The Telos Press Podcast: Miles Yu on China, Ideology, and Geopolitical Conflict

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Miles Yu about his article “Escape from Civilization’s Predicaments,” from Telos 201 (Winter 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the main problems with using the idea of civilization as a way of understanding today’s geopolitical conflicts; the meaning of ideology and its effect on politics; why it is more important to think of ideology than of civilization as a way of understanding politics; how the inability of Americans to see the importance of ideology in the world has affected U.S. foreign policy; what kind of foreign policy would emerge out of the focus on ideology; why Marxism as an ideology has maintained its appeal both for countries such as China and for U.S. intellectuals; and what strategies the United States has in this ideological conflict. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 201 are available for purchase in our online store.

From Telos 201 (Winter 2022):

Escape from Civilization’s Predicaments

Miles Yu

Thank you for inviting me to the Telos Conference.^[*] Unlike most of you, I am not a philosopher. I was trained as a historian. Some of you though may consider that to be, by definition, a failed philosopher.

Nevertheless, I am a product of a deeply philosophical zeitgeist. I was born and raised in China. It’s a country that, for the last several decades, has been vandalized by a radical, Western, communist ideology. It’s an ideology that is said to be deeply rooted in the critical philosophies of modern times.

It’s with that background in mind that I want to explain the title of my talk today: “Escape from Civilization’s Predicaments.” The title itself has created a new predicament for me because it contains the term “civilization.” But what is a “civilization”?

Civilization is an ambiguous term. It became fashionable when evolutionist thinking achieved dominance in modern history. The connotations were of high cultural achievements, as opposed to the lower stages of savagery. In other words, it makes sense only in terms of an inexorable evolution from barbarism to civilization, as the nineteenth-century anthropologist Henry Morgan put it.

With this interpretive framework, the “civilizing” West in the age of European expansion often encountered less civilized regions. For a period, these encounters were hailed as noble, and often exhilarating, missions. It was thought of as a glorious, epic struggle of Enlightenment over darkness and backwardness.

Today, however, the notion of “civilization” has undergone a revolutionary redefinition. On the one hand, there is the belief that all cultures and civilizations are of equal value. We are, in this understanding, living in a multicultural landscape, without a value hierarchy. The world is flat, to borrow a phrase.

On the other hand, old divides still exist. Civilization matters. The world’s conflicts and problems are often explained in terms of a clash of civilizations, an irreconcilable, uncompromising cycle of opposition and hostility along cultural, religious, and ethnic lines.

But I find this approach to defining the world’s affairs, and mankind’s predicaments, in terms of civilization to be inadequate.

The word “civilization” comes from the Latin civilis, meaning belonging to a society. This pertains to cultural roots, assuming that people who share the same moral values, aesthetics, and religious and intellectual heritages form unique civilizational blocs. They belong together. We often hear scholars refer to the Islamic civilization, the Chinese civilization, the Christian civilization, the Confucian civilization, and so on.

But this approach to understanding our world, it seems to me, is epistemologically flawed.

First, within the same supposed civilizational blocs, there are often large communities that do not belong in the same category. A singular Confucian civilization cannot explain the drastic differences between mainland China and Taiwan. North and South Koreas are in the same civilizational bloc, but they are different entities with distinct cultural and political realities. The same could once be said of the former East and West Germanys.

Second, this civilizational approach can aggravate old wounds and augment tribal conflicts when diverging groups are put together. Take Ukraine, as Vladimir Putin is currently trying to do.

The ongoing war in Ukraine is partly a result of the notion of civilizational belonging. Putin believes that Ukraine, or at least the Russian-speaking region and people of Ukraine, belong to a Moscow-centered Slavic civilization.

Ukraine does share cultural heritage with its more powerful neighbor. But Putin’s use of this civilizational heritage to justify invasion is appalling to many who have nevertheless developed their own separate cultural, political, and national identity.

This problem with the civilizational construct is not confined to Europe. A few weeks ago, I was with former secretary of state Mike Pompeo in Singapore. It was at the height of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

If you have ever worked in foreign policy, at the State Department or at any international organization, you will know that Singapore has been masterful at getting along with multiple sides of geopolitical conflicts at the same time. Singapore works to never easily offend anyone. But not this time.

Singapore’s government reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine uncharacteristically and aggressively, and with unmistakable clarity. Singapore was one of the first countries to impose sanctions on Russia.

There was a reason for this. Singapore has a profound fear of Putin’s logic of civilizational belonging, especially if it were to be applied by China in the Indo-Pacific. About 80 percent of Singaporeans are ethnic Chinese, more than any other country in Southeast Asia. Singapore’s strong reaction to an event in faraway Ukraine may well be because of the kind of moral repulsion that many of us felt at seeing an unprovoked war of aggression against a sovereign nation. But it was also a practical, strategic move against China, an aggressor in Singapore’s backyard. Beijing seeks to treat all Chinese-speaking people, worldwide, as “belonging” to a Sinic civilization, led by the Chinese Communist Party.

Before Secretary Pompeo and I visited Singapore, we spent four days in Taiwan. Between 95 and 97 percent of Taiwanese people are ethnic Chinese. As you can imagine, Russia’s Ukraine gambit caused a seismic shock in the island democracy. Taiwan’s reaction against Russia was also extraordinarily tough, swift, and strong. It was grounded in many of the same realities faced by Singapore. If Russia could invade Ukraine to supposedly protect ethnic Russians in another country, then China could do the same for ethnic Chinese or Chinese-speaking peoples and regions, both near and far.

Why am I saying all this? I want to suggest a different way of understanding our world’s predicaments. Instead of using civilization as the dominant category and criteria, we need to use something else. I propose ideology.

Let me clarify what I mean by “ideology.” The word “ideology,” in its modern form at least, came out of the French Revolution. Originally it denoted a system of ideas that form the dominant principles under which a government or a society function. In Chinese, the word “ideology,” or yishixingtai 意识形态, literally means “mode of consciousness.” It is often coupled with the word “superstructure,” or shangcengjianzhu 上层建筑.

Initially, the mid-nineteenth-century Marxists and communists used the word to mean the political and philosophical underpinnings of the means of production and the material foundation of society. Today, this broad Marxist definition of “ideology” still applies, mostly in a philosophical sense. But in the contemporary communist world, especially in China, “ideology” as a political system of ideas simply means the domain of political awareness that conforms to the thoughts of figures like Marx, Lenin, Mao, and other “correct” communist leaders.

Of course, ideology means different things in different parts of the world. Not every part of the world outside of the West is communist. In these places, ideology is the conceptual and intellectual source of human behaviors and actions and policies. It deals with the fundamental, non-material factors that animate and motivate a nation, a religious group, a government, an ethnic group, or a community.

But whatever its understanding, ideology matters. And the fact that we in the West increasingly have not used ideology to understand the modern world, especially to understand the communist world, has always been surprising to me.

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Notes

* This talk was originally presented as a keynote address at the 2022 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Conference on “Civilizational States and Liberal Empire—Bound to Collide?,” held on April 1–3, 2022, in New York, NY.