by liberal japonicus
Nous commented
The capitalist industrial world is very much a materialist paradigm. I wonder, though, if some of the more animistic cultures still retain a bit of that sense of spooky aliveness that might lead to wondering what an object might have to say for itself. I know there’s still a strong underlying element of shamanistic belief in even some heavily industrialized nations and cultures that might give rise to something like this. I also think that there’s a growing sense that we need that feeling of everything being alive and connected in some way as a course corrective for our terrible isolation and our empty materialism (and all that Christian right paranoia about the New Age movement as a competing narrative for spiritual life).
and asked how that might play out here in Japan. So here is a go at that.
Tis interesting to read this, as I’ve just got back from having dinner with a long time Japanese friend here in Osaka. He now runs his family’s 400 year old Buddhist temple, but we first met when he was 18 and we were dropping off our then 15 yo daughter for a 3 week exchange trip with his younger sister (to reassure them we would take care of her in dangerous Oakland). He later stayed with us for a year, still can’t speak much English, while I have perhaps 10 words of Japanese. So lots of gesturing and Google.
Topic of discussion tonight (over okonomyaki), what makes life worth living? With particular reference to his Dad who has been suffering from illness and forced to retire as priest earlier than he would have liked. And, the primary nature of the work these days for Pure Land Buddhist priests, preparing the elderly for death. What I find fascinating about him is that spiritualism is innate and he follows that path without much question. He keeps his personal hobby of body building (our daughter the gymrat’s fault), completely compartmentalized from his spiritual side to an extent I would find impossible.
The law of gravity discussion smells of Plato.
I’d say that what we call gravity ‘existed’ before anyone was there to think about it, i.e. matter and energy ‘interacted’ in a way that can be approximated by ‘laws’. These ‘laws’ are our mathematical description of something pre-existing. That description is a human invention and thus only exists since someone came up with it. But that has no influence on the interaction thus described. The problem I see is the use of the term ‘law’ that implies a law giver or (in Plato’s diction) the ‘idea’ of a law independent of material existence. Nature does not ‘obey’ laws or ‘follows’ them, it simply (Ha!) functions in a certain way without necessary a ‘reason’ behind it. And nature and its mechanisms can be reasonably said to exist. So, if we use ‘law’ barely in the sense of these mechanisms, then laws existed since nature existed. If we assumed an animated universe that literally ‘obeyed’ set laws, we had to postulate something like the auditors of reality (as per Pratchett) to enforce obeysance. Then ‘laws’ would fit our everyday definition.
Only when we confuse laws as our description of nature with the mechanisms of nature itself, we run into the question of ‘did they exist before Newton’.
‘natural laws’ and ‘natural rights’ are a useful illusion (like the value of paper currency). To claim their existence makes things easier. The problems arise when nihilists in practice deny it but behave as if they were not. They claim the authority of the ideas (while redefining them) because outright denial would not give them what they want. That includes ‘might makes right’ because it keeps up the illusion of ‘right’ while in reality it abolishes it by making it freely redefinable.
I read those arguments about gravity, and my first thought is: “Whether you believe in gravity or not, that rock will still fall on your foot.”
What a lot of these philosophical discussions seem to miss is that science is descriptive. It doesn’t invent stuff, it tries to explain it. Anyone who claims that gravity didn’t exist before Newton is using words to mean something far different than their normal meaning.** Without, be it noted, bothering to define his terms. (Or maybe he’s carefully avoiding defining terms in order to produce the appearance of contradiction.)
** To be fair, I suppose it’s also possible that he’s just even more daft than the flat-earthers.
But are we really talking about a “mechanism” in any meaningful way when we talk about gravity? Mechanism is such an interesting word – it’s full of thingness and of a materialist paradigm. It implies a mover and a moved, when what we are actually observing is not a noun, “gravity,” but a description of a relationship between two or more entities (or elements) that seems to repeat itself in a regular fashion – it’s the nouning of a verb. And it is a very selective view of things that prioritizes those relationships in quite interesting ways – helped along by our linguistic habit of constructing things as subjects and objects and inferring things about them based on their status as one or the other. This gets even more fraught when we start to consider the role of pronouns and the difference it makes in our understanding of personhood when we shift between he/she/we/they on the one hand and it on the other.
I arrived at this, in typical me fashion, through a series of lateral jumps while surfing the Web and trying to dig in around the idea of physics and animism – focusing on entities (nouns) versus focusing on reciprocal relationships (verbs). Found a physicist discussing their linguistic notions thereof and citing Robin Wall Kimmerer – and probably getting problematically out of his own linguistic depth and mine in the process. But his discussion of what gets the status of an entity and what gets the status of an object – taken with lj’s discussion of citizenship – got me thinking about JL Austin and performative utterances and illocutionary acts – not descriptive, or predictive as in the “laws of physics” but utterances that transmute social reality by moving a thing from one social status to another. It seems to me that the whole citizenship question is of this nature. It’s attaching a speech act to a protocol in order to enact a social (and thus legal) change of status. It has material traces that can be verified (a record of citizenship) but that status only holds so long as the various parties involved agree to follow the protocol.
The part of all this that really sent a chill up my spine, though, was going to Wikipedia to refresh my understanding of JL Austin, and seeing that one of the citations there under performative acts was this conversation between Enoch Powell and Jonathan Miller on the Dick Cavett show, with Miller bringing up performative acts in conjunction with Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” immigration speech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEPtyb9OHP8
Fuck me if we aren’t right back there again in both the US and the UK. Aside from the fashion and the unapologetically highbrow diction, the entire conversation feels contemporary and relevant.
Damn their eyes, these nationalist bigots.
Marc, yeah, that compartmentalization is something I’ve noticed as well. I aspire to it, though I can feel it rubbing up against that Western notion that I am a unitary personality as I go through the world.
Hartmut, that implication of a lawgiver/maker makes me think of some other things. The initial kanji for law is 法, (hou) which has two components. On the right is water and on the left is to leave, so there is no implication of a maker.
A further point is that in Japanese, people don’t ‘pass’ or ‘make’ laws, they are ‘established’ (制定する）
I’ll stop here, but it’s a pretty interesting rabbit hole (at least to me)
Nous, a really interesting clip. A couple of things I was struck by
-the enthusiastic applause Powell got for some of his bullshit
-Powell’s insistence that he was just pointing out a problem, giving voice to something out there without taking any responsibility
I heard an echo to this Bolton interview where he explains that he was in Maryland, so it didn’t matter who he voted for.
https://youtu.be/5KXFYjKvr4k?si=5FvcZYOavnh7Np-U&t=1034
Hartmut and nous: both fascinating and thought provoking. I also hugely appreciated the Cavett clip – what a pleasure once again to see Jonathan Miller in his prime, particularly as he criticises the rational approach in a supremely articulate and rational (even if via imaginative and creative example) way.
An analysis of the Powell vs Miller debate.
“Overall Assessment
No major factual inaccuracies. The debate’s logical structure is strong on both sides, but Miller’s central analogy fails under scrutiny, and his performative-utterance claim sidesteps Powell’s evidence-based concerns. Powell’s predictions have held up remarkably well demographically (Birmingham’s transformation, national ethnic-minority growth, ongoing integration debates). Miller’s optimistic faith in absorption has been tested by subsequent events (enclaves, cultural tensions, riots). The exchange remains a model of substantive disagreement without rancor—rare today—and highlights enduring tensions between empirical realism and idealistic universalism on immigration. No one “won” in the moment, but history has lent more weight to Powell’s warnings than Miller’s reassurance.”
Enoch Powell vs Jonathan Miller: 1971 Immigration Debate
Grok seems to have missed out on Miller pointing out that Powell is attempting to foment the things he claims are inevitable. Why am I not surprised?
Well, considering who has shaped Grok’s output…
It does pair well with the whole “white genocide” incident that Grok went through in 2025.
“that sense of spooky aliveness that might lead to wondering what an object might have to say for itself.”
In other words, delight.
At least, for me. I get this from the natural world and especially from those landscapes that force you to think from the perspective of death and eternity–places like the cold, blue heaven of the Yukon or the raw geology of southern Utah. It’s the closest thing I have to a religion.
The US president just threatened the genocide not only of a people but a ‘whole civilization’. Can somebody go out on the streets in protest? Or evoke the 25th amendment?
This is not normal. Not even Putin said such things.
I’m not sure that taking to the streets is the right response to the Mad King, given that we were out there just recently. Dems can’t kick him out through the Senate and only the Cabinet can 25th A him. Also he most likely will not get additional military money. Many Dems are calling for Congress to be re-convened.
MANY elected Dems are saying very blunt statements about his mental decline and unfitness–which is historic. At this point, I think that establishing in the population the fact that he is a depraved wacko with mental problems is pretty essential and the Dems are on it. That’s really the only way to shame Republicans into asserting their legislative responsibilities.
We need to brand the Republican party with Trump, make the whole party repugnant because the Republicans will still be Trump when he is gone. They created him, they elected him, they enabled him, and in terms of policies and style of governance–the corruption and disregard for the rule of law–they reflect his values and behavior. There is no respectable, responsible, Main Street Republican party anymore. (Hasn’t been for years, really.)
The US president just threatened the genocide not only of a people but a ‘whole civilization’.
The President is quite correct that his proposed actions would destroy a whole civilization. But it wouldn’t be the civilization in Iran. It would be American civilization.
America would still be here. But it would be nothing previous generations, emphatically including the founders, would recognize.
At the beginning of this particular shitshow, Shitheels tweeted something about how Iran was part of a great civilization in the course of saying he was for MIGA (Make Iran Great Again) Someone must have fed him that, since he’s got no idea of history, but as this has gone on, it’s blowing them back to the Stone Age etc. I’m really curious who had Trump’s ear initially and who moved in.
The President is quite correct that his proposed actions would destroy a whole civilization. But it wouldn’t be the civilization in Iran. It would be American civilization.
His Orangeness as the new Croesus: Make war on the Persians and a great empire will get destroyed.