The Scale of the Human within the Framework

The pictures below show current living conditions in China, the closest thing to another superpower in the world today--the country, that is, that would most likely be at the forefront of global affairs if there were no United States. It might be argued, of course, that this would never happen due to China's traditional isolationism, but all of that is changing as China emerges in the role of a massive importer and exporter. Nor does Russia, for all its bluster in military and political terms, possess anything like the economic clout of the People's Republic, a force with the potential to rival the European Union and Japan--only with much greater military power.

Now look at these pictures and think about what they might tell us concerning the view of humanity under the Chinese state--or indeed under any of the governments that have ruled that great land for the past three thousand years. There is a certain almost whimsical quality, for those of us with an eye for the grotesque, in the way that these photographs present human living spaces as pure geometric shape and color. Replicated over and over, these images might make a good backdrop for a dystopian future world as depicted in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

But this is not pure geometry, pure image; this is where people live. Can you, as a westerner, imagine life as an ant with two legs and a conscience--an ant potentially capable of solving complex mathematical problems or writing music, but an ant nevertheless? Probably you can't; I don't really think I can. In America, we know about regimentation and blandness in the form of cookie-cutter strip malls and one-size-fits-all servings of pablum through the popular culture, but honestly, is anything we know even remotely as dehumanizing as this?

As for the poverty depicted in some of the middle pictures, ones that look like scenes from the New York City slums of the 1880s but projected many decades into the future, do we know anything like this? I'm always amused when an American, in response to a discussion of poverty overseas, gets almost defensive and says, "We have poverty here, too!" Yeah, I've seen it: I've been to the projects, I've been to rural Mississippi, I've been to the forgotten places on the West Virginia-Kentucky line, and I still say that we don't know anything about how poor people really live.

And yet the poverty in other parts of the world--in many cases far, far worse even than we see in these pictures, the poverty of people who live in corrugated tin shacks without running water or electricity, of people whose children are unclothed, of people who don't have enough to eat--is nothing compared to the much greater evil depicted in these scenes: dehumanization. Let's face it, folks, our western idea that each human being is unique and important is a minority view in the world.

The mentality of the pigs who set off those bombs on the London Underground yesterday may represent an extreme, but it's a lot closer to the world norm than our own liberal western view. Yes, it's true that the Ohio National Guard fired on and killed four demonstrators at Kent State in 1970, and that the CIA probably has conducted all kinds of ghastly experiments with LSD and other chemicals, and that governments in this country have acted with unconscionable brutality against minorities. But if you think that the cruelty people have known here is even on the same scale with the cruelty people have experienced elsewhere, then you are dangerously ignorant.

And sadly, there are many people who don't simply think this country is as bad as others, they claim it's much worse: the likes of Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, and Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois have made whole careers on such fantasies, and yet deep down I suspect they all know the truth. All of us do; but sometimes it's easier to go along with the comforting myth that George Bush (or, if you like, Bill Clinton) represents the summit of human evil. Sometimes it's necessary to look beyond our little world here and its problems, and see how the rest of the world treats itself. You don't have to think about the Holocaust or the murders carried out by the Koran-thumping modern descendants of the Nazis. All you have to do is look at these photographs, and imagine what it must be like to be treated as an ant with two legs and a brain capable of higher reasoning.

(Many thanks to Nino Spahic , an architect who works with my brother, for providing these incredible pictures. The views expressed here, of course, are entirely my own.)