22. Revisiting the Slowdown, and the end of the Great Acceleration
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Politics, Geography, Sociology, Slow Down, Books

In his book How Democracy Ends, David Runciman also dwells on Japan. This is partly because the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama did so, in his hugely influential The End of History and the Last Man (You can also hear Runciman discuss Fukuyama, and why his perhaps flawed view in underestimating the East, in his brilliant History of Ideas podcast series, from which I’ve been taking regular doses, as if a palliative soundtrack to the pandemic.)

“Francis Fukuyama cited Japan (along with the EU) as the likeliest illustration of what we could expect from the end of history: the triumph of democracy would turn out to be stable, prosperous, efficient and just a little bit boring … Today Japan and Greece are rarely invoked by politicians in other democracies as exemplars of the possible fate that awaits us all. They don’t work as morality tales any more because their message has grown too ambiguous. Japan remains stuck in an political and economic rut yet it continues to function perfectly well as a stable, affluent society that looks after its citizens. Imagine drawing a ticket in the great lottery of life that assigned a time and a place in which to live from across the sweep of human history. If it read: “Japan, early twenty-first century’, you would still feel like you’d won the jackpot.”—David Runciman, How Democracy Ends (2018)

Here, Runciman doesn’t quite unpack the promising nature of that ambiguity. How can winning the jackpot coexist with being in an economic rut? That’s interesting! Ambiguity is where we are. It is our current condition, not least under the virus. It’s something we have to learn how to work with, and within, and it describes a very different form of ‘drama’ than the simple narrative arcs and resolutions that Runciman suggests politicians are looking for.

“It is Japan and Greece that now offer the best guides to how democracy might end up … As morality tales ago, they are missing something. What they lack is a moral. Instead of the drama reaching a climax, democracy persists in a kind of frozen crouch, holding on, waiting it out, even if it is far from clear what anyone is waiting for. After a while, the waiting becomes the point of the exercise. Something will turn up eventually. It always does.”—David Runciman

This ‘waiting it out’ is clearly problematic, including in the context of Greece and Japan, as Runciman makes perfectly clear with reference to the various toxicities in their political culture, and their various inequalities. Things do not ‘turn up’ equally. I’ll pick up the imperative that we must not simply wait it out later on in this series. In his podcast on Fukuyama, Runciman describes the familiar refrains of ‘missing years’ and ‘spinning wheels’ usually applied to the stasis perceived in Japan and Greece; as if there is nothing to see there. Of Japan, Runciman says that “it does not seem like it’s providentially surfing the river of history — it’s got stuck in the reeds.”

But perhaps this is the point. There is much to see in Japan, just not from when viewed through the orthodox lens (as Runciman knows). Fukuyama, in his The End of History and the Last Man, used the motif of the tea ceremony in his uncomfortable dismissal of Japanese culture, conveying what he saw as a pervasive pointlessness, or stasis, at best, and at worst, a humiliating subjugation to an unchallenged hierarchical social order concerned with recreating a self-protecting stasis. Fukuyama saw Japanese culture as exemplifying the latter of his two manifestations of thymos: isothymia and megalothymia. (Isothymia is the desire to be recognized as the equal of other people, whereas megalothymia is the demand of certain individuals to be recognized as superior to others.)

“After the rise of the Shogun Hideyoshi in the fifteenth century, Japan experienced a state of internal and external peace for a period of several hundred years which very much resembled Hegel’s postulated end of history. Neither the upper nor lower classes struggled against each other, and did not have to work terribly hard. But rather than pursuing love or play instinctively like young animals — in other words, instead of turning into a society of last men — the Japanese demonstrated that it is possible to continue to be human through the invention of a series of perfectly contentless formal arts, like Noh theater, tea ceremonies, flower arranging, and the like. A tea ceremony does not serve any explicit political or economic purpose; even its symbolic significance has been lost over time. And yet, it is an arena for megalothymia in the form of pure snobbery: there are contending schools for tea ceremony and flower arrangement, with their own masters, novices, traditions, and canons of better and worse … (I)n a world where struggle over all of the large issues had been largely settled, a purely formal snobbery would become the chief form of expression of megalothymia, of man’s desire to be recognized as better than his fellows. In the United States, our utilitarian traditions make it difficult for even the fine arts to become purely formal. Artists like to convince themselves that they are being socially responsible in addition to being committed to aesthetic values. But the end of history will mean the end, among other things, of all art that could be considered socially useful, and hence the descent of artistic activity into the empty formalism of the traditional Japanese arts.”—Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1992)

This passage feels somewhat like a political scientist picking up the entire field of aesthetics in his analytical tweezers and peering at it, as if an exotic insect, or frustratedly shuffling columns in Excel, attempting to find the value of art via arithmetic. To reduce art to a simple gradient opposing solid, utilitarian and responsible (American) and contentless, empty and snobbish (Asian) is uncomfortable indeed, as well as entirely missing the point.

I’m not the person to produce a fuller critique of that position, but seeing as Fukuyama has landed on the tea ceremony’s function—if that is what we must reduce it to—do read the opening words from The Book of Tea (茶の本, Cha no Hon) by Okakura Kakuzō, published in 1906:

“(It is) founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life. The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe. It represents the true spirit of Eastern democracy by making all its votaries aristocrats in taste.”— ‘The Book of Tea’, Okakura Kakuzō (1906)

This hardly seems pointless. Indeed, it could be that cultivating a “comfort in simplicity rather than the complex and the costly”, or the “moral geometry (in) defining our sense of proportion to the universe” would be extremely valuable practices right now.

The Slowdown conditions in Japan after the Shogun Hideyoshi—in Fukuyama’s words, “a state of internal and external peace for a period of several hundred years”— would be interesting to understand more about, particularly after Dorling’s ideas. What could be learned from this time, and what might not—given the isolationist sakoku period that followed; what might translate to a contemporary globalised condition under Slowdown dynamics?