Whig vs. Haan

If you want to understand Whig History, just look at the difference between the traditional European and the Disney versions of The Little Mermaid (spoiler alert!). Up until the end, they're pretty much the same - the mermaid dreams of love, and makes a deal with the evil witch, but she fails to get the prince to kiss her, and as a result she forfeits her life to the witch. In the European version, the mermaid dies and turns into sea foam, her dreams dashed. In the American version, however, the mermaid and the prince simply stab the witch in the chest with a broken bowsprit, and everyone lives happily ever after.

I think this difference is no coincidence. Around 1800, history had a structural break. Suddenly, the old Malthusian cycle of boom and bust was broken, and living standards entered a rapid exponential increase that is still going today. No wonder Americans love the Hollywood ending. In an economic sense, that's all we've ever really known. 

So Whig History - the notion that everything gets better and better - overcame Malthusian History. But there's another challenge to historical optimism that's much less easy to overcome. This is the notion that no matter how much better things get, society is fundamentally evil and unfair. 

I know of only one good name for this: the Korean word "Haan". (It's often spelled "Han," but I'll use the double "a" to avoid confusion with the Chinese race, the Chinese dynasty, and the Korean surname.) Wikipedia defines Haan thus:

Haan is a concept in Korean culture attributed as a unique Korean cultural trait which has resulted from Korea's frequent exposure to invasions by overwhelming foreign powers. [Haan] denotes a collective feeling of oppression and isolation in the face of insurmountable odds (the overcoming of which is beyond the nation's capabilities on its own). It connotes aspects of lament and unavenged injustice. 

The [writer] Suh Nam-dong describes [haan] as a "feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one's guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong—all these combined."... 

Some scholars theorize the concept of [Haan] evolved from Korea's history of having been invaded by other neighboring nations, such as Han China, the Khitans, the Manchu/Jurchens, the Mongols, and the Japanese.

Though Korean writers claim that Haan is a uniquely and indescribably Korean experience, there seem to be parallels in certain other cultures. A number of Koreans have told me that "Korea is the Ireland of the East," comparing Korea's frequent subjugation to the domination of Ireland by England. 

Now, I am hugely skeptical of cultural essentialism. I doubt Haan is either unique to certain cultures or indelible. In fact, I bet that economic progress will drastically reduce it. There are signs that this is already happening - young Koreans are much, much less antagonistic toward Japan than the older generation.

But in a more general sense, Haan seems to describe an undercurrent of thought that runs through many modern, rich societies. You see it, for example, in leftist resistance to Steve Pinker's thesis that violence has decreased hugely. Pinker brought huge reams of data showing that violent crime and war have been in a long-term decline for centuries now. Leftist critics respond by citing anecdotal examples of war, atrocity, and injustice that still exist. 

This seems like a Haan view to me. The idea is that as long as examples of serious violence exist, it's not just incorrect but immoral to celebrate the fact that they are much more rare and generally less severe than in past times. 

Actually, talking about Pinker can often draw out what I think of as Haan attitudes. I was talking about Pinker to a friend of mine, a very sensitive lefty writer type. Instead of citing ISIS or the Iraq War as counterexamples, she talked about the problem of transphobia, and how "trans panic" legal defenses were still being used to excuse the murder of transsexual people. I checked, and this has in fact happened once or twice. My friend presented this as evidence that - contra Pinker - the world isn't really getting better. Injustice anywhere, under Haan thinking, invalidates justice everywhere else.

Another example of Haan is Ta-Nehisi Coates' view of history. The subheading of Coates' epic article, "The Case for Reparations," is this:

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

Now unless Coates gets to write his own subheadings, he didn't write those words. But they accurately sum up the message of the piece. The idea is that these wrongs against African Americans cause a moral debt that need to be repaid. It's not clear, of course, how the debt could be repaid, or what "reparations" actually would entail. But what's clear is the anti-Whig perspective. Progress does not fix things. The fact that Jim Crow was less horrible than slavery, and that redlining was less horrible than Jim Crow, and that today's housing policy is less horrible than redlining, does not mean that things are getting better. What matters is not just the flow of current injustice, but the stock of past injustices.

Haan presents a vision of stasis that is different from the Malthusian version. By focusing on the accumulated weight of history instead of the current situation, and by focusing on the injustices and atrocities and negative aspects of history, it asserts that the modern age, for all its comforts and liberties and sensitivity, is inherently wrong.

And Haan asserts that the world will remain wrong, until...what? That's usually not clearly specified. For Korean Haan theorists, it's a vague notion of "vengeance." For Coates, it's "reparations". For leftists, it's usually a revolution - a massive social upheaval that will overthrow all aspects of current power, hierarchy, and privilege, and make a new society ex nihilo. The details of that revolution are usually left a bit ambiguous.

But the vagueness and ambiguity of the imagined deliverance doesn't seem to be a big problem for most Haan thinking. What's important seems to be the constant struggle. In a world pervaded and defined by injustice and wrongness, the only true victory is in resistance. Ta-Nehisi Coates expressed this in an open letter to his son, when he wrote: "You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life."

Haan thinking presents a big challenge for Whig thinking.

Whig History didn't have much trouble beating the old Malthusian version of history - after a hundred years of progress, people realized that this time was different. But Haan thinking presents a much bigger challenge, because progress doesn't automatically disprove Haan ideas. Making the world better satisfies Whigs, but doesn't remove the accumulated weight of history that fuels Haan. 

Nor can all instances of injustice be eliminated. It will never be a perfect world, and the better the world gets, the more each case of remaining injustice stands out to an increasingly sensitive populace. One or two cases of "trans panic" murder would barely have merited mention in the America of 1860. But precisely because there has been so much progress - precisely because our world is so much more peaceful and so much more just now than  it was then - those cases stick out like a sore thumb now. So Whig progress makes Haan anger easier, by raising people's expectations.

There's also the question: Should Whigs even want to defeat the Haan mentality? After all, if we trust in the inevitability of progress, it may sap our motivation to fight for further progress. Optimism can lead to complacency. So Haan resentment might be the fuel that Whigs need to see our visions fulfilled.

But Haan carries some risks. Massive social revolutions, when they happen, are capable of producing nightmare regimes like the USSR. With a few exceptions, the kind of progress Whigs like is usually achieved by the amelioration of specific ills - either by gradual reform, or by violent action like the Civil War - rather than by a comprehensive revolution that seeks to remake society from scratch. In other words, as one might expect, Whig goals are usually best achieved by Whig ends.

As a character would always say in a video game I used to play, "I am a staunch believer in amelioration."

In any case, I personally like the Whig view of the world, and I want to see it triumph. The idea of a world that gets better and better is appealing on every level. I don't just want to believe in it (though I do believe in it). I want to actually make it happen. And when I make it happen, or when I see it happen, I want to feel good about that. I want to savor the victories of progress, and the expectation of future victories, rather than to be tormented by the weight of unhappy history that can never be undone. I want to be able to think not just about the people around the world who are still suffering from deprivation, violence, and injustice, but also about the people who are no longer suffering from these things.

To me, the Whig view of history and progress is the only acceptable one. But Haan presents a stern challenge to that view - a challenge that Whigs have yet to find a way to overcome.


Update: Thabiti Anyabwile, writing in The Atlantic, says similar things in reference to Coates' writings.