One More Epicycle

the shadow of that hyddeous strength 30 October 2006

Some buildings are very beautiful; some are very ugly. Only one that I know of actually scares me, and it’s not merely because of the architecture.

It’s the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang.

I was going to write about this quite a while ago, but then by coincidence Kate mentioned it, and I didn’t want to look too derivative (cue silly memories of time spent at the Brew Pub and wondering who was going to order first so that he could order whatever he wanted).. but enough time has passed.

Jeff Harrell over at the Shape of Days has an excellent post on the subject, which I can’t improve on, and I agree completely when he writes that “[t]he Ryugyong Hotel is, in my opinion, the single most unsettling structure ever erected by the hand of man.”

I also think that the discomfort it induces is worthy of real consideration. Over a decade ago, Fr Richard John Neuhaus wrote of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred at the specific command of Hitler:

Many years ago I shared a platform with a theologian who suggested that Bonhoeffer’s opposition to Nazism was essentially aesthetic; it was the ugliness of the movement that first alerted him to the movement’s evil. At the time I thought this a rather improbable hypothesis that ran the risk of diminishing the moral and intellectual dimensions of Bonhoeffer’s conviction. But in the intervening years I have come to appreciate-with no little help from studying Hans Urs von Balthasar-the inextricable entanglement of the three transcendentals-the good, the true, and the beautiful. Reflecting on Bonhoeffer in the theological journal dialog, Jean Bethke Elshtain addresses the aesthetic under the rubric of shame:

“One of the reasons Dietrich Bonhoeffer was so repulsed by Nazism was precisely because of its aberrant shamelessness. Nazi ideology dictated erasing any barrier between public and private, between that which should be open to public scrutiny and definition and that which should not. The horrific denouement of an ideology that required breaching the boundary of shame was the shamelessness of death camps where human beings were robbed of dignity, stripped of privacy, deprived, therefore, of an elemental freedom of the body in life and of the respect we accord the bodies of the dead after life is no more. Scenes of starved, naked bodies, piles and piles being shoved by bulldozers into lime pits, is a nigh inexpressible instance of shamelessness, with the dead reduced to anonymous carcasses.”

Bonhoeffer understood that the great temptation is to forget that we are not God, that we are creatures living in a world whose fragmentation cannot be overcome by our efforts.

This temptation is surrendered to completely by Juche, the official doctrine of North Korea, and the Ryugyong is truly another Babel. That Juche produced such a demonically ugly building should come as no surprise.

For me, one of the most frightening aspects of the Hotel is that tour guides won’t discuss it. Everyone can see it, everywhere in Pyongyang — it’s monstrously large — but admitting it’s there is off-limits because it’d reveal the magnitude of the state’s failure. As bad as the starvation and the poverty that the regime has produced are, as dark a place as they’ve made North Korea, when the inevitable end comes the greatest challenge will be healing the minds of the people.

The terrifying silence reminds me of the utterly brilliant novel by C.J. Cherryh (but I repeat myself), Wave Without a Shore. I picked it up on a whim from the downtown Kingston library near my house and it was shattering. From its Amazon description:

Freedom was an isolated planet, off the spaceways track and rarely visited by commercial spacers. It wasn’t that Freedom was inhospitable as planets go. The problem was that outsiders — tourists and traders — claimed the streets were crowded with mysterious characters in blue robes and with members of an alien species.

Native-born humans, however, said that was not the case. There were no such blue-robes and no aliens.

Such was the viewpoint of both Herrin the artist and Waden the autocrat– until a crisis of planetary identity forced a life-and-death confrontation between the question of reality and the reality of the question..

The story is a powerful study on the limitations of Nietzschean/Objectivist solipsism, which has a milder sister in modern relativism. It’s the journey of a man who discovers that the world is much bigger than he is, and he ultimately finds his redemption in the truth. One of my favourite contemporary philosophers, Alvin Plantinga, calls the protagonist’s original view “creative anti-realism“: the denial that there really is a world out there which is independent of us, but instead that we construct our realities based on our own perspectives.

Cherryh’s a master at exploring the social implications of a worldview, and she’s in exceptional form here, where totalitarianism and radical self-actualization meet in the denial of reality. Wave Without a Shore affected me emotionally for weeks, and forever changed the way I look at everything from poverty to the tyrants of North Korea.

It’s available in a nice anthology these days, and I recommend it to everyone.

For liberation-minded North Korea information, you can visit One Free Korea and DPRK Studies, and of course the heroic gang at Freedom House. If you haven’t already seen them, you can’t miss Artemii Lebedev‘s astonishing photographs from inside the Hermit Kingdom; an English translation of his commentary is also available.