Optimism moves east

[imomus]

The story so far: As Angrael turns into a paranoid alliance of embattled security states lashing out with ever-increasing violence against the very people who control their energy resources, dragging the West ever deeper into a vicious circle of hatred, reprisals against civilians, and the erosion of all legitimacy, any tender-minded and optimistic view of our future slips away into a bloody sunset.

Is it really just ten years ago that we were talking about long booms rather than mid-flight explosions? Our prosperity was going to continue and increase, and we were going to use our wealth to help the poor. Everybody was going to love us. Our children would grow up in a world that was getting better.



This diffuse, warm sense of well-being wasn't just a side-effect of the MDMA tablets everyone was taking back in the 90s. It was related to a sense that world trade talks (the same ones that have just collapsed at Doha) might bring global justice, that information technology was going to raise educational standards and democratize knowledge, that a new post-industrial economy was going to complement bricks and mortar business, and that the 21st century, just on the threshold, would be a wonderland where lifespan would increase and diseases be defeated thanks to gen-tech.



The images on this page show some short-lived kids' bookstore in groovy, optimistic 1990s London, Paris, Berlin, New York or Tokyo, don't they? It went out of business in 2001, didn't it, replaced by a store selling black, beige and cream clothes and fallout shelters? Actually, no. This "haven for little imaginations" is Kids Republic, a childrens' bookstore in Beijing, China. It's just opened.

The optimism, tender-mindedness and benign curiosity apparent in this store (something about its spirit and design reminds me of Oto Kinoko, the sound store in Kyoto I blogged about excitedly earlier this year, only to find it had already closed down) represent everything we in the West have lost in the last ten years; lost because of our clumsy response to 9/11 and Angraeli realpolitik. Who, in the West, would have children now? But it's nice to know that, somewhere, optimism about the future is still intact.

In 30 or 40 years, the Chinese kids in this photo will be running the world. It's hard to imagine them making a worse job of it than we've done.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

A good way to guarantee peace on earth is to purge the world of everyone.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Alas, I fear the cats would still persecute the mice.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

Nick, I'm surprised by your position about China, and about the purging of Christianity in Japan. Of course, Japan didn't just "purge" Christianity, the process required killing the Christians who refused to de-convert (read: thousands of innocent people, over 250 years or so). Bear in mind that Japan had already imported a foreign religion (Buddhism), so it wasn't like they were just being consistent by excluding foreign influences. After all, Japan has a remarkable ability to absorb influences and synthesize something new; something they could've done with Christianity, just as they did with Buddhism.

As a devout atheist, even I can see that banning religions--new or old--will inevitably lead to persecution; history soundly proves that, from Kurdism and minority sects of Islam in the ME today, back through the Jewish Holocaust, the Pagans being exterminated by the Catholic Inquisition, etc. If people don't have intellectual freedom (and that encompasses freedom of faith), then they have very little freedom indeed. I'd agree that, in an ideal world, there would be no Christianity, Islam, Judaism or any other divisive superstition, but banning groups is absolutely the wrong way to accomplish that goal.

Re: China -- much has already been pointed out by others about China's continuing and deplorable record on the environment, civil rights, human rights, territorialism and so on, so I won't bother with repetition. But curiously, you seem to think that the few examples one can find of "tender-mindedness" in China are likely to extend anywhere beyond a few of the most metropolitan and Westernized cities, available to a very few. I think it's rather obvious that the power structure in China is thoroughly entrenched and isn't going to be inviting the tender-minded folks to share power anytime soon. As long as the government and military are the monolithic block they've been since the Cultural Revolution, and as long as the vast majority of Chinese citizens are essentially peasants without any democratic power, any appealing signs of "tender-mindedness" are little more than window-dressing.