January 1, the First Day of 2019: We Have a Few Questions

On This Day is a new QDaily column, meant to help you understand more.

Today is January 1, 2019. Welcome to the new year.

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin once borrowed a Paul Klee painting to describe what he called the "angel of history": his face turned toward the past, staring at a heap of wreckage, wanting to stop, wake the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But "a storm is blowing from Paradise... irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned." That storm is what people call "progress."

Not long after finishing that essay, Benjamin killed himself at the French-Spanish border. As a Jew, he knew all too well that civilization and barbarism travel together, and that treating history as a straight line of progress holds the door open for catastrophe. The criticism cuts against fascists and equally against the so-called "left" that keeps a blind faith in history. Marx called revolution the locomotive of world history; Benjamin added a pointed correction: the real revolution may be the passengers — all of humanity — pulling the emergency brake.

Seen this way, we cannot quite celebrate the new year, or offer concrete wishes and visions. In 2019 we will still face a world full of uncertainty, a world of "exploding stories." We will mark many important anniversaries, and the sheer disagreement over what those events meant is proof of how history dissolves into nothing between fog-bound accounts and clashing motives. For people living now, perhaps all we can do is "bring to bear, over a longer span, forces that might otherwise be overlooked," and "make the first draft of history a little less like a draft."

A great deal has happened on January 1 over the centuries; here we offer only a few angles on it. Be wary of readings this broad-brush — strictly speaking, they carry a whiff of the same "linear" view of history.

Are We Watching a "Frankenstein" Being Born?

On this day in 1818, the British writer Mary Shelley published Frankenstein. She called the novel "my hideous progeny." Even if you have never opened the book, you probably know the misshapen creature assembled from human corpses. It is remembered not only as the ancestor of science fiction but as an early warning about a fear that has grown more real from the 20th century to today: that humanity may be about to create — or may already have created — a monster that is ethically dubious and, in use, beyond control.

That monster is rooted deep in a myth about science and progress, a myth that would be cashed in under Nazi rule. On this day in 1934, Germany's Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring took effect: any citizen a "Hereditary Health Court" judged to carry a genetic defect had to undergo forced sterilization. More than 400,000 people were caught by the law in the end, and as an extension of Nazi "eugenics," the slaughter of so-called "inferior races" spread fear across all of Europe.

Nazi cruelty is common knowledge, but few people realize how close this "eugenics" still is to us. In 1912 the United States led the way in building segregation centers around the country to shut away those judged unfit to have children, including criminals, the deformed and the mentally ill. Until recent years the Indian state of Chhattisgarh was still dangling subsidies of less than US$20 to encourage people to accept free sterilization as a way of easing poverty, which in practice deepened the disadvantage of lower-caste women. "Eugenics never disappeared. It has always been with us."

If the goal of eugenics was to produce "perfect" human beings, we have never been closer to it. 2018 saw the birth of the first gene-edited babies. What will 2019 see?

How Far Can Humanity Get on the Road to Equality?

On this day in 1808, the United States banned the importation of slaves by law. It was a very limited step forward: illegal transatlantic slave smuggling went on, and the domestic slave market inside the United States was untouched.

Half a century passed before slavery in the United States began to end. On this day in 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, granting free status to enslaved Black people in the Confederate states. From that day the Civil War was no longer only a civil war to preserve (or oppose) the Union; it was also a fight to abolish (or keep) slavery, and it ended in the general emancipation of enslaved Black people across the United States.

To most people, slavery looks long since thrown onto the scrap heap of history. But in recent years some developed countries have begun to worry about its revival. Modern slavery is no longer tied to race; it points instead to the exploitation and neglect of those at the bottom of society. Cross-border trafficking and forced labor, forced prostitution, child labor, forced marriage — these forms of work and personal bondage are slavery in all but name, and they are routinely overlooked. According to the BBC's ethics guide, the number of modern slaves may be larger than the number of victims of the Atlantic slave trade.

In the end, every form of slavery exposes an inequality that the confident language of globalization and free markets has covered over. Only the people drawn into the world market, willingly or by force, may have the right to judge what it has done to their lives. The question is whether they get a chance to speak.

Will Nations Move Toward Openness, or Toward Isolation?

Sixty years ago today, the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista regime. "There was more of the nationalist than the Marxist in Castro," the Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote. In Castro's hands, Cuba went from a commercial colony of the United States to an independent socialist state.

Fatigues and a peaked cap: what drew people to Castro was that air of idealism, along with the authority and resolve he showed in one televised speech after another. But the Cold War had little use for idealism. The United States imposed a trade blockade on Cuba, the Soviets moved into the opening, and Cuba became a missile pad in America's backyard. The missile crisis, a matter of a hair's breadth, was settled peacefully in the end — the Soviets pulled the missiles out in exchange for an American promise not to invade Cuba — but the blockade and the hostility between the two countries lasted more than half a century.

"Humanity's chances of survival would be better if it faced tigers unarmed than if it faced itself unarmed." The historian Arnold Toynbee's quip fits the whole of modern history. Europeans should feel it keenly. On this day in 1958 the European Economic Community was founded: enemies who had fought each other again and again for centuries became economic partners who could not do without one another, and a Europe drained by war moved gradually back toward the center of the world stage. Forty-one years later they carried out a bolder idea still — one currency shared by many countries.

Today the euro turns 20. Its rapid spread once heartened supporters of European integration, but it also planted trouble for its second decade. In an unevenly developed Europe, a single currency and fiscal policy can put countries like Greece and Italy through real pain. As their economies have recovered the euro seems back on the right track, but it now faces a test from populism: the far-right government that made its entrance in Italy over the past two years voiced doubts about the euro long ago, and the European Union as a whole is being pulled apart by issues such as refugees.

Today is worth marking for the two countries that weigh most in the world now, too. Forty years ago, the People's Republic of China and the United States of America formally established diplomatic relations. You could call it a win-win move within the Cold War order, but with hindsight it announced a new era in world history.

Two years after China and the United States established relations, mainland China held its first TOEFL exam, with 732 candidates. By last year that number had multiplied more than 200-fold. Real face-to-face exchange is bound to deepen understanding and respect on both sides. The dividends of openness even showed up, improbably, in a man who never set foot in China: Ronald Coase, the British economist who taught in Chicago, whose theories shaped China's reforms, and who used those reforms to look more deeply into the relationship between institutions and the economy.

If you feel pessimistic about an open world, listen to the comedian Joe Wong's dig last month at the U.S.-Mexico border wall: "Trump wants to build a wall to stop immigrants, and I happen to be from China. I know for a fact that walls don't work."

Will Culture Grow More Alive?

On this day in 1917, Hu Shih, then a student at Columbia University, published an essay in New Youth titled "Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature" (《文学改良刍议》). It set out eight proposals for reforming literature: write with substance; do not imitate the ancients; mind your grammar; do not groan when nothing hurts; drop clichés and stock phrases; do not lean on allusions; do not fuss over parallel couplets; do not shun plain words and common speech. To Hu Shih, vernacular literature was both "the orthodox line of Chinese literature" and "the tool that literature must use in the future" — "the China of today should make the literature of today."

Among the intellectuals of 1917, this stand against tradition set off a "New Literature Movement." Its significance was not confined to literature. In Hu Shih's own words, the vernacular movement of that time broke down the divide between "them," who spoke the vernacular, and "us," who wrote in classical Chinese. A change in literature implied another way of imagining the relationship between the educated elite and ordinary people.

The democratization of knowledge and information ran through the whole 20th century. On this day in 1983, the U.S. Department of Defense's ARPANET adopted TCP/IP as the basic architecture for moving information. With that protocol, people could finally communicate reliably over long distances and build a truly global internet.

Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, who invented TCP/IP, both later won the Turing Award. They never patented it, believing that was the only way to spread the use of the new technology. In the internet's early years such romantics were everywhere, but their ideal of democratized knowledge looks less and less likely to hold. We have been told again and again that the internet removed the barriers to making and sharing content. The reality is that the rise of mobile and apps is leaving most people content to consume information rather than produce information worth anything.

Happy Birthday, Salinger!

J. D. Salinger, a literary idol of the 1950s, kept a startling silence for the half century after he became famous, as though the storms from the second half of the 20th century into the 21st had nothing to do with him. In 2010, his obituary made many readers feel a whole era had slipped past them.

Today Salinger turns 100.

In 1951 Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye. The novel became a defining work of 20th-century American literature: its cynicism, its lingering over adolescence, its distrust of the adult world, even its mockery of literature itself, won over a generation of young readers. The American writer Philip Roth wrote in 1974 that Salinger "was closer to the moment than anyone else, and caught the significant battle being waged between self and culture."

In the story collection Nine Stories, Salinger kept up his provocation of the literary world. These short, tight stories skip the traditional three-act pattern and drop the reader straight into the scene of everyday talk; long, exact dialogue takes the place of a commanding narrator, leaving readers to fill in and interpret meanings the characters have no need or wish to say aloud.

But Salinger's "provocation" was not a pose he chose — in the words of one of his own characters, it was not "phony." He was simply that sort of person: able to see through the world and mock it while staying innocent. The epigraph of Nine Stories quotes a Zen koan: "We know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?" You can read in it a contempt for experience and for so-called "logic," and perhaps also a prophecy of the road his own life would take.

The public's picture of Salinger himself came mostly from that photograph on the jacket of The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger was disgusted by the design and decided to keep away from the public, his eager fans included. In 1953 he moved out of Manhattan. For more than half a century afterward he almost never gave interviews; the last was in 1980.

References: Liu Beicheng, A Portrait of Benjamin's Thought; Luo Zhitian, The Social Function and Reception of the Literary Revolution; Geoffrey Blainey, A Short History of the 20th Century; Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's "On the Concept of History"; Rachana Shanbhogue, Happy birthday to the euro; Charles McGrath, J. D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91; Wikipedia

Cover image from: A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence