Below the sulphurous haze

With 35 million blogs here in China, it feels appropriate to post something on Rawls & Me as I land in Beijing. That I need to use an encrypted network tunnel to get this post online, however, also says something about blogging from China.

Today, I visited the Faculty of Law at Tsinghua University, which will be our partner in the EU-funded exchange programme I am taking part in this summer.

After the conference euphoria in London last week (see previous post), I went up to Stockholm for Easter to see my sister and her boyfriend. As often, we drifted into long political debates about everything from labour-market mechanisms to cultural politics. I enjoy these conversations because they allow me to be wholeheartedly “Left”, whereas I otherwise often find myself defending more market-liberal views. The funny thing is that my sister’s boyfriend, in turn, is considered rather left-leaning by his colleagues at work. Talk about relative denominations. Apart from politics, we also went for a run in the forest and took a long walk around Söder.

All of that now feels very distant – not only after the endless hours spent flying over Russia, but also mentally. If anything, Beijing reminds me of a Warsaw on steroids, with its colossal scale, coal-infused inland air, and vast roads. And yet, beneath the sulphurous haze, one finds pockets of comfort: places with large sofas, green courtyards, and travel-planning expats. Walking down a trendy hútòng near the Lama Temple, I stumbled upon The Vineyard Café, a place I am certain I will return to over the summer. There is a strange kind of reassurance in this – that despite the recent wave of repression, post-modernity seems to be very much alive.

Toward a politics of radical engagement

Talking at conferences always leaves me oscillating between nervous anxiety and overconfident bravado. Yet, in between, there are these moments when you once again come to believe in the social sciences, in the possibility of communication and when you realize exactly how much the world needs a politics of radical engagement.

As intellectuals, we cannot hide. We need to be on the barricades, to challenge our own partiality and parochial beliefs, and make good on the promise of the Enlightenment.

The neoliberal order is not written in stone. We can change it, but it will require us to outsmart the neoliberals: to think in new ways, to show them why their profound pessimism about the human condition is unwarranted, and explain step-by-step why we need trust rather than repression, or as the Germans say, “Freiheit statt Angst”.

It is so easy to “resist” things; the real challenge is to find democratically plausible ways to transform them. That was the great idea of social democracy in the 20th century. Now it is our responsibility to take these ideas further and to show why we should aspire for the greatest in all of us rather than the lowest.