[Xmca-l] Re: General check-in?

[David Kellogg]

Greg--

I think there are two issues worth discussing on this list, but only one of
them is real.

1. The first, unreal, issue, the civil libertarian issue, really just needs
to be discussed in order to be debunked, and even that shouldn't take too
long, since people whose greatest concern at a time when millions of lives
and the future of the planet are at stake, is that 5G technology will be
used to monitor their porn consumption patterns, do tend to be rich white
folks (as Mary and others have pointed out).

China. Take a look at this. It's from Wuhan (unfortunately, I can't send
you the sob of recognition I feel at some of these shots of streets I used
to haunt when I was in my twenties and the city was my home....).

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-china-52210273/coronavirus-please-learn-from-wuhan-s-mistakes

I think it makes the point very well. The Chinese had no interest, no time
and no resources to use monitoring for any other purpose than public
health. By the way, the same thing is true for the statistics on infection,
which all foreign observers, including the WHO but also including
independent scholars from American universities, have found scrupulousy
accurate.

Korea. When I joked that the current South Korean government ignores
everybody who isn't actually a virus, I should have explained myself. When
you arrive at the airport you are given a free test, whether you are Korean
or not. Whether you are Korean or not, if you test positive you are
referred immediately to the Covid Units in hospitals. If you are negative,
like my neighbor recenty arrived from Madrid, you are given an app which
you download, which allows the police to enforce self-quarantine for two
weeks. This system is rather imperfect--several false negatives
(libertarians from America) have simply left their phones at home and gone
on long tours of the country. So there is some talk of replacing the app
with a bracelet now; there has been ZERO talk of civil liberties, etc. The
conservatives here in Korea are not what you would call libertarians--they
come from a militaristic tradition that believes in abduction, rape, and
torture of political opponents, and they are peculiarly susceptible to
right-wing obedience cults like Shincheonji that organize through mass
rallies of tightly packed ranks of spewing aerosols of religious dogma,
right wing politics and saliva. When Yi Manhui "apologized" for the
infamous Patient 31 hotspot in Daegu, he was wearing a gold watch from Bak
Geunhye, and several prominent officials in Gyeongsangdo and Daegu were
Shincheonji members: the new United Future Party has yet to make any
statement about the role of Shincheonji; their main platform has been to
target Chinese people, to complain at the expense of testing foreigners,
and to worry that Korean nurses may be tending Chinese patients. From the
outset, the health authorities have been very careful not to make any
distinction between Chinese and Korean carriers of the virus; the best
evidence is that the virus was first brought by Korean members of the
Shincheonji branch in Wuhan.

2. The second, real, issue will take more than one post to discuss. I think
many people on this list feel instinctively that there OUGHT to be some
connection between life after Covid 19 and climate change, but very few of
us can put their finger on why there MUST be--that is, we all feel its
desirability and find it hard to articulate its precise historical
necessity and to explain how it is connected concretely to the current
crisis. Perhaps that's inevitable--my father likes to point out how the
very mathematical equations you use to model a shock wave are not the same
as non-shock wave equations before and after. But in China and in South
Korea we are already starting to move beyond the basic social unit of
lock-down, which is the household, and trying to find some large social
unit which will enable more economic and social activity than consumption,
isolation, and self-preservation. That unit has to be larger than the
nuclear family, but it also has to be larger than the extended family. At
the same time, it has to be small enough to permit the operation of
preventive medicine.

 In China, before the reform, there really was a unit of production larger
than the family; as John says, it was the work unit. But even this unit
never really replaced the family in the countryside (where it formed the
basic unit of production after the collapse of the communes in the great
famine). Now, in the cities, decades of economic reform have replaced the
work unit with "getihu" (small businesses) on the one hand and huge state
or foreign run businesses on the other. Neither of these is really the
right size for "the dance"--that is, the gradual LIFTING of restrictions
which must follow the lockdown, which will permit limited circulation
but ONLY to the point where the infection rate starts to rise again, at
which point ONLY those units which are compromised by the virus are shut
down.

In Korea, the situation is comparable, with the added wrinkle that we are a
rather segmentary society, where the extended family is largely intact, and
we are massively on-line. Curiously, the issue of finding a supra-familial
segment for life after Covid came up in our Vygotsky group. During the
lockdown, we are preparing a volume of the Pedology of the Adolescent that
consists of a rather short chapter on interests, and a much longer one on
concept formation. We used the word 흥미 for interest--you will recognize
this word as the antipode of 한; it is the Dionysian, exuberant, fun-loving
interest as opposed to the Appolonian, classical, logical concept. But of
course Vygotsky rejects this duality--from the Spinozan side, he insists
that concepts too are interested (they are, Andy would say, projects) and
that interests are conceptual--hence, in English but not in Korean, we say
"class interest" and "bank interest".

We are trying to explain the concept of class interest by analogy with the
classroom. During the current pandemic, it is a classroom interest to
reduce class size to the point where social distancing becomes possible
within the classroom and we can then bring the non-sustainable solution of
on-line classes to an end. Instead, my university is putting pressure on us
to record on-line classes and store them for permanent use, and of course
many professors and even some high school teachers are enthusiastic about
this (EBS, the educational broadcasting system, is providing a lot of
online content which is enabling us to move much of public education online
for this semester). This would, of course, allow the government to fire
teachers and essentialy reduce the whole of education to self-instruction
plus testing. It's in our class(room) interest to defend the integrity of
our classrooms, not least because they DO represent a supra-familial unit
for life beyond the crisis, one that will enable more than just lockdown
and consumption. I think it's THIS scalability of the basic social unit
that provides the necessary link between Covid and climate change.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

Book Review: 'Fees, Beets, and Music: A critical perusal of *Critical
Pedagogy and Marx, Vygotsky and Freire: Phenomenal forms and  educational
action research'  in Mind Culture and Activity*

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847

Some free e-prints available at:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QBBGIZNKAHPMM4ZVCWVX/full?target=10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847

New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: "L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works
Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"

 https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270



On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 1:49 AM HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
> Like Greg, I was struck by Andy’s sense that China may go back to “normal”
> but the neo-liberal “first" world is and will be experiencing a profound
> perizhvanie. You’d hope it will be for the good.
>
> In the U.S,, generally, rates of infection are positively correlated with
> density of population. For example, I live in New Mexico, the fifth largest
> state in the U.S. with a population of a little over a one million and the
> lowest rate of infection…so far. However, our Navajo live spread out to the
> west and north of us, but have very high rates of infection. Little Zia
> Pueblo, just an our by car to the north and west of us, only has about a
> thousand people, with eleven confirmed cases. Poverty. In the country as a
> whole people of color have relatively higher rates of infection. Poverty.
>
> Our governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham (who I am proud to say is a good
> friend), has been successful in pushing baci against Trump’s efforts to
> punish states that did not vote for him by being less than cooperative in
> providing resources against the pandemic. She has been using her bully
> pulpit against Trump's bloviating. His hot air has got to be an infectious
> agent. Most of us are using masks in public, evidence indicating that it
> protects OTHERS by wearing them. Trump prefers NOT to wear a mask.
> Consistent with his politics. You can’t make this up.
>
> Be well,
> Henry
>
> On Apr 8, 2020, at 9:00 AM, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> David,
>
> I wonder if you could say more about your experience of the state-based
> "surveillance" in SK. There are lots of different groups in the U.S., both
> on the left and the right, who are up in arms about the "tracking" of
> citizens via credit card and cell phone usage.
>
> And it sounds like this is a global concern as Mary's report from SA
> suggests.
>
> Also how interesting how similar the conspiracy theories are around the
> globe (globalization and the spread of viral ideas?). That's world
> perezhivanie indeed!
>
> -greg
>
> On Tue, Apr 7, 2020 at 3:08 PM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Helena--
>>
>> Situation in China, courtesy my sister-in-law: life in Beijing is pretty
>> much back to normal at least on the face of it. People are going out to
>> their work units (but there is more work from home than before the
>> crisis). Classes still largely taught from ZOOM. My nephew is in
>> Shanghai, where the situation is somewhat tighter (proximity to
>> Wuhan). Wuhan opened up for real yesterday--people can leave (I lived there
>> for two years in the mid-eighties, but I can barely recognize what I see on
>> the news now....) I have students in Chengdu (who attend my class via
>> ZOOM). People are mostly shopping on line with delivery to the gate of the
>> housing unit rather than to their flat (as we do here in Korea). Air
>> quality better than it's been in decades.
>>
>> Situation here in South Korea: We just extended our lockdown for another
>> two weeks. This is in response to a few days of new infections over a
>> hundred, but the infections are mostly (80%) Koreans from the US and Europe
>> who want to live in a place where the medical system has not broken down or
>> is not in the process of breaking down. There are still some "hotspots" of
>> community transmission, but these are almost all connected with churches or
>> PC cafes. Schools reopen on the 16th, but only online. We have elections in
>> a week, and there is a lot of campaigning going on, including the usual
>> street based campaigning (the right wing opposition campaigns around the
>> curious notion that the government has done absolutely nothing, and the
>> government ignores everybody who is not an actual virus). People shop in
>> stores, and there is no panic buying or disruption of supply chains. The
>> main changes in economic life seem to have to do with transport, and it
>> seems like this too will be permanent (electric scooters are everywhere
>> now). Bowing instead of shaking hands is really not a bad idea, and
>> coffee-shops always were over-rated and over-priced....
>>
>> But what about you, Helena? (One of the things I have learned on this
>> list is that you get more or less what you give--people tend to use what
>> you write as a model for writing back!) Are you still in Vietnam? Your
>> address says Berkeley and your email says Illinois--those are three very
>> different venues for the virus and the economy. Can you give us a brief
>> account of the situation in each?
>>
>> Stay safe, wherever you are!
>>
>> David Kellogg
>> Sangmyung University
>>
>> Book Review: 'Fees, Beets, and Music: A critical perusal of *Critical
>> Pedagogy and Marx, Vygotsky and Freire: Phenomenal forms and  educational
>> action research *
>> in *Mind Culture and Activity*
>>
>>
>> *https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847
>> <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847>*
>>
>> Some free e-prints available at:
>>
>>
>> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QBBGIZNKAHPMM4ZVCWVX/full?target=10.1080/10749039.2020.1745847
>>
>> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: "L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works
>> Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"
>>
>>  https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 8, 2020 at 4:30 AM Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Helena,
>>>
>>> I share your concerns. And, despite its challenges, this situation seems
>>> a great opportunity to apply our distributed expertise(s). I tried to get
>>> some discussion going in a group concerned with the Anthropocene, but
>>> people seemed disinclined.
>>>
>>> Martin
>>>
>>> Here’s the first message that I sent…
>>>
>>> The current situation is producing important evidence about the probable
>>> consequences of the strategies proposed to mitigate climate change.
>>> Satellites are showing significant reductions in pollution:
>>>
>>> https://www.space.com/italy-coronavirus-outbreak-response-reduces-emissions-satellite-images.html
>>> Experts are suggesting that as a result the coronavirus may save more
>>> lives than it takes:
>>>
>>> https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2020/03/11/coronavirus-lockdown-may-save-more-lives-from-pollution-and-climate-than-from-virus/#4a39bb3c5764
>>> So when skeptics ask “How can you know that reducing air travel will
>>> help with climate change?” there is now clear evidence with which to answer
>>> them.
>>>
>>> Also in China:
>>>
>>> https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/04/811019032/why-chinas-air-has-been-cleaner-during-the-coronavirus-outbreak
>>>
>>> At the same time, I am starting to wonder whether the current health
>>> guidelines regarding coronvirus are culturally biased. Can they work in
>>> ‘collectivist’ cultures (to use the shorthand)? The CDC guidelines, for
>>> example, include the recommendations to “Stay home when you are sick,” but
>>> also that other members of the household should “Avoid close contact with
>>> people who are sick” and should “Choose a room in your home that can be
>>> used to separate sick household members from those who are healthy.
>>> Identify a separate bathroom for the sick person to use, if possible.”
>>> This advice is simply not practicable for many households in Colombia.
>>> There are not enough rooms; there is no second bathroom. In addition, many
>>> infants and young children here are cared for by grandparents, or even
>>> great-grandparents (many women here have a baby when young, so an infant
>>> may have a grandmother who is in her late 30s and a great-grandmother in
>>> her late 50s). The evidence shows that children don’t become very ill, but
>>> they do get infected and they can infect other people, among whom elderly
>>> caregivers will be the most at risk.
>>> So I don’t think social distance and auto-quarantine will work in
>>> Colombia. Consider what the Chinese did: they went door-to-door to identify
>>> infected family members and removed them to massive collective quarantine
>>> setttings. People in the West considered this to be draconian, even cruel.
>>> But it made sense: much more cross-infection occurred in Chinese homes than
>>> in places like restaurants.
>>> Unless the authorities can come up with strategies that are more
>>> appropriate to local circumstances and practices, there is likely to be a
>>> rapid and elevated peak of infections in Latin American countries.
>>>
>>> And I see there is a related point here, on ageism:
>>> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200313155256.htm
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Apr 7, 2020, at 1:56 PM, Helena Worthen <helenaworthen@gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello, XMCA-ers -
>>>
>>> I don’t remember ever having read that this list was going to shut down
>>> or even be allowed to fade away. So now I’m writing, as if in the dark, to
>>> the whole list.  We’ve now got a major — maybe “the” major crisis of the
>>> anthropocene on our hands and the distant but connected network represented
>>> by the conversations on this list seem to me to be a treasure more precious
>>> than gold - and I’m not speaking metaphorically.
>>>
>>> I am concerned about some of the people who have been pillars and
>>> resources on his list, people whom I have reached out to over the years and
>>> heard back from with information and perspectives that I would never have
>>> been able to access on my own. Where are you now? What are you doing? Are
>>> you safe and healthy? Do you have information about friends who are unable
>>> to read or respond to this request?
>>>
>>> I hope to hear some responses to this message.
>>>
>>> Take care of yourselves, please —
>>>
>>> Helena
>>>
>>>
>>> Helena Worthen
>>> hworthen@illinois.edu
>>> 21 San Mateo Road, Berkeley, CA 94707
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
> --
> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Anthropology
> 880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
> Brigham Young University
> Provo, UT 84602
> WEBSITE: https://anthropology.byu.edu/greg-thompson
> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20200409/8fdeb1e5/attachment.html