I was accepted into the climate action interfaith dialogue program today. It should be interesting, especially since I am such an atypical applicant. Only two years ago, I would have been extremely skeptical about ascribing any value to faith, believing it to be an obstacle to scientific modes of inquiry. It may have had value when most people’s lives were nasty, brutish, and short, but no longer does. I have changed my thinking dramatically, and the climate crisis is one of the most glaring reasons why. I wrote in the previous post that scientific progress is necessary but not sufficient condition for humanity’s advancement. Increasingly, humanity’s success or failure will be determined by the extent we achieve a revolution of values. That revolution of values, in turn, will be in part shaped by interfaith dialogues searching for moral insights from all of the world’s great religions. We must build a world house or we risk having no homes at all.
I went to watch Nanfu Wang’s One Child Nation this afternoon at the Curzon theater in Bloomsbury. It is such a damning film. Nobody really comes away from it in a positive light. My first thought was to the apocryphal Stalin quote, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” In precisely this way, I think it is difficult to wrap your head on the scale of the human suffering that took place and the reason why the artist’s attempts to do so were not only laudable but deeply moving. The doctor who vowed to atone for her sins, claiming to reach this insight with the guidance of a 108 year old monk, by helping with couple’s infertility issues allows proves that people’s basic sense of right and wrong can surface.
But I am afraid that the views of the brainwashed village doctor are far more common. Indeed, brainwashing originated in Maoist China and never really went away with the Cultural Revolution. Almost all those who were touched by this “strict” policy, including the filmmaker’s mother, were strangely accepting of it.
At the risk of bringing back flashbacks to my Chinese Politics course last year, Foucault’s ideas are eerily prescient when it comes to the formalization of the CCP’s power. Power does not become less benign, but evolves in such a way as to make it more durable. The early implementation of family planning involved village chiefs taking the possessions of offenders. The process of dispossession was brutal but crude. The alignment of human trafficking with adoption altered the consideration of local officials. They didn’t have to be as brutal and fewer babies were left to rot out to die, but the profitability of enforcement increased dramatically. The separation of the twins from Hunan are case and point. Local officials see a giant price tag on the second girl, so they levy tremendous fees on the family beyond their ability to pay. The result is separation. Enforcement was not as overly oppressive in the 1990’s as the 1980’s, but it is a mistake to call it civilized. In many ways, it is worse.
Told from the perspective of the narrator who was once just like her compatriots—too willing to believe government’s narrative about they are only after the greater good, this film raises a broader question about what to do when you find out that the county you love is responsible for unspeakable horrors. The most honest part of her commentary came when she told the audience that I realized that love of one’s nation is not the same as love for one’s government. Even in China, it should be possible to vehemently criticize one’s government without bringing that individual’s patriotism into question. The question for China’s future is how many Chinese people will reach the same insight and acknowledge that their government is capable of fatal errors. The next step is then to hold those errors accountable and to reconcile past injustices.