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Understanding China's Surveillance State
Jon Lanchester
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Back in the 80s and 90s, a tall tale about China started to emerge in the West. It went like this: If capitalism takes root in China, democracy will soon follow.
The rise of the internet only seemed to confirm this story. “Liberty will be spread by cell phone and cable modem,” said Bill Clinton in 1992. Any attempt by the notoriously authoritarian Chinese government to crack down on the Internet will be like “trying to nail jello to the wall.”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) heard these stories and got to work. They created “The Great Firewall of China” to restrict Chinese access to the outside world. They also harnessed the power of the internet to create the most sophisticated surveillance state the world has ever seen.
The CCP no longer fears the Internet. They’ve used it to create “an AI-powered techno-totalitarian state.”
How did this happen? What might it mean that the same surveillance technology is already used by private companies in our own countries? And how might China’s plans for the future affect democracies that interact with them? (Hint: it starts with Chinese smartphones.)
Read “Document Number Nine” by Jon Lanchester, a review of two recent books on the topic, to find out.
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This could be why you're depressed or anxious
Johann Hari
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When Johann Hari was a teenager, he was desperate for relief from depression. He was given a familiar prescription: “You have a chemical imbalance and these drugs will balance it out.” It wasn’t wholly false, Hari insists, but it was drastically oversimplified.
“We have scientific evidence for nine different causes of depression and anxiety. Two of them are indeed in our biology,” Hari explains. “But most of the factors that have been proven to cause depression and anxiety are … in the way we live. And once you understand them, it opens up a very different set of solutions that should be offered to people alongside the option of chemical antidepressants.”
In this talk, Hari explores two of these causes — loneliness and “junk values” — and tells stories of people fighting them in humane, communal ways.
Watch “This could be why you’re depressed anxious” at TED. For a wise Christian engagement with some of these issues, check out Alan’s Noble’s “On Living” in written or chapel talk form.
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Unnecessary Gifts
Wesley Hill
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Our previous issue featured a short piece by Gracy Olmstead on why we should continue having children despite the looming threat of climate change. Here’s another short essay on children, this time by Wesley Hill, a celibate seminary professor and god-parent.
In the ancient world, children were viewed as “links in a generational chain that will preserve the church’s family name or guarantee its future flourishing.” Despite dramatic cultural shifts over time, we often view children in a similar way today — as a way to “ensure we won’t be alone in old age and that our history won’t die when we do.”
Both of these perspectives make children “the solution to some problem” — a means to our own ends. How might Christianity enable us to receive children as gifts of grace?
Read “Unnecessary Gifts” by Wesley Hill in The Point. For more from Wesley Hill, check out “Jigs for Marriage and Celibacy” over at Comment or his new little book The Lord's Prayer.
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Weekly Miscellany
A few extras we couldn't fit in elsewhere
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Andy has been listening to Max Richter's delightful reworking of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons called Recomposed, and re-watching perhaps the greatest TV show yet made: Breaking Bad (not at the same time).
For another pair of not-to-be-taken-together items, Andy currently has two books on his nightstand: Steig Larsson's, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and Liz Bohannon's funny, illuminating, and inspiring autobiography and story of entrepreneurship, Beginner's Pluck.
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Once upon a time, Phillip was a big fan of the enigmatic filmmaker Terrence Malick, but the relationship fizzled one exhausting afternoon in London's Prince Charles Cinema (with Andy, as it happens). But Phillip saw Malick's new A Hidden Life a few nights ago and was beguiled once again. Look for it this December.
He's also revisiting the most formative book he's ever read on Scripture and returning almost daily to Handel Goes Wild, a classical-klezmer mashup that he nevertheless finds strangely appealing. (Sorry, Christa.)
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Current Thought Projects
Ideas we're mulling over long-term
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Andy is trying to trace a trend you might call "post-evangelicalism" – a new form of an old pattern in which Christians and post-Christians search for new forms of faith over and against the Christianity of their upbringing. He's looking at three PE podcasts and the cluster of books their creators and interviewees have produced. This week it is Finding God In the Waves by Mike McHargue and What Do We Do With The Bible? by Richard Rohr.
For more on the way PE's key figures have blended autobiography with 21st-century media, read Alastair Roberts' essay "The New Storytellers".
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Phillip is still thinking about James Williams' Stand Out of Our Light and is taken by his paradigm of three types of attentional light that get obscured by our tech habits:
- Spotlight: our immediate awareness
- Starlight: our higher goals and values
- Daylight: our capacity for reflection, reason, etc.
Do you see these obscured in your own life, particularly when it comes to how you relate to and love other people? Let us know!
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