The old Soviet Union was a world of bureaucratic tyranny, double-speak, and the banality of evil. It was a society of topsy-turvy norms where resentful child informers wielded incommensurate power, and commissars indoctrinated an ideology everyone knew to be bankrupt: “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work” was a wry catchphrase. The great wonder was that it lasted as long as it did, a testament perhaps to the capacity of the mass to keep their mouths shut and heads down, and just get on with it.
It has felt refreshing, therefore, to leave behind a similar totalitarianism in the UK and move to China where my experience to date is of much greater liberty. Over an epochal two decades or so in my home country, the Rainbow Religion appears to have become just that: a dominant state ideology which brooks no rival.
Gulled and duped by emotive appeals to compassion, and enforced by an intolerant “liberating tolerance”, essential freedoms have withered.
Among the modern-day politburos are HR departments inculcating DEI initiatives (usually in hock to some protection-racket wheeze: diversity kitemarks or some such). My own background has been in education for all those 20 years, watching open-mouthed as we were progressively required to swallow patent absurdities by the Department for Education, giving credence in particular to fantasies about gender. On both sides of the Atlantic, the child informers are now those poor little souls who, at the mercy of relentless online algorithms and social contagion, are brainwashed into the cult. Parents are kept in the dark, emotionally blackmailed or legally coerced into playing along. One hoped it would all fall apart under the weight of its own contradictions, as did the USSR, but not soon enough for me. Like Orwell’s Winston Smith there came a point where being forced to accept that black was white became untenable; a government inspector told me to my face that a Christian headmaster expressing orthodox Christian beliefs in a Christian school was no longer permitted. Many dear colleagues face similar dilemmas, but I am no longer under any such restraint in my new school.
I am not naïve about geopolitics or anyone’s useful idiot, I hope. But as you can imagine, it has caused me to reflect deeply on the nature of freedom. The purpose of Western education from Aristotle onwards was to train the young to love the good and hate the bad, which presupposed a universal moral law. In the East Confucius taught something similar: education should lead to virtue. Rousseau and a long line of thinkers after him have turned this on its head. We are now offered a freedom from virtue, which is really no freedom at all, and descends inexorably into infantilism, idiocy, and insanity. St Anthony the Great forecast a coming time when “men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’” Centuries before him Isaiah prophesied the curse of a nation whose children ruled over them. Rousseau’s subjectivist doctrines and romanticising of childhood (despite abandoning his own children) have resulted in that nebulous misconception: “child-centred education”. They have also led inevitably to the triumph of the idea that we are defined by our feelings, rather than objective reality, and should follow our desires without limit or external constraint.
C.S. Lewis followed up a 1943 book on education with a fictional treatment of the same themes in his great dystopia, That Hideous Strength. In both, he delineates the dangers of the subjective drift in Western education; Edmund Burke had offered similar warnings at the time of the French Revolution: “They are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his nature.” Lewis contends that the denial of objective values cannot be held consistently, robs education of any true goodness or beauty, and is ultimately inhuman. It leads not to human flourishing and freedom, but to the Abolition of Man (male and female). So, while Lewis, following Aristotle, saw education as the inducting of the young into “just sentiments”, modern relationship and sex education (RSE) curricula are an invitation to depravity. The inconsistency of safeguarding training on female genital mutilation sitting alongside Costa’s glorification of mastectomy scars seems not to jar as it should, “…but what should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men?”
Chinese parents that I speak to are aghast at developments in California and elsewhere (places they have long aspired to send their children). This is a culture that values harmony over warring echo chambers in its public life, and that rests on a shared moral vision which recognises the centrality of family life to the nation. As Burke put it, “We begin our public affections in our families. No cold relation is the zealous citizen. We pass on to our neighbourhoods, and our habitual provincial connections. These are the inns and resting places.” China has an immense and rich history, and history, of course, is what must be erased or rewritten if your mindset is that of O’Brien in 1984. In Robert Service’s histories of the Bolshevik project, the most striking thing is how haphazard it all was. Like O’Brien, the leaders saw the point of power as power, with the details to be invented as events warranted. In other words, they made it up as they went along, much as the rainbow flag seems to have a new iteration with every vocal victim group included in the cause. School textbooks and lesson plans are hastily and shoddily assembled (they were quite often drivel even before all of this), history is reinvented, and our culture crumbles.
The final chapter of the Abolition of Man describes a future when the values of the majority are controlled by a small group, who in turn, are ruled only by whim. The result of Rousseau’s philosophy is an elite surrendered to their own motivations, who have done away with traditional morality only by the arbitrary selection of parts of it to undermine others which they do not like. They could no more invent a new moral value than a new primary colour; it all has a horribly familiar ring to it in my recent experience.
China has understandably resisted Western universalism, historically, and I can imagine that importing the Alphabet Cult looks as potent a threat as welcoming the opium which so devastated society here in the 19th Century; they will likewise want nothing to do with it. Can you blame them?
Nick Seward is Head of Schools at ICS Hong Kong.
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“Postcard From Hong Kong”
Glad I’m not there!
After reading this, I’m afraid I’m none the wiser about Hong Kong as I was previously.
Likewise. I’d be quite curious how the horrors of the CCP, and Social Credit play out in Hong Kong, and also versus the rest of China.
That’s maybe because Hong Kong is not the subject of this article, rather education there?
You’ll find any number of articles on what you want out there on the internet, I am sure. And maybe some more on the subject of this article.
Education in China (and outside the anglo western world in general) retains traditional values, granted. Traditional family values also prevai therel, granted.
That is pretty much where the positives with China end though if you’re not a fan of totalitarianism. It’s a very well.managed technocracy which is great for those that like order and stability and almost any price.
For those of us who crave to feel free it’s a suffocating place. The western world is heading that way, but isn’t quite there yet.
And don’t think that the Chinese don’t suffer their own madness. The indignity most of them endured willingly over Covid was a to me total insanity. As is the continued mask fetish which still prevails.
Yes it’s a place where teachers can be free of woke craziness. But an place free from societal madness it is not.
Pretty much sums up my view
I agree, Stewart. And it is a place where pointing out the evils of communism to pupils will not go down very well.
Strange that no mention is made of the still active protest movement.
I could well imagine living in Singapore, where the government is a bit authoritarian in some respects (e.g. no chewing gum. So no blobs of chewing gum over the pavements. I could live with that.) But respect for traditional values is much more widespread than here.
No need to travel so far. I have travelled extensively in Eastern Europe (excepting only Belarus and Moldova) and what is accepted as normal in London or Birmingham wouldn’t last five minutes.
Try Hungary. It is acceptable to be proud of your country and celebrate your rich cultural inheritance. Even before 1989, it was stated that Hungary was “the happiest barracks in the camp”.
I remember being propositioned by an extremely attractive young lady in Budapest in 1986. Expressing my polite refusal, I was a bit surprised when she pointed out that she could accept Mastercard or Visa. I didn’t accept her kind offer but joked to my wife, reading in our hotel room 5 minutes later, that Communism was likely in trouble.
Although that proved correct, one of my happiest memories, I did not expect that a generation later, the politicians, academics, media and even big business would have been taken over by a weird and malevolent type of watermelon communism. Green apparently but red on the inside.
Hungary today mostly holds out against that crap and also keeps out the invaders.
Thanks Nick. Some interesting thoughts, but permit me to say that on the whole you seem to operate from a state of denial.
Were you tripping when you wrote this?
The ultimate nightmare of the Chinese digital panopticon does not bother you sense of ‘liberty’?
Regarding emotions – I agree with you: emotions are ‘valid’, but this does not mean that they are ‘right’.
I read it as being written somewhat with tongue in cheek.
Not the article I was expecting from the title, but it makes a good point. The PRC may not be a bastion of freedom and democracy, but we are only one pandemic away from much the same here in the UK. At least they are not bringing up their children to despise their country, it’s customs and it’s culture.
I’m just aware that everything I think I know about the horrors of China comes from the same press that tells me about the horrors of Russia, the evil of Trump, WMD in Iraq, etc. etc.
How much do we know, and how much do we assume?
Any readers here who have actually spent time in China?
I did, although only four months, two in Shen Zhen and two in Hong Kong. In the Chinese part of Shen Zhen, ie, accross the special industry zone border, everyday life is really a lot freer than what we are used to, although this manifests itself in forms many people would probably rather abhor, like one-legged, dirty beggars in the streets or people throwing dead cats out of their shop doors into the gutter. Assuming an English council was given authority over such a street, the health-and-safety executives wouldn’t rest for a minute until all hospitality businesses – of which there are plenty – had been shut down and most of the public activities prohibited. In contrast to this, the whatever-authority responsible for this part of Shen-Zhen held monthly public strip shows with women in traditional Chinese costumes slowly undressing in public, an event which seemed to be very much favoured by the male population. Occasionally, one would see larger, closed bodies of policemen doing martial arts training in public. Apart from that, they were barely noticable, patrolling the streets in small groups and ignoring must of the turmoil going on around them.
Thanks RW. Interesting that you are downvoted for sharing your personal experience. Sounds as if you’re guilty of malinformation.
I lived in China for 3 years. Before I went, one of my friends tried to dissuade me, his descriptions made it sound like North Korea (he hadn’t been himself, I guess these were just impressions he had from the media). That wasn’t my experience at all, but I would be very cautious about generalising. For one thing, I was very obviously a foreigner, making it impossible to fully experience life as local people do.
Semi related. I am in Korea now and masks are at about 20 percent maybe. Pleasantly surprised. Covid hardly ever comes up in convo.
Best option is to stay in Britain and fight. Hardly anyone outside the wider blob supports the woke madness.
Not a ‘postcard from Hong Kong’ more a short essay on the author’s understanding of Western philosophy.
I think I have gone on the same journey as the author. I value greatly the freedoms of “The West”, but I am no longer so sure of their immutability, especially having now seen how vulnerable they are when the sheep get panicked. And in certain specific areas where I would have accepted without question that ‘we’ certainly have the upper hand when compared with most other parts of the world (free press, blind justice etc.), I now see with great sadness that we are found seriously lacking.
Indeed, I used to be 100% certain that NASA took men to the moon. Now, I must admit, I am no longer so sure.
Unlike the author, however, I have never had anything good to say about British “Education”.
I too have thought of the moon landings as something as a test case for the “Empire of Lies.” On the face of it, all the evidence suggests the Apollo programme was what it was put out to be.
But when one sees the quagmire of lies at the present time, and the opening up of the lies inb past US history from the causes of the Vietnam war to the death of JFK, you begin to ask if maybe the rabid desire to beat the Communists might, just possibly, have combined with technological over-reach to make it worth someone’s while to fake the thing rather than back down.
I’m not saying that’s the case – I think it’s a lower than 50% possibility. But my point is that once a government goes the way of wholesale and habitual lies, it forfeits the right to have even its real achievements believed. “What a tangled web we weave” and all that.
Indeed. I have no doubts about the technical feasibility of landing men on the moon. But when one takes into account the means, motive and opportunity to fake the whole thing, and the tendency of the sheep to get divided and conquered and believe anything TPTB throw at them, and the inevitable presence of grifters to earn a pretty penny from getting governments to spend all our money for us on said grifters (ref. Tesla, SpaceX, Pfizer, Moderna et al), it all starts to seem a lot more likely that men never, ever went to the moon. I have no way to independently verify the narrative that we did, and neither does anyone else – not from a position on earth.
Moon landings were a fraud. 1000 reasons, whistle blowers, clues, obvious lies and frauds. Can start anywhere and the movie fraud is revealed as admitted by Kubrick and the drunk Aldrin – radiation, the rockets, no computer systems, the LEM, no noise crater or dust in the fake landing, the fat bottom module re entry, the magic parachutes, the ridiculous studio shot moon photos from the wrong height, the sun which is just a light cluster, the actornauts who can’t remember seeing stars, the fact that radiation on the moon would kill you in no time and destroy your equipment etc etc and yeah 1960s tech…..but the Americans have ‘lost’all the tapes telemetry designs hardware and software and don’t know how to get to the moon….FFS
This is a strange experience to find myself agreeing with the majority of comments. I am interested to know exactly what he can do in Hong Kong that he can’t do here.
Buy candied chicken feet in street markets would be a safe bet. But he actually wrote that and it can also be inferred from the web site of his work place: Teach Christian children attending a Christian school based on Christian values, instead of having to hold lessons about anal sex, chest tissue and gender-fluidity in the name of child welfare as defined by the UK authorities.
I guess I meant what is forbidden as opposed to not available. It is legal to sell and buy candied chicken feet here – just not much of a market. Unlike the UK, religious organisations are not allowed to run schools for children in China.
https://www.ics.edu.hk/
The link is also in the article.
Fair enough – I wonder if this limited to Hong Kong or are such schools available in mainland China – if the former then how much longer?
Apparently roughly as long as in the West!