Treadmill

Growing up in small-town Kalmar on the east coast of Sweden, running always meant to follow the shoreline and the seasons. These days in twenty-million Seoul, I run in an air conditioned basement on a treadmill. On the treadmill, if I raise my head, I can see a golden sign commemorating the visit to HUFS by Barack Obama and, in the mirror, Korean students struggling to bring discipline to their bodies. You do not have to be Slavoj Žižek to see that there is something fundamentally unnatural with this kind of environment.

Call it a “temporary dive” but today was worse than usual, I struggled to extend my sense of motivation, to make it last through those six kilometres and 30 minutes. My mind flickering like a television screen between channels, from morning windows high above lower Manhattan to Türkenschanzpark in the 18th district of Vienna. Fifteen minutes later it all turned black. Not miserable noir melancholy black, but simple emptiness, void. Yet, I am too much of a hobby psychologist to not be at least a bit fascinated by my own emotions; the fact that I do not normally feel like this. So, I kept running, the meter reached 6 km and I stepped down. The void was no more but it made me think again of social ontology, how the world actually appears to other people and to what extent it is only “broken” in an epistemological sense. Maybe I should go to church tomorrow to renew my faith in one possible set of answers to these questions.

Singapore

After a week full of teaching I left South Korea late on Friday night. Equipped with a cheap last-minute fare with SQ and some new books, I followed the aircraft across the digital map towards the equator. Six hours later, the tropical heat hit me on the jetway. Like in the past, I was reminded of how vibrantly green this city is, how spotless the subway is and how much it all still lives up to the cliché of being “Disneyland with the death penalty”.

This time around, I had the fortune of having some good travel advice from an old student of mine which opened previously unknown doors to Lebanese food, great coffee on Kandahar Street and a probably not intended walk along the margins of society. Afterwards, as I was diving into the swimming pool back at the Conrad, I could still not help thinking of “The twilight years” by Richard Overy and how “the modern era's promise of progress was overshadowed by a looming sense of decay and death” during the intra-war period in Britain. Not only the last week on the knife-edge in Korea but the whole territorial proxy-conflict madness that the rest of Asia has been sinking into has made the future far more precarious than it was only ten years ago. Back in Europe, the anti-feminist backlash, rising xenophobia and short-sighted austerity measures sorts of complete the picture that we are incapable of taking active responsibility for our global future.

Against that backdrop, I do the only thing I can do and that is to write another academic paper pointing out the possibilities of accelerating globalization.

Changing travel plans

A lot more thinking later and we decided to indeed change our travel plans. Now, Anna and Eddie will head up to Kiruna while I return alone to Korea. Given the situation with North Korea, but also our own private circumstances with problems of finding adequate daycare for Eddie and a good working environment for Anna, this feels like the right decision. Later in April, I will fly over to Europe to join them for some days after which we will decide whether or not we are all going back to Korea for the remainder of the semester.

So, for the first time since he was born in July last year, I will spend a night away from Eddie, something that I think will feel very strange. At the same time, I will try not to think too much about it but rather focus all my energy on my long list of research papers to be written and then count down the days until I board my Turkish Airlines flight in the evening of the 16th April.

The Embarcadero

Taking the stroller for a walk along the San Francisco waterfront, it is strange to imagine that in less than 48 hours, our aircraft will be flying in over the Korean Peninsula and we will be back at the epicentre of all the recent belligerent rhetoric. As a parent, it of course becomes particularly difficult to make the decision to go back under the current circumstances. On one hand, we are returning to a city of twenty million people including some of our best friends, not to mention all the students and the different professional responsibilities that await us. On the other hand, it is difficult not to wonder what people returning to Warsaw in August 1939 were thinking, if they were just as certain as we are that rationality would prevail and that the security guarantees given by the Western powers would make war unthinkable.

Obviously, the Poland-analogy is halting since a total war would mean a quick end to the KFR (or the “Kim Family Regime”, as the DPRK is referred to in American military lingo). Knowing this, I remain optimistic that the current dark clouds will blow away.

Emotional

Seoul International Marathon came and went. On the night before, my friend and I decided that we would run the first ten kilometres, something which, conveniently, would deliver us at the doorstep of a local Starbucks :-) Considering the chronic lack of sleep, this turned out to be a good decision as it gave us a taste of a Korean marathon experience but without any of the subsequent physical pain.

And now, little more than ten days later, I find myself back in the United States for two conferences together with Anna and Eddie. The first one, the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, is a long-standing favourite of mine which over the years has taken me everywhere from Portland to Las Vegas. This year, the conference is meeting at Loews Hotel in Hollywood. Yesterday morning I chaired a panel on “markets and morals” and later in the day I presented my “Modernity as a runway”-paper (which is still under review despite that I submitted it almost a year ago). Both events went really well but today I had a not so good moment as I again found myself fighting that fairly lonely battle in defence of progressive politics. Like in the past, I have a tendency to get very emotional in ways that are not always that helpful. After all, I should know by now that it is simply not possible to persuade other people about a completely different understanding of politics, history and the future of human civilization in two minutes. Yet, simply shutting up and just accepting the prevailing nihilism in academia also feels wrong. My fear however is that I make my own position a disservice by coming across as hopelessly naïve.

Seoul (International Marathon)

Although I have been living in Seoul for almost two years now, I realized that I have written almost nothing about the city here on Rawls & Me. Like Korea in general, I guess part of this has to do with the very normality of the city. Despite being one of the largest cities in the world with a metropolitan area of more 25 million people, everyday life in our little bubble up here in Imundong feels more like a small college town with its local cafés, pseudo-Italian bistros and students everywhere. Were it not for the occasional train bringing oil up to the front, the heavy military helicopters circling above from time to time or for all the students dressed in uniform, one would even be excused for forgetting that we are less than 100 km away from the most militarized zone on the planet.

As for the wider city, I hope to be able give a full account in two weeks when I plan to run Seoul International Marathon with one of my best friends who is coming over from Sweden. Or, should I say, I planned to run that marathon. Suffering from severe sleep deprivation and general baby apocalypse, I think I should be happy if I manage to finish half of those 42 kilometres… But of course, I will give it a shot and I promise to keep you posted about the result.

Nuclear winter

While I may not be up for #Blogg100 or any similar promises, I thought I wanted to share this image of Seoul where the temperature has dropped down to -20 again. Luckily, we have warm coffee and the export-version of Anna's pepparkakor.

February

Two full weeks later, we once again find ourselves on a red-eye flight, this time heading back to what seems to be an ever more fragile North-East Asia. Despite some rhetorical détente between the two Koreas, the news have still been full of irrational island disputes, preparations for nuclear tests and submarine drills. Meanwhile, in our own baby bubble, Eddie is beginning to crawl and can now stand up for prolonged periods, he has also started to drag objects towards him (water bottles are a favourite) and he has made innumerable friends along our journey. An absolute highlight was our visit to Koh Lanta and his play date with Adrianna.

Yet, as much as Eddie has proven to be an icebreaker between worlds, it is difficult to not echo the sentiments of my last post concerning the future that we are about to create for him. As strong as the integrative, constructive forces may be, there is also so much fragmentation and blatant lack of social trust. We may be wiring Prometheus through an ever thicker web of airlines, ATMs and electronic connections but as long as these things are not matched by a cosmopolitan sensibility, a sense of collective responsibility for our planetary future and an understanding that we are living through a make-it-or-break-it moment for humanity as a species they will do little good.

Later this week, I will have the privilege of welcoming a new batch of students to our UPEACE Dual Master’s degree programme in Seoul.  Over the course of their programme, the students will spend one year in Costa Rica and many will eventually go on to work in international organizations. If ever so little, the programme is a symbol of how Korea is turning towards the world rather than to its past of isolation, an orientation which feels particularly important in times like these.

Globality as an unfinished revolution

After ten days of winter in Seoul confined to our one-room apartment, we decided to relocate to South-East Asia for a couple of weeks so that Anna could work a bit more undisturbed on her ISA-paper while I would be able to stay outdoors with Eddie for longer. Flying down here on Air China in an Airbus full of small emperors (children who are the only young ones in two generations and who receive practically unlimited attention), I was again reminded of how painful some future socialisation processes will be as these children grow up and have to realise the political, financial and emotional limitations of the world. With boys outnumbering girls due to the One-Child-Policy, there is clearly a risk for a lot of frustration and nationalist bravado in a country as steeped in revanchism as China.

I do not know why but on that plane I suddenly experienced an unusual streak of pessimism about the future. As much as everything is indeed within our reach, there may be too much group egoism, sectarianism and, not to forget, simple stupidity in this world for us to successfully meet our planetary challenges. With very limited room left for trial-and-error and armed with omnicidal weapons, pessimism does unfortunately seem very reasonable. Yet, important as it may be to take in that feeling to realize the gravity of our situation, the only way forward has to be one that believes in people and their ability to grow.

Ambivalence, irony and democracy in the Anthropocene

With the lingering taste of Portuguese custard tarts from the road in Britain, I browse through the pages of my newly published piece in Futures. Of the things I have written in recent years, it is perhaps the manuscript that I have come to feel the most for. In it, I have tried to bring alive many of the conversations I have had at conferences and with friends around the world about the future of modernity.

With this manuscript finished, I am thinking of developing some of the key thoughts, in particular the need for broad social investments and accelerated forms of socio-economic globalization, in new papers to be presented during 2013. Before that however, more parental leave with Eddie is on the agenda!