“Went back to a soft currency system,” someone volunteers.
“What is soft currency?” I ask.
Silence.
The boy who called me
laoshi
has his nerve back. “Ah, it is an economic system which does not tie its own currency into the world market.”
“Meaning?” I ask.
“Meaning”—he takes a breath—“that a Chinese yuan inside the borders of China had value—that it bought things—but that outside the Chinese border it was just a piece of paper.”
“Ah,” I say. Then I tell the truth. “You’re the first person ever to explain that to me. Unless I slept through it in middle school, which is possible.” Honest laughter this time.
I continue. “The U.S. could no longer provide social services, keep schools open, hospitals, banks. Eventually, the Communist Party organized well enough under Christopher Brin to take over portions of New York City and attempted to provide basic social services. We will skip over the struggles of the early party, which was, as everyone knows, given a major shot in the arm by the help of the Chinese who had managed to get their economic shit together.”
Grins in the room.
“Along comes the Second Civil War, led by Brin until he was killed in Atlanta and after that by Darwin Iacomo and Zhou Xiezhi and the United States becomes a socialist country. So there we have it, capitalism to proletariat revolution to socialism. Now,” I ask, “where is the American feudal period?”
Actually, it was a Canadian who first asked me that, Karin, happily poking holes in my education. The class has the same answer I do, which is to say that they have no idea.
“Well,” I say, enjoying myself immensely and not giving Karin
any credit, “unless you count slavery, which was regional, there was no feudal period. And the only American primitive period was the Native Americans, and their economic history is discontinuous from ours.”
A young woman who hasn’t spoken thus far raises her hand. “Our feudalism was in Europe,” she says.
I nod. “Okay,” I say, “I’ll give you that.”
Up until now everything I’ve said has been fine. I stop. I don’t really have the nerve to go on. I look up, there are students in every seat, and there are two people leaning on windowsills. They are all waiting, waiting for me to make my point. “But now, all of this so far has been very fine from a political point of view. But from a scientific point of view it is clearly a very Newtonian way of thinking.”
They all watch me. I don’t know what they are thinking.
“Newtonian,” I say, “From Newton. The guy with the apple.” Marx and Mao Zedong, I am the last person anyone would ever expect to be standing here lecturing on science and politics. Maybe I can just explain why it’s Newtonian and stop there, that doesn’t seem too dangerous.
“Newton thought of the universe as like a giant clock. He said that the universe was rather like a mechanism, wound up and set in motion by God and therefore moving in grand patterns, much like planetary orbits. The nineteenth and twentieth century were mostly involved with trying to figure out Newton’s patterns and describe them all.
“Marx attempted to reduce society to its component forces. For Newton, the forces that described the universe were basically gravity, motion and inertia. Marx’s major forces were economic. He thought that an analysis of economic relationships would explain the movement of history. And when he had analyzed these relationships he could extrapolate to predict the way society would move in the future.” I tap on the board. “This is his analysis.”
Some nods. I notice the flicker of highlighters. “I would appreciate
it if you didn’t take this down,” I say softly. “You will not be tested on any of this.”
The young man who calls me
laoshi
grins and leans back.
“Marx assumed that either things were predictable or they were random. Things are either predictable or random, aren’t they?” It is a trick question, these are engineering students. Engineering tends to work with things we can solve. Things we can solve are usually predictable. “What are the two kinds of predictable equations?” After I ask it I realize they may not know.
A young man, “Linear or periodic.”
“Right. Linear. If I drop this book you can calculate the speed of the book as it falls. Correct? Linear or periodic?”
“Linear,” he says.
I tap the blackboard behind me. “Linear or periodic?”
“It’s not an equation,” says the woman who said our feudal period was in Europe.
“Ah, but it looks like a graph, would the equation be linear or periodic?”
“Linear,” a couple of people say. Obviously. It’s a line, from primitive to the communist utopia.
“Give me an example of periodic?”
The
laoshi
young man. “The seasons.”
“Right, spring, summer, fall, winter, spring, summer, fall, winter. Capitalism assumed that an economy cycles in a boom and bust cycle. Expansion, adjustment, expansion, adjustment. After all, economics is not unpredictable, is it? The law of supply and demand holds true, reduce the supply and demand will force prices higher. A system that’s predictable isn’t random.
“So which was right, Marx with his linear view of history, or capitalism with its cyclical view? Obviously not capitalism, because history didn’t repeat. We did progress from primitive society to feudalism, to capitalism. Unless the cycle is just longer than we realize and we are all going to drop back to primitive and start the climb all over again.”
“But a periodic equation is a loop,” the feudalism woman says, “it has to repeat exactly.”
“We’re using mathematics as metaphors,” I explain. “Science filters into the general public as metaphors that describe our world, our history. For Marx, there were only two possibilities, that history was either predictable or it was random. If it was random, then it should have behaved in a random fashion, but Newton had described the universe as governed by natural laws. Marx’s genius was in determining that social history was also governed by recognizable factors. He set out to systematically define those factors—the basic ones economic—and then, once he thought he had, he did for society what Newton’s system did for planetary motion, he predicted the future.”
I should stop. But it would sound ridiculous if I stopped. And there’s something exciting about standing up here, thinking all this, saying all this.
“That is what you have been taught, and that’s the prevailing social view. It’s basically a Newtonian view. Since Newton we’ve had a number of major revolutions in the way we think the universe works, three of them in the twentieth century. The first was relativity, the second was quantum mechanics, the third was chaos. What is chaos?”
Laoshi
says, “The study of complex, non-linear systems.”
“Good. What’s the butterfly effect?”
“Laoshi,
pardon me?”
“Any of you interested in physics?” I ask. “Can someone describe ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’?”
The young woman who said American feudalism occurred in Europe says, “Sensitive dependence on initial conditions refers to the way small factors affect non-linear systems.” The definition is textbook, the voice is Brooklyn. She and the ABC, I like them.
“Right,” I say. “The most classic example is weather, which is not random—for example thunderstorms occur at the leading edge of low pressure systems. But weather is not cyclic, if it rained
on August the ninth last year that doesn’t tell you what it will do this year. The mean average temperature for this year is not the mean average temperature for last year, nor this century for last century. In fact, the climate of the earth has changed radically, through ice ages and warm periods, and no one has ever been able to identify a pattern that repeats itself.
“If I am trying to predict weather, I can feed huge quantities of information into a system; temperature and wind direction and humidity for places all over the globe, the effect of the earth’s rotation, land masses, mountain elevations, oceans, and get a fairly reasonable representation of weather. But if I change one temperature in one location by one-tenth of a degree, pretty soon my model’s weather will start to diverge from actual weather conditions. In a few months, the system and the real world won’t resemble each other at all. Weather shows sensitive dependence on initial conditions. It is so sensitive to variables that the movement of air by a butterfly’s wings in New York eventually has an effect on dust storms in Beijing.”
Stop now, the conclusion is obvious. I pause. But they are waiting, thirty people willing me to finish. And I want to, I am proud of my theory, I don’t want to be careful this one time.
“History is also a complex system. It is not. random, but it is non-linear. Marx’s predictions were based on the assumption that history is a linear system, and using those assumptions he predicted the future. But if weather is a complex system, it seems reasonable to assume that history is also a complex system. History is sensitive dependent on initial conditions. You cannot predict the future.”
There is a sigh in the classroom. I have said what everybody knows but no one says. It is in the room, hanging.
Marx was wrong.
“For class on Thursday please read the first chapter and prepare problems two, six and seven,” I say. “I know we haven’t discussed how to do the problems, but I want to see how you tackle
engineering problems using systems. That’s it, I’ll see you Thursday if I’m still a teacher.”
They sit for a moment. I check the time, it is a little over an hour. I am wringing wet under my black suit, exhilarated, more than a little scared. Suddenly they all start getting up and six or seven people are standing around my desk asking to be admitted to the class.
Apparently nobody says anything, because come Thursday, I am still teaching. Nobody that is except Alexi Dormov, who leaves me his usual list of questions and a note. “If you keep this up, you’re going to end up here. Hope you like goats.”
Comrade Cecily Hester from the Office of Occupational Resources calls me. I can see her excitement. “I’ve been reviewing the responses I’m getting, I think you had better come talk to my supervisor,” she says. “I think you’re rather out of my league. Congratulations. How about today?” she says.
Today is fine. Around ten.
I get dressed in my Chinese suit and go downtown where I meet with Comrade Cecily Hester’s superior, Comrade Huang. Comrade Huang is ABC. As one goes further up in any hierarchy, one meets more and more ethnically Chinese. We discuss what kinds of things the companies will offer me, what should be important to me. Comrade Huang talks about the difference between paid salary and the value of benefits. “When you enter a big multinational,” he says, “you are entering a community. You should be aware of the kinds of environments the managerial philosophies create.”
Whatever that means.
“If I decide on a company, can there be a three-month trial?” I ask. “Can we set something up so that either I can get out of the company or they can let me go if I’m not comfortable or right for their environment?” He says it’s possible.
Comrade Huang calls two corporations, Western Technologies and New Mexico-Texas Systems and talks to them while I wait in a shabby green waiting room with dusty slipcovers on government issue chairs.
“Engineer Zhang,” he says when he comes out to get me, “would you possibly be able to fly out to Arizona for an interview Friday?”
No, I am thinking, I’m not ready. “I have a class to teach,” I say.
“I understand that is Tuesday and Thursday, this would be only Friday and Saturday.”
There is nothing to say, no defense.
I fly to Albuquerque to meet representatives of New Mexico-Texas Light Industrials. I am met at the airport by a driver and a representative. Ms. Ngyuen is as brown as my mother and despite her Asian name looks Chicano. She has a short bob of hair, conservative, and wears a tan short-sleeved shirt and pants; like a geologist or an archeologist. Albuquerque is in the Western Corridor, water is a constant problem, and Ms. Ngyuen and I talk water all the way to the headquarters.
I expect something dramatic like Wuxi Technologies, perhaps an oasis of green in the middle of this rocky landscape. We come to a chainlink fence and drive parallel to it for miles. Beyond the chainlink is nothing, the landscape is the same on either side. We stop at a guardhouse, turn in and go through a gate. The sign says “New Mexico-Texas Light Industrials” but it’s very small.
It is ten in the morning and light sears the landscape. I keep hoping for the oasis, but we drive for fifteen minutes and see nothing but rock and brush. The brush looks dead; Ms. Ngyuen informs me that it comes alive in the spring. Like Baffin Island, I imagine, the living things live their whole lives in that narrow time when conditions are favorable, and all the rest of the time they wait.
Eventually, far ahead I see a complex of buildings. They are
low, the same color as the land, a kind of bleached brown. When we get closer I see they’re surrounded by gravel. Well, why waste water on grass? It’s untended, nothing like the raked garden of stones at my flat in Wuxi. The site is a cluster of half a dozen buildings. But the size is deceiving, buildings I assumed were a story high are actually three stories. We drive under one right into the garage.