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I grew up with Japan as an economic powerhouse, outstripping the U.S. in electronics, automobiles — everything modern except spaceflight. A generation after inflicting a bombing campaign on Japan that left few buildings standing even before we dropped two atomic bombs, this country watched Japanese banks buying up prime real estate in our cities. Japan was leading with both innovative designs and quality manufacturing.
These ruminations were touched off in a debate about the world’s economic woes. We had begun comparing the U.S. response to Japan’s. This conversation happened after Japan’s “Lost Decade” (approximately 1991 to 2003) but BT, “before Trump.” I was saying at the time that Japan had too many healthy elders needing the social safety net and too few youngsters paying in, but the customary fix for that problem — immigration — was not possible because the Japanese still do not wish to compromise their superiority. Most of the work Japanese don’t want is handled by Koreans, but the Koreans are not allowed to stay.
I had not looked closely enough to see that Japanese banks had pushed the country into a liquidity trap by inflated loans to corporations whose chief asset was being “too big to fail.” The short term issue was very like the run up to the Great Recession in this country — Japan just got there first — but I was feeling pretty smug about the long term issue because the U.S. has a substantial history with immigration and a society that does not depend on ethnic identity or religion or language. Our social glue is ideas.
I did not anticipate that the U.S. would elect a president who attacked the people who most commonly do the work Americans don’t want in his announcement speech. I did not anticipate a political issue over building a wall along the Mexican border to keep out the rapists and other criminals. After living near the border nearly all of my adult life, I was being told that I should be afraid. Surely, I thought, the voters would not buy such a hysterical bill of goods.
“In Japan,” my interlocutor lamented about my incomplete comparison, “family structure is strong there. Families take care of their own and don’t expect the government to do it for them. Also, there is a sense of pride for producing and shame for not doing your part, what we miss here. There is a loyalty to the company, employer that most Americans don’t understand. I remember passing one business in Tokyo where all of the employees formed outside of the door when opening reciting the company mission. This wasn’t an unusual thing. Here we have troubles with the pledge of allegiance in some areas.”
Just as I did not anticipate the rise of Trumpian xenophobia, he did not anticipate the death of Japanese corporate culture. Over a third of Japanese workers are now, as we say in this country, “temps,” with lower wages, fewer benefits, and no job security. Wages have stagnated since the Lost Decade and productivity per worker has fallen like a stone.
Still and all, I don’t disagree with his remarks on the positive side of Japanese cultural values. The positives are there to be seen at a glance: extreme loyalty, excellent craftsmanship, personal responsibility to the collective, reliable care of the commons. All valid observations of a nation that can also be racist, insular, and imperialistic.
Japan’s Axis allies were also splendid people in a glass half full sense. Germany didn’t get on the cutting edge of science and technology by accident and Roman culture — pre-Italy Italian — marks most of the world even today.
My hero, Will Rogers, was very tight with Mussolini, only backing off when the Fascists began to get crosswise with the two countries for which Rogers always expressed love, the U.S. (Mussolini) and the Cherokee Nation (Hitler via his comments about Indians in Mein Kampf).
The great Modernist poet Ezra Pound did not back off on Mussolini when things got dicey or, for that matter, on Hitler. After the war, Pound did time in a mental institution when he was found mentally unfit to be tried for treason. If he was malingering, he did so convincingly enough to never finish the Cantos.
Pound the raving anti-Semite, in his final years, befriended a young Allen Ginsberg, apparently wrapping his considerable intellect around some serious contradictions.
Among them, Japan and Germany and Italy carry some of the richest and deepest wells of culture in the sense of seeking and representing truth in science and in the arts. If those cultures can go wrong, any culture can go wrong.
I share the majority opinion in the world — not just among the allied nations — that WWII was a “just war.” Still, that does not justify or excuse the firebombing of Dresden, and to point that out is not to claim moral equivalence with the Nazis. It’s to describe the world as it is rather than how we wish it were in preparation for changing that part we can influence.
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We — not just the United States but all of humanity — bumble along towards adequacy while claiming the goal is perfection, we have reached it, and other nations should profit by our example. Adequacy at this time would be lowering our output of CO2 enough to keep the planet fit for human habitation. If we had a spare planet from which to observe the outcome with detached amusement, I would love to hear those who shrug off the extinction of species learn to sing in a different key when the species about to be extinguished is H. sapiens.
Our economic competitions over who can make the best toys cheapest are trivial, as are the “improvements” in weapons of mass destruction by orders of magnitude. Our green (for now) planet is a fragile spacecraft revolving around a benign (for now) power source.
Old Sol, our sun, is said to be good for another five billion years. Mr. Trump would say that he won’t be here to worry about Sol’s death throes engulfing earth. This is similar to the defensive thought that the very worst results of global warming will not show up for hundreds of years. That may be so, but there are plenty of superstorms and famines between us and “the very worst.”
There are other ways for this fragile spacecraft we inhabit to end its useful life besides absorption into a red giant. Collision with an asteroid we can’t control; the greenhouse effect can at least be slowed down. Timeline aside, one day our species will depart this solar system under its own power or perish.
If the speed of light is a universal speed limit, the problem is how to finesse it with self-contained spacecraft moving through space for generations. That’s a hard puzzle, and it would be good to get about solving it before we have a deadline — with the emphasis on “dead.”
Civilizations that solve major sub-puzzles on the way to the great puzzle of how to escape the solar system — those civilizations will deserve to be called adequate. When adequacy is safely tucked away, then we can worry about who’s perfect.
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This post was previously published on www.medium.com and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Photo credit: iStock
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The post Never Mind a Perfect Civilization. What is an Adequate Civilization? appeared first on The Good Men Project.