A Japanese challenge to the `end of history' (Book Review) Madhuri Santanam Sondhi* | The Asian Age | 05 February 2008
http://www.asianage.com/presentation/leftnavigation/opinion/opinion/a-japanese-challenge-to-the-`end-of-history'.aspx Francis Fukuyama made history of sorts by announcing a Hegelian "end of history" shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although the liberal democratic free-market dispensation failed to evolve worldwide, the goal he prematurely pronounced as realised, lingered on. But so did pluralism, however defined. Shimon Peres on his first visit to India, opened his IIC speech with a dramatic announcement: India and Israel are threatened by the same enemy. After a half minute's suspense he named the enemy cable television! Fujiwara Masahiko, a distinguished mathematician at Ochanomizu University who has taught at Harvard and Cambridge (UK), in The Dignity of a Nation (Shinchosa Japan 2007) expresses the threat from globalisation somewhat differently: Japan's obsession with the pursuit of wealth ("economic realism") which informs her domestic, foreign and strategic policy, has degraded her emotional and cultural life and introduced a culture of self-obsession. His attack on the shibboleths of modernism are far more sweeping and radical: he contests the whole concept of the free market democratic utopia. Each of Fujiwara's apparently outrageous statements has a rider. If the so-called "triumph of capitalism" is an illusion, it is so because it has seriously destabilised society. No doubt logic and reason have been the sine qua non of progress in science, mathematics and technology, but "logic alone will drive the world to ruin." Equality and freedom are fictions invented by the West to counteract oppressive monarchism: they have no inherent meaning unless contrasted with slavery. To believe that individuals can pursue pleasure freely, because an "invisible hand" would ensure harmony is a "fatuous" notion. Democracy is a "conceptual wonder," but based on the erroneous assumption that people are capable of making mature judgments. Democracy, moreover, leads to war, not peace, as the populace can always be roused to heights of jingoism or manipulated by a skilful demagogue. That his book sold over two million copies in Japan indicates a pervasive unease and concern about Japan's dignity and international stature which her meteoric economic advance and socio-political westernisation have not assuaged. Fujiwara holds that the western definition of progress has led the West itself into a civilisational impasse through over-dependence on and misapplication of enlightenment values like logic, reason, freedom, equality, democracy, and the supposed ultimacy of the economic principle. In imitation, Japan is going even further by cutting at the roots of her own creativity and originality by neglecting Japanese language and literature in the mind-numbing exercise of trying to prioritise the English language. Many in the subcontinent might regard this at best as old hat, at worst, unrealistic. We have seen the century-old prescriptions of Gandhi, Tagore, the Arya and Brahmo Samajis et al with their varying attempts at adjusting classical or folk tradition with judicious inputs of modernity wilt before the onset of industrialisation, democratisation, urbanisation and now for the younger Indian, mass culture. Count Okakura Kakuzo shared a similar dialogue with Tagore over Meiji Japan's headlong embrace of the West, generally ascribed to Japan's desire to recover her lost stature and get even with if not defeat those who had humiliated her. Fujiwara's salvo comes a good century later when modernisation cum westernisation is even more entrenched in the imaginations if not lives of Asian peoples. The basic paradigm is rarely challenged in its essentials, and in that sense although history has not ended, the history of ideas has for the time being, run into a morass. He speaks for a country that modernised earlier (almost three quarters of a century before) and more efficiently than any other in Asia, and despite losing the war, raced on to become world "Number Two." For decades she served as a model of how to combine tradition and modernity, and how to organise a humane and efficient workplace, but now as Asia "rises," she appears to be beset by self-doubt. Basanta Kumar Mallik and Fujiwara share the starting-point that logic and reason are incapable of delivering any fundamental faith or value, and only come into play after some belief or hypothesis has been a-rationally adopted as true. Such primeval choices are conditioned by culture, environmental circumstances et al. Mallik concurs that worldviews, religious or secular, social, political or cultural, i.e., including democracy, have non-rational (but not irrational) foundations. They only become irrational when taken to be universally true. Fujiwara quotes Godel's incompleteness theorem to make a similar point. These non-rational non-universal assumptions must needs be unmasked and then reassembled with inputs from other paradigms. This entails combining the undeniable usefulness of western technological and scientific prowess with the emotional and psychic, specifically samurai culture of Japan's elites. Fujiwara's "shock and awe" tactics aim to expose the ambivalent foundations of the modernist enterprise which systemically generates certain social and political problems: one must search outside modernity for remedies. It is a truism that the humanities have failed to keep pace with the awesome progress in science and technology. The threat of war and destruction is ever with us, its scale magnified with each new dazzling technological innovation. Fujiwara does not defend his country's record in the last World War, nor its roots in Commander Perry's bullying expedition. He focuses on Japan's decision to deliberately forsake her samurai culture, abandoning "patriotism" (love of received culture and values) for jingoistic "nationalism." The bushido emphasis on charity, justice, courage and compassionate empathy for the weak and disadvantaged would never sanction the invasion and ill-treatment of a weaker country. It is difficult to challenge the common-sense of the age until certain anomalies cry out for attention: Fujiwara obviously feels such a moment has arrived to contest modernity in Japan, if not for the world. He advocates an educational focus on Japanese literature and cultivation of Japanese aestheticism which nourishes emotional and psychic development. "Unprofitable" tea ceremonies, flower arrangement or appreciation of cherry blossom have lost their centrality in Japanese life: modernity either museologises culture as the past, or marginalises, or commercially exploits it as ethnicity. All Asian countries in differing degrees feel threatened by the phenomenon of modernisation or globalisation; Fujiwara's prescription of a combination of past and the present, East and West is not new: but the question remains as to whether it is possible to isolate science, technology and industrial organisation from the social ethos from which they have emerged and inject them into a different socio-cultural environment. The questions he raises are real and affect individuals and societies alike. Aurobindo and Basanta Kumar Mallik had envisioned the near future either as a syncretic or complementary universalisation of the world's basic values through an evolutionary process which would lead to a new enlightenment. As optimists we might just interpret the current impasse as a stage in that evolution. *Madhuri Santanam Sondhi can be contacted at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
