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