DARK AGES AMERICA

The Diamond of the Mind

“The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to salvation is hard."—From the Katha Upanishad

And so, as we approach Comment #200 on the previous post, and thus need to start another discussion (though we can certainly keep talking about Japan and technology), I figure I should say something Important and Insightful regarding the state of the world, as we slide toward Xmas and the New Year. However, the state of the world is obvious: capitalism is coming apart, and this is the real story of the 21st century. It doesn’t matter whether one is talking about Rom Mittney’s haircut, or Kim Kardashian’s rump, or riots in Greece, or Latreasa Goodman (a hero of mine), or the latest piece of techno-crap from Apple. The hilo conductor, as we say in Spanish, the thread pulling it all together, is that the socioeconomic formation that has been with us for 500 years or so is finally coming to an end. One might argue that the spiritual emptiness of capitalism is obvious to only a few, but I’m convinced that there is a subconscious awareness of this among a good part of the American population, Black Friday Wal-Mart riots notwithstanding. Americans may be stupid, but they aren’t dead.
On one level, the country is totally adrift. Thomas Naylor recently sent me an article in which he argues that Obama won the election because he is chic, cool, not because he has a vision. Indeed, says Prof. Naylor, the guy has no vision at all. Everything with him is ad hoc; he has no idea where to lead the nation, or what that might even consist of. Far from being any sort of leader, he’s just winging it—playing at being president, as it were, and the hollowness of it all, the charade aspect of it, is hard to miss. On another level, the direction of the nation is pretty clear: downward, and absolutely nothing can alter that trajectory. No empire, in its dying phase, was able to halt or reverse the downward path it was on; and despite our belief in American ‘exceptionalism’, we will not escape our fate. In this regard, Occupy Wall Street (what’s left of it) is as clueless as Barbara Ann Nowak (bless her heart) or Herman Cain (a loveable douche bag, if there ever was one).

And yet life goes on, and it contains so much that is marvelous. December, it seems to me, is a time for taking stock, for being grateful for the previous 11 months. I was lucky: my gratitude list is pretty long right about now. In terms of change, or good fortune, I like to think in terms of events that are ‘meteoric’ vs. ones that are ‘geologic’. Meteoric includes stuff like a great (if brief) love affair with a beautiful woman half my age, or taking a cable car to the top of Mount Misen on Miyajima, and looking down, through the mist, at the Inland Sea. Geologic events are things like sitting in a café and making notes for my next book, or having a good workout at the gym, and feeling completely like a body. Viewed from a certain perspective, it’s all sacred, it seems to me.

But most people on the planet don’t get to have this. In fact, something like 3 billion people live on less than $2 a day. This is the fallout from neoliberalism (capitalism) and globalization (imperialism). “There is enough for everyone’s need,” said Gandhi, “but not enough for everyone’s greed.” I’m not sure; overpopulation seems like the greatest threat to the planet, and to the human race, that we currently face. The world population forecast for 2050 is for 9 billion people, and if the past is any guide, we’ll probably hit that figure well in advance of mid-century. More and more, things are escaping from our conscious control. In terms of structural or collective solutions, it’s not clear what is to be done, or who is in a position to do it. If you are concerned about overpopulation, ecological destruction, social inequality, genocide, economic havoc, and government by corporate plutocracy, all well and good; but dealing with any of these things at a group or political level is a murky proposition. What group will you join? What politics will you pursue? What impact can you realistically expect to have? In times such as these, what are the levers of change—beyond disintegration itself, which I personally believe is how substantive change is going to take place. Geologic (micro) changes accumulate until you get meteoric (macro) changes, as Marx was one of the first to point out—the quantity-to-quality argument—although I think Epicurus beat him to it by about 2,000 years. Or to put it another way, the way we live on a daily basis is finally going to (dis)solve the way we live on a daily basis. Individually speaking, you can live better (Gandhi) or you can live worse (Lloyd Blankfein), but the long-term effects of your behavior probably won’t be in for quite a while.

Given the fact that there is no immediate or obvious answer to the issue of meaningful collective action, let’s talk about things at the microlevel instead. In the current issue of n+1, Kristin Dombek describes an acid trip she was on during her college years, which was threatening to turn really bad. At this point, a friend put her arm around her, and “I found my way to some edge, thin as a thread, where the panic turned into laughter.” She continues:

“This is the diamond of the mind, this ability….From then on when the panic crept in I could just push over the thread-thin edge to the other side, feeling the way to joy. Joy is the knowledge that the thread is there. A thread runs through the middle of your life, and if you find it, the second half can be comedy instead….You can do this yourself, if you have found the diamond in your mind.”

I had a similar experience many years ago with magic mushrooms (psilocybin), when as the landscape began to undulate (I was on Vancouver Island) and I felt the terror rising, I made a deliberate decision to enjoy what was happening. Somehow, I found the “thread-thin edge to the other side.” The next few hours were fascinating, as a result, but this may have been more the result of luck than courage, I don’t know. (Woody Allen believes most of what happens to us is a matter of luck. He may have a point.)

All any of us can do, it seems to me, is to put one foot in front of the other, and keep walking; though it does help to have a sense of the direction you want to go in, obviously. As some wag once put it, Wisdom is essentially knowing what to do next.

 

The Question Concerning Technology

Dear Wafers and Other Friends:

As we are approaching the 200-message mark on the previous post (god, you guys have been engaged these days!), it is with some regret that I must leave the topic of Mittney (Rom! Can you forgive me?), and move on to other topics. I'm not really ready to talk about Japan, since I'm still reeling from my trip and need time to process the whole thing, but for now let me say a few words about one thing I observed there that forced me to rethink a basic premise I've had about the history/sociology of technology. This is mostly thinking out loud, if you guys can tolerate something only partially digested (to mix metaphors).

Actually, it involves two premises. One, technology is not, as is commonly thought, value-neutral. In other words, the conventional wisdom is that you can use an axe to fell a tree and thus build yourself a house, or you can chop off your neighbor's head, which would not be very polite. Virtually all Americans (not the sharpest 'race' on the planet, I grant you) believe this, the president included. But as so many scholars have demonstrated, perhaps beginning with Marshall McLuhan, this just ain't so. Technologies are the bearers of culture, and if you introduce any particular technology into a society (print medium into the oral culture of medieval Europe, for example), you eventually transform that society into something else. The introduction of vaccines for cattle into rural Mexico, many decades ago, led to the marginalization of the 'sacred' culture of the curandero, and thus to a different concept of man's relationship to the cosmos. The vaccine cannot be isolated, in other words; it carries with it the world view of modern science and all that that entails (in particular, a 'disenchanted' world).

Second premise: Japan is a hi-tech society and people there are walking around with iPads, cell phones, and whatever stuffed into every available orifice. But it proved not to be so. The Japanese are fascinated with the new, that is true; but technology is not their 'hidden religion' (see Why America Failed, ch. 2). Yes, there is some degree of zombification operating there, to be sure, but much less than I anticipated; maybe 20% of the population is awash in Finnish and Korean (and Japanese) techno-crap. So you do see folks (the young, esp.) walking down the street staring into electronic screens, for example; but only about 20% at most. Tokyo aside, Japan is not a 'loud' country. Even then, I was amazed to ride the subway in Tokyo and see signs showing a cell phone with the word OFF (in English) in block capitals superimposed on the image. Occasionally, an electronic voice comes over the air and says, "Please make sure your cell phones are turned off." You look around, and people are busy texting, but not making any noise. When I took the express bus out to Narita Airport en route to returning to Mexico, an electronic voice also added, "It disturbs your fellow passengers." This bowled me over, because in the U.S., who gives a damn about the people around them? You can sit in a restaurant in LA or NY with some woman three feet away, literally yelling into her phone about her recent gall bladder operation. Y'all can identify with this, I'm sure.

The only exception I found to this was the lounge in the hotel I stayed in in Hiroshima. It was terribly American in design, very un-Japanese: formica tables, fluorescent lights, a completely sterile environment. There, people would sit and yak away loudly on their phones, and to hell with anyone else. So what the heck is going on?

Try this: if the 'hidden religion' of the United States is technology, as well as an extreme form of individualism (which I discuss in A Question of Values), the hidden religion of Japan is interrelatedness, or group consciousness. In fact, it's hardly hidden: everybody knows this about the Japanese, including the Japanese. Nor is it always a positive thing, as it can stifle personal expression and creativity, and some Japanese scholars have argued that it was the root cause of the Pacific War (1931-45), during which time it was impossible to speak out against the military direction of the nation. Whistleblowers have a hard time in Japan. Well actually, they are practically nonexistent, and the 2011 disaster at Fukushima is only the latest example of this. Maruyama Masao, in the postwar period, blamed the war on a "system of irresponsibility," and recently one courageous critic (although I believe he lives in New York) said that Fukushima was the product of Japanese culture itself.

To return to the subject of cell phones, then, what we see is not the introduction of a new technology and the subsequent transformation of the culture. No; the culture of Japan is strong enough to resist the negative effects of this technology, by a factor of something like 80%. I remember sitting in a luncheonette in a subway station and seeing a woman receiving a call on her phone, and actually taking out a small towel and putting it over her mouth, and the phone, so as to mute her voice while she was talking. More often, the Japanese will leave the space, and conduct the conversation out of earshot of those around them. Whereas Americans live like they were individual atoms, bouncing around with no civic responsibility whatsoever (and certainly as it concerns technology, since it is the hidden religion), the Japanese live in society, in community, and in relatedness to other people, and therefore are acutely sensitive to the potential impact they have about those around them. Despite the negative aspects of the group mentality mentioned above, I found this institutionalized, semi-conscious courtesy quite refreshing. So while in the US, technology combines with the ideology of extreme individualism to create a race of obnoxious techno-buffoons and zombies, in Japan the culture of public respect limits what technology can do--even though, as I said above, the Japanese tend to love the new. In a word, Marshall McLuhan doesn't apply to Japan. Or one might say, it is the cultural medium that is the message there, not the technological medium. I had to rethink my basic assumptions regarding all this (always a good thing, if somewhat disorienting).

In that regard, I was fascinated by the recent comment James Howard Kunstler made on his blog, which got reported in the comment section of the previous post here:

"Finally, I have one flat-out prediction, one I have made before but deserves repeating: Japan will be the first society to consciously opt out of being an advanced industrial economy. They have no other apparent choice really, having next-to-zero oil, gas, or coal reserves of their own, and having lost faith in nuclear power. They will be the first country to enter a world made by hand. They were very good at it before about 1850 and had a pre-industrial culture of high artistry and grace - though, granted, all the defects of human psychology."

Could Japan be the model, the cutting edge of a post-capitalist or post-industrial society? Is a kind of "back to the future" logic operating here, in which it is the craft tradition, rather than the latest piece of technological garbage, that might create a viable culture, and thus a viable model for the rest of us? Think of the Renaissance, during which time cultural renewal depended on a return to Classical civilization ("reculer pour mieux sauter"--step backwards in order to better jump ahead). As Gary Snyder once said to me, when I teased him about having a 'romantic' vision: We may have to return to the used-parts bin, and discover that some of the stuff we threw out in our zeal for progress is not so obsolete after all.

Well, I said I was thinking out loud. Food for thought, in any case, eh wot?

Mittney, we hardly knew ye!

Ay, Mittney, Mittney!

Who were you, anyway? You streaked across the dark, Obamaesque sky like a comet, and then just as quickly--you we're gone. A nation weeps.

You were, like the man who defeated you, an empty person, a Nowhere Man. Basically, a shmuck with a haircut. But there is one crucial difference: whereas your rival stands for nothing at all, and thus got filled up with Wall St. and the Pentagon--in other words, wound up as a corporate shill and a war criminal--you did have a philosophy. True, it wasn't much--warmed-over Reaganism, really--but you believed it. You believed that 47% of the American public were worthless layabouts; that the government is there to promote the rich and grind the poor into the dust; and that we should project American power to every corner of the globe, just for the hell of it. You probably think trees cause pollution, that ketchup is a vegetable, and that the homeless are homeless because that's what they really want for themselves. Pretty thin gruel, intellectually speaking, but at least it was something.

Of course, your rival has done enormous damage to America in four short years. He shredded the Bill of Rights, institutionalized kill lists and destroyed thousands of civilian lives in Pakistan and Afghanistan, increased hatred and bitterness toward the US, funneled $19 trillion into the pockets of bankers while the real unemployment rate stood at 18%--man, the list goes on and on. He even murdered American citizens on a whim, and has probably implemented the torture of many more. But what bothers me about your defeat, O Great Mittney, is that you could have done more, you could have made things even worse, and faster, too. And that's what America really needs, O My Mitt: to just fucking get it over with, instead of dawdling around with social/economic and cultural disintegration. So we'll continue slouching towards Bethlehem, committing suicide in piecemeal fashion, where you might have put us on the fast track to hell. This is indeed a sad day for our great nation, as you sat in your hotel room eating meatloaf, and composing your concession speech.

Who will remember you, in a month's time, O Mittney? Who remembers John Kerry? Who the hell was John Kerry? You get my point. Ay, Mittney: we hardly knew ye!


The Truthout Review

Dear Wafers and other friends of the blog:

Here is the latest review of my work, which just appeared on Truthout:

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/12455-america-what-happened

I need to say a few words about this, and to salute Truthout for being willing to publish it as the author submitted it, without any cutting or editing. (Counter Punch falls into the same exceptional category, imo.)

Many years ago the historian Jackson Lears pointed out that whether one was talking about The Nation or The National Review, it was pretty much the same story. I.e., the Left and Right in the U.S. think they are in opposing camps, but the similarities are far greater than the differences. Both, he remarked, believe in "progress," technological and economic expansion ("growth"), and the American Dream. Voices critical of these goals were practically nonexistent, or completely marginalized. This remains true today, of course, and I get something of a charge out of the fact that the Left is congenitally unable to entertain a scenario that is becoming more and more obvious each day: It's all over but the shouting (indeed, "progressives" are part of the shouting). Hence, their delusion is pretty thick, because if your arguments are not based in reality, how good can your analysis be?

The author of this review, David Masciotra, submitted it to several "progressive" online publications, and the reaction was basically, We'll run it if you refute Berman's argument(!). One editor, who happened to have a Master's degree from a prestigious Ivy League university, went completely bananas, telling (yelling at, actually) David that Occupy Wall Street was going to turn everything around, and that the U.S. had a great future ahead of it. Talk about impaired reality-testing (recall my constantly reiterated observation, that in America stupidity is not particularly a function of IQ). But the crucial point is that this voice, the one that says Game Over and provides the documentation for this conclusion, can almost never get a hearing. As a result of which, we drift ever closer to disaster on a daily basis, not only unwilling to consider why America failed, but also unwilling to even recognize that it failed.

Anyway, I wish to thank David for writing it, and Truthout for running it. And be sure to tell your friends: It's all over but the shouting.

Thank you all again for your support.


 

Land of the Rising Sun

Dear Wafers,

I fly to Japan early Monday morning, and will be there for six weeks. I don't know what the Internet cafe situation is there, esp. since I'll be spending two weeks in the wilds of Northeast Honshu; plus, I'll need to concentrate on my research while I'm there. So as of Monday, things will be kind of iffy on this blog, touch and go. I'm telling you this so you know that messages might not get posted for a while. But never fear: I'll be back, and hopefully everything sent in will get preserved.

Meanwhile, I wanted to ramble a bit about how I got into this project, and what my thoughts are about it at this point in time.

One of my early books (1981) was The Reenchantment of the World--the only best-seller I ever had. I guess it hit the market at just the right time, when there was a lot of interest in holistic healing and nonscientific systems of thought. The book generated a lot of interest because of its central, radical thesis: that in their own terms, these nonscientific thought systems were true; that they described a world that did, to a great degree, exist. And that if the scientific world view was also true, it was so in its terms, i.e. the parameters of the modern world. This didn't mean that I believed (for example) that arrows fell to earth in a straight line (Aristotle) prior to the Scientific Revolution, and that they changed their trajectory to a parabola around 1600 (Galileo). (Man, wouldn't that be a hoot.) Rather, that in the rush to modernity, the baby got thrown out with the bathwater: a whole world of learning, an alternate sensibility, got lost. This, I still believe, and I believe that we are much poorer for it, despite the very real benefits of the modern world. (A theme, I should add, that is echoed in Ursula Le Guin's brilliant novel, The Telling.)

(Much to my surprise, I still get letters from folks out there saying, "That book changed my life." This not from folks who took too much acid back in the 60s, but from philsophers, therapists, and people who have their critical faculties very much intact.)

I wouldn't call it my best book, and if I were to rewrite it today, I certainly would change a lot of what I originally wrote. As Noam Chomsky once remarked, if you are a professor and are giving the same lectures 20 years on from the same yellowed notes, it might be time to start thinking about retirement. Any scholar worth his or her salt is not going to agree with everything s/he wrote 31 years ago. And yet, there are a few themes that remain more or less consistent within the body of my work, and one of these is the costs of modernity. Modernity certainly has its blessings, and these are continually celebrated both in academic works as well as in the popular press. The costs of modernity, on the other hand, the aspects of the premodern era that were really valuable (as well as true)--well, these are things that most writers are not terribly interested in; and in the US, of course, at least 99% of the population is not even aware that there is an issue here.

My interest in Japan was born many years ago out of a fascination with its craft tradition, which is one of the most breathtaking the world has ever known. I remember my high school English teacher, Harold Sliker--this around 1960, when teachers were dedicated and students paid attention in class, and were still able to read--talked about the Japanese tradition of sword making, and how the artisan would fast and meditate for three days before beginning the work, and then would forge the hot steel by repeatedly folding it over, and tempering it, until the result was a brilliant blade. I was fascinated by this, but never followed it up. Well, not as a teenager, at any rate. Years later, however, when I was writing the Reenchantment book, I found the same sort of dedication in the Western alchemical tradition. Care, dedication, tradition, craft, community, infinite patience--this was the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater.

Of course, I realize that there is a socioeconomic and political context here that makes the whole subject tricky. It is perhaps not an accident that Heidegger joined the Nazi party, and that the Nazis got involved in a weird amalgam of tradition and modernity that the historian Jeffrey Herf aptly calls Reactionary Modernism. Or that the world of the medieval alchemist was one of feudal-organic hierarchy; or that the samurai tradition, including the mingei, or folk craft tradition, got cleverly channeled into the militarism of the 1930s, culminating in the attack on Pearl Harbor. And as far as contemporary Japan goes, young people are for the most part interested in landing a job with Mitsubishi, making a ton of yen, and sticking the latest iPhone up their noses. Things like the tea ceremony, in their eyes, are for squares and tourists. Which is not all that surprising, given the impact America has had on that nation.

The first impact came in the form of Commodore Perry, who sailed into Edo Bay in 1853 and threatened to blow the place to kingdom come if the Japanese did not open themselves up to commercial trade with the US. This was the catalyst for major turmoil within Japan, culminating in the overthrow of the shogunate in 1868 and what is known as the Meiji Restoration. While England, e.g., had more than a century to adjust to capitalism, Japan had to turn itself on its head in the space of a single generation. The result is a society that is extremely neurotic, still torn apart by issues of tradition vs. modernity. I wrote this recently to a Japanese friend, an anthropologist of about 50 years of age, who wrote back: "I struggle with all of this on a daily basis."

The second impact came in the form of General MacArthur, and the Occupation of Japan during 1945-52. The Americanization was fairly relentless, and the Japanese got on the bandwagon in a hurry: Coca-Cola, jeans, American movies, the whole nine yards. "Irresistible Empire," Victoria de Grazia called it for the case of Europe being steamrolled by the US, and one can say that it was even more irresistible in the case of Japan. (Check out Oe Kenzaburo's Nobel acceptance speech, 1994.) In any case, the land of green tea and ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints) is still reeling from the double whammy delivered by the United States. (By the way, this does not mean that I think Japan should have won the war; I don't. I'm just vainly trying to head off that accusation, like the one that surfaced in the wake of Ch. 4 of Why America Failed, in which because I said that the antebellum South had certain nonhustling characteristics that were admirable, a whole bunch of readers took this to be a defense of the Confederacy and of slavery. Man...my mother told me I should be a plumber instead of a writer, but did I listen? I keep saying on this blog that Americans are not very bright, and I have no doubt that when my book on Japan appears, the same crowd will be jumping up and down and screaming that I want Japan to have been the victor in WW2. Too many people in this country with lobotomies, apparently.)

Anyway, all this by way of saying that Japan and what it represents, historically and culturally speaking, is a very complex subject, and that whenever one asserts X about it, there is always a non-X or anti-X that needs to be taken into consideration. That being said, let me return to Harold Sliker, Japanese sword makers, and the significance of the craft tradition. On craft in general, Octavio Paz wrote in 1973: "Between the timeless time of the museum and the speeded-up time of technology, craftsmanship is the heartbeat of human time." Or to quote Alan Watts (The Way of Zen), "people in a hurry cannot feel."

Here is Watts on Zen art:

"The aimless life is the constant theme of Zen art of every kind, expressing the artist’s own inner state of going nowhere in a timeless moment. All men have these moments occasionally, and it is just then that they catch those vivid glimpses of the world which cast such a glow over the intervening wastes of memory—the smell of burning leaves on a morning of autumn haze, a flight of sunlit pigeons against a thundercloud, the sound of an unseen waterfall at dusk, or the single cry of some unidentified bird in the depths of a forest. In the art of Zen every landscape, every sketch of bamboo in the wind or of lonely rocks, is an echo of such moments."

(If you want to get an idea of what Watts is talking about on film, check out Enlightenment Guaranteed and Cherry Blossoms, both by the German filmmaker and Japanophile, Doris Doerrie.)

Bernard Leach, England's greatest potter (who lived in Japan for many years), says that shibui is an aesthetic ideal in Japanese craft, referring as it does to the austere, the subdued, and the restrained. This element, he remarks (A Potter's Book), gave the work a religious and psychological basis--something quite different from the hi-tech products being turned out by Japan today. During its integrated periods, adds Donald Richie (A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics), Japan presented the spectacle of a people who made art a way of life. All of this got lost in the rush to modernize, to Americanize. Yet one wonders whether any society, be it ours or the Japanese, can sustain itself without this kind of religious or psychological foundation. In this regard, the Japanese reaction to the Tom Cruise film, The Last Samurai, when it was released in 2003, is rather instructive (I need a stronger word here). The film is not really historically accurate; it is a romanticization of the last samurai rebellion, led by Saigo Takamori in 1877 (a folk hero in Japan to this day)--a shorter equivalent of our own Civil War, and fought, perhaps, for similar reasons (see the infamous Ch. 4 of Why America Failed). On blogs, newspapers, radio programs and whatever, there was this huge outpouring of emotion in response to the film, to the effect of: "This is us; this is the real Japan." Shades of Ursula Le Guin, once again: a corporate-commercial reality had been rammed down their throats, pasted over a deep, spiritual reality, and suddenly, the Japanese came out of the closet and declared: We're not having it; modernization tried to destroy our soul, but ultimately that soul still exists, and it will have the final say.

Well, I don't know how real (i.e., lasting) that outpouring of emotion was; everybody eventually went back to Mitsubishi to put in 14-hour work days, I'm guessing. But it does seem to me that there is a kind of 'magical' substrate that simply won't go away, and that we should be grateful for that. Can human beings really live without meaning? Japan tried to do it since the Meiji Restoration, and it hasn't worked out very well. America tried to do it since the late 16th century, and it seems to me that that is why it failed. In the last analysis, meaning is not a luxury.

Still, the US, as well as Japan, are too far gone to embrace the substrate voluntarily; this much seems certain. But the modern world will pass, as I've suggested in previous writings, and as we transition to a more austere world--by necessity, not by choice--certain things may come to the surface once again. I'm thinking of my earlier post on Ernest Callenbach, and his posthumous essay, in which he wrote the following (please pardon my duplication of part of that post):

"All things 'go' somewhere: they evolve, with or without us, into new forms. So as the decades pass, we should try not always to futilely fight these transformations. As the Japanese know, there is much unnoticed beauty in wabi-sabi--the old, the worn, the tumble-down, those things beginning their transformation into something else. We can embrace this process of devolution: embellish it when strength avails, learn to love it.

"There is beauty in weathered and unpainted wood, in orchards overgrown, even in abandoned cars being incorporated into the earth. Let us learn...to put unwise or unneeded roads 'to bed,' help a little in the healing of the natural contours, the re-vegetation by native plants. Let us embrace decay, for it is the source of all new life and growth."

Mono no aware, the Japanese call it: the somewhat melancholy awareness of the impermanence of things. There will be something of great value on the other side of the Great Watershed we are facing, I'm convinced of it. Perhaps, Japan offers a clue to what it might be.