is an educational approach that opposes uncritical pragmatism. Whatever the discipline or subject, curriculum and pedagogy can be designed to build not only technical competency, but also capacity for philosophically informed critical thinking, a vital skill and habit for today’s leadership in the public, private, and people sectors. I know that many of my NUS colleagues are driven by a similar ethic and are very experienced and successful at performing their vocation according to these values. I would like now to share from my own practice some examples of how I have attempted to break down the boundaries that separate thinking and doing. I will focus on the setting of assignments and examinations, the design of classroom activity, and the bridging of classroom and world.<br /><br /><strong>Dialogue-Writing</strong><br /><br />The ‘dialogue’ is an assignment I devised for the University Scholars Programme module called Democratic Possibilities in Singapore. Student teams were assigned to topics such as fear, multiculturalism, meritocracy, pragmatism, and globalization, and asked to look for one or two news articles with a theme that related strongly to their assigned topic. They then wrote dialogues surrounding the central issues in these news article, spoken by fictitious characters who took distinct theoretical and philosophical positions such as liberalism, communitarianism, Marxism, and feminism. Finally, the students performed scenes from their dialogues – some even made short films based on the dialogues – and led the entire class in a discussion of the main ideas and issues, the theoretical and philosophical applications, and the moral-aesthetic dimensions of politics and democracy. To encourage active, out-of-the-box thinking during these seminars, the students themselves designed experiential activities, in some cases very elaborately executed.<br /><br />Imaginatively entering into the worldview of each character, the students were expected to ensure that their characters engaged with one another in an effort to resolve their differences or at least to clarify them. Through this collective writing exercise that called for creative engagement of the abstract and the concrete, the students quickly learnt to identify clearly the commonalities and fundamental differences among these important theories and philosophical traditions that have shaped the world, and that continue to be embedded – sometimes unnoticed – in our contemporary institutions and practices. The collective writing experience, as frustrating as it often turned out to be, made students appreciate what was at stake in negotiating their differences.<br /><br />In designing this exercise, I had also hoped that the dialogues themselves could serve as academic and democratic models of civility amid fundamental differences in ideals and values. The process of writing the dialogues followed by their open discussion in class would help develop skills for real-life discussions and negotiations, rehearsing for future action in a complex world that is diverse and multicultural, yet profoundly interdependent even at the most global levels. Students learn that in such a world, we do not have to give up our ideals and convictions, but we should first listen to what others are saying (or not saying), then understand why they believe the things that they do, and then appreciate what is at stake if they were to abandon or compromise these beliefs. Only then can our own ideals be nuanced and strengthened not by dogmatic insistence, but by critical engagement with others and oneself.<br /><br />Focusing only on the instrumental value of ideas and ideals, an uncritical pragmatist might suggest that we should forget about historical, foundational, and embedded reasons and motivations. But these reasons and motivations become the 800-pound gorilla in the room that prevents deep understanding amid an unavoidable diversity and threatens to wreck any superficial success at forging collective agreements and agendas.<br /><br /><strong>24-Hour Take-Away Exam</strong><br /><br />24-hour take-away exams are a useful way to develop a student’s ability to handle intellectually challenging tasks within a realistic and less stressful time constraint. They also allow, in fact demand, more original, unexpected, and sophisticated questions to be set that require students to apply and critique what they have learnt rather than regurgitate this material as a demonstration of their short-term memory. Such questions call for deep understanding of concepts and analytical tools, and sufficient imagination to look beyond issues and contexts discussed in class. The 24-hour exam gives students the opportunity to produce good quality responses that demonstrate their capabilities, while retaining the important element of working under pressure, but doing this in a more realistic setting than a 2-hour closed-book exam.<br /><br />In 2002, the examination questions for the Democratic Possibilities in Singapore module referred to an actual advertisement of a commercial slimming and beauty centre graphically promoting its bust enhancement treatments. In the first question, the student had to play the role of a neo-Marxist feminist and, from that position, write a tightly argued letter to the newspaper’s forum page. In the second question, the student had to play another role, as a feminist with a different theoretical position – for example, a liberal feminist – and, from that position, write a letter to the forum page that engaged in debate with the neo-Marxist feminist’s arguments. In the third question, the student had to play a third role, as government advisor and, from that position, formulate recommendations for responding to a public outcry against this sort of advertising deemed to be exploitative, obscene, and inconsistent with Singapore’s ‘Asian values’. By setting up these hypothetical situations and roles that students could relate to, I was able to test them on the depth of their knowledge of Marxism, liberalism, feminism, and communitarianism, all in an action-oriented approach.<br /><br /><strong>Case Studies and Role Play<br /></strong><br />For the module State-Society Relations in Singapore, which I taught at the LKY School, I developed a classroom activity that combined a case study approach with role play. At the start of semester, student teams were tasked to write factual case studies on a range of suggested topics such as the casino debates in global-city Singapore. In the second half of the semester, once the theoretical material had been discussed, seminars were dedicated to ‘working through’ each of these case studies. Having carefully studied the cases ahead of class, students would role-play scenarios carefully designed to foreground difficult moments of decision-making as well as raise problems that arise from the collision of theory and practice. For public policy students, these role-play scenarios were useful in setting up open- ended situations that allowed theory and concepts to be ‘experienced’ and problematized. They were also an opportunity to practise or rehearse the kind of real-life functions that political leaders and public managers often do perform.<br /><br />For instance, the team that wrote a case on the casino debates were asked to imagine that they were corporate communications executives in various relevant ministries who, in 2004, were tasked to brainstorm ideas in order to produce an outline for a comprehensive press statement by the Minister for Trade and Industry announcing the government’s decision to go ahead with the integrated resorts proposal. They were also asked to cooperate on drafting some talking points in anticipation of questions from the press and other stakeholders who may be present at the press conference.<br /><br />Through this exercise, students used research skills (library work and interviews mainly) to write the case studies. They engaged with the more conceptual material introduced in class to frame the empirical data so that key learning points would come to the foreground. And, through role play, they actively experienced the situations, dilemmas, and challenges of working and negotiating with one another in a scenario that may in fact serve as a rehearsal for real life.<br /><br /><strong>Service-Learning </strong><br /><strong><br /></strong>My efforts to develop service-learning at NUS are, perhaps, the most elaborate example of how I have attempted to connect the classroom with society. Service-learning is a two-way process through which students can learn how to deal with the many complications of connecting theory and practice. Through attachments and projects designed to enable critical engagement with society, students can enrich their classroom learning and actually experience for themselves how ideas, values, debates, and contradictions play out in social and political life. Through classroom learning, students acquire different analytical lenses for making sense of a complex reality, learning how to make judgements and decisions within such complexity. This two-way process, which rarely happens without design, instantly transforms students into social agents and empowers them in profound and often unpredictable ways.<br /><br />Civil Society: Theory and Practice was an advanced module mounted by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences for the University Scholars Programme. In this module, students were required to dialectically engage the experiences they gained on semester-long practical attachments to civil society organizations with theoretical and comparative case study materials discussed in class. The attachments provided students with the opportunity to work with organizations in the identification of real community needs and the co-execution of projects through which these needs could be authentically and realistically addressed. A central question was ‘How do we make sense from diverse and often incompatible sources of and approaches to knowledge on the one hand, and experiences gained from practical exposure on the other hand?’ Writing assignments and closing seminar sessions were designed to provoke sustained critical reflection on their experiences and theoretical knowledge.<br /><br />Over 10 weeks, students gained some first-hand experience of the life of civil society organizations, including the more mundane aspects of their work. Partner organizations have included Action for AIDS, AWARE, Consumer Association of Singapore, Nature Society (Singapore), Rainbow Centre, Singapore Heritage Society, Singapore International Foundation, Teen Challenge Singapore, The Necessary Stage, Theatre Works, and Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2). In their closing seminars, students devised various creative means of conveying the significance of their attachment experiences and what they made of the often contradictory, or at least untidy, relationships between theory and practice.<br /><br /><strong>Conclusion</strong><br /><br />Today, I have argued that pragmatism can serve us well in a diverse, multicultural, and globalized world. I have also argued that pragmatism can easily degenerate into an unthinking mindset, more dogmatic than any ideology it pretends to distance itself from. Uncritical pragmatism engenders the doer who will not think beyond the most narrowly technical and profitable; the doer who is incapable of moral reasoning, critical thinking, creativity, and imagination; the doer who despises such things as naïve, time-wasting, or troublesome. The doer-who-will-not-think engenders and imprisons in a stereotypical ivory tower its opposite, the thinker-who-will-not-do. I have argued that universities must, now more than ever, break down these barriers between thinking and doing. They must resist the temptation to appear superficially practical and useful to the powerful doers-who-will-not- think, if this will mean compromising their mission to educate people more holistically so that they will have the philosophical capacity, the moral courage, and the imaginative vision to understand what it really means to be in the service of humanity.Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-12123232632834478732009-04-07T16:30:00.005+02:002009-04-07T17:46:08.172+02:00Miao offers dating adviceI've made a preposterous decision to dispense my own dating advice as a follow-up to <a href="http://non-compos-mentis.blogspot.com/2009/04/im-not-70-years-old-thank-you-very-much.html">my previous post</a>. Naturally I'm not as well-versed as Dr Philanderer in the intricacies of romance or in the complexities of the power play between males and females, and neither am I knowledgeable when it comes to the gender-specific expectations that members of each sex harbour towards their potential love interests (and I tend to consign such expectations to the rubbish bin), but I think general maxims - rather than tiresome instructions on whether a female should blow air on her cup of hot tea - work best most of the time, because chances are that you won't get overly self-conscious or unnatural from all the clumsy attempts to remember those irritating nitty-gritty rules.<br /><br />(By the way, yesterday I showed Dr Philanderer's latest article to The Likeable Creature, and he said, "I won't notice things like whether you are blowing on your tea unless you really bore me!")<br /><br />Whenever I read Dr Philanderer's writings, I am always struck by how he is teaching people to be pretentious. Perhaps I sound very naïve (probably due to my under-exposure to the dating scene - which, if Dr Philanderer's descriptions are reliable, certainly appears to be very superficial), but I seriously think dating is not and should not be about maintaining a facade or performing in a circus. If you are looking for a stable, healthy and lasting relationship, engaging in a masquerade is not going to accomplish much. If I need to learn how to brush my hair in a particular manner before I can find a suitable partner, then I'd rather be left on the shelf than be with someone who has an obsession with cosmetic details.<br /><br />I am aware that it is important to leave a good impression; but why would I want to date someone who likes me only because I conform to certain conventions, because I follow orthodoxies? Why would anyone want a romantic relationship which is supported by a weak edifice of artificiality? Why would you want to carry the burden of always having to defer to traditional stereotypical conceptions that people have of you by virtue of your gender (or your skin colour, your age, etc.)?<br /><br />If you want my opinion, I think everything can actually be very simple (though perhaps I'll be disillusioned once I become more acquainted with the dating scene). You can pare things down to just a few friendly maxims; they don't have to be so complicated. Now, please brace yourself for some hackneyed words of 'wisdom', coming from yours truly:<br /><br />If you want to appear totally awesome in front of someone for whom you have non-platonic feelings, then just strive to be awesome at all times. If you want to be able to engage in meaningful and intelligent conversations, then just cultivate a habit to read more, watch more news and documentaries, ask more meaningful questions and learn more. If you want to show how attuned and sensitive you are to artistic endeavours and perspectives, then just open your eyes wider and try to seek beauty in all the corners of your everyday life. If you want to establish yourself as a connoisseur of the good things in life, it would be ideal to start being more appreciative of the little luxuries you enjoy. If you want to portray yourself as a thoughtful and patient person, then just keep reminding yourself to distribute more kindness to others whenever possible, and to be more empathetic towards other people's suffering. If you want to exuberate confidence, then just try your very best to develop the courage to stand up for your own principles when necessary, and to have more self-esteem. In daily life you should always aim for perfection, so that you don't have to go through any charade when you are hanging out with someone in whom you are interested.<br /><br />Being intellectual isn't about going to great lengths to find out the other party's areas of interest and then to read up furiously on the relevant subjects so that you can regurgitate everything during your conservations. Being artistic isn't about memorising all the names of famous artists and masterpieces without being able to be sincerely moved by the ingenuity and emotions that went into the creative processes involved in crafting these works. Being caring isn't about being chivalrous, and neither is being polite about dining in a certain fashion. Being confident isn't about employing your diaphragm when speaking, or about moving in a deliberately slow and smooth motion. Being attractive isn't about following hard-and-fast rules. Falling in love isn't about losing your own individuality; it is about being accepted for who you are, it is about being a better person for your partner. (Yes, I sound so clichéd, I know.)<br /><br />If you think I make more sense than Dr Philanderer, then just keep these in mind: 1) Extend your efforts to be brilliant to every single part of your life, such that you eventually internalise all these amazing qualities, such that they naturally come to form your character; and 2) don't try too hard to impress, because it is revolting.Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-32040644676281578552009-04-04T15:38:00.003+02:002009-04-06T20:47:48.304+02:00Martin A. Schwartz's The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research<strong>Published in the <em>Journal of Cell Science</em>, 121: 1771 (2008)</strong><br /><br />I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.<br /><br />I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn't know what to do without that feeling. I even think it's supposed to be this way. Let me explain.<br /><br />For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it. That can't be the only reason - fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.<br /><br />A Ph.D., in which you have to do a research project, is a whole different thing. For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred? My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn't know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn't have the answer, nobody did.<br /><br />That's when it hit me: nobody did. That's why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn't really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn't know wasn't merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.<br /><br />I'd like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don't think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is to do important research. It's a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don't know what we're doing. We can't be sure whether we're asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. Admittedly, science is made harder by competition for grants and space in top journals. But apart from all of that, doing significant research is intrinsically hard and changing departmental, institutional or national policies will not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty.<br /><br />Second, we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid - that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. I'm not talking about 'relative stupidity', in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don't. I'm also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don't match their talents. Science involves confronting our 'absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, 'I don't know'. The point of the exam isn't to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it's the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student's weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student's knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project.<br /><br />Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-47173832082419472032009-03-09T08:30:00.005+01:002009-03-09T12:13:27.525+01:00Why Chinese is So Damn Hard by David Moser<a href="http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html"><strong><em><u>Why Chinese is So Damn Hard</u></em></strong></a><br /><strong><em>by David Moser </em></strong><br /><strong><em>University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies</em></strong><br /><br />The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title of this essay is, "Hard for whom?" A reasonable question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine. When little Chinese kids go through the "terrible twos", it's Chinese they use to drive their parents crazy, and in a few years the same kids are actually using those impossibly complicated Chinese characters to scribble love notes and shopping lists. So what do I mean by "hard"? Since I know at the outset that the whole tone of this document is going to involve a lot of whining and complaining, I may as well come right out and say exactly what I mean. I mean hard for me, a native English speaker trying to learn Chinese as an adult, going through the whole process with the textbooks, the tapes, the conversation partners, etc., the whole torturous rigmarole. I mean hard for me -- and, of course, for the many other Westerners who have spent years of their lives bashing their heads against the Great Wall of Chinese.<br /><br />If this were as far as I went, my statement would be a pretty empty one. Of course Chinese is hard for me. After all, any foreign language is hard for a non-native, right? Well, sort of. Not all foreign languages are equally difficult for any learner. It depends on which language you're coming from. A French person can usually learn Italian faster than an American, and an average American could probably master German a lot faster than an average Japanese, and so on. So part of what I'm contending is that Chinese is hard compared to ... well, compared to almost any other language you might care to tackle. What I mean is that Chinese is not only hard for us (English speakers), but it's also hard in absolute terms. Which means that Chinese is also hard for them, for Chinese people.<sup>1</sup><br /><br />If you don't believe this, just ask a Chinese person. Most Chinese people will cheerfully acknowledge that their language is hard, maybe the hardest on earth. (Many are even proud of this, in the same way some New Yorkers are actually proud of living in the most unlivable city in America.) Maybe all Chinese people deserve a medal just for being born Chinese. At any rate, they generally become aware at some point of the Everest-like status of their native language, as they, from their privileged vantage point on the summit, observe foolhardy foreigners huffing and puffing up the steep slopes.<br /><br />Everyone's heard the supposed fact that if you take the English idiom "It's Greek to me" and search for equivalent idioms in all the world's languages to arrive at a consensus as to which language is the hardest, the results of such a linguistic survey is that Chinese easily wins as the canonical incomprehensible language. (For example, the French have the expression "C'est du chinois", "It's Chinese", i.e., "It's incomprehensible". Other languages have similar sayings.) So then the question arises: What do the Chinese themselves consider to be an impossibly hard language? You then look for the corresponding phrase in Chinese, and you find Gēn tiānshū yíyàng 跟天书一样 meaning "It's like heavenly script."<br /><br />There is truth in this linguistic yarn; Chinese does deserve its reputation for heartbreaking difficulty. Those who undertake to study the language for any other reason than the sheer joy of it will always be frustrated by the abysmal ratio of effort to effect. Those who are actually attracted to the language precisely because of its daunting complexity and difficulty will never be disappointed. Whatever the reason they started, every single person who has undertaken to study Chinese sooner or later asks themselves "Why in the world am I doing this?" Those who can still remember their original goals will wisely abandon the attempt then and there, since nothing could be worth all that tedious struggle. Those who merely say "I've come this far -- I can't stop now" will have some chance of succeeding, since they have the kind of mindless doggedness and lack of sensible overall perspective that it takes.<br /><br />Okay, having explained a bit of what I mean by the word, I return to my original question: Why is Chinese so damn hard?<br /><br /><em>1. Because the writing system is ridiculous.</em><br /><br />Beautiful, complex, mysterious -- but ridiculous. I, like many students of Chinese, was first attracted to Chinese because of the writing system, which is surely one of the most fascinating scripts in the world. The more you learn about Chinese characters the more intriguing and addicting they become. The study of Chinese characters can become a lifelong obsession, and you soon find yourself engaged in the daily task of accumulating them, drop by drop from the vast sea of characters, in a vain attempt to hoard them in the leaky bucket of long-term memory.<br /><br />The beauty of the characters is indisputable, but as the Chinese people began to realize the importance of universal literacy, it became clear that these ideograms were sort of like bound feet -- some fetishists may have liked the way they looked, but they weren't too practical for daily use.<br /><br />For one thing, it is simply unreasonably hard to learn enough characters to become functionally literate. Again, someone may ask "Hard in comparison to what?" And the answer is easy: Hard in comparison to Spanish, Greek, Russian, Hindi, or any other sane, "normal" language that requires at most a few dozen symbols to write anything in the language. John DeFrancis, in his book <em>The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy</em>, reports that his Chinese colleagues estimate it takes seven to eight years for a Mandarin speaker to learn to read and write three thousand characters, whereas his French and Spanish colleagues estimate that students in their respective countries achieve comparable levels in half that time.<sup>2</sup> Naturally, this estimate is rather crude and impressionistic (it's unclear what "comparable levels" means here), but the overall implications are obvious: the Chinese writing system is harder to learn, in absolute terms, than an alphabetic writing system.<sup>3</sup> Even Chinese kids, whose minds are at their peak absorptive power, have more trouble with Chinese characters than their little counterparts in other countries have with their respective scripts. Just imagine the difficulties experienced by relatively sluggish post-pubescent foreign learners such as myself.<br /><br />Everyone has heard that Chinese is hard because of the huge number of characters one has to learn, and this is absolutely true. There are a lot of popular books and articles that downplay this difficulty, saying things like "Despite the fact that Chinese has [10,000, 25,000, 50,000, take your pick] separate characters you really only need 2,000 or so to read a newspaper". Poppycock. I couldn't comfortably read a newspaper when I had 2,000 characters under my belt. I often had to look up several characters per line, and even after that I had trouble pulling the meaning out of the article. (I take it as a given that what is meant by "read" in this context is "read and basically comprehend the text without having to look up dozens of characters"; otherwise the claim is rather empty.)<br /><br />This fairy tale is promulgated because of the fact that, when you look at the character frequencies, over 95% of the characters in any newspaper are easily among the first 2,000 most common ones.<sup>4</sup> But what such accounts don't tell you is that there will still be plenty of unfamiliar words made up of those familiar characters. (To illustrate this problem, note that in English, knowing the words "up" and "tight" doesn't mean you know the word "uptight".) Plus, as anyone who has studied any language knows, you can often be familiar with every single word in a text and still not be able to grasp the meaning. Reading comprehension is not simply a matter of knowing a lot of words; one has to get a feeling for how those words combine with other words in a multitude of different contexts.<sup>5</sup> In addition, there is the obvious fact that even though you may know 95% of the characters in a given text, the remaining 5% are often the very characters that are crucial for understanding the main point of the text. A non-native speaker of English reading an article with the headline "JACUZZIS FOUND EFFECTIVE IN TREATING PHLEBITIS" is not going to get very far if they don't know the words "jacuzzi" or "phlebitis".<br /><br />The problem of reading is often a touchy one for those in the China field. How many of us would dare stand up in front of a group of colleagues and read a randomly-selected passage out loud? Yet inferiority complexes or fear of losing face causes many teachers and students to become unwitting cooperators in a kind of conspiracy of silence wherein everyone pretends that after four years of Chinese the diligent student should be whizzing through anything from Confucius to Lu Xun, pausing only occasionally to look up some pesky low-frequency character (in their Chinese-Chinese dictionary, of course). Others, of course, are more honest about the difficulties. The other day one of my fellow graduate students, someone who has been studying Chinese for ten years or more, said to me "My research is really hampered by the fact that I still just can't read Chinese. It takes me hours to get through two or three pages, and I can't skim to save my life." This would be an astonishing admission for a tenth-year student of, say, French literature, yet it is a comment I hear all the time among my peers (at least in those unguarded moments when one has had a few too many Tsingtao beers and has begun to lament how slowly work on the thesis is coming).<br /><br />A teacher of mine once told me of a game he and a colleague would sometimes play: The contest involved pulling a book at random from the shelves of the Chinese section of the Asia Library and then seeing who could be the first to figure out what the book was about. Anyone who has spent time working in an East Asia collection can verify that this can indeed be a difficult enough task -- never mind reading the book in question. This state of affairs is very disheartening for the student who is impatient to begin feasting on the vast riches of Chinese literature, but must subsist on a bland diet of canned handouts, textbook examples, and carefully edited appetizers for the first few years.<br /><br />The comparison with learning the usual western languages is striking. After about a year of studying French, I was able to read a lot. I went through the usual kinds of novels -- <em>La nausée</em> by Sartre, Voltaire's <em>Candide</em>, <em>L'étranger</em> by Camus -- plus countless newspapers, magazines, comic books, etc. It was a lot of work but fairly painless; all I really needed was a good dictionary and a battered French grammar book I got at a garage sale.<br /><br />This kind of "sink or swim" approach just doesn't work in Chinese. At the end of three years of learning Chinese, I hadn't yet read a single complete novel. I found it just too hard, impossibly slow, and unrewarding. Newspapers, too, were still too daunting. I couldn't read an article without looking up about every tenth character, and it was not uncommon for me to scan the front page of the People's Daily and not be able to completely decipher a single headline. Someone at that time suggested I read The Dream of the Red Chamber and gave me a nice three-volume edition. I just have to laugh. It still sits on my shelf like a fat, smug Buddha, only the first twenty or so pages filled with scribbled definitions and question marks, the rest crisp and virgin. After six years of studying Chinese, I'm still not at a level where I can actually read it without an English translation to consult. (By "read it", I mean, of course, "read it for pleasure". I suppose if someone put a gun to my head and a dictionary in my hand, I could get through it.) Simply diving into the vast pool of Chinese in the beginning is not only foolhardy, it can even be counterproductive. As George Kennedy writes, "The difficulty of memorizing a Chinese ideograph as compared with the difficulty of learning a new word in a European language, is such that a rigid economy of mental effort is imperative."<sup>6</sup> This is, if anything, an understatement. With the risk of drowning so great, the student is better advised to spend more time in the shallow end treading water before heading toward the deep end.<br /><br />As if all this weren't bad enough, another ridiculous aspect of the Chinese writing system is that there are two (mercifully overlapping) sets of characters: the traditional characters still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and the simplified characters adopted by the People's Republic of China in the late 1950's and early 60's. Any foreign student of Chinese is more or less forced to become familiar with both sets, since they are routinely exposed to textbooks and materials from both Chinas. This linguistic camel's-back-breaking straw puts an absurd burden on the already absurdly burdened student of Chinese, who at this point would gladly trade places with Sisyphus. But since Chinese people themselves are never equally proficient in both simplified and complex characters, there is absolutely no shame whatsoever in eventually concentrating on one set to the partial exclusion the other. In fact, there is absolutely no shame in giving up Chinese altogether, when you come right down to it.<br /><br /><em>2. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet.</em><br /><br />To further explain why the Chinese writing system is so hard in this respect, it might be a good idea to spell out (no pun intended) why that of English is so easy. Imagine the kind of task faced by the average Chinese adult who decides to study English. What skills are needed to master the writing system? That's easy: 26 letters. (In upper and lower case, of course, plus script and a few variant forms. And throw in some quote marks, apostrophes, dashes, parentheses, etc. -- all things the Chinese use in their own writing system.) And how are these letters written? From left to right, horizontally, across the page, with spaces to indicate word boundaries. Forgetting for a moment the problem of spelling and actually making words out of these letters, how long does it take this Chinese learner of English to master the various components of the English writing system? Maybe a day or two.<br /><br />Now consider the American undergraduate who decides to study Chinese. What does it take for this person to master the Chinese writing system? There is nothing that corresponds to an alphabet, though there are recurring components that make up the characters. How many such components are there? Don't ask. As with all such questions about Chinese, the answer is very messy and unsatisfying. It depends on how you define "component" (strokes? radicals?), plus a lot of other tedious details. Suffice it to say, the number is quite large, vastly more than the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet. And how are these components combined to form characters? Well, you name it -- components to the left of other components, to the right of other components, on top of other components, surrounding other components, inside of other components -- almost anything is possible. And in the process of making these spatial accommodations, these components get flattened, stretched, squashed, shortened, and distorted in order to fit in the uniform square space that all characters are supposed to fit into. In other words, the components of Chinese characters are arrayed in two dimensions, rather than in the neat one-dimensional rows of alphabetic writing.<br /><br />Okay, so ignoring for the moment the question of elegance, how long does it take a Westerner to learn the Chinese writing system so that when confronted with any new character they at least know how to move the pen around in order to produce a reasonable facsimile of that character? Again, hard to say, but I would estimate that it takes the average learner several months of hard work to get the basics down. Maybe a year or more if they're a klutz who was never very good in art class. Meanwhile, their Chinese counterpart learning English has zoomed ahead to learn cursive script, with time left over to read <em>Moby Dick</em>, or at least Strunk & White.<br /><br />This is not exactly big news, I know; the alphabet really is a breeze to learn. Chinese people I know who have studied English for a few years can usually write with a handwriting style that is almost indistinguishable from that of the average American. Very few Americans, on the other hand, ever learn to produce a natural calligraphic hand in Chinese that resembles anything but that of an awkward Chinese third-grader. If there were nothing else hard about Chinese, the task of learning to write characters alone would put it in the rogues' gallery of hard-to-learn languages.<br /><br /><em>3. Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic.</em><br /><br />So much for the physical process of writing the characters themselves. What about the sheer task of memorizing so many characters? Again, a comparison of English and Chinese is instructive. Suppose a Chinese person has just the previous day learned the English word "president", and now wants to write it from memory. How to start? Anyone with a year or two of English experience is going to have a host of clues and spelling rules-of-thumb, albeit imperfect ones, to help them along. The word really couldn't start with anything but "pr", and after that a little guesswork aided by visual memory ("Could a 'z' be in there? That's an unusual letter, I would have noticed it, I think. Must be an 's'...") should produce something close to the target. Not every foreigner (or native speaker for that matter) has noted or internalized the various flawed spelling heuristics of English, of course, but they are at least there to be utilized.<br /><br />Now imagine that you, a learner of Chinese, have just the previous day encountered the Chinese word for "president" (总统 zǒngtǒng ) and want to write it. What processes do you go through in retrieving the word? Well, very often you just totally forget, with a forgetting that is both absolute and perfect in a way few things in this life are. You can repeat the word as often as you like; the sound won't give you a clue as to how the character is to be written. After you learn a few more characters and get hip to a few more phonetic components, you can do a bit better. ("Zǒng 总 is a phonetic component in some other character, right?...Song? Zeng? Oh yeah, cong 总 as in cōngmíng 聪明.") Of course, the phonetic aspect of some characters is more obvious than that of others, but many characters, including some of the most high-frequency ones, give no clue at all as to their pronunciation.<br /><br />All of this is to say that Chinese is just not very phonetic when compared to English. (English, in turn, is less phonetic than a language like German or Spanish, but Chinese isn't even in the same ballpark.) It is not true, as some people outside the field tend to think, that Chinese is not phonetic at all, though a perfectly intelligent beginning student could go several months without noticing this fact. Just how phonetic the language is a very complex issue. Educated opinions range from 25% (Zhao Yuanren)<sup>7</sup> to around 66% (DeFrancis),<sup>8</sup> though the latter estimate assumes more knowledge of phonetic components than most learners are likely to have. One could say that Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic: technically so, but in practical use not the most salient thing about it. Furthermore, this phonetic aspect of the language doesn't really become very useful until you've learned a few hundred characters, and even when you've learned two thousand, the feeble phoneticity of Chinese will never provide you with the constant memory prod that the phonetic quality of English does.<br /><br />Which means that often you just completely forget how to write a character. Period. If there is no obvious semantic clue in the radical, and no helpful phonetic component somewhere in the character, you're just sunk. And you're sunk whether your native language is Chinese or not; contrary to popular myth, Chinese people are not born with the ability to memorize arbitrary squiggles. In fact, one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some relatively common word. You feel an enormous sense of vindication and relief to see a native speaker experience the exact same difficulty you experience every day.<br /><br />This is such a gratifying experience, in fact, that I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. English is simply orders of magnitude easier to write and remember. No matter how low-frequency the word is, or how unorthodox the spelling, the English speaker can always come up with something, simply because there has to be some correspondence between sound and spelling. One might forget whether "abracadabra" is hyphenated or not, or get the last few letters wrong on "rhinoceros", but even the poorest of spellers can make a reasonable stab at almost anything. By contrast, often even the most well-educated Chinese have no recourse but to throw up their hands and ask someone else in the room how to write some particularly elusive character.<br /><br />As one mundane example of the advantages of a phonetic writing system, here is one kind of linguistic situation I encountered constantly while I was in France. (Again I use French as my canonical example of an "easy" foreign language.) I wake up one morning in Paris and turn on the radio. An ad comes on, and I hear the word "amortisseur" several times. "What's an amortisseur?" I think to myself, but as I am in a hurry to make an appointment, I forget to look the word up in my haste to leave the apartment. A few hours later I'm walking down the street, and I read, on a sign, the word "AMORTISSEUR" -- the word I heard earlier this morning. Beneath the word on the sign is a picture of a shock absorber. Aha! So "amortisseur" means "shock absorber". And voila! I've learned a new word, quickly and painlessly, all because the sound I construct when reading the word is the same as the sound in my head from the radio this morning -- one reinforces the other. Throughout the next week I see the word again several times, and each time I can reconstruct the sound by simply reading the word phonetically -- "a-mor-tis-seur". Before long I can retrieve the word easily, use it in conversation, or write it in a letter to a friend. And the process of learning a foreign language begins to seem less daunting.<br /><br />When I first went to Taiwan for a few months, the situation was quite different. I was awash in a sea of characters that were all visually interesting but phonetically mute. I carried around a little dictionary to look up unfamiliar characters in, but it's almost impossible to look up a character in a Chinese dictionary while walking along a crowded street (more on dictionary look-up later), and so I didn't get nearly as much phonetic reinforcement as I got in France. In Taiwan I could pass a shop with a sign advertising shock absorbers and never know how to pronounce any of the characters unless I first look them up. And even then, the next time I pass the shop I might have to look the characters up again. And again, and again. The reinforcement does not come naturally and easily.<br /><br /><em>4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates.</em><br /><br />I remember when I had been studying Chinese very hard for about three years, I had an interesting experience. One day I happened to find a Spanish-language newspaper sitting on a seat next to me. I picked it up out of curiosity. "Hmm," I thought to myself. "I've never studied Spanish in my life. I wonder how much of this I can understand." At random I picked a short article about an airplane crash and started to read. I found I could basically glean, with some guesswork, most of the information from the article. The crash took place near Los Angeles. 186 people were killed. There were no survivors. The plane crashed just one minute after take-off. There was nothing on the flight recorder to indicate a critical situation, and the tower was unaware of any emergency. The plane had just been serviced three days before and no mechanical problems had been found. And so on. After finishing the article I had a sudden discouraging realization: Having never studied a day of Spanish, I could read a Spanish newspaper more easily than I could a Chinese newspaper after more than three years of studying Chinese.<br /><br />What was going on here? Why was this "foreign" language so transparent? The reason was obvious: cognates -- those helpful words that are just English words with a little foreign make-up.<sup>9</sup> I could read the article because most of the operative words were basically English: aeropuerto, problema mechanico, un minuto, situacion critica, emergencia, etc. Recognizing these words as just English words in disguise is about as difficult as noticing that Superman is really Clark Kent without his glasses. That these quasi-English words are easier to learn than Chinese characters (which might as well be quasi-Martian) goes without saying.<br /><br />Imagine you are a diabetic, and you find yourself in Spain about to go into insulin shock. You can rush into a doctor's office, and, with a minimum of Spanish and a couple of pieces of guesswork ("diabetes" is just "diabetes" and "insulin" is "insulina", it turns out), you're saved. In China you'd be a goner for sure, unless you happen to have a dictionary with you, and even then you would probably pass out while frantically looking for the first character in the word for insulin. Which brings me to the next reason why Chinese is so hard.<br /><br /><em>5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated.</em><br /><br />One of the most unreasonably difficult things about learning Chinese is that merely learning how to look up a word in the dictionary is about the equivalent of an entire semester of secretarial school. When I was in Taiwan, I heard that they sometimes held dictionary look-up contests in the junior high schools. Imagine a language where simply looking a word up in the dictionary is considered a skill like debate or volleyball! Chinese is not exactly what you would call a user-friendly language, but a Chinese dictionary is positively user-hostile.<br /><br />Figuring out all the radicals and their variants, plus dealing with the ambiguous characters with no obvious radical at all is a stupid, time-consuming chore that slows the learning process down by a factor of ten as compared to other languages with a sensible alphabet or the equivalent. I'd say it took me a good year before I could reliably find in the dictionary any character I might encounter. And to this day, I will very occasionally stumble onto a character that I simply can't find at all, even after ten minutes of searching. At such times I raise my hands to the sky, Job-like, and consider going into telemarketing.<br /><br />Chinese must also be one of the most dictionary-intensive languages on earth. I currently have more than twenty Chinese dictionaries of various kinds on my desk, and they all have a specific and distinct use. There are dictionaries with simplified characters used on the mainland, dictionaries with the traditional characters used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and dictionaries with both. There are dictionaries that use the Wade-Giles romanization, dictionaries that use pinyin, and dictionaries that use other more surrealistic romanization methods. There are dictionaries of classical Chinese particles, dictionaries of Beijing dialect, dictionaries of chéngyǔ (four-character idioms), dictionaries of xiēhòuyǔ (special allegorical two-part sayings), dictionaries of yànyǔ (proverbs), dictionaries of Chinese communist terms, dictionaries of Buddhist terms, reverse dictionaries... on and on. An exhaustive hunt for some elusive or problematic lexical item can leave one's desk "strewn with dictionaries as numerous as dead soldiers on a battlefield."<sup>10</sup><br /><br />For looking up unfamiliar characters there is another method called the four-corner system. This method is very fast -- rumored to be, in principle, about as fast as alphabetic look-up (though I haven't met anyone yet who can hit the winning number each time on the first try). Unfortunately, learning this method takes about as much time and practice as learning the Dewey decimal system. Plus you are then at the mercy of the few dictionaries that are arranged according to the numbering scheme of the four-corner system. Those who have mastered this system usually swear by it. The rest of us just swear.<br /><br />Another problem with looking up words in the dictionary has to do with the nature of written Chinese. In most languages it's pretty obvious where the word boundaries lie -- there are spaces between the words. If you don't know the word in question, it's usually fairly clear what you should look up. (What actually constitutes a word is a very subtle issue, of course, but for my purposes here, what I'm saying is basically correct.) In Chinese there are spaces between characters, but it takes quite a lot of knowledge of the language and often some genuine sleuth work to tell where word boundaries lie; thus it's often trial and error to look up a word. It would be as if English were written thus:<br /><br />FEAR LESS LY OUT SPOKE N BUT SOME WHAT HUMOR LESS NEW ENG LAND BORN LEAD ACT OR GEORGE MICHAEL SON EX PRESS ED OUT RAGE TO DAY AT THE STALE MATE BE TWEEN MAN AGE MENT AND THE ACT OR 'S UNION BE CAUSE THE STAND OFF HAD SET BACK THE TIME TABLE FOR PRO DUC TION OF HIS PLAY, A ONE MAN SHOW CASE THAT WAS HIS FIRST RUN A WAY BROAD WAY BOX OFFICE SMASH HIT. "THE FIRST A MEND MENT IS AT IS SUE" HE PRO CLAIM ED. "FOR A CENS OR OR AN EDIT OR TO EDIT OR OTHER WISE BLUE PENCIL QUESTION ABLE DIA LOG JUST TO KOW TOW TO RIGHT WING BORN AGAIN BIBLE THUMP ING FRUIT CAKE S IS A DOWN RIGHT DIS GRACE."<br /><br />Imagine how this difference would compound the dictionary look-up difficulties of a non-native speaker of English. The passage is pretty trivial for us to understand, but then we already know English. For them it would often be hard to tell where the word boundaries were supposed to be. So it is, too, with someone trying to learn Chinese.<br /><br /><em>6. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen).</em><br /><br />Forget it. Way too difficult. If you think that after three or four years of study you'll be breezing through Confucius and Mencius in the way third-year French students at a comparable level are reading Diderot and Voltaire, you're sadly mistaken. There are some westerners who can comfortably read classical Chinese, but most of them have a lot of gray hair or at least tenure.<br /><br />Unfortunately, classical Chinese pops up everywhere, especially in Chinese paintings and character scrolls, and most people will assume anyone literate in Chinese can read it. It's truly embarrassing to be out at a Chinese restaurant, and someone asks you to translate some characters on a wall hanging.<br /><br />"Hey, you speak Chinese. What does this scroll say?" You look up and see that the characters are written in wenyan, and in incomprehensible "grass-style" calligraphy to boot. It might as well be an EKG readout of a dying heart patient.<br /><br />"Uh, I can make out one or two of the characters, but I couldn't tell you what it says," you stammer. "I think it's about a phoenix or something."<br /><br />"Oh, I thought you knew Chinese," says your friend, returning to their menu. Never mind that an honest-to-goodness Chinese person would also just scratch their head and shrug; the face that is lost is yours.<br /><br />Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here's a secret that sinologists won't tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place. This is because classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway. An uninitiated westerner can no more be expected to understand such writing than Confucius himself, if transported to the present, could understand the entries in the "personal" section of the classified ads that say things like: "Hndsm. SWGM, 24, 160, sks BGM or WGM for gentle S&M, mod. bndg., some lthr., twosm or threesm ok, have own equip., wheels, 988-8752 lv. mssg. on ans. mach., no weirdos please."<br /><br />In fairness, it should be said that classical Chinese gets easier the more you attempt it. But then so does hitting a hole in one, or swimming the English channel in a straitjacket.<br /><br /><em>7. Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck.</em><br /><br />Well, perhaps that's too harsh. But it is true that there are too many of them, and most of them were designed either by committee or by linguists, or -- even worse -- by a committee of linguists. It is, of course, a very tricky task to devise a romanization method; some are better than others, but all involve plenty of counterintuitive spellings.<sup>11</sup> And if you're serious about a career in Chinese, you'll have to grapple with at least four or five of them, not including the bopomofu phonetic symbols used in Taiwan. There are probably a dozen or more romanization schemes out there somewhere, most of them mercifully obscure and rightfully ignored. There is a standing joke among sinologists that one of the first signs of senility in a China scholar is the compulsion to come up with a new romanization method.<br /><br /><em>8. Because tonal languages are weird.</em><br /><br />Okay, that's very Anglo-centric, I know it. But I have to mention this problem because it's one of the most common complaints about learning Chinese, and it's one of the aspects of the language that westerners are notoriously bad at. Every person who tackles Chinese at first has a little trouble believing this aspect of the language. How is it possible that shùxué means "mathematics" while shūxuě means "blood transfusion", or that guòjiǎng means "you flatter me" while guǒjiàng means "fruit paste"?<br /><br />By itself, this property of Chinese would be hard enough; it means that, for us non-native speakers, there is this extra, seemingly irrelevant aspect of the sound of a word that you must memorize along with the vowels and consonants. But where the real difficulty comes in is when you start to really use Chinese to express yourself. You suddenly find yourself straitjacketed -- when you say the sentence with the intonation that feels natural, the tones come out all wrong. For example, if you wish say something like "Hey, that's my water glass you're drinking out of!", and you follow your intonational instincts -- that is, to put a distinct falling tone on the first character of the word for "my" -- you will have said a kind of gibberish that may or may not be understood.<br /><br />Intonation and stress habits are incredibly ingrained and second-nature. With non-tonal languages you can basically import, mutatis mutandis, your habitual ways of emphasizing, negating, stressing, and questioning. The results may be somewhat non-native but usually understandable. Not so with Chinese, where your intonational contours must always obey the tonal constraints of the specific words you've chosen. Chinese speakers, of course, can express all of the intonational subtleties available in non-tonal languages -- it's just that they do it in a way that is somewhat alien to us speakers of non-tonal languages. When you first begin using your Chinese to talk about subjects that actually matter to you, you find that it feels somewhat like trying to have a passionate argument with your hands tied behind your back -- you are suddenly robbed of some vital expressive tools you hadn't even been aware of having.<br /><br /><em>9. Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have only recently met.</em><br /><br />Language and culture cannot be separated, of course, and one of the main reasons Chinese is so difficult for Americans is that our two cultures have been isolated for so long. The reason reading French sentences like "Le président Bush assure le peuple koweitien que le gouvernement américain va continuer à défendre le Koweit contre la menace irakienne," is about as hard as deciphering pig Latin is not just because of the deep Indo-European family resemblance, but also because the core concepts and cultural assumptions in such utterances stem from the same source. We share the same art history, the same music history, the same history history -- which means that in the head of a French person there is basically the same set of archetypes and the same cultural cast of characters that's in an American's head. We are as familiar with Rimbaud as they are with Rambo. In fact, compared to the difference between China and the U.S., American culture and and French culture seem about as different as Peter Pan and Skippy peanut butter.<br /><br />Speaking with a Chinese person is usually a different matter. You just can't drop Dickens, Tarzan, Jack the Ripper, Goethe, or the Beatles into a conversation and always expect to be understood. I once had a Chinese friend who had read the first translations of Kafka into Chinese, yet didn't know who Santa Claus was. China has had extensive contact with the West in the last few decades, but there is still a vast sea of knowledge and ideas that is not shared by both cultures.<br /><br />Similarly, how many Americans other than sinophiles have even a rough idea of the chronology of China's dynasties? Has the average history major here ever heard of Qin Shi Huangdi and his contribution to Chinese culture? How many American music majors have ever heard a note of Peking Opera, or would recognize a pipa if they tripped over one? How many otherwise literate Americans have heard of Lu Xun, Ba Jin, or even Mozi?<br /><br />What this means is that when Americans and Chinese get together, there is often not just a language barrier, but an immense cultural barrier as well. Of course, this is one of the reasons the study of Chinese is so interesting. It is also one of the reasons it is so damn hard.<br /><br /><em>Conclusion</em><br /><br />I could go on and on, but I figure if the reader has bothered to read this far, I'm preaching to the converted, anyway. Those who have tackled other difficult languages have their own litany of horror stories, I'm sure. But I still feel reasonably confident in asserting that, for an average American, Chinese is significantly harder to learn than any of the other thirty or so major world languages that are usually studied formally at the university level (though Japanese in many ways comes close). Not too interesting for linguists, maybe, but something to consider if you've decided to better yourself by learning a foreign language, and you're thinking "Gee, Chinese looks kinda neat."<br /><br />It's pretty hard to quantify a process as complex and multi-faceted as language-learning, but one simple metric is to simply estimate the time it takes to master the requisite language-learning skills. When you consider all the above-mentioned things a learner of Chinese has to acquire -- ability to use a dictionary, familiarity with two or three romanization methods, a grasp of principles involved in writing characters (both simplified and traditional) -- it adds up to an awful lot of down time while one is "learning to learn" Chinese.<br /><br />How much harder is Chinese? Again, I'll use French as my canonical "easy language". This is a very rough and intuitive estimate, but I would say that it takes about three times as long to reach a level of comfortable fluency in speaking, reading, and writing Chinese as it takes to reach a comparable level in French. An average American could probably become reasonably fluent in two Romance languages in the time it would take them to reach the same level in Chinese.<br /><br />One could perhaps view learning languages as being similar to learning musical instruments. Despite the esoteric glories of the harmonica literature, it's probably safe to say that the piano is a lot harder and more time-consuming to learn. To extend the analogy, there is also the fact that we are all virtuosos on at least one "instrument" (namely, our native language), and learning instruments from the same family is easier than embarking on a completely different instrument. A Spanish person learning Portuguese is comparable to a violinist taking up the viola, whereas an American learning Chinese is more like a rock guitarist trying to learn to play an elaborate 30-stop three-manual pipe organ.<br /><br />Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson in humility". I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility.<br /><br />There is still the awe-inspiring fact that Chinese people manage to learn their own language very well. Perhaps they are like the gradeschool kids that Baroque performance groups recruit to sing Bach cantatas. The story goes that someone in the audience, amazed at hearing such youthful cherubs flawlessly singing Bach's uncompromisingly difficult vocal music, asks the choir director, "But how are they able to perform such difficult music?"<br /><br />"Shh -- not so loud!" says the director, "If you don't tell them it's difficult, they never know."<br /><br /><strong><em>Bibliography</em></strong><br /><br />(A longer version of this paper is available through <a href="http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu/">CRCC</a>, Indiana University, 510 N. Fess, Bloomington, IN, 47408.)<br /><br />Chen, Heqin, (1928)"Yutiwen yingyong zihui" [Characters used in vernacular literature], Shanghai.<br /><br />DeFrancis, John (1966) "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese", Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, Vol. 1, No. 1, Feb. 1966, pp. 1-20.<br /><br />DeFrancis, John (1984) <a href="http://www.pinyin.info/readings/chinese_language.html">The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy</a>, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.<br /><br />DeFrancis, John (1989) <a href="http://www.pinyin.info/readings/visible_speech.html">Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems</a>, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.<br /><br />Kennedy, George (1964) "A Minimum Vocabulary in Modern Chinese", in <a href="http://www.pinyin.info/readings/george_kennedy.html">Selected Works of George Kennedy</a>, Tien-yi Li (ed.), New Haven: Far Eastern Publications.<br /><br />Mair, Victor (1986) "The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: A Review Article of Some Recent Dictionaries and Current Lexicographical Projects", <a href="http://www.sino-platonic.org/">Sino-Platonic Papers</a>, No. 1, February, 1986 (Dept. of Oriental Studies, University of Pennsylvania).<br /><br />Zhao, Yuanren, (1972) Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics, Anwar S. Dil (ed.), Stanford: Stanford University Press.<br /><br /><strong><em>Notes</em></strong><br /><strong><em></em></strong><br />1. I am speaking of the writing system here, but the difficulty of the writing system has such a pervasive effect on literacy and general language mastery that I think the statement as a whole is still valid.<br /><br />2. John DeFrancis, <a href="http://www.pinyin.info/readings/chinese_language.html">The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy</a>, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984, p.153. Most of the issues in this paper are dealt with at length and with great clarity in both this book and in his <a href="http://www.pinyin.info/readings/visible_speech.html">Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems</a>, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989.<br /><br />3. Incidentally, I'm aware that much of what I've said above applies to Japanese as well, but it seems clear that the burden placed on a learner of Japanese is much lighter because (a) the number of Chinese characters used in Japanese is "only" about 2,000 -- fewer by a factor of two or three compared to the number needed by the average literate Chinese reader; and (b) the Japanese have phonetic syllabaries (the hiragana and katakana characters), which are nearly 100% phonetically reliable and are in many ways easier to master than chaotic English orthography is.<br /><br />4. See, for ex., Chen Heqin, "Yutiwen yingyong zihui" [Characters used in vernacular literature], Shanghai, 1928.<br /><br />5. John DeFrancis deals with this issue, among other places, in "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese", Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, Vol. 1, No. 1, Feb. 1966, pp. 1-20.<br /><br />6. George Kennedy, "A Minimum Vocabulary in Modern Chinese", in <a href="http://www.pinyin.info/readings/george_kennedy.html">Selected Works of George Kennedy</a>, Tien-yi Li (ed.), New Haven, 1964, p. 8.<br /><br />7. Zhao Yuanren, Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics, Anwar S. Dil (ed.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976, p. 92.<br /><br />8. John DeFrancis, <a href="http://www.pinyin.info/readings/chinese_language.html">The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy</a>, p. 109.<br /><br />9. Charles Hockett reminds me that many of my examples are really instances of loan words, not cognates, but rather than take up space dealing with the issue, I will blur the distinction a bit here. There are phonetic loan words from English into Chinese, of course, but they are scarce curiosities rather than plentiful semantic moorings.<br /><br />10. A phrase taken from an article by Victor Mair with the deceptively boring title "<a href="http://www.sino-platonic.org/abstracts/spp001_chinese_dictionaries.html"> The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: A Review Article of Some Recent Dictionaries and Current Lexicographical Projects</a>" (<a href="http://www.sino-platonic.org/">Sino-Platonic Papers</a>, No. 1, February, 1986, Dept. of Oriental Studies, University of Pennsylvania). Mair includes a rather hilarious but realistic account of the tortuous steeplechase of looking up a low-frequency lexical item in his arsenal of Chinese dictionaries.<br /><br />11. I have noticed from time to time that the romanization method first used tends to influence one's accent in Chinese. It seems to me a Chinese person with a very keen ear could distinguish Americans speaking, say, Wade-Giles-accented Chinese from pinyin-accented Chinese.Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-63589010996839431232009-03-03T16:42:00.009+01:002009-03-04T18:18:58.094+01:00If I were God; on friends, birthdays and postcardsIn today's test, there is a question that goes like this:<br /><br />"<em>If I believe in God and God exists, then I will go to heaven. If I believe in God and God does not exist, then no harm is done. Therefore, if I believe in God, either I will go to heaven or no harm is done.</em> ... Is this argument sound? If it is valid but unsound, which premise is false, and why?"<br /><br />My answer: "The argument is valid but unsound. Even if God exists, it does not necessarily mean that heaven exists. Perhaps He is a deistic God. Even if He is a theistic God, He may actually want to punish intellectually lazy and greedy people who choose to believe in Him only for prudential reasons and not because they genuinely have faith."<br /><br />After the test, a friend asked me, "If you were God, what kinds of people would you reward?" And I said, "Those who in their lives loved me unconditionally and promoted good in my name, and those who, through independent intellectual effort and conviction, believed in, remained neutral about, or denied my existence." In retrospect I'd like to add another criterion for the former group: those who belong to it will only be rewarded if they also tolerate the unorthodoxy of, or questioning by, the latter group. And, in general, I'd simply reward everyone who has led decent, responsible and upright lives.<br /><br />Anyway I proved that a proposition is a contradiction using a method that is different from that which is provided by my textbook. My method is legitimate since it obeys all the rules in logic; so I am prepared to argue with my tutor (and ready to concede defeat if he convinces me) if he deducts marks from me because of that question.<br /><br />*<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6UipuUc9wFpVm0jIkazZ_Z38h7qCjqozL5b-pIJyUoMiOyo14QYBkUMPRMS1i1byoWxP6ZmJuODYvWRmW4zBqJuP0OP_o2c6V4F9Su2iTxtvz8i9lmMLF7Qnk-_w3BfaQNjPHgA/s1600-h/ahmah4.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5308975736806048898" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 192px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6UipuUc9wFpVm0jIkazZ_Z38h7qCjqozL5b-pIJyUoMiOyo14QYBkUMPRMS1i1byoWxP6ZmJuODYvWRmW4zBqJuP0OP_o2c6V4F9Su2iTxtvz8i9lmMLF7Qnk-_w3BfaQNjPHgA/s320/ahmah4.jpg" border="0" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8Fyvqn0FFde1z_cQkWueOV5a7KyM8yYMKC95VAuVwpCPLCrZ2G-BVUlzswqSrvcetPTJkc-kOj3WGCJB8QkMSgAymRGj_V6k_AVky6HgsaJosZqy3VivEkQTk72SS1d5CDSbUaA/s1600-h/ahmah3.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5308975730818233218" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 192px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8Fyvqn0FFde1z_cQkWueOV5a7KyM8yYMKC95VAuVwpCPLCrZ2G-BVUlzswqSrvcetPTJkc-kOj3WGCJB8QkMSgAymRGj_V6k_AVky6HgsaJosZqy3VivEkQTk72SS1d5CDSbUaA/s320/ahmah3.jpg" border="0" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_9BGkuMW2wN6AtoS-7pi1SberDrVgb5hE-rMCkZIbf4QXFjfIn8wYRL9Lj0P-OHemJLdcQol19SW11rCgVQbhlp8_k8jdynCLOgExW2mh278dXpkpCUFR-HuQswjbiraG1kT3yA/s1600-h/ahmah2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5308975728899241970" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 192px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_9BGkuMW2wN6AtoS-7pi1SberDrVgb5hE-rMCkZIbf4QXFjfIn8wYRL9Lj0P-OHemJLdcQol19SW11rCgVQbhlp8_k8jdynCLOgExW2mh278dXpkpCUFR-HuQswjbiraG1kT3yA/s320/ahmah2.jpg" border="0" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE2OUpSL0r3LHqSpgsiROZtGdZhBcV_YLj2NWAJi4V4tPsWISjalx6itwjxO2PflWoZQoZN-xJNcOo9ZyeSUZyYHuZm8lE5Yq94SKnCjVnBdAMv88Uzhn92silOCBcz5uoP3Wxmg/s1600-h/ahmah.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5308975728519086626" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 192px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE2OUpSL0r3LHqSpgsiROZtGdZhBcV_YLj2NWAJi4V4tPsWISjalx6itwjxO2PflWoZQoZN-xJNcOo9ZyeSUZyYHuZm8lE5Yq94SKnCjVnBdAMv88Uzhn92silOCBcz5uoP3Wxmg/s320/ahmah.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />Ah Mah has grown so much prettier ever since she left Singapore! We've already known each other for 8 years; but I haven't seen her ever since I sent her off at the airport two years ago. She is from China and is of Korean descent. Actually I applied for tuition waiver to attend summer school at Korea University (KU) so that I can fly over and spend time with her, but I couldn't find anything positive to write about Korea in my personal statement (I don't dislike Korea at all; I'm just really indifferent towards its culture and language), so I simply wrote something completely undiplomatic and foolishly honest - "I want to go to Korea because I wish to meet up with my friend whom I haven't seen for two years." Very unsurprisingly, my application for tuition waiver wasn't successful. I am never skilled at lying through my teeth, and I seriously don't know how to sound passionate about something in which I have very little interest. Neither did I advertise my own strengths - I totally didn't write about how I could contribute to the intellectual life of the programme. I desperately need lessons on how to write a proper personal statement/cover letter.<br /><br />Nevertheless, chances are that I'll still be jetting off to Korea this June, since our mutual friend, Fifi the Magical Unicorn, is going to KU for summer school, and it would be wonderful if the three of us can hang out together again and relive old times. If I go (and it is likely that I am going, unless some unforeseen circumstances arise), I'll be staying at Ah Mah's place. Fifi the Magical Unicorn also suggested taking cheap inland flights from Korea to Japan for short trips. I just hope that everything will go according to plan.<br /><br />I'd love to visit Japan, because it is such a civilised country, despite the fact that the government shamelessly refuses to assume responsibility for World War 2. The language is poetic (an online friend of mine who is well-versed in both Mandarin and Japanese says that Mandarin's beauty lies in its subtlety, profundity and elusiveness - which explains why Mandarin is sometimes impossible to translate - whereas Japanese's loveliness resides deeply in its lingering aftertaste); its scientific community is really advanced; its traditional art is sublime; and there are aspects of its popular culture and literature that are enviably sophisticated. And I take pride in the fact that I've been reading Mandarin translations of works by Haruki Murakami since 2003 (and trust me, the Mandarin translations of his writings are much better than the English ones), way before he first became popular among English readers. This shows that I have fantastic taste; and everyone should just trust my taste in literature from now on, thank you very much.<br /><br />-<br /><br />Strider left for Australia this evening, and he probably will not come back to Singapore again in the near future. I sent him a message this morning asking him to take good care of himself and apologising for not being able to send him off, but strangely he did not reply. Anyway, Strider, if you are reading this, I hope you'll be happy. We may not be extremely close friends but I truly enjoyed the times we went out. Hopefully we will meet again in time to come.<br /><br />WZ left in 2005; Ah Mah in 2007; Strider in 2009. I am still not immune to the sense of loss - regardless of its degree - that comes with departures. <p></p><p>By the way, I want to watch the Japanese film <em>Departures</em>, which won the Oscar Best Foreign Film award this year.<br /><br />-<br /><br />Someone asked me for my birthday the other day. I usually choose not to tell anyone my birthday, because whenever someone gives me a gift, I feel as if he has only given me an obligation to return the favour. I am not comfortable receiving presents from just anybody, unless I am close enough to him/her to know clearly that there are no strings attached, that he/she is just using the occasion as an excuse to perform a gesture of love.<br /><br />I remember last year I went back to school to collect something from Dr Berliner one day before my birthday, and he asked, "It's your birthday tomorrow; how are you going to celebrate it?" And I said, "I'm not going to celebrate it." He looked at me for a while and continued, "You're too young to not celebrate your birthday. Keep celebrating until you reach 30 - then it will be time to stop." And I replied, "My birthday just an arbitrary date." And he revealed a hint of a smile, as if asking me in silence, "Why are you so cynical?" I smiled back.<br /><br />Life, despite all its glaring imperfections and devastating disappointments, is still amazing. Every year when my birthday arrives, I am reminded of how wonderful it is for me to be breathing and to have a reasonably decent life. Every year, on my birthday - the day life fortuitously decides to bestow its priceless gift upon me - I celebrate life. I celebrate my mother, a selfless woman who always sacrifices herself to save the best for me, who went through great labour pain in order to deliver such a precious gift to me.<br /><br />Our birthdays are all about something much larger than our own insignificant, transient existence.<br /><br />-<br /><br />Fei asked me to send him a postcard. Right now I'm still hunting for nice postcards. If any of you would like me to send you a postcard/letter as well, just email me your home address (unless you prefer leaving a comment here and announcing to the whole world your address), telling me if you'd like your postcard/letter to be written in English, Mandarin or incredibly butchered German. If you wish, you may also include a rough gist of what you wish me to write. Getting a handwritten note from a stranger whose personality you intimately and yet only partially know through his/her blog can be an indescribably magical feeling, a calm overwhelming of emotion that consumes you when you feel the mildly hypnotic spell of a stranger's heartfelt communication with you. This time, the stranger is me. And when I write to you I would be nervously fevered and excited in my flow of expression, because I would wonder who this mysterious person I am writing to exactly is:<br /><br />Does he love books - does he feel as emotionally engaged as I do when reading, do his favourite books have the ability to countenance vast intellectual exploration? Does he appreciate beauty - when he captures beauty in a gaze, in that moment does he feel as if his life is complete, or does he turn a blind eye to all the enchanting grace around him? Does he hold on steadfastly to beliefs in freedom and justice, despite having experienced tremendous disillusionment and weariness, simply because he does not want to give up? Is his idealism rooted in cynicism, or is his idealism divorced from reality - is he courageous or gullible in dreaming? Is his heart big enough to love an animal unconditionally? How would he feel when he reads what I've written for him? What does he think my handwriting reveals about me? Will he read it during the day or at night, when he can quietly enjoy undisturbed solitude? Is he lonely like me?<br /><br />Insofar as we do not meet, we might very well be great friends.</p>Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-56561094831587132822009-02-22T17:48:00.017+01:002009-02-27T10:07:47.809+01:0025 random things about meOkay, so I've been asked to write 25 random facts about myself. This just further confirms my suspicion that some of you out there are just simply dying to find out more about me, because I'm such a enigma shrouded by a miasma of mystery, because my quiet personality seductively eludes all deliberate attempts at deeper understanding. So I shall now partake in this activity to satisfy your insatiable curiousity, because I'm narcissistic like that.<br /><br /><strong>[Update: </strong>So, erm, I just realised that I'm supposed to pass this around and ask another 5 people to do it. My 5 unfortunate victims are: Chee Chee, The Chemistry Goddess, Coropo, Fifi the Magical Unicorn and Ah Mah.<strong>]</strong><br /><br />1. If this world is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel, then it must be a tragicomedy to me. Sometimes the beauty of life overwhelms me so immensely that I feel breathlessly amazed, but sometimes I get so astounded by the level of stupidity exhibited by mankind that I really feel that humanity is utterly hopeless. It makes me smirk.<br /><br />2. I often make very cynical remarks and adorn them with a huge dose of sarcasm, but actually I suspect that deep down inside I'm essentially an idealist. I feel moral outrage and sadness when I witness injustice; I feel extremely touched whenever I see people taking pride in their ideals and displaying perseverance in pursuing dreams that would make our world a more loving place. Their contagious optimism and their courage to hope invite not mockery but admiration, because they continue to have faith despite a series of debilitating disappointments, because reality has not made them weary but has instead only made them more steadfast in their convictions, because they believe so wholeheartedly that we are all gifted with the capacity to love, and that all we need is just patience and encouragement. Sometimes I laugh mercilessly at them for being so gullible, but maybe I am the one who deserves scorn, because I have conceded defeat and I have allowed reality to exhaust my spirit, while they have not. They persist in marching arduously on, down the long and winding road to progress, while I am left standing behind in unspeakable solitude, measuring the increasingly insurmountable gap in the distance between us.<br /><br />3. So, I suppose I am really an idealist, but my idealism is grounded in the battered reality; but at the same time I am a cynic, because I am too painfully aware that life always falls short of my quixotic expectations. Maybe I am the hybrid of extremes, the paradox, the fusion of polar opposites - defying boundaries, ridiculing dichotomies.<br /><br />4. I want to live my life in a relentless pursuit of Truth, even though there may be things that reside forever beyond the scope of our comprehension and that constantly evade our grasp. On my deathbed I want to be confident that I have lived with intellectual integrity, so that I can pass away with the comforting knowledge that I have not compromised the dignity of Truth, that I have always given Truth the respect it fully deserves. Truth is too precious to be ignored or twisted - when it appears in front of me I cannot stop staring at it; I cannot avert my eyes from it and pretend that it is not there, even though blissful ignorance might give me more happiness.<br /><br />5. Not all emotions have to be productive in tangible terms. Not all anger has to lead to action that would effect changes. If nothing else, it enriches your inner emotional life. If we should have feelings only when they can result in calculable impacts, we would be devoid of the very essence that makes us sentient beings.<br /><br />6. Now, something about my personal life. I am extraordinarily silent when it comes to my private affairs, but I guess there is no harm in sharing this: I am currently involved in a romantic relationship with someone, and we have been dating each other exclusively for the past three years. We met in a library. I was reading a book when he/she came over and asked if I wrote poetry. From there, one thing led to another, and here we are now. I will not reveal anything else about my partner, so don't bother trying to find out his/her nationality, occupation, age, and whatnot. If I am in a good mood I may tell you a little more, but otherwise I will most probably ask you politely to kindly mind your own business.<br /><br />7. I seriously think that I was born in the wrong country - if not because of the government which espouses principles with which I strongly disagree, then because of the infernal weather. I absolutely adore winter wear - I think scarves, boots and winter coats are really lovely things, but unfortunately I cannot wear them here. Actually, strictly speaking, I can, but for your information I have not lost my last modicum of sanity yet (despite the title of my blog), and I don't want to cook myself slowly to death.<br /><br />8. I am trying my best to be a more generous person, because kindness surpasses intellect - it expands our spirits beyond the narrow confines of our selves, such that our hearts eventually come to embrace others. Kindness empowers us with a wonderful feeling, and it encompasses the world with beauty. The tremendous lack of kindness in this world has made me a cynic, but perhaps, by finding kindness within myself, I would be able to heal some of the wounds I carry with me, and to inspire hope, however frail and little, in other people as well.<br /><br />9. At the same time, I believe that kindness can be reduced to nothing if it is not tempered with wisdom. Men have done many wrongs - the wrong approaches they adopt, despite their kind intentions, have given birth to their mistakes. I sincerely believe that George Bush is a patriotic man who truly wanted the best for his country, but because he lacked the requisite wisdom to guide his conduct, his policies have incurred more wrath than gratitude.<br /><br />10. Cultivating intellectual integrity establishes the foundation of wisdom. It does not guarantee wisdom, but it makes sure that we are on the right track. At least this is what I think.<br /><br />11. I want to devote my love to just one person till the end of my life. Perhaps I sound hackneyed, overly dreamy and even anachronistic (considering the age we live in); but I think learning to love and to make sacrifices is one of the most enriching lessons in life, and having just one soulmate till the end of time is an ineffably poetic notion. When you love someone, he/she becomes your responsibility, a burden you delight in shouldering, a weight that counters the unbearable lightness of being, because now your existence is bigger than yourself - it has meaning; it touches another person; it makes you wonder where the world ends and where paradise comes into being. When you love someone, his/her joy fills your soul with laughter, and his/her sadness mists your eyes. Why would anyone be so crazy to want a responsibility like that?<br /><br />12. Even though I hope to love just one person till the day I depart, I know only too well that life does not always go the way I want it to. Circumstances and people inevitably change, and sometimes, no matter how hard we try, we cannot salvage things, prevent them from petering out, or prolong them without suffering. Sometimes, if we are lucky, changes take place in perfect alignment with one another, paralleling with immaculate precision, and lovers stay faithfully together through the ravages of time. I can only hope for life to be kind to me.<br /><br />13. I have never told the people around me that I love them. My pride gets in the way; and when your heart is so full of joy in their company, with the utterance of each of these three words, the intensity of your feelings just comes out woefully diminished. Words are inadequate, but I know that they are sometimes necessary to assure others of their importance to me, so I am going to say this here, just this once: I love you; and I hope you'll always remember this, and forgive me unreservedly when I hurt you, because sometimes I forget this myself, and do really stupid things which I will eventually come to regret.<br /><br />14. D.H. Lawrence wrote, <em>"Some sort of perversity in our souls... makes us not want, get away from, the very thing we want. We have to fight against that."</em> There exists such a perversity in my soul, and I have to fight against that, lest it consumes me whole, and destroys everything that is sacrosanct in my life.<br /><br />15. I prefer keeping my social circles distinct from one another. I would rather that they do not mingle. I am scattered; each group of friends possesses a different piece of me in the jigsaw puzzle that forms my identity, and instead of wanting them to fit all these pieces together to gain a finished picture of me, I would rather keep my various cliques separate, because I do not want to allow some of them to have access to additional information about me. So if I have no reservations about introducing you to some of my closest friends, then you know that you occupy a relatively more special place in my heart than others.<br /><br />16. I do not have a favourite colour. Like Proust, I believe that beauty lies not in individual colours but in the harmony of hues, in the consonance of shades - sometimes kaleidoscopic, sometimes simple and pure, but always pleasing and aweinspiring.<br /><br />17. There are many reasons why I do not want children - e.g., I am terrified of having to endure labour pain, I don't think I will be a responsible mother, I find kids very annoying in general, et cetera. But I guess the main reason is this: My children will have no say at all in whether they want to come into this world. Of course, perhaps they will lead such fulfilling lives that they thank me gratefully for making the right choice for them, but I'd still rather not make such fateful decisions.<br /><br />18. I am a huge sucker for movies with historical backdrops - e.g., <em>Das Leben der Anderen</em>,<em> Sophie Scholl</em>, <em>Zwartboek</em>,<em> Valkyrie</em>, et cetera. <em>Das Leben der Anderen </em>is easily the best movie I've ever watched in my entire life, because it is so unpretentiously sophisticated - the story is tender and touching, and it was told in this unutterably sorrowful and intimate voice, as if those mellow echoes of history were meandering through the vast oceans of time to whisper to me. It moved me endlessly to see a man, summoned by his conscience, swimming bravely against the currents of his era, just because he wanted to do what is right. The ending was particularly good - that is, if you can understand the dialogue in German (but if the translations are competently done, you'd be able to appreciate it as well). I don't think I can ever do it sufficient justice just by describing it (in fact, I've probably made it sound very clichéd), so you really have to watch it to experience for yourself what an artistic masterpiece it is. It has both style and substance - it articulates very eloquently, without resorting to rhetoric, just what it means to be a good man. Even if you don't care for this, the poignant fiction itself is stirring enough to enrapture you in wistful silence.<br /><br />19. My taste in music is rather eclectic. I listen to almost all genres - bossa nova, soft rock, folk, instrumental, <em>chanson</em>, indie, blues, jazz, electronica, classical, and so on. Occasionally I listen to rap songs as well - Eminem's <em>Mockingbird </em>is pretty good. The genres I totally hate are techno, heavy metal and hip hop. There is not even a single song I like that belongs to any of these categories. Heavy metal and hip hop songs often come with disgustingly solipsistic and mindless lyrics accompanied by completely tuneless background noise that attempts shamelessly to pass itself off as music. I get spasms all over my body and froth uncontrollably at my mouth when I listen to such gibberish.<br /><br />20. I hate it when professors ask me to advance my arguments in really short papers - e.g., essays for which the word limit is 1000 words or for which the maximum length is 3 double-spaced pages or something. There is just way too little space for me to satisfactorily flesh out my arguments, and I feel as if a mosquito has just bitten me in my behind but my hands are tied in such a manner that I cannot scratch it to relieve my itch. It makes me feel increasingly vexed as I write it, and the end-product is usually a dismally bad piece of work. Even with economical language, there just is not enough room for me to develop my points.<br /><br />21. Approximately half of my wardrobe is contributed by my female cousins and by my mother's friends' daughters who are of around the same build as me. I seldom shop for new items myself, and I honestly don't understand why anyone would need 3000 pairs of shoes.<br /><br />22. If I had an OBSCENE amount of wealth, I would want to travel around the world and preferably spend at least one year each in these countries: Japan, Germany, China, France, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, Hungary, Czech Republic, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, Greece, Turkey, Mexico, Poland, Netherlands, Denmark and Argentina. I would also set up a research institute and hand out handsome scholarships to promising scientists to embark on cutting-edge research work in the fields of astrophysics, quantum mechanics, biology, medicine, neurology and environmental science. Last but not least, I would donate to causes that serve to advance gender equality, to improve health care for people in poor nations, to promote secularism, and to eliminate the exploitation of labour in third-world countries.<br /><br />23. If I could only have one gift in the world, I would want to be able to play the piano like Chopin. No stuttering clumsiness in speech, no barrier of language, just melodious fluency that is timeless and that has no need for words.<br /><br />24. If I could meet any living persons I want to, I would like to have lunch with David Attenborough (when I watch his documentaries I feel that life is amazing), Richard Dawkins, Kazuo Ishiguro, Milan Kundera, Stephen Hawking (I'll feed him), Lisa Randall, Michio Kaku, Barack Obama, Andrew Wiles, Terrence Tao, Angela Merkel, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Umberto Eco, Ronald Dworkin, Bill Bryson, Andrea Bocelli, Rowan Atkinson, Roger Federer, Zinedine Zidane, Wentworth Miller, George Clooney and Jodie Foster.<br /><br />25. If I have to describe myself in 6 words, I'd say: I elude summary in six words.Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18483755.post-82357027819186574102009-01-28T18:36:00.005+01:002009-01-28T18:47:06.603+01:00"I was thinking, all the while, I love you. I have been obstinate."<blockquote>...<br /><br />When she walked home with him over the fields, he said:<br /><br />"I am glad I came back to you. I feel so simple with you -- as if there was nothing to hide. We will be happy?"<br /><br />"Yes," she murmured, and tears came to her eyes.<br /><br />"Some sort of perversity in our souls," he said, "makes us not want, get away from, the very thing we want. We have to fight against that."<br /><br /><div align="right">- Excerpt from D.H. Lawrence's <i>Sons and Lovers</i></div></blockquote>Miao 妙http://www.blogger.com/profile/02530675682644268678noreply@blogger.com0