Peace is Every Step

Language is cool.

In my course on discrete mathematics, I am given arguments with the goal of proving the validity of them and the truthfulness of their claims. Ultimately these statements of something (anything) could be reduced to a set of symbols that can then be plumbed for an answer to determine its truthfulness. Within this world view, everything is either true or false, unless we produce undecidable statements such as the Liar's Paradox:

I am lying now.
This statement is false.

The paradox here is if you presume the preceding statements are to be either, true or false, what are these statements actually saying?

Language is special that way. Without it, we may not be able to arrive at paradoxes like the above. Yet it is this language which prevents us from going further. It's almost screaming out to us to question some of our foundational understanding of knowledge.

I feel there is so much more to discover which we cannot know (yet). Humans are blessed with creativity, a kind of purposeful birthing of pseudo-contemplation, of strange dreams that blend into reality to inspire us. And these inspirations and discoveries will come to be recorded in languages, either in novels or journals, in mathematical formulas, in musical compositions, or in unexplored spaces that occupy the "lost in translation". Language equally improves our understanding as it does to limit it, a constant reminder to continually go beyond possibility, to improve the boundaries of the knowable. That's just damn cool.

To and fro, to and fro, cultivating a small field.

My, my, it certainly is hard to maintain a decent committment to writing regularly. No wonder my skills are declining along with my vision. Anyways it's friday at the office and I've got a few moments to dip the quill.

Last weekend I came across an article on the phenom that is Yon-Sama, a.k.a. Bae Yong-Jun. His immense popularity is testament to the reach of Korean soft power and the country's successful cultural export-focused strategy. Apparently his star power is shining not only in Japan, but also in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and countries in South-East Asia. Having no familiarity with Korean soap opera productions, I can't say whether this is a good or bad thing. However, there was a blurb by an Anthropologist that immediately cut me:

[UBC] anthropology professor Millie Creighton says the soap operas rekindle in viewers a passion for the past.

"In most of these countries, many scholars have written about a resurging nostalgia that seems to have taken hold just around the time they became fully industrialized, modernized and highly westernized," says Prof. Creighton, who currently teaches in Japan.

"Suddenly, in each case, there seems to be a reverse longing for what might have been lost and a sense of potentially having lost their 'Asian-ness.' "

I can totally empathize, even rationalize this sentiment. It's something that's part of the habitus of being a Canadian of Chinese descent. ("Descent" is a funny word because it sounds like a fall from grace.) Until contemporary "Asian-ness" entered my consciousness, my transcultural outlook took on a temporal dimension, a schism of -isms: Canadian-ness based on modernism, multi-culturalism, democratic universalism, individualism, futurism; Chinese-ness based on nostalgic traditionalism, ancestor worship and familialism, historicism.

It's no surprise to me that in the economies where the Yon-sama phenomenon takes root, they are also the very countries that define the so-called "Asian century": forward-looking nations that have industrialized or are industrializing towards the making of a tommorrow with extremely high growth rates. They're now able to take a rest, unwind, lie down and imagine themselves as they used to be.

It's also no surprise that Yon-sama's success came in the form of a soap opera about pre-modern Korea. Maybe our best conceptions to soothe the alienating potential of globalization is to take refuge that we were once dignified, cultured, esteemed, and rarified before the spectre of "progress" landed at our feet. And sometimes that is how conversations at my family dinner table shake down too. How about yours?


(see comments for the Globe and Mail article)