May 13 2008
An Interesting Conversion with ZDS
It was always a pleasure meeting like-minded folks. This is true for hillbilly racists, white working class laborers, liberation theologists, too-poor-to-own-property-but-enough-to-afford-a-latte-a-day liberal activists. So is it true for immigrant intellectuals from the Orient.
ZDS is a professor in law school. We are of the same age but took quite different routes to the same spatial and temporal location as we did this afternoon… that is too much. We met in his office about my coal mine paper.
But the conversation diverged soon after. I am pleasantly surprised that he’s a fan of Foucault and Said too (more so of the latter and P Bourdieu). His has a insightful view concerning the two: Foucault is too concerned with domination and permeation. Said, however, expands Foucault’s thesis and dares to contest the symbols that were created by the powerful.
Our different views of recent events: Tibet, 08 election and the Western liberal democracy, echo our choice of favorite between Said and Foucault. I suspect his training in law and legislation breeds in him a more optimistic outlook for the outcast surviving in democracy. After all, his job is to protect the right to be different.
I am much more pessimistic about where the liberal legacy in the U.S. is heading to. Now think of it, I may have been “shocked and awed” by the collective reactions following 9.11. But the force of conformity is unmistakeable.
Will an Obama presidency change the paranoia, the hysteria of fear and the intolerance of dissent? To me, that is the hypocracy and the weakness of popular democracy, for it creates a paradox that is unsolvable: even if Obama’s election will change the political ethos of our time, he cannot win unless sufficient majority are ready for the change. If, just for the argument’s sake, the majority is wrong, irrational or stupid, what’s in liberal democracy that can bring a change to this sorry reality?