Grand Strategy Annex

29th January 2012

Post with 5 notes

Abstract Thinking about China

There is a famous passage from Keynes that I have quoted on many occasions, but it is always worth quoting again:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

The practical men of whom Keynes wrote not only believe themselves to be quite exempt from intellectual influence, but also believe themselves to be hard-headed, realistic thinkers who have no patience with mere abstractions. Keynes here makes us aware of the practical man’s debt to ideas, mostly unconscious, but we ought also to understand the practical man’s use of abstractions, since the practical man himself does not understand his own abstractions.

Who thinks abstractly? This was the title of an essay by Hegel. Hegel wrote a lot of long, impenetrable books, but this short essay gives a marvelously clear exposition of one of the central ideas of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel’s argument is that we begin our thinking with abstractions, and we only move on to concrete thinking as an attainment of mature thought. We must systematically cultivate our knowledge and experience if we are to ever to surmount the simple abstractions of our naive thinking and attain a concrete level of thinking.

Who, then, thinks abstractly? The practical man, who believes himself quite exempt from abstractions, is in fact the one who thinks the most abstractly, because he has invested the least in cultivating his thought and knowledge. The practical man’s level of thinking remains naive and has not yet attained concrete knowledge.

So that you don’t suppose that I am going to speak only in abstractions, I will name names and be specific. But first some context. I have gotten to the point that I cannot abide shallow news coverage, so I restrict my intake of news and commentary to a few sources that don’t waste my time with trivialities. Even then, I still find myself reading a lot of thoughtless commentary that seems to have little relationship to reality.

A few days ago when I was reading a review of a recent book in Foreign Policy magazine I realized that I was confronted with the kind of trivial, abstract thought I have come to loathe. My criticism, then, is of this book, and those of its ilk, and not the magazine that gave an exposition of the book, although the sort of thinking present in the book is all-too-common among the punditry and the commentariat.

The book in question, provocatively titled Becoming China’s Bitch: And Nine More Catastrophes We Must Avoid Right Now, is featured in the Foreign Policy article A new book asks, “Are we becoming China’s bitch?”

The article by Isaac Stone Fish quotes the author of the book, Peter D. Kiernan, as saying:

“…it’s not a book about China exactly. It’s about how America got diverted and lost momentum, and a dragon leapt into the breach. It’s also about getting our mojo back.”

Isaac Stone Fish openly acknowledges in his article that we are likely to see many books in this vein this year, and the author of the book noted that the title as purposefully provocative, “It’s meant to push people outside their comfort zone.”

No doubt the author believes that he is giving hard-headed and realistic advice. The only problem with the growing number of books like this, and commentators who repeat that conventional wisdom about China’s rise ad nauseam, is that they aren’t realistic — they are in fact divorced from reality. And they are divorced from reality because they are abstract. 

How is a political book about the growing Chinese economy abstract, embedded as it is in the ordinary business of life? It is abstract because it tears the present state of world affairs out of historical context and presents it in isolation. This is the essence of abstract thinking, and the most common form of abstract thinking today is to think in abstraction from history.

Commentators on current events feel themselves equipped to compass the world if they know a few statistics and have a sense of the present state of international affairs, but this is a mere snapshot of the world, and it means almost nothing when divorced from historical context.

The fact of the matter is that the rapid expansion of the Chinese economy is but the beginning of a long process of industrialization. This process will be sui generis, specific to China (and the same can be said of the industrialization of India), because the circumstances and conditions of China’s industrialization are distinct from the industrialization of Europe, North America, and Japan, all of whom have already passed through the initial process of industrialization.

No one knows what the future holds. We cannot say this too often, nor take it to heart too fervently. No one knows what the future holds for China. The development of the Chinese economy will go through many stages, just as the industrialization of Europe has gone through many stages, and even as China’s economy evolves, the already industrialized nation-states of the world will continue to develop from their point of advanced industrialization. 

There are some few things that can can say with a high degree of certainty, but despite the current political fetishism of the nation-state, this institution is not among those permanent features of human experience. The nation-state that we know as China today may not exist in fifty or a hundred years, although there will most assuredly be more than a billion Chinese engaged in economy activity of one kind or another fifty and a hundred years from now. 

Don’t expect the world to remain the same. It will change, and the things that we view as certainties today will be viewed as utter folly tomorrow.

Tagged: KeynesChinaabstractionHegelpractical menthinkinghistoryindustrializationeconomics