Hasn’t been easy to grasp China—on one hand, a masculine, vein-popping national communist regime against American interest; on another, something softer, deeper, wiser than what’s sensed and portrayed in the West. But this seeming contradiction is key to understanding China...
What is native—original—to the Chinese civilization-state? 
How does China see the logic of its imports and the trajectory of their harmonization with what is native to the civilization-state?
Despite its myriad and in some ways even pervasive flaws and dangers, the Chinese sensibility of BOTH the natural whole and the primal division of parts points in a profoundly different technological direction from the Western sensibility pushed by our secular elite for centuries
China understands clearly that catechizing its autonomous machines in accordance with its native cosmology is the key to BOTH progress and return in the digital age. The logical policy flowing from this is a complete “harmonization” of everyone in China under the one cosmology
In the West, “China envy” is natural (the longing to establish the “one true cosmology” always eludes “our” grasp; wars of religious unification rage against irreconcilable religious particulars), but naturally comes with hatred as well as admiration...
The danger for China and the West is that digital is all about the triumph of the discrete and particular over the whole; no one cosmology can catechize all the autonomous machines without declaring war against nature and our given, incarnate, ensouled human being.
China is right to fear the impact of the religious western way of war in a digital age. America is right to fear the impact of the depersonalizing eastern way of peace in a digital age. But neither fear sufficiently articulates the digital challenge: preserving humanity and peace
It is increasingly clear even in the West that “globalism” is unable, per Western dreams, to peacefully preserve our humanity. This is because the digital medium is one that has ALREADY made such globalism—centralized, uniform, “scientific”—impossible.
Digital of course does pull forward the globe and the global—while obsolescing any possible “ism” attached to it. The fantasy of “globalism” is replaced by the religion of digitalism, the push for peace by ending our humanity through union with the automated machines.
Both China and America, east and west, have an ancient original ethos that together represent a shared interest or even duty to prevent digitalism from seeking global peace and unity by obsolescing our humanity through our transformation into a part of our automated machines.
It is hard to see how that shared interest or duty can be fulfilled if China and America succumb either to Western globalism, Chinese uniformity, or a cataclysmic war between them. //
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
