Simon links to a review (in pdf!), by economist Edward Leamer of UCLA, of Thomas Friedman’s big, bestselling book, The World is Flat.  If you bear with me, there is something to say here about how we might bring ancient Chinese thought into modern life.

  Friedman spoke here at Williams College this past Monday night.  I went and listened intently.  He is a skilled speaker and does a great job describing how the intensification and diffusion of web technologies impinges upon our everyday work and cultural lives.  I can understand why so many people want to read and think about his book.  If I were to offer a critique (that is my job, after all), I’d say that he does not do enough to draw out the political implications of his observations or the possibilities for new forms of conflict in his flat world.  But I am not going to develop a full critique here.

    Rather, I want to pick up this idea from Leamer’s review that Simon quotes:

Is a computer more like a forklift or more like a microphone?
It doesn’t matter much who
drives the forklift, but it matters a lot who sings into the
microphone. Think about the forklift first. You might be a lot stronger
than I, but with a little bit of training, I can operate a forklift and
lift just as much as you or any other forklift operator. Thus the
forklift is a force for income equality, eliminating your strength
advantage over me. That is decidedly not the case for a microphone. We
cannot all operate a microphone with anywhere near the same level of
proficiency. Indeed, I venture the guess that I would have to pay you
to listen to me sing, not the other way round. And I seriously doubt
that a lifetime of training would allow me to compete with Springsteen,
or Pavarotti.

    Great question!  My first impulse is to gravitate toward the microphone answer.  And, as Leamer suggests, microphones do not have the equality-creating potential of forklifts: they tend to reward those people who can create the most popular and attractive content.

    Thus, computers, and web-based technologies, create a profusion of new avenues of communications that may (I am open to the counterargument) generate more economic inequality than equality.  Profiting from an avenue of communication will depend upon what it is you are communicating and what it is that audiences want to hear or read or see.  Look at how the blogosphere has shaken out.  Yes, there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, but few that can be considered economically profitable in any significant way.  Indeed, figuring out how to profit from web-based communications is still an open question and many, many companies have fallen by the wayside trying.

    So, what about ancient Chinese philosophy?  The microphone of the web allows for new means of disseminating, analyzing and applying ancient thought in modern, and postmodern, contexts.  It is not at all clear that this will create a profit potential – I strongly suspect it will not, because it seems few people have an innate interest in the ancient texts.  But, that, too, is an open question.  If profit is less of a concern (I am keeping my day job!), however, then the open mic of the internet may have the beneficial effect of marginally increasing the circulation of ideas drawn from Confucius and Mencius and the Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu and others.

    And, perhaps, Mencius is right when he says economic inequality is inherent in the very nature of things.  We should not expect the web to be a forklift, because, while there have been many, many forklifts produced and exchanged in the world in the past century, economic inequality has persisted.

    In any event, I see a certain good in the microphone versus the forklift.  And part of that good is political.

   Passing the microphone around globally and opening up a broader conversation about the contemporary meanings and relevance of ancient Chinese philosophy ultimately pushes against the power of the Chinese Communist Party to turn these systems of thought to its own political purposes of regime legitimation.  The Confucian revival in the PRC is, in its officially-sponsored forms, meant to legitimate hierarchical and centralized authority, rather like the emperors of the past using Confucianism as a state ideology.  But in Imperial times the state could control the definition and interpretation of "Confucianism."  Now, with the global microphone (or maybe we should say the profusion of thousands and thousands of microphones), a single state authority cannot monopolize the discourse of Confucianism.  Confucian humanists and Confucian postmodernists and Confucian liberals and Confucian Taoists and Confucians of every stripe have a platform and, potentially, an audience.  And that, I believe, is a good thing.

    In the end, then, the microphone of the internet may not generate economic equality, but it may contribute to greater political equality.