The Washington Times Interview

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/conscience-realist/2012/dec/22/morris-berman-americas-culture-me-myself-and-i/

and

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/conscience-realist/2012/dec/23/morris-berman-true-believers-and-american-dreams-d/

Merry Xmas!

Thomas Naylor (1936-2012)

I just learned yesterday that my friend and staunch Vermont secessionist, Thomas Naylor, died on December 12 from a massive stroke. He was only 76 years old, and very actively writing and organizing conferences for next year. I spoke to Tom about two weeks ago, and although his voice was kind of thin, he seemed fine: happy to chat, intellectually alert. A few days later, he was dead. I also spoke to his wife, Magda, yesterday afternoon, who told me that no one saw it coming.

There was no one like him, really; he articulated a rare political position, and he did it well. I admired Tom because life for him was not a pose or a hustle; it was about integrity, sincerity, and dedication to a vision. Tom stood up for what he believed, even though it was vastly unpopular. For me, his little book on "Secession" offered an important prediction regarding America's future. It's a manifesto, really, and a possible roadmap for creating a decentralized, eco-friendly, non-imperial America; or non-America, really, which I think needs to happen. He saw that America's soul had rotted out, and that the small minority that cared about quality of life, and about living a truly moral life, needed to separate out from the huge machine that was devouring us all, even murdering our children. The movement he created, the Second Vermont Republic, was his answer to the nation's spiritual suicide-in-progress.

So Tom will be sorely missed; he leaves a gap that will be hard to fill, in Vermont or elsewhere. Edwin Markham wrote a poem many years ago about Lincoln, saying that when a great man dies, it's like a tall cedar being cut down in the forest, and that this "leaves a lonesome place against the sky."

Bless you, Tom. R.I.P.

-mb

Further Thoughts on Japan...and America

Recently I've been reading The Kimono Mind, a study of Japanese culture written in 1965 by the Austrian-born architect Bernard Rudofsky. It also happens to be, by way of comparison, a study of American culture; and the author is quite clear that he regards Americans as a large collection of morons. This alone, of course, makes the book quite enjoyable, since Americans are, in fact, a large collection of morons. In his 1982 Postscript to the paperback edition Rudofsky writes:

-"ineptness and stupidity are our forte."

-"Could anybody conceive of an American president conversing in a foreign language?"

-"The length to which Americans sometimes go to avoid looking reality in the eye borders on paranoia."

And so on. When it comes to comparing how work is done in the two countries, Rudofsky says that while the Japanese have an "addiction to doing things superlatively well," in America "nothing could be farther from our thoughts." Our goal is quantity, not quality, he correctly points out.

I was recently reminded of Japanese-American differences the other day when I read a short article in a newspaper (carried by Reuters) regarding a recent court decision handed down in Florida. I couldn't help thinking how incomprehensible this story would be to a Japanese person. Here it is verbatim:

"TALLAHASSEE, Florida--Motorist Richard Catalano's five-year quest to crank up Justin Timberlake tunes on his way to work won the blessing of the Florida Supreme Court on Thursday.

"A unanimous ruling affirmed that a 2007 state law prohibiting loud music while driving violated the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.

"Catalano received a $73 ticket in 2007 for violating a newly enacted Florida law that prohibited motorists from playing music that is 'plainly audible' 25 feet away."

A number of things we might say about this; but first, a very representative anecdote from my recent visit to Japan. I was having lunch in a cafe located in a Tokyo subway station when a few tables away, a young woman's cell phone vibrated. Before she answered the call, she took out a small towel, about the size of a washcloth, and placed it over the phone and her mouth. She also talked in a low voice. This was done so as not to disturb the people around her. (It's also common in such a situation for the person to get up and leave the restaurant, and take the call outside.) And as I mentioned in a previous post, there are signs posted in subway cars asking passengers to turn their phones off.

Back to Tallahassee. Here's my list; readers may have a few items of their own to add to it.

1. It never occurred to Richard Catalano, whoever he may be, that blasting his car radio might bother other drivers around him. And if it did occur to him, his attitude apparently was, "Too bad for them; this is America; I can do whatever I want."

2. Bad enough that Mr. Catalano is an inconsiderate and narcissistic douche bag; so are the judges on the Florida Supreme Court, who upheld his ridiculous point of view. Their concern is that his First Amendment rights were being violated; the rights of nearby drivers to *not* have to listen to this music somehow doesn't enter into the equation.

3. Catalano's concern for the Bill of Rights, along with that of the Court, is of course touching; but nobody here apparently is concerned about the fact that the current president has shredded that Bill of Rights, such that if the chief executive decides on a whim to have an American citizen assassinated, or to scoop up anyone he dislikes and imprison him under the "indefinite detention" clause of the National Defense Authorization Act, he can do it with impunity. No, for Catalano and the members of the court, what's important is the 'freedom' to disturb people around you with loud music. This is the appropriate target of the Bill of Rights.

4. So important was this 'freedom' to Mr. Catalano that he conducted a five-year campaign to have his obnoxious behavior exonerated. This issue was apparently worth five years of his life.

As I said, reading the newspaper article through Japanese eyes is an instructive exercise.

On a final note, Rudofsky records that when Fukuzawa Yukichi, the "Japanese Voltaire," published his Encouragement of Learning in 17 volumes over 1872-76, it sold 3,400,000 copies--this at a time when the Japanese population numbered 34 million. In other words, 10% of the country bought these books. Translated into contemporary American terms, says Rudofsky, this would be equivalent to a sale of 22 million copies. Can one imagine such a thing happening in the US? Not even some ridiculous Oprah-approved New Age self-help book could come close to such sales, let alone a text on the importance of education.

And when I tell people the country is finished--they laugh!

(c)Morris Berman, 2012

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.

On that note: Merry Christmas!

©Morris Berman, 2012

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?

(c)Morris Berman, 2012

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!