Pointless musings
Mar. 24th, 2003 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tarigwaemirAd Mundo Exteriore,
Again, this was written a few days ago, but not posted until now. Which is why it's longer than usual and even more meandering...
Maeve and kaydee's IM conversation just reminded me of some thoughts I've been having on the shades of opinion in the modern political spectrum and how labels really aren't clear-cut for anyone. Not a direct connection and by no means a response. Let's just say kaydee's post was the inspiration.
The truth is, I'm not really a liberal. I am virulently anti-Republican, but I don't particularly like the Democrats either. (They seem like a bunch of wet noodles to me.) I don't even like the Greens or the Socialists, because they're far too extreme and impractical. Modern liberals actually irritate me as well with their insistence on moral superiority, when morals shouldn't belong in politics. Ethics, as in the laws that govern a society in order to prevent chaos and disorder, are indeed integral to the functioning any political system. But morals, which are absolute principles not social conveniences, are a different case altogether. They don't belong in politics. I think abortion is a sin, but I don't oppose its legality. After all, I think fornication is a sin, but that's certainly not illegal. There's a certain privateness to morality—I have certain principles that I know I must follow, but I don't believe I must then impose their specifics on other people. (This is why Alex infuriates me so much. Simply because he thinks it's all right to go and do whatever he wants does not mean that it's all right for me. This is not a matter of personal desires, but a matter of personal stability. Did I mention that I really can't tolerate Alex anymore this year?) Anyway, I think it's sort of silly for modern liberals to act so self-righteous about their political positions. It's necessary for the public forum, I suppose, the exchange of rhetoric and psychological advantages and all that, but why should we delude ourselves?
But I suppose they're not really deluding themselves—this is what they believe. And if they believe in it enough to go marching and rallying, I respect that. Nevertheless, there is a line I have to draw between us. ("Us" being the vague "they" and I, not necessarily including you, the reader.) I have moral stances, of course, on political issues, but those stances concern my personal conduct. The opinions I hold regardless of those principles are mostly based on my ardent "internationalism". Why am I an internationalist? Because in eighth grade, I wrote an essay on how civilization began when group identity extended beyond mere ties of kinship. Possessing a sense of cultural identity that incorporated people whom one would never see or know...that was the huge step for the rise of cities and social structures. This idea is by no means proven, but nevertheless, it was the first idea that I thought up on my own to any extent, and I haven't really managed to be convinced otherwise. I believe that historically, we move back and forth between broadening and narrowing the boundaries of our group identity. I think that the ultimate challenge is to be able to perceive ourselves as first belonging to humanity. It's not so easy as one would imagine. We first think of ourselves in terms of name, family, gender, city or region, and nation. By the time we get to human, there is very little sense of identity left. To make humanity into an integral part of our social identity...I doubt that it's possible, but still, my sense of continuity desires that we move towards this unreachable summit.
In this context, it's not so difficult to believe in world goverment as a historical necessity. Though I doubt that a world government will be possible for a long while yet. (I used to hope it would happen late this century, but it'll probably happen in the next. Or even later, since I can't predict at all the course of the near future. Maybe there will be a long era of prosperity without further globalization. Maybe the terrorism situation will result in a new geopolitical polarization despite the efforts not to demonize Islam.) The current imbalance of power in the world doesn't exactly encourage the situation, unless we had a particularly visionary president who was charismatic enough to present the decline of national sovereignty as supporting America's best interests. I don't believe a world government is a cureall for the world's problems. Quite the contrary, I think it will introduce new problems and new questions that will be different from anything we've ever faced before. Nevertheless, there is a trend towards some sort of international cooperation. The UN and all its fellow organizations are proof. The problem is, these institutions are powerless right now, and nations still interact with each other rather anarchically. I want to introduce order, even if it means that order will bring its own flaws. The European Union shows potential in this respect, at least in objectives if not in status.
Thus, my political opinions are flimsily based on this historical aesthetic and revolve mostly around international affairs. Governments will never hire me, and I do admit that there is something almost treacherous, or rather anti-patriotic about this position. (At least as an American. As a Korean, I just get, well, very nationalistic and inconsistent. Wrong of me, I know, especially now that I'm a U.S. citizen.) Anyway, what I wanted to explain was, this is my political position, and it is not really framed in the same context as the liberal/conservative schism. (Not that there's much of a schism.) I can't call myself a liberal or a conservative, just an internationalist, and perhaps a fanatic one at that. Frankly, in the end, both liberals and conservatives are different types of isolationalists. Liberals don't want strong interference overseas but believe in spouting lots of words about democracy and human rights, conservatives want to interfere whenever they want to but don't want to be aware of what's going on abroad. At least I don't pretend that my position is particularly superior to another's. In the end, it's all a matter of preference, and I can't presume to judge.
Moreover, modern liberalism becomes rather repelling when it accompanies a materialistic skepticism that is nevertheless horribly dogmatic. For a political philosophy that champions toleration, its proponents can be frighteningly narrow-minded. Conservatives are just as narrow-minded, of course, and despite the label, I think they're just too modern for me as well. Part of what I like about Chesterton—he exposes a lot of the absurdity on both sides, though from a different setting. I think I agree with him: I am a medievalist. I am also very Confucian, with its emphasis on order, on maintaining proper relations, on respect for tradition. Of course, now we stray away from politics and go into mindsets in general, but still, there is a whole outlook that accompanies both current liberalism and conservatism that is very antagonistic to mine.
I don't really like individualism. Accuse me of being antidemocratic, but I believe democracy has nothing to do with it. It's no longer even the teenage disgust that realizes in the midst of rebellion, conformity is only reinforced. It's the sense that all this focus on individual identity, individual desires, and individual separateness is enslaving, that real freedom is to be found in harmony, not division. (Why I ended up respecting T.S. Eliot after all. The Modern (note the capital) writers all seem to know the flaws of modern thought, and their writing wrestles with it, which is why they appeal to me. Actually, most intellectuals during the twentieth century have acknowledged constant alienation and mindnumbing drive for simple satiation, which are the consequences of modern rebellion, but why they haven't managed to free themselves yet is beyond me.) And now I'm going off on a metaphor again, but it's like traditional Korean dance. Beauty lies in the tension, the restraint of the motionless pose, not in the frenetic, gyrating movement of current popular dance.
In the end, it's really impossible to explain to someone who just doesn't share your point of view. As I've said, most of this is all a personal thing. The point I wanted to make and failed to cover was that very few people are really the stereotypical "true" liberal. I just spent all this time trying to explain why I specifically wasn't. I suppose in frivolous conversation, I adopt the pose of the liberal, not only in politics but also in general philosophy. That's not really a good thing—some people don't quite seem to realize when I'm making outrageous statements for the sake of saying something. (Alex, for one. Argh. Tries to take everything I say as a serious exposition of opinion. At most, I'm only sincere about the surface issues. I don't even begin to share my truly important views with him, because then we'd have to somehow bridge the drastic cultural differences. And I'm not speaking of simple East vs. West.) Seriously speaking though, my writing is probably more honest than my conversation. I usually extend the courtesy of arguing from a common ground rather than my own strong beliefs and assumptions, which puts me at a severe disadvantage on debating most serious impersonal issues. Personal issues of course are easier, but I don't really feel passionate about them. How paradoxical, neh?
Quiz found from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pornkings:
1. What does your first name mean?
My first name can be interpreted as the Korean word for "one", which was deliberate since my parents knew that they were probably too old to have another child by the time they found out that Mother was pregnant with me. Since they knew I was doomed to be an only child, they thought it would make a charming girl's name. -_-
No, actually I like my name. In Chinese characters, it means "summer beautiful", or if you flip the syllables around, "Beautiful Summer". The second character's especially obscure, and I think it emphasizes the meaning "feminine beauty". It has all the balanced characteristics of a name in pronounciation and meaning. Also, it's easy to romanize--yes, my "English" name is actually the romanization of my Korean name. Father spent some time in thinking it up, so I'm rather proud of it.
2. What does your middle name mean?
I don't have a middle name, but my baptismal name is Hannah, which sounds exactly like the romanization of my Korean name. Hannah of course was the mother of Samuel, and according to my aunt the nun, she is the Old Testament exemplar of faithful prayer. I don't know what Hannah means in Hebrew though.
3. What about the last name?
Loosely translated, it means "plum" but according to Mother, it's not precisely a plum but a fruit which is similar to a plum. I'm a Jeoneui Yi, where Jeoneui is some ancient town or village in Chunchungdo, I think.
4. So, if you were to put the meanings of all your names together, what would it say?
"Beautiful summer plums"? I don't think my first name really belongs with my last name though...
5. If you'd been born the opposite sex, what would your parents have named you?
Oh, this is interesting. My name, if I were a boy, would have been Yin-ki, which means "Foundation of Wisdom" or something like that. Isn't that a nice name? Horrible when romanized though. It has its own music in Korean, nevertheless. I often do imagine who I'd be like if I had been born a boy, which is why Yin-ki is now the name for my twin brother who lives in a parallel universe. I talk to him inside my head when I'm too lazy to make up an imaginary person. ::realizes how odd that sounds:: What?! We all have those moments, don't we? And Yin-ki acts very sensible and sarcastic when I'm being childish, so he digs me out of my wallows in self-pity.
My mother's name is really a Koreanized Japanese name. She doesn't like it because her parents didn't even bother to think up a new name. It was her older sister who named her, because she thought the name sounded "pretty". You know those Japanese girl names that end with "ko"? In Korean, the complement is "ja", and both my mother and my maternal aunt have "ja" names. It's a sign of indifference, and my mother gets very enthusiastic about "women's rights" when she mentions it.
My father's name is means "Flame of Righteousness" but according to my mother, it sounds awkward in Korean. (It's also really difficult to pronounce properly in English, since it uses the one vowel sound in Korean that probably doesn't exist in any other language.) It's also ridiculously difficult to write in Chinese. >_< Mine's medium difficulty, though the second character is sort of obscure, and Mother's is rather simple, but Father's is just impossible to remember.
Tin, from whom I got this meme, asked about the convention of using English names for Asian immigrants. Most of the comments answered her question, but it did make me think. There really is no convention in my own experience. I know one boy who puts his Korean name as his middle name, which is actually pretty odd. You don't see that too often. Also, there's the opposite end where the family changes its last name to sound more American and then names its children with names like "Sarah Daisy". How...how Western. Also, there's this boy who was in my Korean school in first grade (oh, way back when), and he didn't even have a Korean name, so he was called "Ma-i-keul". I think that's awful, really. I definitely plan on naming my children with Korean names, carefully following the generational rules and traditions (even if we have to go back to Korea to look at the records). (You see, all the male cousins of a generation in a particular clan have the same syllable in their name. All my cousins' names end in "ki"—Hyong-ki, Min-ki, Won-ki, etc. That's why I would have been named Yin-ki. You know what syllable to use by some sort of clan document or record. Actually, you can usually tell if someone's distantly related to you if they share your last name and they have the proper syllable in their name.)
I'm pretty lucky in the ease of transition between languages. My name sounds different in Korean of course (it's much simpler in vowel sounds) but it's not fundamentally different. Ugh, unlike my father, who not only has a difficult name to begin with, but went ahead and romanized it in the worst way possible, to maximize mispronounciation. Sometimes I think he should have stuck to Sebastian (his baptismal name).
...Tari
Again, this was written a few days ago, but not posted until now. Which is why it's longer than usual and even more meandering...
Maeve and kaydee's IM conversation just reminded me of some thoughts I've been having on the shades of opinion in the modern political spectrum and how labels really aren't clear-cut for anyone. Not a direct connection and by no means a response. Let's just say kaydee's post was the inspiration.
The truth is, I'm not really a liberal. I am virulently anti-Republican, but I don't particularly like the Democrats either. (They seem like a bunch of wet noodles to me.) I don't even like the Greens or the Socialists, because they're far too extreme and impractical. Modern liberals actually irritate me as well with their insistence on moral superiority, when morals shouldn't belong in politics. Ethics, as in the laws that govern a society in order to prevent chaos and disorder, are indeed integral to the functioning any political system. But morals, which are absolute principles not social conveniences, are a different case altogether. They don't belong in politics. I think abortion is a sin, but I don't oppose its legality. After all, I think fornication is a sin, but that's certainly not illegal. There's a certain privateness to morality—I have certain principles that I know I must follow, but I don't believe I must then impose their specifics on other people. (This is why Alex infuriates me so much. Simply because he thinks it's all right to go and do whatever he wants does not mean that it's all right for me. This is not a matter of personal desires, but a matter of personal stability. Did I mention that I really can't tolerate Alex anymore this year?) Anyway, I think it's sort of silly for modern liberals to act so self-righteous about their political positions. It's necessary for the public forum, I suppose, the exchange of rhetoric and psychological advantages and all that, but why should we delude ourselves?
But I suppose they're not really deluding themselves—this is what they believe. And if they believe in it enough to go marching and rallying, I respect that. Nevertheless, there is a line I have to draw between us. ("Us" being the vague "they" and I, not necessarily including you, the reader.) I have moral stances, of course, on political issues, but those stances concern my personal conduct. The opinions I hold regardless of those principles are mostly based on my ardent "internationalism". Why am I an internationalist? Because in eighth grade, I wrote an essay on how civilization began when group identity extended beyond mere ties of kinship. Possessing a sense of cultural identity that incorporated people whom one would never see or know...that was the huge step for the rise of cities and social structures. This idea is by no means proven, but nevertheless, it was the first idea that I thought up on my own to any extent, and I haven't really managed to be convinced otherwise. I believe that historically, we move back and forth between broadening and narrowing the boundaries of our group identity. I think that the ultimate challenge is to be able to perceive ourselves as first belonging to humanity. It's not so easy as one would imagine. We first think of ourselves in terms of name, family, gender, city or region, and nation. By the time we get to human, there is very little sense of identity left. To make humanity into an integral part of our social identity...I doubt that it's possible, but still, my sense of continuity desires that we move towards this unreachable summit.
In this context, it's not so difficult to believe in world goverment as a historical necessity. Though I doubt that a world government will be possible for a long while yet. (I used to hope it would happen late this century, but it'll probably happen in the next. Or even later, since I can't predict at all the course of the near future. Maybe there will be a long era of prosperity without further globalization. Maybe the terrorism situation will result in a new geopolitical polarization despite the efforts not to demonize Islam.) The current imbalance of power in the world doesn't exactly encourage the situation, unless we had a particularly visionary president who was charismatic enough to present the decline of national sovereignty as supporting America's best interests. I don't believe a world government is a cureall for the world's problems. Quite the contrary, I think it will introduce new problems and new questions that will be different from anything we've ever faced before. Nevertheless, there is a trend towards some sort of international cooperation. The UN and all its fellow organizations are proof. The problem is, these institutions are powerless right now, and nations still interact with each other rather anarchically. I want to introduce order, even if it means that order will bring its own flaws. The European Union shows potential in this respect, at least in objectives if not in status.
Thus, my political opinions are flimsily based on this historical aesthetic and revolve mostly around international affairs. Governments will never hire me, and I do admit that there is something almost treacherous, or rather anti-patriotic about this position. (At least as an American. As a Korean, I just get, well, very nationalistic and inconsistent. Wrong of me, I know, especially now that I'm a U.S. citizen.) Anyway, what I wanted to explain was, this is my political position, and it is not really framed in the same context as the liberal/conservative schism. (Not that there's much of a schism.) I can't call myself a liberal or a conservative, just an internationalist, and perhaps a fanatic one at that. Frankly, in the end, both liberals and conservatives are different types of isolationalists. Liberals don't want strong interference overseas but believe in spouting lots of words about democracy and human rights, conservatives want to interfere whenever they want to but don't want to be aware of what's going on abroad. At least I don't pretend that my position is particularly superior to another's. In the end, it's all a matter of preference, and I can't presume to judge.
Moreover, modern liberalism becomes rather repelling when it accompanies a materialistic skepticism that is nevertheless horribly dogmatic. For a political philosophy that champions toleration, its proponents can be frighteningly narrow-minded. Conservatives are just as narrow-minded, of course, and despite the label, I think they're just too modern for me as well. Part of what I like about Chesterton—he exposes a lot of the absurdity on both sides, though from a different setting. I think I agree with him: I am a medievalist. I am also very Confucian, with its emphasis on order, on maintaining proper relations, on respect for tradition. Of course, now we stray away from politics and go into mindsets in general, but still, there is a whole outlook that accompanies both current liberalism and conservatism that is very antagonistic to mine.
I don't really like individualism. Accuse me of being antidemocratic, but I believe democracy has nothing to do with it. It's no longer even the teenage disgust that realizes in the midst of rebellion, conformity is only reinforced. It's the sense that all this focus on individual identity, individual desires, and individual separateness is enslaving, that real freedom is to be found in harmony, not division. (Why I ended up respecting T.S. Eliot after all. The Modern (note the capital) writers all seem to know the flaws of modern thought, and their writing wrestles with it, which is why they appeal to me. Actually, most intellectuals during the twentieth century have acknowledged constant alienation and mindnumbing drive for simple satiation, which are the consequences of modern rebellion, but why they haven't managed to free themselves yet is beyond me.) And now I'm going off on a metaphor again, but it's like traditional Korean dance. Beauty lies in the tension, the restraint of the motionless pose, not in the frenetic, gyrating movement of current popular dance.
In the end, it's really impossible to explain to someone who just doesn't share your point of view. As I've said, most of this is all a personal thing. The point I wanted to make and failed to cover was that very few people are really the stereotypical "true" liberal. I just spent all this time trying to explain why I specifically wasn't. I suppose in frivolous conversation, I adopt the pose of the liberal, not only in politics but also in general philosophy. That's not really a good thing—some people don't quite seem to realize when I'm making outrageous statements for the sake of saying something. (Alex, for one. Argh. Tries to take everything I say as a serious exposition of opinion. At most, I'm only sincere about the surface issues. I don't even begin to share my truly important views with him, because then we'd have to somehow bridge the drastic cultural differences. And I'm not speaking of simple East vs. West.) Seriously speaking though, my writing is probably more honest than my conversation. I usually extend the courtesy of arguing from a common ground rather than my own strong beliefs and assumptions, which puts me at a severe disadvantage on debating most serious impersonal issues. Personal issues of course are easier, but I don't really feel passionate about them. How paradoxical, neh?
Quiz found from
pornkings:1. What does your first name mean?
My first name can be interpreted as the Korean word for "one", which was deliberate since my parents knew that they were probably too old to have another child by the time they found out that Mother was pregnant with me. Since they knew I was doomed to be an only child, they thought it would make a charming girl's name. -_-
No, actually I like my name. In Chinese characters, it means "summer beautiful", or if you flip the syllables around, "Beautiful Summer". The second character's especially obscure, and I think it emphasizes the meaning "feminine beauty". It has all the balanced characteristics of a name in pronounciation and meaning. Also, it's easy to romanize--yes, my "English" name is actually the romanization of my Korean name. Father spent some time in thinking it up, so I'm rather proud of it.
2. What does your middle name mean?
I don't have a middle name, but my baptismal name is Hannah, which sounds exactly like the romanization of my Korean name. Hannah of course was the mother of Samuel, and according to my aunt the nun, she is the Old Testament exemplar of faithful prayer. I don't know what Hannah means in Hebrew though.
3. What about the last name?
Loosely translated, it means "plum" but according to Mother, it's not precisely a plum but a fruit which is similar to a plum. I'm a Jeoneui Yi, where Jeoneui is some ancient town or village in Chunchungdo, I think.
4. So, if you were to put the meanings of all your names together, what would it say?
"Beautiful summer plums"? I don't think my first name really belongs with my last name though...
5. If you'd been born the opposite sex, what would your parents have named you?
Oh, this is interesting. My name, if I were a boy, would have been Yin-ki, which means "Foundation of Wisdom" or something like that. Isn't that a nice name? Horrible when romanized though. It has its own music in Korean, nevertheless. I often do imagine who I'd be like if I had been born a boy, which is why Yin-ki is now the name for my twin brother who lives in a parallel universe. I talk to him inside my head when I'm too lazy to make up an imaginary person. ::realizes how odd that sounds:: What?! We all have those moments, don't we? And Yin-ki acts very sensible and sarcastic when I'm being childish, so he digs me out of my wallows in self-pity.
My mother's name is really a Koreanized Japanese name. She doesn't like it because her parents didn't even bother to think up a new name. It was her older sister who named her, because she thought the name sounded "pretty". You know those Japanese girl names that end with "ko"? In Korean, the complement is "ja", and both my mother and my maternal aunt have "ja" names. It's a sign of indifference, and my mother gets very enthusiastic about "women's rights" when she mentions it.
My father's name is means "Flame of Righteousness" but according to my mother, it sounds awkward in Korean. (It's also really difficult to pronounce properly in English, since it uses the one vowel sound in Korean that probably doesn't exist in any other language.) It's also ridiculously difficult to write in Chinese. >_< Mine's medium difficulty, though the second character is sort of obscure, and Mother's is rather simple, but Father's is just impossible to remember.
Tin, from whom I got this meme, asked about the convention of using English names for Asian immigrants. Most of the comments answered her question, but it did make me think. There really is no convention in my own experience. I know one boy who puts his Korean name as his middle name, which is actually pretty odd. You don't see that too often. Also, there's the opposite end where the family changes its last name to sound more American and then names its children with names like "Sarah Daisy". How...how Western. Also, there's this boy who was in my Korean school in first grade (oh, way back when), and he didn't even have a Korean name, so he was called "Ma-i-keul". I think that's awful, really. I definitely plan on naming my children with Korean names, carefully following the generational rules and traditions (even if we have to go back to Korea to look at the records). (You see, all the male cousins of a generation in a particular clan have the same syllable in their name. All my cousins' names end in "ki"—Hyong-ki, Min-ki, Won-ki, etc. That's why I would have been named Yin-ki. You know what syllable to use by some sort of clan document or record. Actually, you can usually tell if someone's distantly related to you if they share your last name and they have the proper syllable in their name.)
I'm pretty lucky in the ease of transition between languages. My name sounds different in Korean of course (it's much simpler in vowel sounds) but it's not fundamentally different. Ugh, unlike my father, who not only has a difficult name to begin with, but went ahead and romanized it in the worst way possible, to maximize mispronounciation. Sometimes I think he should have stuck to Sebastian (his baptismal name).
...Tari
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2003-03-27 01:38 pm (UTC)O.o
Re:
Date: 2003-03-28 07:03 am (UTC)...Tari