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There
is one supreme and universal law of human relations in all its
manifestations, social, political, economic, cultural:
people create no end of mischief in the hours when they are not sleeping. Any
vision of history-yet-to-come must be predicated on this principle.
A correspondent of mine objected to the idea I floated a couple
of times that Japan would be the first advanced industrial nation to "go
medieval." This prompts me to clarify that emphasis should be on the
word "first." The re-set to a much lower scale and intensity
of human activity is certain for all nations; the only questions are the
time-frame and the quality of the journey and those are sure to vary from one
group of people to another.
I picked on Japan because their journey seems to have compressed and
accelerated in recent years and also because there's a lot to admire in their
possible destination if history is any guide: a graceful culture of lower
energy and high artistry. The transition between that older culture and the point
of industrial take-off was also much sharper for Japan than so-called Western
societies. They did not look back on the startling episode of Rome and they
didn't experience a thrilling "Renaissance" of rediscovery in its
technical achievements -- which eventuated in the Western discovery of a
"new world" and all its exploitable resources. The Japanese were
pestered by Catholic missionaries for a brief time beginning in the 1540s,
but tossed them out in 1620s, along with the merchants who accompanied them
-- and then very consciously barred the door. They even gave up on the guns
that the Euro-people had introduced, regarding them as unsportsmanlike.
Finally, Commodore Perry from the USA landed in the 1850s, with all the
weight of Western technological momentum behind him, and demanded access to
trade there and Japan, in effect, surrendered to modernity.
They also thrived on it for a while. For one thing, they had a
lot of beautifully-made exotic cultural objects to trade with the west, and
their artisan skill level in things like ceramics and metallurgy made the
transition to industrial technology of their own easy. In half a century,
Japan went from an isolated archipelago of tea ceremonies and silks to
building steel battleships and airplanes, and we all know the mischief that
led to during the first half of the horrid 20th century: the Rape of Nanking,
the Bataan Death March, the bombing of Tokyo, and Hiroshima. Then came Act 2:
postwar economic revival, the SONY stereo, Mitsubishi, major league baseball,
and really excellent automobiles. That went on for while, too. About 40 years.
There was one insurmountable problem lurking in the background:
Japan did not possess any fossil fuels, oil or methane gas, to run all the
equipment of modernity that they had ramped up. That didn't matter so much
when imported oil was $11-a-barrel, but it became crucial when the cost
quickly rose to $100-a-barrel, as it did in recent years. It also began to
matter that Japan's bigger neighbor and age-old rival (and sometimes victim),
China, ramped up its own industrial economy which, of course, consumed a
healthy portion of what the world oil market put up for sale. By the early
21st century, China was eating Japan's lunch (its bento box, shall we say) by
manufacturing the same stuff that the Japanese had excelled at making, and
all of a sudden the whole project of modernity in Japan hit the skids.
Then came the Tōhoku earthquake
of 2011, and the giant wall of water that slammed, among other things, the
multiple nuclear reactors at Fukushima. The Japanese industrial confederation
had taken a certain amount of comfort in its ability to keep the electricity
going by other means than fossil fuels. Now, all of a sudden, a nuclear
dragon was loose upon the land, a veritable Godzilla, Japan's worst
nightmare. A year later, all but two of Japan's nuclear power plants were
shut down. By no coincidence, Japan also found itself wallowing in a trade
deficit after decades of enjoying trade surpluses, due to the amount of oil and
gas the nation had to import to keep the electricity running.
Japan's energy predicament is expressing itself in a financial
crisis, naturally enough, since finance is a set of abstract markers for what
is happening in an economy -- and the country's finances are pretty much
running amok as its political leaders try desperately to adjust to the new
realities of powerdown. They are employing
accounting fraud to offset the inescapable failures of capital formation
under the circumstances, the same as all the other advanced industrial
nations. As a purely financial matter it simply amounts to no longer being
able to generate enough new wealth to pay the interest on old credit, or to
justify the creation of new credit. Since credit is the lifeblood of industrialism,
the sun is setting on that phase of history. Japan finds itself in a
dishonorable quandary and in tune with some of its older cultural
infrastructure appears to be committing suicide with a sword thrust into the
guts of its banking system.
America, in contrast, is driving over the edge of the Grand
Canyon, Thelma-and-Louise-style. Europe is drinking a poison cup in sumptuous
seclusion. China and India will just look like lemming marches into the
increasingly vacant sea.
Financial hara-kiri might be the best outcome for Japan --
better, say, than a war with China over some desolate islands -- if Japan
were to retreat as rapidly back into a traditional artisan economy as it
bailed out of in the 1860s. I realize this is a long-shot and includes many
knotty elements not under discussion here, such as population reduction and
the fate of Fukushima. Also, history is almost never symmetrical. Things
don't retrace the arc they came up. The journey will surely be bumpier. But
Japan might get there first and set some interesting precedents for the rest
of us.
At the heart of the matter is this. Industrialism is an entropic
project. It accelerates and intensifies entropy, which is to say the drive
toward disorder and death. Tradition in human societies is the great
moderator of entropy. Of course nothing stays the same forever, but some of
us would like to see the human project continue, and to get to place where it
can feel comfortable with itself for a while, perhaps even something resembling
a new (and completely unfamiliar) golden age, when the people not asleep can
be trusted.
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