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January 08, 2005
The Moral Centre Doesn't Count
(On the occasion of being unfortunate enough to see "Churchill - The Hollywood Years")
An American who lived in China tells a story of how he asked a friend to find him a maid. Taking the request, in keeping with the principles of guanxi, as both an opportunity and a request of the greatest earnestness, he began a three-month quest to find the perfect maid, by which time the American had already found one and did not hesitate to say so. On this occasion, because of his understanding of the cultural differences involved the Chinese friend was able to explain how such a faux pas would usually spell the end, or at least the severe cooling, of a friendship, and the American saved face eventually by finding another job for the woman.
Guanxi is unequivocally a currency, a system in which transactions are well-defined, memorised, and not to be reneged upon. By doing others favours, one builds up a store of endebtedness, an insurance policy for the future. Asking for favours, and giving them, is a transaction to be taken seriously by both parties.
I recount this story only to contrast it with our own confused outlook. Of course, in fact things work similarly in western countries, but lamentably it's often considered vulgar to explicitly refer to personal favours as anything resembling a financial transaction. As a consequence, although favours do change hands much as currency, between close family and friends a fatal supplementary dimension is added.
One is certainly expected to repay, but what is expected above all is a mystification of the exchange - you must act as if you were doing the favour out of inner generosity and kindliness, and would do so regardless of any precedent exchanges.
This level of dissimulation, particularly among family, can lead to simmering unspoken resentments lasting whole lifetimes. Moreover, by substituting an unknowable relation for a relatively straightforward one it is ensured that debts can never be truly resolved; once you become involved in this vague market where everything happens under the counter and all prices are obscured, you submit yourself to an indefinite voluntary servitude.
As Nietzsche so clearly saw, "kindness" is one of the grappling hooks of resentment. Instead of being able freely to enter and leave relationships of power, the weak can get their hooks into you forever, slowly leeching your energies in amounts that never quite suffice for manumission but serve to exhaust and enervate, and generate resentment. This is perhaps why family relationships in the West (and one might say particularly in England with its proud tradition of repression) are so fraught, English literature is full of examples of simmering, angst-ridden family relationships whose obscure and damaging bonds can never be broken.
We might even say that the quintessentially Western practice of commercial psychoanalysis is the only mechanism yet discovered to liquify these bonds and plug the embargoed emotional trader back into the exchange economy (with a good cut going to the analyst, of course).
As in this emotional market, so in the actual market. In England money is often considered to be vulgar (especially by those who have it) and as something to be cunningly hinted at rather than celebrated. Why else do middle-class westerners find other cultures' - and their own underclasses' - taste for the bright and showy so vulgar or - to use the inverted form of the insult - so "charming" and "colourful"? Even the hiphop culture of "Bling" can only be imported into the middle England as an ironic statement, a patronising pastiche of those who can't afford the gold and diamonds they aspire to, by those who can and who therefore consider them amusingly gauche.
This is our problem. We are unable to submit ourselves to currency, believing it to be an empty and vacuous form of exchange (rather than the endlessly convoluting and fascinating numerical game that it obviously is). Rather than submitting to its magical power to elevate and ruin people and to create and dissolve bonds by purely arithmetical means, we invent this ironical dimension of interiority to save our souls.
Is this why English capitalism, now in its dotage, turns increasingly to the cultural production of decadence, backward-looking reruns of the glorious past, and xenophobia, accompanied by jeremiads against the corrupt forces of the global market? Whilst on the other hand, for Western businessmen guanxi often has negative connotations of bribery and corruption, a muddying of the pure waters of "relationships" with cynical exchange?
Whilst the cult of "moribundia" has a positive role to play in generating interest in neglected and peculiarly local forms of culture, and in encouraging appreciation of richly historical mongrelised artefacts veneered over by visions of globalised blandness, dwelling on those things that "money can't buy", feeding off corrupted empire-ROM, and maintaining a suspicion of all things new to the point of sickening self-satisfaction and hypocritical disavowal is the very opposite of culture.
How pathetic must the English look to the outside observer when a sneering parody of the perceived American lack of or disregard for culture and history, a film fabricated by adolescent-rebellious port-quaffing cantabrigians, is passed off as a celebration of our famous sense of humour? Whilst patently unable to take on board any of the craft skills of filmmaking of the last half-century (they are, of course, of foreign origin) the filmmakers presume still to vaunt some ineffable superiority. It is a sight that would be comical if it weren't so terribly unfunny.
The want of, or dissimulation of, any cognate principle to guanxi is a part of the same obstinate and misguided chauvinism, a desperate clinging to pretentions we can no longer afford, even if it means our sole remaining activity is self-abasement.
For a member of the English middle-class, whose every professional move depends on family and other connections, to demand a favour as recompense for one previously done remains a last resort, something that comes, if ever, at the desperate climax of an whining, insinuating argument where every type of emotional blackmail has been exhausted. It represents an unacceptable level of obscenity because it exposes the human social being as mere decentred counter of an external nomos, an arithmetical rule to which, it seems, the average Englishman prefers the oppressive, inescapable, nerve-fraying uncertainty of subjection to the constitutively unknowable (read uncountable) vicissitudes of an internal oracle. A "self" whose incessant demands for attention stem from sublimated aggression and egoic self-centeredness.
The English culturally valorize (more or less ironically) this repressed character. We love stories of closed little villages where everything is under the surface (even if inevitably it erupts into murder ). In the field of music Britain can still claim vitality andd global influence, but its stars are invariably those open to the vulgar outside influences ignored or sneered at by the substandard film products we churn out. Hugh Grant and his fellow simpering screen clowns may well turn out to be the last "truly British" export in history, a fittingly sorry monument to wilful decline.
Considering again the context of the family, one thinks of the Lovecraftian malevolence of Agatha Christie's Mrs Boynton in Appointment with Death, a puritan New England mother from whose "black, smouldering eyes" comes forth "a power, a definite force, a wave of evil malignancy", a woman who by cynical, sly use of her invalidity controls her adult children who cringe around her like tamed and servile animals.
Let's hope that Britannia, a similarly dissimulating matriarch, will find soon that her children have at last built up the strength to escape from the clutches of their mysteriously-enforced servitude. And it is difficult to think of a more succinct description of what it means to be English than 'servitude', whether to the Empire or its absence, whether empowered or embittered.
"Mrs Boynton might be old, infirm, a prey to disease but she was not powerless. She was a woman who knew the meaning of power, who had exercised a lifetime of power, and who had never once doubted her own force...[H]e understood now what that undercurrent to the harmless family talk had been. It was hatred, a dark eddying stream of hatred."
(Mrs Boynton is of course murdered -" but not by her "dumbly enduring" children who, although they constantly plotted her death, remained too terrified to carry it out.)
All of this renders even more darkly comic the fact that the mutually-hallucinated realm of ego-fugged altruism is hailed as the moral command centre that makes us so special, so that even the unleashing of markets cannot corrupt our liberal democracies' supposed tendency to betterment and fellow-feeling.
What if it was the other way round, and it was the market, as locus of generalised unbinding, that had unleashed us from shadowy, irresolvable obligations; and, to our shame, we had failed to live up to the task, preferring to scoff, wallow and decay?
Posted by robin at January 8, 2005 01:06 PM