“Major Works on Religion and Politics” by Reinhold Niebuhr

Niebuhr is known to be President Obama’s favorite theologian-philosopher. It is easy to see why Niebuhr's writings can be claimed by both modern-day progressives and neoconservatives: he was an unabashed socialist, who believed in American exceptionalism and a muscular foreign policy. This collection, spanning the course of his life, from working as a pastor in Detroit to his time as a public intellectual in New York, shows the nuance in the development of his thoughts, as well as his bedrock principles, which remained constant. Particularly insightful are the essays where he expounds on the dichotomy of civil society versus the governmental State, the morality of the individual versus the morality of society (or lack there of), and on socialism versus Socialism (both of the State and Party varieties). He is most illuminating when he critiques those intellectual bedfellows who would seem closest to him.

“What is China?” by Ge Zhaoguang

This is a short, yet important, book, if for no other reason than it is one of only a few recent books written by a Chinese intellectual, still working in China, that has been translated into English. As such, this book gives the reader insight into how mainland Chinese see the breath of Chinese history, as well as the country’s place on the world stage today. Ge is a history professor, but he also delves into the culture and politics of what has made China China. However, as a historian, he begins by asking how has China been defined historically and how has that conception changed over its various dynasties, both as defined by the Chinese themselves and by the outsiders who have come into contact with “the Middle Kingdom.”

Ge realizes that both culturally and geographically what has been considered China has changed over the centuries. “From the third century BCE, when the Qin Shi Huangdi established a unified empire and used its official power to ensure that “all weights and measures were standardized, the gauge of wheeled vehicles was made uniform, and the writing system was standardized,” down to the second century BCE, when the Han dynasty “admired nothing other than Confucianism” in its philosophy but, in terms of its institutions, “took variously from the ways of the Lords Protector and the [ideal] kings” in its political system, a Chinese empire (Zhonghua diguo), relatively unified in terms of politics, culture, and language, had formed.” The peripheries of the empire might have shifted and its borders might have expanded, but from the Qin Shi Huangdi there arose a core to China. This core consisted of “the central region [that] has been relatively stable, becoming very early on a place with commonly recognized territory…. The cultural tradition based on Han culture, however, extended across time in this region, forming into a clear and distinct cultural identity and cultural mainstream…. Regardless of how [future] dynasties were established, they all believed that they were “China” or the “Middle Kingdom”…. The notion of All-under-Heaven, through which traditional culture imagined itself as the center of the world, and the tribute system, which depended on courtly ritual, also helped build up a [single] consciousness” of China.

For Ge, ““All-under-Heaven” is one family; its standard of identification is culture.” There is a China-centric particularism to the world that does not depend on geography. There is a tension between how China’s borders are understood in political and in cultural terms. There was always the historical fascination with “bringing the Four Barbarians into China (na si Yi ru Zhonghua),” even as the actual power of the state ebbed and flowed with each empire. The aim was expanding territory from the ethnically Han center out to the peripheries, while accepting other ethnic groups as part of a single Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu). Even, “the abdication edict from the last Qing emperor in 1911 called for preserving the model of “Five Nations under One Republic” that “continued to preserve the complete territory of the five nations of Manchus, Han, Mongols, Hui, and Tibetans.””

Despite the coopting of multiple ethnicities, Ge claims that the core of Chinese culture has always been Han. This comprises “the use of Chinese characters (Han zi) to read and write, as well as the ways of thinking that are derived from Chinese characters…. The structure of family, clan, and state in ancient China…. The belief system of “three teachings in one.” In traditional China, “Buddhism was used to cultivate the mind, Taoism was used to extend life, and Confucianism was used to govern the world.”… No religion could supersede the secular power and authority of the emperor, and thus religions accommodated one another while remaining under a dominant political power…. [The] understandings of and interpretations of ideas about “the unity of Heaven and man” (Tian ren he yi) in the universe, the study of Yin and Yang and the Five Elements…. and finally [the concept] of All-under-Heaven, which was influenced by the cosmology of “round Heaven and square Earth.”” Ge does recognize cultural blending and convergence between the outsiders and the Han, crucially, in both directions. During the Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties Han culture and Confucian primacy was particularly ascendant, whereas in the Yuan and Qing dynasties foreign ways were blended into Han orthodoxy.

External interactions have been paramount in defining how China sees itself and its place in the world. It has been colored by the Manchus conquering of the Ming Dynasty and establishing the Qin Dynasty, the West’s efforts at colonization of Asia, and by Japan’s grasping for Asian hegemony starting at the end of the nineteenth century. As the Chinese were forced to interact with outsiders beyond their neighboring barbarians within the tribute system, they were forced to acknowledge that the world was not centered around China. “As the status and power of the nation and state were diminished, the self-consciousness of the nation and state grew ever stronger.”

In the present day, Ge feels that China has ambitions to unite the cultural Chinese across the globe, while taking its place as a central leader on the world stage once again. ““Grand unification” has been a political ideal, some might even say a dream, throughout Chinese history…. Because China was bullied by both East Asian and Western countries in the early modern period, none of its rulers can accept the ignominy of losing sovereignty or giving up territory…. China’s idea of itself as a ruler of All-under-Heaven (Tianxia ba zhu) meant at most that it was a “suzerain” (gong zhu) state of the Asia region…. China is a state that is formed on the basis of culture, and feels that it is important to defend the idea of a great multinational state that has existed since the Han and Tang dynasties and was exemplified in the Qing-dynasty ideal of “spreading virtue in four directions” across vast territories…. China is also eager to show that its culture is the representative of Eastern culture.”

“Trick” by Domenico Starnone (translated by Jhumpa Lahiri)

This short novel is narrated by an Italian widower finagled by his daughter into traveling back to his old home in Naples to babysit his grandson. The old man is a once famous artist who now keeps busy illustrating books. As the novel progresses one can sense the narrator has not aged well. He is now unconfident in both his art and his life. “For a few moments I felt like an insignificant part of a long process of disintegration, a scale soon destined to join the organic and inorganic matter solidifying since the Paleozoic era on the ground and at the bottom of the sea.” Snooping through his dead wife’s papers, he found that she had been cuckolding him for years. The narrator moves about gingerly, as if each new step could spell disaster. He is old and proud, yet he knows that time has passed him by. “Fashions, I thought, sadly, wear out, leaving behind the futile traces of those who upheld them.” His grandson gives him all he can handle. He is rambunctious, bordering on bratty. Yet, in time, the narrator almost seems to crave the four-year-old’s approval. The grandson becomes both his rival and his glimpse to a path not taken. Starnone is at his best when he describes the specificity of Naples in detail. The narrator can still speak in dialect, but it almost seems false to him. “But the Neopolitan that was spoken in Vasto, at the Pendino, at the Market— the neighborhoods where I was raised, and before that my father and grandparents and great-grandparents, maybe all my ancestors put together—didn’t know the word ire, the wrath of Achilles and others who lived in books. They only knew ‘a raggia, rage.” Instead of becoming a street tough or a degenerate gambler like his father, he has become an effeminate artist. But he still has a part of the old city within him. This is a story about an old man trying to come to terms with the importance of his legacy and the futility of his remaining days.

“Border Districts” by Gerald Murnane

This is a novel that any writer would love. It is fundamentally about the process of thinking, the images that one pictures in the mind, and the memories that the brain recalls. “I have learned to trust the promptings of my mind, which urges me sometimes to study in all seriousness matters that another person might dismiss as unworthy, trivial, childish.” The novel’s narrator is a writer, as well as a deep thinker, perhaps, even, a philosopher. The ebbs and flows of internal thought are tremendous. “I supposed the endless-seeming landscapes of my own thoughts and feelings must have been a paradise by comparison with the drab sites where others located their selves or their personalities or whatever they called their mental territories.” There are thoughts wrapped in thoughts wrapped in memory. The narrator describes the craft and process of writing the very book he is supposedly writing. He is full of asides and tangents that flow to where his thoughts and memories happen to take him. He digresses and circles back around to conclude or clarify a point made in previous pages. “The mind is a place best viewed from borderlands.” I am not sure if this novel is supposed to be memoir disguised as fiction or fiction disguised as memoir. The details of the narrator’s life certainly mimic the experiences of Murnane. “I moved to this district near the border so that I could spend most of my time alone and so that I could live according to several rules that I had for long wanted to live by.” This novel definitely engages with the reader’s mind and forces one to grapple with one’s own conception of the world, one’s mental constructs, with one’s own faulty memory, and with the experience of life itself.

“Lightening Rods” by Helen DeWitt

This novel is humorous and raunchy. Some of the jokes are so sly you don’t quite know whether she really means them to be funny at all. The protagonist, Joe, has had an unsuccessful career as a salesman- both trying to sell Encyclopedia Brittanica’s and Electrolux vacuum cleaners. He fantasizes while he masturbates everyday after work in his trailer. And that’s what leads him to his great innovation. He thinks of all the companies that have had problems with over-eager, go-getter-type salesmen, who inevitably get the firm into trouble with sexual harassment suits. The companies want to keep the sales, while avoiding expensive litigation. Therefore, Joe starts up a company, Lightening Rods, which is a temp firm that hires personal assistants who on the side offer anonymous sex in the handicap bathroom stall. The path is initially rocky, but eventually rewarding. On the way to success, Joe ends up inventing toilets that go up and down to help out dwarfs, as well as toilet seats that expand and contract to help the obese and the skinny. One of his personal assistant hires goes on to become a Supreme Court Justice, while two others have successful careers in business. The book is complete farce, but with a thin veneer of social commentary. The story moves along at a brisk pace and Joe’s side thoughts are worth the read in and of themselves. DeWitt has a knack for portraying characters who should seem ludicrous in a highly realistic light. No matter how farcical, she does not skimp on developing their personalities and quirks to make them human. She says she developed the idea of a lightening rod when she got repeatedly fucked in the ass by the publishing industry during the travails of her first novel. This is revenge at its humorous best. This is no “Last Samurai”, but it is an entertaining read.