The Case Against Moderation, the Good, and Virtue

“Moderation cannot claim the merit of opposing and overcoming Ambition: they are never found together. Moderation is the languor and sloth of the soul, Ambition its activity and heat.”
- La Rochefoucauld

“… under Socrates’ influence ethics ceased to be the art of living well in a dangerous world – as it had been for Homer. it became the search for a super-good that nothing can destroy, a uniquely potent value that defeats all others and insures those who live by it against tragedy.”
- John Gray

“Love and virtue, their self-conviction was an astonishing thing: a pantomime of wishes, a sham dream that made actual, detectable, dreamable dreams as real as rock.”
- Lorrie Moore

Finding the Navi in Plato’s Republic

Like the creation of the cosmos in the Book of Genesis, the creation of the just city in Plato’s Republic takes place twice. In the first version of the city, undertaken as an attempt to determine the meaning of justice, Socrates describes a modest and frugal society, in which the citizens lead simple lives focused on securing the necessities for life. Their diet consists of austere fare – bread, figs, olives, onions, greens, wine, but no meat – and they pass their evening hours singing hymns of praise to the gods. They are careful to limit the number of children they bear, being on guard against overpopulation, which necessarily gives rise to poverty and war. They eschew all luxuries, including furniture. Socrates notes that their life of honest labor will enable them to enjoy health, to live out their lives in peace, and pass along their self-sufficient ways to their descendents (372d).

This city and its way of life fit the image of the type of human community exalted by present-day environmentalists, a sort of sustainable utopia where the foremost concern is not overstraining the resources at one’s disposal. But Socrates’ principal interlocutor, Glaucon, finds this depiction of the moderate and modest community revolting, disparaging it as a “city of pigs” (372d). Where are the couches and tables, he asks, or the relishes and desserts? Stanley Rosen suggests that the reason for Glaucon’s strident interruption might lie in his hunger, in that he has his mind set on the feast promised by Polemarchus at the beginning of the dialogue (Rosen, 75). But Glaucon, the brother of Plato who is generally associated with the idea of spiritedness, being a warrior who thirsts for glory and victory on the battlefield, can be said to force the conversation toward the direction of cities as they really exist, rather than indulge in idle philosophic speculation. Socrates consents, and sets aside this vision of the just city as a frugal and moderate collective. Instead, they will speak instead of a city in which “relishes, perfumes, incense, and cakes” are not only plentiful but available in a wide variety.

Interestingly, the first profession to be welcomed into this new, “feverish” city, the first profession emphatically not related to providing for the necessities of life, is that of the prostitute (373a). After the city is opened to the courtesans, trailing in their wake are poets, actors, dancers, craftsmen, makers of perfume, servants, teachers, wet nurses, beauticians, barbers, and cooks. Socrates then observes that such an expansion of the city will compel it to seize territory from its neighbors, in order to grow enough food for its inhabitants. The need for increased farmland entails the mobilization of an army, which in turn raises the specter of further wars of expansion to satisfy the growing demands of the city. Thus, the city, Socrates implies, becomes locked into a certain fate, a future about which he expresses grave reservations. For in contrast to the reigning conventional wisdom of contemporary liberalism, in which commerce and the attendant multiplication of desires are held to promote peace, Socrates identifies the transition from an economy of restraint to one of unlimited abundance as the “origin of war,” as well as the factor that “most of all produces evils both private and public” (373e).

The image of a sustainable society, in which human beings spontaneously respect limits and seek only to fulfill necessary desires, exerts, not surprisingly, an especially powerful allure in the age of climate change and resource depletion. Indeed, the Navi in James Cameron’s Avatar appeal to these yearnings, as they have absolutely no desire for anything that the Earthling corporation can offer them in exchange for moving to another part of the planet. Rosen, however, questions whether Socrates actually prefers the healthy city to its feverish successor, since the former’s emphasis on necessity would create an unpromising climate for philosophy. Indeed, the true city can be said to be less real than its “unhealthy” counterpart, since it aims at creating a “happiness that is undisturbed by desire, in particular, erotic desire” (Rosen, 81). The problem of the injunction to respect limits lies in how human beings usually arrive at this respect: through trial and error. To put it somewhat tautologically, necessity is that which we encounter against our will.

Though Rosen considers the “healthy” city to be “subnatural” and “subpolitical,” since its inhabitants live at what he considers an impossible level of simplicity, nevertheless, the distinction between necessary and unnecessary desires remains a vital one in the dialogue, reappearing in the discussion of the democratic soul in Book VIII. It is the reign of useless desires that, according to Socrates, tips democracy over into tyranny. The political consequences of pursuing the necessary desires, on the other hand, remain enticingly ambiguous.

Text cited:

Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Republic: A Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

A Memory of Albert Cook, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Criticism Almost as Much as Art

One of my most intellectually formative experiences was attending a class taught by Albert Cook back in 1989, when I was an undergraduate. The topic of the day was the poetry of Emily Dickinson. He spoke at a rapid clip, making it difficult to take notes, but I was immediately mesmerized by his approach to the study of poetry. He actively speculated about the alternate forms that a poem might have taken. His observations were often voiced in the subjunctive mood, replacing a key word with its contrary, making him verge on rewriting Dickinson’s work while in the act of discovering its hidden dimensions. Though I did not begin drawing upon Cook’s approach in my own work until much later, at the midpoint of my career as a graduate student, when I was forced to get past the thought that everything significant or essential about a literary work had already been said, or that any statement I could make was hopelessly naive, the act of reconstructing a work of literature or art, which runs in the contrary direction of exposing how a work is “constructed,” offered a productive and invigorating idea of contingency, one proper to an author’s or artist’s decision in what form the work will finally take. The irony is that the critic gets closer to this internal process the more he or she usurps the position of the artist, i.e. by speculating upon how a certain work might have been otherwise. This gesture of usurpation to a certain extent resembles Harold Bloom’s idea of misreading, though the antagonism here is less a matter of Oedipal passion than Platonic sublimation, leading not to the production of more literature but to thought, or the creation of concepts, or a way of life. Plato, after all, could only hope to defeat the poets by fighting on their own territory, by outdoing them as the creator of a supreme poem, whether this takes the name of the just city or of the Ideas.

Cook seemed to know as much as the poet, knew the poem even better than the poet. Alas, I was young and foolish, and did not stick around for the whole course, but this single lecture stayed in my head for years, until I had matured enough to recognize its worth.

The Ethics of Scarcity: On John Gray and J. G. Ballard

Writing in 1907, on the eve of the immense carnage that would sweep away the longstanding regimes and institutions associated with a more optimistic and more hierarchical epoch, the French engineer-turned political theorist Georges Sorel proposes a model for grasping sociopolitical change that treats “social conditions as forming a system bound together by an iron law which cannot be evaded, as something in the form of one block, and which can only disappear through a catastrophe which involves the whole” (Reflections, 11). Change is not an incremental process, in which social transformations are brought about by the deliberate implementation of political projects aimed at improving the general well-being. Instead, it is sudden, violent, and largely unwilled, carried forward by upheavals that invert established systems of value and dissolve cherished, long-held certainties. Otherwise, absent the force of such an overwhelming compulsion, a collective will have little incentive to develop new habits and cultivate new ways of life, for these only come into being from the stresses of adjusting to unanticipated dangers and unpredictable circumstances.

If any set of issues in the present drives home the inadequacy of incremental and gradual measures, it would be the challenge posed to the current sociopolitical order by the problems of global warming and resource depletion. Modifications of the political and economic status quo are woefully insufficient to avert a grim future marked by the uprooting of entire populations by rising sea levels, famines triggered by atmospheric carbon dioxide playing havoc with rainfall patterns, and the intensification of geopolitical rivalries over dwindling reserves of hydrocarbons. The lack of political will shown thus far by the United States and the major emerging industrial powers in addressing these dangers, coupled with a global economy that operates upon the expectation of unending growth, works steadily to cast such a dire prospect into our fate. But if the political process aimed at reducing carbon emissions appears stalled and flawed, the military has become sufficiently alarmed to issue bleak and urgent reports on the implications of environmental destruction for global security. The report issued by the Pentagon last August projects nightmarish scenarios such as catastrophic flooding in Bangladesh that triggers massive waves of refugees into neighboring countries and endemic drought in already stressed regions like Sudan. Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni states the alternatives bluntly: “We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an economic hit of some kind. Or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives” (New York Times, 8/8/09).

We are thus confronted by a staggering disproportion between the urgency of the crisis, along with the devastating consequences if we do too little or act too late, and our incapacity to translate our understanding into meaningful collective action. The act of undertaking such sweeping measures will transform the life to which the United States and other advanced industrial nations have become accustomed over the course of the half century following the end of the Second World War. These changes are made more difficult to accept or imagine because our predominant models of politics remain wedded to the promise of abundance and the expectation of never-ending growth. Even the primary adversary of liberal democratic capitalism, state socialism, fought and lost the ideological battle on the terrain of economic prosperity, as it failed to match the rising standard of living delivered by the capitalist economies. What this means of course is that intellectually and psychologically we are largely unprepared to take the measure of a reality in which scarcity becomes increasingly the dominant factor of social life. Our anxious position resembles that of the generic leftist opponent of British imperialism as dissected by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier. The left-wing intellectual, in his outbursts of moralistic fervor, condemns the depredations of the Empire and snickers at the pretensions of the colonial officials of Raj, but fails to make the connection that his material comforts depend upon the desperate poverty of a hundred million Indians. There is no way to bite into a serving of strawberries and cream without eating the British Empire. The alternative, Orwell points out, of halting the exploitation of foreign peoples means “reducing England to a cold and unimportant island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes” (Road, 159-160). But where Orwell’s imaginary socialist fights, however confusedly, to bring about an egalitarian political order in which the benefits of prosperity are extended to all, our society is more likely to find itself in actual combat for far less idealistic purposes, straining instead to maintain as much of an embattled and unsustainable status quo as possible. The underlying challenge nevertheless is to make the transition to a society of diminished material expectations while preserving a modicum of the rule of law and preventing irreparable harm to the social fabric.

Some will dismiss these notions as extreme and unduly alarmist. Perhaps such pessimism is excessive and unwarranted in an interdependent global economy. But as British philosopher John Gray points out, scarcity and the attendant evils it brings, such as wars fought over access to rivers and fertile land, are in fact the norm in history. What is exceptional and an aberration, in historical terms, is the incomprehension with which we greet such developments, not least their recurrence in our own time. Gray writes, “if we find the emergent pattern of conflict unfamiliar, it is because we are still haunted by nineteenth-century utopian visions in which the spread of industry throughout the world ushers in an age of perpetual peace” (Heresies, 115). He observes that the “great game” for access to the vast energy resources of Central Asia has resumed, with the United States jockeying with China and Russia for favors from the corrupt and brutal oligarchs who control the region (Heresies, 119). The world’s largest remaining reserves of cheap oil, that is, supplies of petroleum that are relatively inexpensive to extract using existing technology, are to be found in regions where political instability is rife, such as the Niger River Delta, and where authoritarian regimes, like the House of Saud, hold power. As is often the case in oil-rich states, the wealth generated by the sales of petroleum have flowed disproportionately to a tiny elite while the masses continue to suffer in dire poverty. Moreover, the rapid rise of the economies of Brazil, China, and India has exacerbated the competition for oil, natural gas, and other vital resources. Although the emergence of these nations as economic powerhouses has succeeded in lifting millions out of poverty, the world’s energy output must, according to Michael Klare, “increase by 57% over the next twenty-five years,” a highly optimistic prospect, to avoid the onset of a severe global recession or depression (Rising Powers, 11). The emergence of these countries as world powers means a worsened predicament for the smaller nations that not only lack vital resources but also the geopolitical and economic muscle necessary to acquire them. The process of extracting oil from the alternative sources that offer the best hope of keeping pace with demand, such as from shale in the Rocky Mountains and the tar sands of Alberta, uses up massive quantities of an even more vital resource — fresh water.

If Gray, a supporter of Margaret Thatcher turned critic of neo-liberal globalization, is a most compelling intellectual guide to our unwilled sociopolitical realities, it is because he is a thinker most avowedly at odds with the prevailing spirit of the times. Gray charts a rigorous and idiosyncratic course that makes its way to the tragic insights about the problematic nature of human beings forsaken by the progressive left and the capitalist right alike in their embrace of the idea of progress. His book Straw Dogs (2002) was the object of a vehement denunciation by Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, who called it a “dangerous, despairing” work, the product of a “full-blooded apocalyptic nihilist” under the sway of a “virulent misanthropy” (Guardian, 9/7/02). For Gray contends that the humanitarian sentiments and liberal sensitivities that have become commonplace in contemporary society are unthinkable without the affluence and security created by the cruel and unjust politics they denounce. Eagleton must surely find unforgivable such statements as the following: “Humans thrive in conditions that morality condemns. The peace and prosperity of one generation stand on the injustices of earlier generations; the delicate sensibilities of liberal societies are fruits of war and empire” (Straw Dogs, 107). But what Eagleton’s outrage causes him to miss is the exacting thought experiment that Gray undertakes in this book. Proceeding in a non-linear fashion, through aphorisms and anecdotes, he unravels the therapeutic illusions that modern humanism has deployed between itself and the harsh Hegelian formula that history is a slaughter-bench. Whereas the conventional opinion in the West clings to the idea that economic and cultural interconnectedness fosters the spread of liberal values throughout the globe, Gray questions whether we have pulled free of the orbit of history, with its cycles of anarchy and tyranny. Although such a question might strike one as an eminently sensible one to consider, given recent events, the vituperation aroused by his act of exploring it attests to the stubbornness with which the Enlightenment belief in progress and human perfectibility endures even after the ideological projects it inspired have become discredited.

In that sense, Gray’s project must be considered alongside the work of a kindred spirit, the recently deceased novelist J. G. Ballard, whose writings share the conviction that the affluent societies which emerged in the postwar years are to be defined largely as extended exercises in delusion. Like Gray, Ballard’s overriding theme is the fragility of modern liberal societies, which operate according to the assumption that they have overcome, through their economic productivity, the afflictions that have plagued human beings across the ages, while subterranean yearnings for “a more passionate world” boil over into the consumption of illegal drugs, the practice of S&M, and the liberation and release granted by war. Ballard’s final novels cohere into a series with striking thematic continuities, as they explore the perils of a leisured existence and its apparent opposite, a life of ceaseless work. In Cocaine Nights (1996), a former professional tennis player named Bobby Crawford wakes an entire resort out of its sedative-induced stupor through a therapeutic regimen of crime and other forbidden activities. He organizes the residents into shooting pornographic films, arranges for the trafficking of stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamines into the resort, and goes off on nightly jaunts during which he vandalizes houses, smashes car windows, and shoplifts while charming all those he meets. Far from turning him over to the police, the residents actually regard him with gratitude for rescuing them from an empty and tedious existence, even after he deliberately sets a fire that causes the deaths of five people (220). Millennium People (2003) features a violent insurrection against the state carried out by middle class professionals living in a gated community, who have become fed up with parking fees, maintenance charges, and the other high-priced expenses of the affluent life. They set off firebombs in a video store, and vandalize a travel agency, actions in which the regressive glee of destruction is never far away from the high-minded aim of edifying the public: “Travel is the last fantasy the 20th century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself” (55). The sheer incongruity of rioting middle-aged professionals, who do not want to brawl with the police unless they’ve had their morning cappuccinos, might be regarded as a limit case of consumerist pathology, yet the grotesque nature of their wanton acts of destruction is rooted in a bitter historical insight — the narrator, entering the residential complex for the first time, observes, “Most revolutionaries in the last century had aspired to exactly this level of affluence and leisure, and it occurred to me that I was seeing the emergence of a higher kind of boredom” (77).

In short, the work of both Gray and Ballard is marked by a shared preoccupation with the afterlife of dead ideas, with the compulsions that decaying dreams continue to exert over us, because we find it unbearable to lay them to rest. As the subtitle of Gray’s recent book, “the death of utopia,” would indicate, the sociopolitical paralysis of our time has a cause far deeper than the failure to reform crucial political institutions or to reorganize economic life around egalitarian principles. Rather, Gray and Ballard demonstrate how the impasse is to be found at the level of the imagination itself, from our inability to extricate ourselves from the horizon of expectations that has outlived the collapse of state socialism and has now been claimed by the defenders of neo-liberal capitalism. Thus, as belief in political action has waned, science and technology have become invested with the hopes for a “transformed world” that were formerly associated with revolutionary political programs (Heresies, 20). But more than that, science has mutated into a religion, offering to its adherents the same things that believers of all stripes have always desired, namely “salvation from themselves” (Heresies, 23). Gray is that rare atheist who holds that the followers of traditional religions, like Christianity and Buddhism, are less deluded and argue from more solid philosophical basis than contemporary secular atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. For religions transmit in poetic form the truth that human beings are intrinsically flawed and radically disordered entities. Humanistic atheists, on the other hand, inherit from Christianity what Gray regards as the religion’s most harmful aspect, the belief that human beings possess a unique significance in the cosmos, while jettisoning its most profound teaching, the lesson of human fallibility found in the story of Eden.

Secular humanists are thus prone to exalt and overrate human capacities, especially the power of reason. Furthermore, their faith in science proves to be quite a tenuous and unstable construction, something embraced out of exhaustion and default rather than with any genuine enthusiasm. As Gray writes, “If people cling to the hope of progress, it is not so much from genuine belief as from fear of what may come if they give it up” (Straw Dogs, 19). The idea of progress thus serves as a sort of platonic medicinal lie for the terminally disenchanted, holding together social bonds and enabling individuals to go on making the sacrifices and compromises necessary for sustaining the existing order: “For the men and women of today, an irrational faith in progress may be the only antidote to nihilism. Without the hope that the future will be better than the past, they could not go on” (Straw Dogs, 28). Along these lines, the key task for art and culture is to confront this fear and see what emerges once one has extricated oneself from it. What is thus needed is an art that incorporates the trauma of relinquishing an essential element from our horizon of expectations, an art that registers the amputation of a limb from the body of the ideas to which we have become long accustomed.

A common feature of contemporary narratives that undertake this task is the portrayal of the reversion of society to the Hobbesian state of nature, evoking the ubiquitous fear and violence that results from the dissolution of civilized restraints. Michael Haneke’s film Time of the Wolf and Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Road concern the survivors of an unnamed catastrophe, who are cast into a dangerous world where death might wait at any corner or behind any tree. But it is Ballard’s own autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun that remains the far more resonant work for rendering, with a vertiginous attention to detail that borders on the uncanny, the downward journey from the heights of colonial privilege and luxury to the brutal, predatory reality of a Japanese prison camp near Shanghai during the Second World War. Young Jim, separated from his parents when the Japanese intern the city’s British residents after the outbreak of hostilities, is forced to endure hunger during the weeks following Pearl Harbor and nearly sold into slavery by a scheming companion. But the novel’s most troubling sequences have to do with how readily Jim becomes acclimated to his new circumstances, and how he comes to derive a powerful sense of liberation once the rules that governed his former life of luxury and privilege have dissolved. Watching an elderly beggar scrub out a toilet near a fetid canal, Jim suspects that his own method of coping with hardship is similar to that of the destitute Chinese, the dead bodies of whom have been for him an ordinary, everyday sight:

A strange doubling of reality had taken place, as if everything that happened to him since the war was occurring in a mirror. It was his mirror self who felt faint and hungry, and who thought about food all the time. He no longer felt sorry for this other self. Jim guessed that this was how the Chinese managed to survive. Yet one day the Chinese might come out of the mirror (Empire, 77).

Jim’s response to his own sufferings provides the vital reminder that the loss of privilege is not necessarily accompanied by an increase in compassion or empathy. Indeed, the opposite proves to be more often the case. He finds something of a surrogate father in a British doctor, who grows concerned that the boy has learned too well to adjust to the war. For Jim readily takes to a strange new role. He is well-liked by the other prisoners, but their congeniality does not prevent them from placing bets on how far he can walk away from the camp to set traps for birds before being shot at by the guards (Empire, 172). The doctor thus makes a point of making Jim perform impractical tasks, like studying Latin, in order to keep him anchored to the memory of the civilized world. As the war nears its end and supplies to the camp become drastically reduced, and Jim comes under the sway of strange dreams and reveries. He dwells on his fantasy of growing up to become a fighter pilot for the Japanese air force, and gives himself over to the thought that he can raise the dead. Lying in a field among prisoners dead and dying of starvation, he grows angry when a few still capable of walking form a party to be marched into the countryside, so that they will die outside his view (Empire, 209).

It is often noted that Ballard’s experience in the prison camp was formative for his career as a writer. For his later novels, though set in vastly different surroundings, revisit the perennial question of what human beings become once they find themselves freed from normal social restraints. The self-induced upheavals in a gated community and the imposed ordeals of the prison camp provide the mirror for the future of a world being transformed against its will, while discovering the forbidden pleasures that a sudden change of fortunes makes possible. The fiction of Ballard and the philosophical writings of Gray chart the paths through which history resumes its course. They show us that whereas capitalism was lauded at the end of history as the system best suited for human capacities, it now names our helplessness, our continuing inability to take collective action against catastrophic dangers.

Texts cited:

J. G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1996.
J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.
J. G. Ballard, Millennium People. London: Harper Perennial, 2004.
John Gray, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions. London: Granta Books, 2004.
John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughs on Humans and Other Animals. Granta Books, 2002.
Michael Klare, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008.
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958.
Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence. Ed. Jeremy Jennings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Recording of my talk on ethics and scarcity

Here is link to the mp3 file of the talk I gave on October 23 at the UWM Center for International Education, retitled “The Ethics of Scarcity,” which focuses on the work of John Gray and J. G. Ballard.

Review of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata

Tokyo Sonata, released in 2008, takes on two concerns that weigh heavily on the minds of most Americans: mass layoffs and war in the Middle East. While it may be difficult to suppress the thought that the Japanese have again come up with a more efficient and economical version of something Americans find familiar, in the hands of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, best known for his horror films, these subjects are handled with both wry detachment and ultimately a hard won poignancy. Kurosawa proves that he is just as artful at making anxiety films as he is at directing horror movies.

The film deals with the crises that befall the Sasaki family after the father, Ryuhei, loses his cushy administrative post in a large corporation because of outsourcing. At the beginning of the film, the head of the company is shown being introduced to a young Chinese woman who speaks fluent Japanese. A broad smile crosses his face when he is told that shifting the administrative operations of the firm offshore will enable him to hire three employees at the salary of a single Japanese employee. Shocked and bewildered, Ryuhei is too ashamed to reveal to his family that he has been laid off. Every morning he leaves the house dressed in his coat and tie, and spends his days bouncing between the unemployment office and various parks in the city where the homeless gather for free lunches and other jobless salarymen loll about in their suits. Ryuhei meets a friend from high school, Kurosu, who has also lost his job, but who has devised strategies to indicate to the outside world that he is still gainfully employed – for example, he has programmed his mobile phone to ring every 20 minutes, so that he can hold imaginary conversations with his boss.

The sudden loss of Ryuhei’s middle class status and professional identity coincides with events that conspire to expose the emptiness of his authority as a father. His younger son, Kenji, unintentionally deprives his primary school teacher of his ability to control the classroom when the teacher wrongfully accuses him of bringing a manga into the classroom. The boy defends himself by telling the teacher that he saw him reading a porn manga on the subway, leading his classmates to squeal with delight and take over the classroom. Dismayed by the consequences of his act, Kenji tries to escape the situation by taking piano lessons in secret. The older son, Takashi, appears to be a prototypical alienated youth, staying away from home all night and working a meaningless job handing out packets of tissues with advertisements on them. Fed up with the fact that his life is going nowhere, he signs up with the US military for service in Iraq.

Kurosawa carries out a delicate balancing act between the quirky and the unsettling. It is unclear whether Kenji is eager to learn the piano, paying for lessons with his lunch money, because he loves music or because he is attracted to his teacher. When Takashi defends his decision with the reasoning that since the US is responsible for Japan’s security, and so joining the US military will enable him to protect Japan, a chill emanates from his words that drives home the fact that he is about to take an irrevocable step in his life. If the film does go slightly off-key, it is in the storyline of Megumi, the tactful wife and stalwart mother who knows far more than she lets on. The upheavals in her household drive her to her own breaking point, which, thankfully, does not play out as melodramatically as it might have. Indeed, the somewhat farfetched turn of events in the final third of the film does generate a precious scene in which the secret life of the husband and wife do finally converge: it is only during a hostage drama that Megumi and Ryuhei are able to meet outside the artificial and routinized space of their home.

Though many of the scenes in the film have an undercurrent of humor, nevertheless the rumblings of catastrophe press in on the family from every direction. Kurosawa’s detached and minimalist style is quite well-suited to evoking the specters of ominous events that wait just at the edge of middle class stability. What I also find marvelous about Tokyo Sonata is how it preserves the mystery of its characters even as they undergo the various ordeals that force them to reveal who they are and what they are made of. One of the delights of the film is that it never reveals whether Ryuhei was even competent at the job from which he was let go. An interview for a rare office job plays out like a bad dream in which it dawns upon the dreamer that he or she is naked. But instead of nakedness being the source of humiliation, Ryuhei mentions his skills at karaoke, and is then asked to sing by an arrogant interviewer, who has dyed hair and is barely older than his own son.

It’s rare, perhaps unimaginable today, for a Hollywood film about downward mobility to conclude in the resigned acceptance of a life of physical labor as one’s lot. Instead, there is a lucky break, whether through supernatural means or not, in which the hero is able to escape such a fate. One thinks of the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life, who comes down to show the hero how miraculous his life has been. Kurosawa’s film is refreshingly devoid of such tricks. There is a remarkable scene in which Ryuhei’s friend Kurosu says that they are all on board a sinking ship, and then promptly joins a column of those rendered superfluous — homeless people and laid-off salarymen in suits — shambling down the streets of Tokyo in a hopeless and endless war of attrition.

But that is not to say that the film denies the audience any consolations. Rather it makes the point that these consolations, to be credible, must be hard won. Kurosawa demonstrates insightfully how difficult it can be to extricate oneself from a life of quiet desperation, especially when that quiet desperation comes with elevated social status, myriad consumer items, and a hefty salary. The Sasaki family picks itself up from the debris and settles into a new life, and even new hopes and dreams. No angel shows up to take things back to how they were before, indeed, the self-knowledge gained by the characters rules out that option as much as their constrained economic circumstances. Instead, there comes at the end a spare and undramatic scene showing an audition at a school for music. The magic comes from Kurosawa simply letting his camera rest on the pianist for the entire time it takes him to play Debussy’s Clair de lune. The path to wisdom, harsh as it was for the Sasakis, proves to be a path to beauty as well.

The Dark Ages of Perspectivism

Jean Baudrillard, in a commentary titled “The Despair of Having Everything,” asserts that the attacks of 9-11 were not carried out by people “from whom we have taken everything and to whom we have given nothing back.” Rather, the rage felt by the militants of al Qaeda requires from us a reversal of perspective to grasp – for it is “the hatred felt by those to whom we have taken everything and who can give nothing in return.”

Not surprisingly, this is a passage that my undergraduates generally find utterly mystifying. Not even the historical explanations that wars have often served as a vital medium of cultural exchange, such as the discovery of algebra by the European crusaders or the adoption of tournament-style combats at the court of Saladin, seem to provide enough of a grip for making sense of what Baudrillard has in mind. G. K. Chesterton brings us somewhat closer to clarity with his formula that love causes us to appreciate the differences and individuality of the other, whereas hatred makes us imitate him or her. Writing on the eve of the Great War, he observes, “the more we love Germany, the more pleased we shall be that Germany should be different from ourselves, should keep her own ritual and conviviality and we ours. But the more we hate Germany, the more we shall copy German guns and German fortifications in order to be better armed against Germany. The more modern nations detest each other, the more meekly they follow each other…”

Of course, except on the fringes of the right, most Americans would be hard pressed to name any quality which they would find admirable among the militants of al Qaeda. It’s hard to forget how Bill Maher was chased from network TV for having the temerity to suggest that carrying out a suicide attack entails a modicum of courage. At a recent meeting of the Colloquium for the Study of Violence and Religion, I got into a conversation with a fellow participant, a well- and widely-read doctor, who remarked that the Muslim world envies the West for its technological advances, whereas we in the West envy the Muslim world for their sense of honor and readiness to defend dignity. But do we in the West truly admire these qualities? The doctor, it is true, grew up in an earlier time, when such values were not objects of immediate ridicule, indeed when they were regarded as essential for the well-being of any society. Having grown up in the wake of the sixties and seventies, I on the other hand have grown up with far higher doses of individualism and cynicism. As Michael Gillespie puts it, in reference to Hegel’s idea of bourgeoisification (the early form of hedonistic consumer society): the modern state “resembles the individual in the state of nature, who lacks the inner resolve to conquer his desire.”

Liberal democratic capitalism thus constitutes the effort to build society in such a way as to accommodate our lack of “inner resolve to conquer [our] desire.” Such an activity is necessarily expansionist, meaning that the world will have to be made safe for it. This unfortunate reality is explored with tremendous insight in Morris Berman’s Dark Ages America which lays out, in terms that will unsettle those on both the Left and the Right, why an individualistic, hedonistic, and consumerist society (as well as a progressive one) will necessarily take the form of an empire. Berman, unlike the vast majority of cultural critics out there, is hard-headed enough to suggest that the overcoming individualism and consumerism will necessarily come at a high and harsh price, namely at the cost of much of what we currently take for granted as individual freedom.

But it is a passage from Berman’s earlier book, The Twilight of American Culture, that best captures to my mind the intellectual deficit of our posthistorical empire, this ominous inability to find something worthwhile in one’s enemies. Writing of the startling decline in literacy that swept over Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, Berman observes that even the educated displayed a precipitous decline in intellectual capacity. Scholarly activity was limited mostly to copying manuscripts, with almost no attempt at analysis or debate over what texts actually meant: “From A.D. 600 to 1000, most people forgot how to read or think.” But what is more frightening, in a formulation that Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Adorno would appreciate, is that they “forgot they had forgotten.” Chief among the capacities they lost was the “cognitive ability of comparing different viewpoints and perspectives,” which is for example evident in Augustine’s Confessions, in which he constructs the worldview of the Manichaeans in order to critique it.

But isn’t one of the consequences of deconstruction precisely the sense that the intellectual activity of constructing the perspective of the other in one’s own mind a form of intellectual imperialism, a kind of mastery that prepares the way for colonization and elimination of otherness? Or is its tendency to focus on difference in the abstract, apart from concrete differences, a symptom of the fear that the study of concrete differences would undermine the grounds for tolerance? In my view, much contemporary theory cannot move beyond the liberal pluralistic subject, or a subject that is on its way to becoming more liberal, more secular, and more enlightened. In spite of all the talk about respecting difference, there is really only one path for the subject to follow. And what if he or she does not follow it? Is this a subject with whom we can reach some kind of negotiated settlement, or are we so convinced of the rightness of our ways that we should rule out in advance any kind of theologico-political peace talks, given that we believe nothing is to be given up – or is to be gained – from such a dialogue?

To get out of this rut, we need not so much as to “historicize” as to develop an “unhistorical consciousness” of which Nietzsche speaks in “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.”

Once more Baudrillard: “To understand the hatred the rest of the world feels towards the West, we must reverse our perspectives. This is not the hatred felt by people from whom we have taken everything and to whom we have given nothing back. Rather, it is the hatred felt by those to whom we have given everything and who can give nothing in return. Their hatred stems from humiliation, not from dispossession or exploitation.”

Reconsidering Evolution (Ghibli redux)

In one of the short films being shown at the Ghibli Museum, the one which shows the evolution from amoeba to boy, there is a subtle and haunting riddle at the core of it.

As I mentioned in my post on Ghibli, much of the film focuses on the competition between the creatures that will become the boy with another creature – the protagonist is a fish that jumps to land and grows legs in order to avoid the jaws of a bigger fish with sharp teeth. But soon afterwards, as the protagonist crawls freely away, he finds himself being trailed by another amphibian, which is presumably the fish that tried to eat him earlier. This other, larger amphibian now acts as his rival, jumping on him to move ahead in their race. The protagonist then mounts up on two legs to run past him (in a gesture that is peculiarly Asian: the arms are raised quite high while running, and the new creature looks over both cautiously and contemptuously at his rival as he runs by). Then, the two become dinosaurs – the protagonist eventually becomes a triceratops being chased by a giant Tyrannosaur. At the next stage, the protagonist becomes a rodent, while the Tyrannosaur transforms into a bird and sweeps far above the lowly mammal. We don’t see the rival as the hero evolves into ape, caveman, and then boy. But when he reaches the top of a mountain, there is a girl waiting for them, and they kiss.

Now, the question is, where did the girl come from? Was she the boy’s nemesis from earlier on, during primeval times? Is she what became of the bird? Not an unlikely interpretation, given the flying girls who populate Miyazaki’s imagination: Nausicaa, Kiki, and Sheeta. Indeed, there’s something quite mischievously clever about the giant predator and graceful bird evolving into the focus of the boy’s desire. But the best part of all is that this possibility is left unstated by the film.

Apocalypse by Subtraction (take 2)

The turn of the millennium has seen the emergence of a sort of speculative narrative which I call, for lack of a better word, the subtractive apocalypse. The most familiar example of this is the film/novel Children of Men, in which the world is upended by the onset of universal infertility. The film presents a far bleaker situation than does the novel, as governments all over the world collapse except that of the UK, which is accordingly flooded by refugees from the Continent and beyond. The refugees, or “fugees,” as they are called, are forced into detention centers, lawless zones filled with black markets and run by armed insurgents. The novel, on the other hand, shows a world in which almost everyone is obsessed with comfort, of preparing to meet the annihilation of humanity after having received a massage or eaten a gourmet dessert.

Blindness, the novel by Jose Saramago, belongs in this category – in it, an epidemic of blindness sweeps over an unnamed city and then over the world. As in the film Children of Men, the authorities are confronted with a mysterious problem which they decide is simply too overwhelming to solve, so they deal with it by pushing the affected to the margins and erecting a barbed wire fence around them. The victims of the blindness plague are placed in a mental hospital which they are not allowed to leave, on pain of death. One of them is promptly shot for attempting to leave the grounds of the asylum, and after more patients are brought in, more of them are killed when panicked guards fire on them as they try to collect their rations. Aside from leaving these food packages, the state does nothing to help maintain a minimum of order and dignity in their lives. The novel goes into detail about the filth from the overflowing toilets which the blind inmates have to deal with on an everyday level. The overcrowded asylum evokes a medieval vision of hell: unable to wash, the inmates sleep in beds in which they have defecated. The dead are buried in the yard beneath the excrement of those who could not reach the lavatories.

Similarly, the state does nothing to protect the inmates from each other, as when the criminal element in the hospital takes over and demands first money and jewelry, and then sex, as the condition for releasing to the others their share of the food. Both Blindness (the novel) and Children of Men (the film) show the terrifying descent of society into the war of all against all brought about largely because of the state’s impotence (whether malign or helpless), its willed abandonment of people to their fate once it recognizes a certain problem to be insoluble. This motif appears in 28 Weeks Later, in which US troops guarding the protected area (a sort of green zone) are given the order to fire on the infected and uninfected alike when the rage virus breaks out once again. But 28 Weeks Later lacks the fantastic premise whereby social reality becomes deprived of a certain vital element (sight, fertility). But are narratives of “subtractive apocalypse” necessarily fantastic in nature? I suppose that James Howard Kunstler’s “peak oil” novel A World Made By Hand would fit the category, although the reason for the reversion of the United States to a pre-industrial way of life without fuel or electricity is entirely rational: the loss of access to oil supplies from the Middle East and elsewhere.

Indeed, not only might a speculative fiction that portrays a realistic world be included in this grouping, but comedies as well – the film Idiocracy, directed by Mike Judge, after all portrays a world in which the missing element is intelligence. In it, the uneducated (or rather, the ineducable) breed with multiple partners, while the mentally gifted die off without offspring. The scientists are too busy looking for cures for baldness or for ways of prolonging erections to notice that the population is slipping into dangerous levels of inanity. The president is a porn star, people water crops with a sports drink, and Costco hands out law degrees. People wear t-shirts with corporate logos on them, and, as Dana Stevens helpfully reminds me in her Slate article which makes the case for the thematic similarities between it and Children of Men, the slogan for Nike is “Don’t Do a Thing” and Carl’s Jr.’s is “F**k You, I’m Eating.”

Also, I would add that the condition of the “missing element” can be discussed in formalistic terms as well – in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, what gets subtracted, thanks to its penny-dreadful lyricism, is the content. But to return to the twist of the light-hearted apocalyptic achieved by Idiocracy, I would love to see a film in which governments collapse and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world because nobody can get drunk, in which all alcohol mysteriously turns into water or something. It would be Animal House as imagined by Luis Bunuel, whose Exterminating Angel and That Obscure Object of Desire deal with not being able, for some mysterious reason, to commit an ordinary enough action. Now that would be an apocalypse to keep the otherwise shockproof viewers awake at night!

Studio Ghibli Museum

I visited the Studio Ghibli Museum today, which is located about twenty minutes by train from Tokyo. Tickets are hard to come by – I made my reservation about two months in advance through a travel agency (see the Ghibli site for details on how to make reservations from the States and elsewhere in the world).

Photographs are not permitted inside, so I will have to rely on my admittedly faulty short-term memory. The room just to the right of the entry-way contains a variety of mechanisms used to create animation, including a circular platform on which are arranged characters from Totoro. It spins under a strobe light, creating the impression of movement. Nearby are dioramas with images of bucolic settings, mostly, and on the opposite side there is a marvelous short film that portrays evolution from primordial ooze to little boy, hitting in between trilobite, fish, amphibious quadrupeds, dinosaurs, bird, rodent, and monkey. The film moves quickly across time, and the most charming moment comes about when the humanoid missing link loses the thick black hair covering his belly and the fur above it morphs into a frayed shirt.

What I found most interesting about the museum was the cluttered work-spaces of Miyazaki, Takahata, and their colleagues – books in piles as well as on shelves, antique photographs in frames, storyboards and other art hanging on the walls. Miyazaki has collected a remarkable variety of books: there are books on Egyptian art, Armenian art, the art of Magna Graecia, Himalayan art, Venice, the art of the Mayas, Rembrandt, a photo history of the US Navy, a study of wooden fighting ships, dance photography, as well as the volumes of the Fairburn System, an encyclopedia of visual reference soon to go out of print. Unexpected discoveries include Toynbee’s A Study of History. Even more unusual is this portrait, hanging beneath what looks like a canvas by Paul Klee.

Miyazaki is drawn to black and white photos, mostly from the Victorian era. Little framed portraits stand on his desk, usually of Europeans – there is one little girl who is holding an umbrella: she is an inspiration for Mei and for the other little girls in his films.

Miyazaki has made a new film, Ponyo on the Cliff, which was released last year in Japan, and will open in August in the US.