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T. Greer Profile picture
T. Greer
@Scholars_Stage
Long takes on 🇨🇳 politics, 🇺🇸 conservatism, and books I find interesting
Aug 10 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I asked Claude to analyze four or five of my more artful or viral essays from years past and describe to me the literary techniques most commonly used therein.

And guys...

"That not X, but Y frame is one of his most frequent single constructions..." Image Anyways here is the full list -- first on sentence structure: Image
Aug 5 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
I will defend Helen on this point, to a point.

By “normal” I am taking her to mean “individuals did not exist in a state of daily fear and stress, or they were unable to make meaningful plans because life was subject to too many upheavals to ever do so.” If your definition of “normal” is “there is freedom of worship” or “people were free to choose their employment” then no, neither Soviet Russia, nor the Eastern Bloc, nor Maoist China, was ever that.
Aug 1 • 26 tweets • 6 min read
Strong disagree.

I do think one’s preference on this reveals a lot about one’s outlook, however. I really like the answer that Donna Tussing Orwin—professor of Russian literature—gives to this question:

“ I inclined first to Tolstoy. His combination of moral sensibility and love of life appealed to me, and I didn’t like Dostoevsky’s over-the-top world of the self in crisis. The two authors have much in common, and yet diverge in ways that make comparison irresistible.

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Both associate the self with moral agency; for both therefore, the individual is the ultimate source of good and evil. For both, goodness, which consists in overcoming selfishness, is natural but weak. For both feelings trump reason in the soul, though Tolstoy is closer to the Greeks and the Enlightenment in his association of virtue with reason. For Dostoevsky, reason is always tainted by egotism, and therefore he relies on love to spur moral impulses. Dostoevsky concentrates more on evil; for this reason his writings anticipate the horrors of the twentieth and the nascent twenty-first centuries. Tolstoy depicts crimes, such as the lynching of Vereshchagin (War and Peace) or uxoricide in Kreutzer Sonata, but not the pure malice embodied in such Dostoevskian characters as Stavrogin (Demons) or Smerdyakov (Brothers Karamazov). Tolstoy’s most evil characters, like Dolokhov in War and Peace, seem to invade his texts from another (Dostoevskian?) world. Dostoevsky also portrays pure goodness. Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin (The Idiot), even though he is named after Tolstoy, is more virtuous than any Tolstoyan character could be, and so is Alyosha Karamazov. Both authors are wicked satirists. Tolstoy’s rationalizing solutions to social ills can seem naive, while Dostoevsky’s high-minded ones seem sentimental.

Tolstoy’s fiction encompasses a broader range of experience than Dostoevsky’s. No one has described childhood, family life, farming, hunting, and war any better. This reflects his affinity for the physical and the body. Not coincidentally, Tolstoy is also celebrated for his portraits of nature and animals. Dostoevsky usually associates the physical with the base. (Compare fleshy old Fyodor Karamazov with his ethereal son Alyosha.) In his writings illness often brings insight, while Tolstoy mostly (though not always) prefers healthy states to unhealthy ones.

Dostoevsky’s fiction aims at the revelation of character to the fullest extent possible. He believes that each individual is unique, however, and therefore ultimately inaccessible to others. His protagonists vacillate between good and evil; this makes the future of any one of them, even the most virtuous, unpredictable. Tolstoy’s characters are complex but not unique. The variety among them (greater than in Dostoevsky) is a result of a practically but not theoretically infinite number of combinations among all the possibilities inherent in human nature, and the interaction of these with the outside world. Tolstoy depicts the intersection of chance, historical forces, and character. In his view, the more disengaged we are from outside circumstances, the freer we are. Tolstoy gravitated in old age toward Christian anarchy, while Dostoevsky in his last novel (Brothers Karamazov) seems to advocate for a Christian theocracy headed by someone like Zosima.

I still prefer Tolstoy’s earthiness and expansiveness to Dostoevsky’s brilliant, edgy anatomy of the psyche, but I can’t imagine life without them both.”
Jul 16 • 25 tweets • 4 min read
There are many reports that students can only read a few paragraphs or pages at a time now. How then to teach English literature?

I faced that exact challenge when I taught mid-level ESL learners in China. My solution: poetry. With the 12th graders I taught, who were applying to American universities, we read full books—the Iliad, Balzac, All Quiet on the Western Front, Michael Sandel’s Justice book, to name a few.
Jun 27 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
A certain kind of American really likes to attack degrowthers. But in the American context the thing isn't real. It is attacking the enemy you wish you had instead of the enemies you do.

see this is exactly what I am talking about. You *wish* the rent control freeze in New York was about degrowth. That is the enemy you want. It is not the enemy you have.
Jun 19 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I dunno I have this excel sheet with the reading lists of 10 different programs that I gathered over the last decade and while there are always some surprises there is more homogeneity than diversity. This is particularly true in terms of broad genre: philosophy, novels, and epic poetry are the main vehicles.

At the expense of other types of poetry, history, oratory, essays, memoirs, and biography.
Jun 18 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
I’ll take a stab.

The concept of the Great Books was invented in the 1910s and 1920s and is not some civilizational tradition as often claimed; the implicit version of western civilization it teaches is a false one, giving the Greeks too much credit and erasing the Germanic contribution wholesale; there is also an implicit teological vision built into the current version of the canon that sees the whole affair of human reason, and in particular the enlightenment, as culminating in WWI, the Holocaust, and the incoherence of modernism, thus presenting a nihilistic vision of human potential and of the civilization to which we are heirs; as the canon is frozen in the 1930s it does not incorporate any of the compelling ideas that have transformed the world since then; philosophy is a poor way to understand the world and is less useful for this purpose than history, poetry, rhetoric, language and all of the other things punted out of the canon to stuff more philosophy in; there is no correlation between studying these books and living a virtuous life, or even an efficacious one. Also steelmanning the STEM critique:

May 10 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This is not the argument of that particular essay but I will note that Tolkien here is actually channeling a premodern view—just a different premodern view, that of Beowulf and the Norse myths, whose stories portrayed heroes locked in combat with evil they would never vanquish. A lot of Tolkien’s sensibility is downstream his admiration of that particular kind of hero—the man who fights the good fight though he knows he will lose it, indeed whose fight is good and noble precisely because he will lose it.
May 4 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
I am listening to this as an audio book.

It was not the book I expected it to be. Far better.

A few brief points: Image 1. I am surprised by the nuance of Halberstam’s arguments and observations.

I thought I knew what this book was because of how often it is referenced and summarized. But it is not the cartoon it is so often described as.
May 4 • 24 tweets • 4 min read
Recently turned down an invitation to attend a conference.

If you are organizing conferences in Washington you must realize a few things: 1. The main reason people attend any conference is to meet people. Interesting people, useful people, old friends. This is the actual reason people are coming to your conference. Everything else is ancillary to this.
Mar 30 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
@zenahitz I’ll bite on this. Let’s say the goal is something like “broad based scientific literacy” — the ability to understand the broad strokes of how the physical world works, as well as fluency in mathematical techniques you’d need to understand the average paper somewhere. @zenahitz One way to do this might be to look at what different science degrees require of their students and see where there are commonalities—especially when those degrees require coursework outside their major.
Mar 21 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
New essay: China and the Future of Science Image A few quotes:

“ I sometimes think of Leninist systems as a little bit like that bus in the movie Speed…. Either it hurtles towards some clearly defined goal or things start to fall apart.” Image
Mar 17 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I spent most of the last week in the hospital and not reading the news.

Catching up on the Iran stuff now.

My main conclusion: the epistemic certainty you all have on this is *crazy.* For almost all takes

Mar 7 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
This is a very good thought experiment. Who are the five authors that most 20th c writers have read but most 21st c writers have not?

What about 19th c writers? The obvious answer is something like “the top 5 poets of each era” because 21st century writers do not consume much poetry.
Mar 5 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
The idea that the Iran operation was mostly about China, that it fundamentally changes Chinese perceptions of American strength, or that it has already altered the balance of power between China and America in any real way, is bizarre to me. We know what metrics the Chinese judge their competition with the US by. We know the military measures they care about and we know the non-military elements of national power that they think are most important.
Jan 9 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I would only want Rubio to run in 2028 if it is clear he can win. Too valuable a candidate to waste on a unwinnable election.

But it is insane to me that people are pushing Vance to run when Rubio is clearly the star player of this administration thus far.

My 2c. Marco Rubio is the only Republican who can make basically every faction of the GOP happy.

He is pretty funny, doesn't come off as angry and resentful at the world. Very good on camera.

Performs under pressure. A competent statesman.
Dec 30, 2025 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Important brief from @Arranjnh for @ChinaBriefJT on the relationship between military power and the "new quality productive forces" that Xi Jinping has staked the future of the Chinese economy on. Image If you have followed anything said by Chinese leaders since about 2020, you know that China has embarked on a grand quest to dominate 21st century science and technology. I wrote about that here: scholars-stage.org/saving-china-t…
Dec 10, 2025 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
New Book Review Essay: "Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska's The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West may not be the worst book I have read this year, but it is by far the most disappointing."Image I wrote a 30-page long review essay of Karp and and Zamsika's book for American Affairs. This blog post is the TLDR version.Image
Oct 28, 2025 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
I do not think China hawkery vs dovery is that well correlated with having lived in China.

I do think it is correlated with career inside China. Journalists who have lived in China are generally far more hawkish than academics who did, for example. It is not an accident that both Pottinger and Garnaut worked as China correspondents before they went into government. If you have never been to China but your area of policy expertise is climate, you are probably pretty dovish on China. If you have never been to China but your area of policy expertise is military affairs, you are probably hawkish on China.
Oct 25, 2025 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
The other problem with Angelica’s post is that she has the causality reversed: thr Taiwanese nationalist movement did not form because foreigners created a historical narrative to justify it—foreigners took cues from TW nationalists not the other way around! (This is also true for many bearish takes on China’s economy and politics: many ideas start with *Chinese* critics of the existing situation, get parlayed to their western friends in journalism/finance/think tank world, and then come to dominate the western debate about China).
Oct 24, 2025 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Again, I just don't have time for people convinced of Chinese weakness. "bro they don't have a culture of innovation over there" sure, fine, but do we install nuclear at $2.50/W? There are many bad things about China. So many. Could list them for days. Many sources of national weakness. Many real problems, problems that keep Xi up at night.

I don't have a lot of patience for people who try to portray China as some kind of wonderland.