I have to be careful, being Japanese-American and and permanently making my home here, it’s easy for me to carry a cultural chauvinism about Japanese culture. It can also, give how orientalism works, come across as a cultural chauvinism about Asia as opposed to the West. So anything I say should be taken with a measure of salt. Anyway, onward and upward.
I keyed into the word materialism and remembered a passage from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that has stuck with me.
After a while he says, "Do you believe in ghosts?"
"No," I say
"Why not?"
"Because they are un-sci-en-ti-fic."
The way I say this makes John smile. "They contain no matter," I continue, "and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people’s minds."
The whiskey, the fatigue and the wind in the trees start mixing in my mind. "Of course," I add, "the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people’s minds. It’s best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you’re safe. That doesn’t leave you very much to believe in, but that’s scientific too."
"I don’t know what you’re talking about," Chris says.
"I’m being kind of facetious."
Chris gets frustrated when I talk like this, but I don’t think it hurts him.
"One of the kids at YMCA camp says he believes in ghosts."
"He was just spoofing you."
"No, he wasn’t. He said that when people haven’t been buried right, their ghosts come back to haunt people. He really believes in that."
"He was just spoofing you," I repeat.
"What’s his name?" Sylvia says.
"Tom White Bear."
John and I exchange looks, suddenly recognizing the same thing.
"Ohhh, Indian!" he says.
I laugh. "I guess I’m going to have to take that back a little," I say. "I was thinking of European ghosts."
"What’s the difference?"
John roars with laughter. "He’s got you," he says.
I think a little and say, "Well, Indians sometimes have a different way of looking at things, which I’m not saying is completely wrong. Science isn’t part of the Indian tradition."
"Tom White Bear said his mother and dad told him not to believe all that stuff. But he said his grandmother whispered it was true anyway, so he believes it."
He looks at me pleadingly. He really does want to know things sometimes. Being facetious is not being a very good father.
"Sure," I say, reversing myself, "I believe in ghosts too."
Now John and Sylvia look at me peculiarly. I see I’m not going to get out of this one easily and brace myself for a long explanation.
"It’s completely natural," I say, "to think of Europeans who believed in ghosts or Indians who believed in ghosts as ignorant.
The scientific point of view has wiped out every other view to a point where they all seem primitive, so that if a person today talks about ghosts or spirits he is considered ignorant or maybe nutty. It’s just all but completely impossible to imagine a world where ghosts can actually exist."
John nods affirmatively and I continue.
"My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn’t that superior. IQs aren’t that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quants are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know."
"What?"
"Oh, the laws of physics and of logic—the number system—the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.
"They seem real to me," John says.
"I don’t get it," says Chris.
So I go on. "For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity."
"Of course."
"So when did this law start? Has it always existed?"
John is frowning, wondering what I am getting at.
"What I’m driving at," I say, "is the notion that before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity existed."
"Sure."
"Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone’s mind because there wasn’t anyone, not in space because there was no space either, not anywhere…this law of gravity still existed?"
Now John seems not so sure.
"If that law of gravity existed," I say, "I honestly don’t know what a thing has to do to be nonexistent. It seems to me that law of gravity has passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of nonexistence that that law of gravity didn’t have. Or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. And yet it is still ‘common sense’ to believe that it existed."
John says, "I guess I’d have to think about it."
"Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself going round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense.
"And what that means," I say before he can interrupt, "and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads! It’s a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own."
This book, and this part in particular, struck me quite hard. I came to the book shortly before my honors colloquium course talked about modernity and the Holocaust, specifically reading Polyani’s The Great Transformation, Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Richard Rubenstein’s The Cunning of History, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality and the Southern Agrarians I’ll take my stand (oh, to be able to sit down and read like that again. I can barely get through a blog post nowadays)
There are enough themes in that set of books to probably argue for an infinity of claims, but the Rubenstein’s discussion of how the Nazi government first set out to systematically classify Jews as non-citizens before killing them underlined to me the unreality of citizenship. Just like Pirsig’s example of the law of gravity, citizenship passes the same tests of non-existence and I’ve generally carried that understanding around with me. So the whole range of ICE actions, from detentions to executions, what I am surprised by is not the extent of the actions, but the fact that people are so surprised that these can and do happen to US citizens.
I would agree with nous that capitalism is a materialist paradigm and and various left thinkers have expanded on that, from the Marxist perspective that capitalism functions through the universal commodification of the human experience or Lukács talking about the reification of social connections, or the Frankfurt school talking about the instrumental utility and it seems to me that the non-material, be they norms, behaviors and laws, acts to keep this materialist paradigm in check. Or perhaps ‘kept’, given how things are breaking down, attention is being commodified, stochastic plagiarism is unaddressed and our personal information becomes an input into LLMs and AI.
It doesn’t surprise me that this materialist paradigm is most rampant in the US (with the UK a close second), which has them trying to make out materialist explanations for citizenship and right of abode. It also may go a long way to why the people of these countries often tend to view their citizenship as something material and fail to realize that it is something that can go poof! Here is the Scotusblog’s pieces on birthright citizenship and I’d note the pieces by Pete Patterson here and here. There are others who are rebutting him, but the fact that birthright citizenship can be twisted any which way to come up with an outcome of making sure it is the ‘right’ people who can get it points to how much citizenship is an instrumental utility. In case one thinks that this is just a US problem, this Guardian article talks about UK ICE and what they are doing. It certainly seems like a pushme-pullyou kind of dynamic.
I start to get out over my skis when I start to suggest that not only Japan, but East Asian societies, at least in my encounters with them, retain a certain amount of spiritualism that usefully acts as invisible guardrails. This isn’t to say that these are perfect, and that Asian societies are paradises. As Martin Luther said, it all depends on whose ox is getting gored. During the pandemic, Japan initially refused entry for foreigners who had valid visas but were trapped outside the country. A lot of Western commentators commented on how bad this was, but the Japanese people were overwhelmingly in favor of it (89% according to one poll). If the idea of the rights that you get as a citizen is a spiritual concept, it’s really hard to convince people that simply getting the right paperwork flips a switch.
On the other hand, the Chinese approach, termed COVID-Zero, was pretty draconian and a number of observers claim that this has gone some way to de-legitimizing the regime. I’m not so sure about that, and even if it did, Trump and the US have gone a long way to reestablishing Zhi’s legitimacy.
This spiritualism definitely has problems. Women have a lot harder time in these countries and I have feminist friends who say things like ‘I would never in a million years naturalize’. I don’t argue, it’s not my place, but I do think they assume that if it were ‘real’ Western citizenship, it would guarantee some things in a way that it doesn’t in Japan. But it seems to me that citizenship, especially in light of ICE, doesn’t guarantee much and you need to view it as transactional.
And spiritualism doesn’t really bend very much in the application of logic. While it grants some boons, you are still subject to the vagaries of chance. I also wonder if this is why the Epstein files hasn’t really emerged in Asia as something discussed. I mentioned earlier that this might have been down to Epstein’s own preferences and the fact that East Europe was a far more conducive place for him to find what he wanted, but I also think that the networking that Epstein did seems, at least to a certain depth, what people are supposed to do in order to accomplish goals. When I first came to Japan, and was teaching, I felt ‘collected’ by some Japanese who felt that having a Western friend was the mark of being cosmopolitan. That marginal utility quickly went to zero as the supply of foreigners increased, but being taken out for meals or drinks, at places I probably would not have even thought of entering, was part of the give and take.
I am grossly overextending this to China and Korea, despite having no living experience in China and only a year in Korea. And the differences between Korea and Japan were pretty profound. But in both places, it wasn’t like there was some sort of logic bomb to set off, you often run into things that just don’t move. The reaction of some is to really get upset and explain it away by residual racism, and from one perspective, it is that. But from another, it is a view that there are dividing lines and just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
When I have engaged with people living out here and set out these thoughts, I have gotten a couple of reactions. One is the assumption that I am making out Asia to be a better place than the West, and then present examples of terrible injustices here. This always struck me as odd, but now more than ever. I’d definitely rather be in the precariat somewhere in Asia than in almost any state in the US.
Funnily enough, the dissident Chinese artist Ai WeiWei had this piece where he lambastes German society. I found this section fascinating.
A society governed by regulations, yet lacking individual moral judgment, is more dangerous than one with none at all.
A society that values obedience without questioning authority is destined to become corrupt.
A society that admits to error but refuses to reflect on its origins possesses a mind as stubborn and dull as granite.
Here, at a deserted street, people stop dutifully at a red light. Not a car in sight. This, I once thought, is the mark of a highly evolved society.
At the heart of bureaucracy lies a collective endorsement of power’s legitimacy, and therefore, individuals surrender their moral judgment — or perhaps never developed one. They abandon challenge. They relinquish dispute.
A few evenings ago, I was coming back from our welcome party, and walking to my house with no cars, I stood at the red light with 3 other people. I’ve known people here like him who can’t understand why people would “stop dutifully at a red light”, and they seem to have a lot of issues living here. A strain within that is ‘I know best, so why don’t I get to decide what to do’ and it often spins out to exactly the kind of observations that WeiWei makes. I’d say that this triumph of individualism over any kind of collective effort is pretty profound in Anglo-American discourse. Europeans, as the Ai Weiwei piece suggests, seem to overcome this.
As I said, I don’t think this is an unalloyed good, and a lot of it comes from an unexamined ethnocentrism. Japan is tightening up its requirements for visas and naturalization. Keeping in mind Ai Weiwei’s comment about Germany, the Japanese notion of kokumin, or ethnic state, actually comes from the German staatsvolk, and because of Japan’s occupation, goes to Korea as kungmin and to China as guomin, all with the same characters (国民). The whole process by which this concept comes into these countries is pretty interesting and is often referred to as “translated modernity“.
The claims of the individual in a capitalist material society seem to spiral into a situation where the richest or most powerful individual gets to blow through all the guardrails. In contrast, power in Japan is a question of networks with those networks being both conservative, reducing progressive impulses, and providing checks on the power of individuals.
I’ll end with a news story I found fascinating. This story, from a monthly magazine called Sentaku, unfortunately in Japanese, reports that the prime minister Takaichi wanted to send SDF forces to the Strait of Hormuz, and Takaya Imai, the mastermind of the snap election that gave Takaichi her majority, got in a shouting match. Sentaku, being independent, is the only one reporting it, while the mainstream Japanese sources have only reported on the pressure the US has been putting on Japan. That kind of dynamic seems totally absent in the US now, and makes me glad I’m here and not there.
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.