The world is full of fiery souls who will declaim in defence of their inviolate principles at the drop of a Phrygian cap and yet who, when the time arrives for things to be done that involve some risk to career or life security, are inexplicably mute.
Less conspicuous, if often more valuable in practice, is another personality type: those whose unassuming aspect tells you nothing of the steeliness within, but who simply do what needs to be done, and take the risks that require to be taken. Watching these people we observe a demeanour less heroic than housekeeperly, less stern than whimsical: for this reason, though others may underestimate them, they are never at risk of taking themselves too seriously.
And so it's instructive to observe the sorts of people the Chinese government has detained over the past week or so, since one of that country's bravest spirits, former literature professor Liu Xiaobo, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. If there's one sure index of the fears and frailties of a bully-regime, it's who causes them anxiety when the chips are down.
That we know anything worth knowing about what is happening in Beijing right now is due to that latest of the West's paradoxical gifts to the world: what we delight in calling the social media. If in the West the blogosphere is chiefly an outlet for the ressentiment of the professionally disappointed, in places such as China and Iran it is the new quill and parchment of a home-grown Enlightenment.
If for us Twitter has become merely a tributary for the passing thoughts of the self-important, in other parts of the world it has become the necessary substitute for the phone call or the personal conversation, when they become imprudent or impossible.
Thus the close friends of Liu - gentle people who have become inured to the terrors of state bullying, even as their more glamorous contemporaries have succumbed to it - have been blogging and tweeting away as the plainclothes-men have been trudging the corridors outside their flats, or filling their keyholes with superglue in the time-honoured manner of the high-school pest.
Now their vigil may finally be over. By the time you read these words (Chinese State Security willing) Liu's wife Liu Xia may have hosted the first Nobel celebration dinner party in her Beijing flat, surrounded by an unheroic-looking assemblage of crumpled souls, clad in neat but threadbare sweaters and careworn overalls.
Here is Liu Di, the shy, owlish-looking young woman who took her online moniker the Stainless Steel Rat from a 1960s American sci-fi character, and who has led State Security on a merry dance through the philosophy of non-violence for a decade. There is Wang Jinbo, who has been detained numerous times for "subverting state power", despite his mild-mannered essays and letters.
If we could look around that table we might see some of the true heroes of the past two decades of Chinese public life, people who in time may come to be celebrated as the country's Havels and Sakharovs and Michniks. And we would recognise none of them.
In the West today it's fashionable to display your broad-mindedness by celebrating the grand economic achievements of Chinese communism, since an obsessive preoccupation with human rights there only makes you the intellectual equivalent of the dinner-party boor. Thus it often escapes us how narrow and confined are the foundations upon which the grand edifice of Chinese state supremacy has been built. Even today the research profile at Peking University includes no serious study of any great texts of political or moral thought other than desiccated Confucian homilies, Leninist bromides and flaccid philosophical syncretisms, presented as if in the conviction that Chinese tradition already holds all the accumulated wisdom of the world within it.
And so when brave spirits like Liu Di and Wang try to assemble some kind of political philosophy adequate to a modern, liberal-democratic China, they are forced to fall back upon their own resources - meaning the entire diverse array of non-Chinese political and social thought, to the extent that it is legally obtainable within China's territorial boundaries. In their blogs and tweets Michnik and Walensa, Gandhi and Thoreau rub shoulders with Adam Smith and David Hume, Keynes and Hayek, Charles Darwin and Carl Jung, along with American sci-fi, Japanese anime and children's fiction, holus-bolus, in a joyous assemblage of rapturous intellectual experiment, rather like the notebooks of intelligent, questioning autodidacts in the West a century or so ago, when ordinary folks still possessed the means to penetrate the private languages of the scholarly class.
Meanwhile we, who once imagined ourselves as custodians of this great disorderly river of thought as it flowed towards futurity, have more or less forsaken it. We content ourselves with an empty repertoire of critical poses that in the end criticise nothing.
Observe the foreign guest list at Peking University these past few tumultuous months. A young undergraduate there would most recently have been treated to a performance from Noam Chomsky, the American linguist turned conspiracy-theorist, as he stood, begowned and befuddled in bashful gratitude, and blamed all the ills of the world upon the US and Israel, effectively absolving the Chinese Communist Party of all of its sins. A couple of months earlier you would have been treated to the agreeable obscurities of Harvard professor Homi Bhabha, as he celebrated the endless interconnectedness of everything, and hymned the post-colonial world's ever-growing borderlessness, even as ordinary Chinese citizens struggle to access the foreign press through the Great Firewall. This, you would be forced to conclude in your perplexity, must be the grand heritage of Western philosophy, displayed through two of its most celebrated exponents.
There on the dais, in the uptown splendour of Peking University, are two of the loudest self-proclaimed moral heroes of the Western academy, each traducing their vocation in abject fashion. While here, in the confines of their downtown two-room flats, are a handful of brave souls acting as intellectuals were once trained to act: not posturing and wheedling their way into eminent sinecures, but simply pursuing truth wherever they should find it.
Liu Xiao, Liu Di, Wang Jinbo and the rest: should State Security be so kind as to permit you your celebratory meal, buon appetito and manman chi.
