TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
I've been thinking a bit about my FOUR PILLARS and if anything would be different if I re-wrote them today (about a year after originally writing them in their first form). I've thought of this mostly after a reader was nice enough to reach out with some thoughtful insights about ecology as related to conservatism and western culture (you know who you are if you're reading this :DDD). What he said was very insightful even if I didn't always agree, and I told him some stuff which I think is worth letting others know as well. Though I would probably not change most of the important points of my pillars, these are some quick notes as to how things would differ if I re-wrote them that I thought were worth sharing:
If I re-wrote the pillars, I would idealize Japanese culture, thought, etc. in them less explicitly. I wrote these pillars originally right after moving back from Japan, so I was still caught up in a kind of reverse-culture shock and reverse-homesickness, idolizing and missing that country a lot. However, I've really come to hate the idea of nationalism in general and come to see it as something that is more harmful for the purpose of cultural and environmental preservation than helpful. There are a great number of individual cultural elements that fit together in Japan that I really love the combination of (nature worship, sexual openness, freedom of expression, etc.), and I have a personal attachment to a lot of things like the way the Japanese language sounds and the way the Japanese people look. But I would rather focus on the specific greatness of these elements rather than just labelling things as "Japanese" and hence "good."
I would talk about the value of ecological stewardship and how it relates to a broader "conservationist" or "conservative" mindset in particular. The common critique of "conservatism" is that conservation should not be seen as an inherent good. Whatever we "conserve" is something dependent on a particular historical set of circumstances and not something eternal and inherently holy or perfect. So we shouldn't see "conservation" as an inherent good, but rather only the conservation of what is good and appropriate. I would address this criticism head-on by appealing to Heidegger once more. Most of this is based on the idea of "heritage" at the end of Being and Time. Essentially, he argues that while we constantly can and in fact must come to see the world and ourselves in new ways, they can never come out of nowhere. We must take up certain "models" from the past traditions around us, whether we choose to accept them, reject them, re-interpret them, or whatever else.
For me then, I see natural environments as one of these important historical repositories of meaning. One example from Japan for me is the "ice flows" of northern Hokkaidou. For centuries, northern Hokkaidou has seen a ton of drifting sea ice and it's quite a marvelous spectacle. But nowadays, there is less and less ice each year and eventually there will likely be none. Now we cannot directly experience this wonder of nature in the way that previous generations did, and thus we lack the ability for future generations to "do more" with it (use it as artistic inspiration, feel a spiritual kinship with it, get sick of the cold and go inside while watching!, etc.) For me then, the conservation of the landscape is like a conservation of the variety of "templates" that we can model our own understanding of the world on. Environments being destroyed are like old books being destroyed. Of course in the long run all environments will change, but we are speeding up the rate like crazy, and it makes sense to want to slow it back down to me.
In my second pillar, I focused very explicitly on Abrahamic religion as something that keeps us segregated and "othered" from nature. In some ways, this thought even effects our idea of a "cure" being a "return to nature," as if nature was a pristine, uncorrupted, garden of Eden that man is unworthy of. This is not an accurate representation of the relationship we have ever had with the natural world. I should have been more careful to not present a "return to nature" as a return to some perfect, idyllic garden. My insistence is to return to nature as a number of "templates" and meaningful "models" (as I mentioned above) and thus to see it as part of culture and spirituality and thus part of the conservation of these two.
I have a lot of problems with the Abrahamic view of man and nature, but I think I am guilty of over-emphasizing it at the expense of some other things which have played an equal role in a severance from nature and a modern sense of existential dread and lack of meaning. A lot of good old-fashioned Marxist critique of capitalism and modern industry probably plays a good explanatory role here. I find that dialectical materialism is such a sterile and depressing view of the world, though... But maybe I am guilty of stereotypes here. "Marxism" is a broad intellectual tradition.
Sometimes I spoke of "individualism" in negative terms in my pillars. In particular, I feel like there needs to be a greater recognition of the value of "individualism" in my third pillar. I would like to speak in a way that shows the mutual dependence of the individual on society and vice versa, rather than setting them up as opposing pairs. After a lot of soul-searching, I have to come to the conclusion that ultimately I like people who are unusual, who are individualistic, and who stand outside of societal norms. I think that this is by no means in contrast with the idea of a harmonious, high-trust, loving society. But I think that I sometimes downplayed the importance of individuality and being unique to frame everything in Confucian terms. I also think that I probably over-stressed the influence of Confucianism in Japanese culture. It actually plays a much more minor role historically than in China or Korea.
In recent years, I find myself less and less able to argue against the moral superiority of pacifism, even in its most radical forms. Pacifism has a strong history of support in almost all major world religions, but if there is one text that has made me more and more convinced of it, it has been Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You. The argument I think about most is as simple as it is difficult to argue against:
Besides, apologies for violence used against one's neighbor in defense of another neighbor from greater violence are always untrustworthy, because when force is used against one who has not yet carried out his evil intent, I can never know which would be greater--the evil of my act of violence or of the act I want to prevent. We kill the criminal that society may be rid of him, and we never know whether the criminal of today would not have been a changed man tomorrow, and whether our punishment of him is not useless cruelty. We shut up the dangerous--as we think--member of society, but the next day this man might cease to be dangerous and his imprisonment might be for nothing. I see that a man I know to be a ruffian is pursuing a young girl. I have a gun in my hand--I kill the ruffian and save the girl. But the death or the wounding of the ruffian has positively taken place, while what would have happened if this had not been I cannot know.
Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Ch. 2.35
This latter point is important to dwell on, because Tolstoy is really arguing something quite extreme: we NEVER have the moral authority to kill someone, no matter how close they are to causing the death of ourself or another, because OUR act of violence is always certain, while HIS is always just a likelihood, no matter how close or impending it is. I have been unable to find any way to argue against this point. Of course, it goes completely against all of our instincts of self-preservation. This is precisely why this level of boundless, "irrational" love is traditionally only the kind of thing we see in Christs and Buddhas. It is a completely impossible, idealistic level of non-violence that none of us can likely live up to. But, as Tolstoy later argues, that is precisely why the image of the loving Christ is valuable. He would cease to inspire us if he could ever be matched, because that would mean we would reach a state where we would stop continuously trying to become more and more loving, which is what his teaching is really all about: a constant effort to be a better person than we were the day before. So he must necessarily exist on a level that is impossible for us to reach.
That said, as much as I understand this both intellectually and instinctively, I find it very hard to blame a parent who kills someone who is attempting to murder their child, for example. I find that there must at least be some spectrum on which some acts of violence are "less bad" (I don't want to say "better") than others. And pacifism is also a deontological concept: it is based on a RULE of non-violence, and generally I am not a fan of reducing morality to ironclad-rules, even ones as "simple" and "obvious" as "don't kill others." Even if they were genuinely found to be 100% applicable in all cases as a moral right, I think that learning to intuit these things as virtues is better than externalizing them into rules. In any case though, I feel like pacifism is the closest thing I have found to a higher, objective sense of what is right (even if we can't always live up to it). I would like to find some way to integrate this into my Confucian-inspired virtue ethics, but I haven't quite worked them out yet.