The good days..
So the results are out – 649 versus 123 – Donald Tsang has won.
Of all the clips over youtube, and the first thing I did was to listen to RTHK’s podcast. Everything was under my expectations, except I just cannot bare watching the announcement on the videos. The main reason is that Alan Leong has somehow sacrificed – this is a no-win game for him, by standing out he basically voluntarily turned himself into someone that seeks approvals from the Hong Kong people, whom understandably gravitated towards stability and the recent economic booms. I was not disappointed at the game, as there is an interesting twist to it – maybe Donald Tsang was sincere, or maybe it is a political token to promise so, he basically set the goal of establishing a timetable of universal suffrage in Hong Kong. If this is true, that would be great news. In the past ten years, there seems to be a gradual awakening of Hong Kong identity. From July First demonstration, the proliferation of blogs, the thriving debates in what constitute ‘Hong Kong’s culture’, to this date the idea of a political mini-show, Hong Kong people are getting more comfortable with the idea of political discussion, even I do, surprisingly in the past four years I am more interested in reading about politics and political philosophies.
Because of one episode of BBC documentary by Adam Curtis, The Trap, I came to realize we do have a peculiar sense of freedom, which is built upon the notion of positive and negative liberty.
I had a hard time understanding the notion until I see this illustration on the Stanford website:
Imagine you are driving a car through town, and you come to a fork in the road. You turn left, but no one was forcing you to go one way or the other. Next you come to a crossroads. You turn right, but no one was preventing you from going left or straight on. There is no traffic to speak of and there are no diversions or police roadblocks. So you seem, as a driver, to be completely free. But this picture of your situation might change quite dramatically if we consider that the reason you went left and then right is that you’re addicted to cigarettes and you’re desperate to get to the tobacconists before it closes. Rather than driving, you feel you are being driven, as your urge to smoke leads you uncontrollably to turn the wheel first to the left and then to the right. Moreover, you’re perfectly aware that your turning right at the crossroads means you’ll probably miss a train that was to take you to an appointment you care about very much. You long to be free of this irrational desire that is not only threatening your longevity but is also stopping you right now from doing what you think you ought to be doing. This story gives us two contrasting ways of thinking of liberty. On the one hand, one can think of liberty as the absence of obstacles external to the agent (Negative Liberty). You are free if no one is stopping you from doing whatever you might want to do. In the above story you appear, in this sense, to be free. On the other hand, one can think of liberty as the presence of control on the part of the agent (Positive Liberty). To be free, you must be self-determined, which is to say that you must be able to control your own destiny in your own interests.
Very timely concepts, at least for me, indeed. So in the case of Hong Kong, we are allowed to express our opinions on the candidates and our thoughts on institutional rights, etc. We might like or dislike Donald, or we might seek universal suffrage and deliberative democracy – but hold on a second – it seems that Donald got over 80% support of Hong Kong citizens, despite this apparent non-democratic election. Does it mean that we do not opt for the liberal ideal anymore? The twist of this metaphor of the smoker driver basically sheds me new light,
the smoker in our story provides a clear example of a divided self, as there is the self that wants to get to the appointment and there is the self that wants to get to the tobacconists. We now add to this that one of the selves – the keeper of appointments – is a ‘higher’ self, and the other – the smoker – is a ‘lower’ self. The higher self is the rational, reflecting self, the self that is capable of moral action and of taking responsibility for what she does. This is the true self, since it is what marks us off from other animals. The lower self, on the other hand, is the self of the passions, of unreflecting desires and irrational impulses.
I do not want to make the ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ distinction here, as I do not feel qualified to make any moral judgments here. But the case in Hong Kong is similar – we might want to achieve the political ideals (that explains why half a million out of the seven million HK people demonstrated for universal suffrage in 2004), but at the same time we want stability and economic performance (just like the smoker who needs his tobacco). I feel a genuine sense of emptiness and dispair today when I was in the tube, watching all the English people around me when I listened to the podcast and how all the editorials in Hong Kong (except the leftwing Apple Daily) using all the rhetorical Chinese proverbs basically repeating how great this election is and how we Hong Kong together are ready to bring ourselves to a higher level.
Hadn’t we just opted for the tobacco? Better yet, is being the keeper of appointments a real option out there? I honestly, have no idea.
Let me just sum it up with my favorite story of the recent (highlight and italic on me),
In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: Let’s establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.
After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink:
“Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair –the only thing unavailable is red ink…”
Is this not the very matrix of how ideology functions, not only in totalitarian conditions of censorship, but, perhaps even more, in the more refined conditions of liberal censorship?
We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict – war on terror, human rights, etc. – are FALSE terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it: our freedoms themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom. -Slavoj Zize
The only thing I am sure about is google personal homepage now has new themes, which actually made me quite happy for a while,
except we can no longer sign in Flickr with our oldskul account. Yes, I am very very sad about that. Monster corporations! (talking about the paradoxes of life…)
