Volume 55
DECEMBER 2006
54. 6: THE CHINA LOVER, by Ian Buruma (2008) BR 12.31.2009
Its an odd title for a book that is mostly about Japan. But, then, the relationship
between these two Asian states is an odd one. Japan can rightly credit its
older and larger neighbor with providing aspects of its culture and written
characters, but its behavior has not always been one that expressed much gratitude
for the loan of them. In recent years, the continental giant has roared ahead
economically at a growth rate approaching double digits, while the island empire
has languished in protracted recession. China is no longer the backward behemoth
that some seventy years ago was treated by its neighbor as a land of lesser
beings.
The narrative thread that weaves The China Lover together is a Japanese woman,
variously known as Ri Kohran, Li Xianglan, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, Otaka Yoshiko,
and Shirley Yamaguchi. I confess that a first, this being a novel, I had
considered her a fictional character. But I stole a look at the acknowledgments
at the end of the book, it turns out that he author owes a considerable amount
of his story to the memoir of the many-nomered Ms Yamaguchi and an interview
with her co-writer. In consequence, it is difficult to discern at times where
the novel begins and ends with what it the true story of this fascinating lady.
As to historical setting there is much that is already part of the record,
although Japanese and Chinese accounts do differ on essential facts. Anyone
who has seen Bertoluccis The Last Emperor will recall emperor Pu Yis misadventure
with the Japanese in the establishment of Manchukuo in Japanese-conquered Manchuria
in 1932. The whole enterprise was a cynical canard to justify the conquest
and settlement of Chinese continental territory, part of which was a reverence
for the older culture. Some Japanese actually took this somewhat seriously.
Yamaguchi herself, having been born in Harbin, was a cultural hybrid, speaking
and singing in Chinese like a Chinese, but also being a Japanese she could
speak ad sing in Japanese as well.
The Japanese had all sorts of grand plans for Manchukuo. At one point, during
the war, they planned to build a new city for refugee Jews that they rescued
from their ally, Nazi Germany (cf. Archives, 34. 3: DESPERATE VOYAGERS, by
M. Tokayer and M. Swartz, 1979 [BR] 8.5.2006). American Jewish financier, Joseph
Schiff, had helped finance their successful 1905 war against the Russians,
and some of he Japanese high command thought they could use Jewish money and
intelligence in their design to be the overlords of all Asia.
Things turned out differently, of course. The Japanese military built instead
a heinous facility near Harbin at which they chemical and biological weapons
on captive Chinese, Russian and even Western soldiers and civilians. Blandly
called Unit 731, prisoners, who were referred to as logs were submitted to
unspeakable tortures, given diseases and even vivisected. So much for being
China lovers.
The career of Yamaguchi is the spine of the story, told by three narrators,
in the periods preceding the war, during the war and in the reconstruction,
each of whom is connected in some way with motion pictures. Mr. Saito Daisuke,
who has connections with Japanese gangsters operating in Manshukuo, is the
first to come under the thrall of Yamaguchi, then known as Ri Koran, and used
in propagandistic films used to falsely portray an amicable relationship between
the Chinese and Japanese. Manchukuo becomes in the image of these motion pictures
a sort of Japan-ified China, a kookie world in which, apparently, the best
of Chinese culture is taken to its proper level by way of Japanese culture.
A largely isolated, island nation, the Japanese probably bought all this baloney.
But at the same time the Japanese army had a different definition of Sinophiliathey
loved to slaughter Chinese. By 1938, the army had marched largely unobstructed
into the then capitol, Nanking, and proceeded to kill some 300,000 (some Japanese
right-wingers still claim the figure was 30,000, and that they were combatants),
a great number of them having been raped first. (Cf. Archives 9. 7: THE
RAPE OF NANKING, and the Death of Iris Chang [BR] 4.22.2005)
Japan paid in kind for their atrocities when that number was matched in the
atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the fire bombing of Tokyo. It
is in the aftermath of that, during the reconstruction and democratization
of Japan, that Ri Koran repatriates and takes up her career as Yoshiko Yamaguchi.
This section is narrated by another movie buff, an American homosexual whose
connection with the movies, in this case comes from a clerical position with
the studio producing Frank Capra films (Capra was also involved in making propaganda
films during the war, such as Why We Fight). We find Sidney in post war Japan,
again in a clerical position as a censor of Japanese films, but spending much
of his time becoming an aficionado of Japanese movie lore and of slim, smooth-skinned
Japanese young men. Eventually he, too, forms a friendship with Yoshiko, who
is a legend in Japanese films, but desires to travel to America and try her
chances with Hollywood.
Presently, Shirley Yamaguchi, Yoshiko ends up making a film with Robert Stack
and Robert Ryan, in which she is the female lead in a film that has little
use for a female lead. House of Bamboo is set in postwar Japan in 1955, a B-move
crime thriller that uses Tokyo as a prop for chases and shoot-outs. She made
one more American produced film, Navy Wife (1958), this one set in Japan as
well, and returned to making Asian films in Hong Kong (reverting to her Chinese
name, Li Xianglan), and later a television show. Save for the escapades of
Sidney in the gay bars and movie houses of Shinjuku, much of this section seems
documentary. This writer elected to rent a copy of House of Bamboo, and found
Ms Yamaguchi not quite as possessed of luminous eyes and riveting beauty as
Burmuma describes her, but passable as an actress. (Two years later Myoshi
Umecki won an academy award for her role on Sayonara, set in the same period
in Japan.)
Part Three, is narrated by a Japanese revolutionary in a prison camp in Lebanon.
Sato Kenkichis connection with the movies is through his mother, the operator
of a cheap movie house in the bombed-out suburbs of Tokyo that shows pink
movies about Americans raping innocent Japanese girls. Sato is part of the
group who perpetrated the terrorist incident at Lod Airport in 1972 but, after
being praised by the Arabs, ended up arrested and imprisoned. His connection
with Yoshiko was as her cameraman during her career hosting a womens television
show. He is left with his memories of her, her letters, and movies.
The Japanese seem to be a people who are only able to get outside of the prison
of their highly-structured, provincial society by escaping their islands. Even
within, escape can only be achieved by, for example, becoming one of the reclusive
hikikomori (cf. Archives 52. 15. SHUTTING OUT THE SUN, by Michael Zeilensiger
2006 [BR] 10.27.2008). Yoshiko and the narrators of this story are examples
of that, save for Sidney Vanoven, the closeted gay American who escapes into Japan. Yoshiko is raised in Manchuria, where she is already a hybrid, Daisuke
is also in Manchukuo, where he can indulge his passion for Chinese women. Manchukuo
is an invention, a Potempkins Village masking a slaughterhouse. Eventually,
Sato Kenkichi, the revolutionary, can express his anti-imperialist (read American
imperialism here) political passions in a cause between Palestinians and Israelis.
But anyone who has seen Japanese traveling knows that they can never really
escape. The China Lover reminds us of that, and that, for Japanese unable to
escape the confines of their islands, there are always the movies.
___________________________________________________________
2008, James A. Clapp
54. 5: OBAMA AND THE
LOGIC OF WORSHIP 12.19.2008
UrbisMedia
The sheer silliness of the stranglehold religion has upon government is represented
by the dispute that has arisen over Barack Obamas decision to select pastor-bigot
Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church to give the invocation at is inauguration,
outraging the LGBT community and others. He also selected a more liberal pastor
to give the prayer at the end. But the real question is, what is this, an inauguration
or a religious event? Why have either of theseof course, both Christianpastors
spew their nonsense that seems only to bring divisiveness and controversy and
not only insults gays and lesbians, and people of other, not-included, faiths,
and non-theists such as myself. Obama has portrayed his invitation to a pastor
with whom he disagrees on a numbers of social issues as openness and inclusiveness,
but he fails to recognize just how narrow and exclusives his choices happen
to be. Moreover, it appears that it might be more informed by a calculus of
political advantages than by the norms he expresses.
One of the popular online sites I visit had a piece the other day about where
President Obama and his family are going to worship (emphasis mine)? We all
know, of course, that our political process is suffused with this religious
nonsense. We know that, if Obama were truly a Muslim (which the Republicans
tried to pin on him) the question would be where John McCain worships (we already
know where Sarah Palin worships). However he feels about religion and worship
Obama will probably take himself off to some Christian church, kneel, lower
his head, join his hands and maybe say to himself This is bullshit. Nevertheless,
our mythology requires us to believe that the most powerful man on earth must
exercise obeisance to the most powerful man in the universe.
BS is what I would say. But there was a time when I sort of understood worship;
the same way I later understood that you had a better chance of getting laid
after a political rally or a rock concert. The Church operates the same way;
the music, incense, ceremony, those stained-glass windows, the stirring readings
from the gospels, they are all designed to take you to another level psychologically,
to where you feel you are connected in some way with the spiritual world.
Its all in the power of suggestion, combined with the willingness to believe
(although some religions do employ narcotic assistance). The evangelical and
charismatic churches that have become popular in recent years have greatly
increased their production values and come to understand the utility of music
and values in their liturgies. Black gospel music churches were already well
ahead of that curve. But the desired effect is to transport the worshipper
emotionally to a state of intensity that is spiritually orgasmic. (Oh, my
God!) Nowhere is the line between physical and spiritual ecstasy more blurred
that on those Indian temples adorned with sexually explicit sculpture.
The practice of worship has always stuck me as odd behavior. We observe it
in al societies and, of course, it is not restricted to devotion to the divine
(just go to Graceland in Memphis or a Stones concert sometime).
First of all, does God really need all of this adoration. He is all-knowing,
isnt He? So he knows if you really care about Him, right? Worship therefore
comes off as sort of sucking up to the deity, ingratiating yourself for some
sort of special favoritism perhaps, or to get Him to favor your faith over
that of the those infidels over there bowing towards Mecca, or those Hindus
worshiping some god with the head of an elephant. Oh, I love you better and
more truly, oh great God of us all. I will build thee a bigger church. Who
loves ya, baby? I prostrate myself before thee.
What self-respecting God needs all this fawning? Its boring, and a waste of
time.
There is also something ostentatious about worship. People fall to their knees,
bang their heads of the floor, raise their hands heavenward, mutter prayers
and praises, they might even do harm to themselves with scourges and piercings.
Every year people are crushed to death in the worshipping throngs at Mecca.
It seems there is a bit of putting on for the crowd as well as trying to
impress the deity with the sincerity of their veneration. Rich people used
to (and still do) endow private chapels in the big churchessort of the executive
jets to the afterlifewhere they could worship away from those smelly co-religionists
all mobbed together in the nave. They could also inter themselves in their
chapels, their bodies in a permanent state of worship. Muslims make a haj,
Buddhists chant, others have festivals and ceremonies. I suspect a lot of worship
to be showing off.
People actually say that they worship. I worship at Chucks Church of the
Risen Christ and Muffler Repair, one might say. What? You mean thats a special
holy place in some strip mall along some godforsaken (I use that non-religiously)
ugly suburb. What makes that a place of worship? At least in the old days some
care and putative rationality was exercised in selecting a place of worship.
There had to be some sense that the location, was special. Maybe some goatherd
had a visitation of the BVM on some hill and that spot became sacred. Being
that that are closer to heaven, church locaters have long had a predilection
for mountaintops and hills for the placement of their places of worship. Failing
that, of course, churches use to have the highest spire, or campanile in the
city.
At any time around the world there will be people worshiping someone or something
that they have no evidence whatsoever even exists. They have a vision in their
head perhaps, some idea that has been implanted by their culture, some Osiris,
or Amun, or Yahweh, or Ganesh, or Buddha, or Jesus, or whatever. They will
be spinning prayer wheels, dobbining at the Western wall, choking on incense
in a moldy temple, or trying to find the direction of Mecca from a Wal Mart
parking lot in Wisconsin (GPS improves the accuracy of Muslim worship.)
So where will President Obama be worshipping? I thought I wouldnt be concerned
about that, but now I am. We had an idiot for a president for eight years who
allegedly got down on his knees for some divine advice on how to run this country.
What we got was disaster, and by a man who has neither reservations nor regrets
about the death and destruction he has brought, nothing to confess, nothing
to seek forgiveness for. It is unknown just how much Obamas faith is a product
of listening to the ravings of Rev. White, or owes to political acumen. But
I resent his using my vote to give a religious bigot a national pulpit, and
secondly for giving validation to the insidious conjunction of church and state.
Maybe he sees this move as good ecumenical politics, but it might also be
a regrettable Faustian compact. I am reminded of a street in Rome that runs
from the Vatican toward the heart of the Capitol. Its called Via della Conciliazione
and was built by Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator to effect a dtente
with Pope Pius XI. I dont want to see Pennsylvania Avenue turned into Americas
Street of Conciliation with the fascists of the Religious Right. If Obama
needs a place of worship I recommend the Lincoln Memorial.
_______________________________________________________________
2008, James A. Clapp
54. 4: VENETIA ADOREMUS 12.15.2008
Daughter Laura sent me a bunch of photos she found of the aqua alta in
Venice these daysthe highest in over 30 years. It is a preview of what global
warming will do to this city that is only two feet off the Adriatic lagoon
at its lowest point, near Piazza San Marco. Laura wrote look what is happening
to our lovely city! I know what she meant. She spent a lot of time there
as a Guggenheim fellow years ago, learning curatorship in the Guggenheim
gallery there. She had fallen in love with the city when we visited as a
family several years before.
Aqua
alta in Piazza San Marco (2008). Danza
Europa rehearsal on stage (1979)
I have probably visited Venice at least a dozen times in the years since 1975
and 2000. No city I ever visited had the initial impact upon me as the first
time I exited the Stazione into what felt like the 12th century. My first thought
was Oh, shit, I didnt bring nearly enough film! (I dont think that digital
cameras were even imagined in 1975.) For an urbanist, this was equivalent to
what it would be for a photographer to be asked to do a nude layout of Angelina
Jolie.
On that first visit, with Patty, I was never quite sure what time period I
was in. We stayed in a cheap hotel in the Lista de Spagna, just down from the
Stazione. Below our room, a street vender was selling model gondolas that played
O Sole Mio (really a song from Naples); the window on the side of our room
was touching distance from the kitchen window of a local family. They greeted
us unabashedly while they sugared up their morning coffee.
That day Patty had discovered that there was a Giacometti exhibit at an old
palazzo not far from the hotel. Off we went and turned out being the only viewers
of a beautiful exhibition in the spacious rooms of the grand old palazzo. The
Giacomettis had plenty of space between each other, standing and striding tall
on their pedestals, as though we were in a piazza full of bulimics. When we
were about to leave, the sole custodian approached me, in Italian, and asked
me if I would something special for another couple mille lire. I thought
it odd to be approached about what I figured would be some porn, but then my
Italian isnt very good. He took my hesitancy as possible interest and steered
me to a plain door. When he opened it I could see that there was a dark staircase
leading up. Ascendere, he said.
I hesitated. Patty was still looking at the Giacomettis. Something looked strange
in the gloom of the narrow staircase. Non pericolo, he said. Molto interessante,
you will like. Then he reached past me and flipped on a light switch. A forty-Watt
bulb neat the top of the staircase barely illuminated what I saw to be life-size
figures lining both sides of the staircase. Warriors. Giapponese, he said,
Ascendere.
I was one of those calls you encounter when traveling; am I going to be mugged,
or is this going to be a positive unforgettable travel experience. I called
Patty over. Oh, my God, she exclaimed when her eyes adjusted to he gloom,
whats at the top?
Ascendere, non pericolo, signora, the guide encouraged. He didnt have to
with Patty. She was into things Japanese, just having written a paper on
Jomon pottery in ancient Japan. I reached for my wallet, but the guide gestured
and said, Dopo, if the signora likes. Ascendere.
Patty, fearless, went first, and I slowly followed her as we climb past what
were fully-dressed warriors with fierce face masks, beneath ornamented helmets,
standing at attention in breast armor, with greaves and battle boots, with
spears and bows and fully loaded quivers. It was like being in a Kurosawa movie.
The little bulb cast ominous shadows that seemed to quicken the warriors as
we passed them. They are scary, Patty said, but Im taller than all of them.
She was.
At the top was a large room with a low ceiling that seemed to be the attic
of the palazzo. A little light was admitted by small windows of what appeared
to be blown glass formed in a rough circular pattern. It made it all the more
shadowy and ominous. Filling nearly the entire room that was about the size
of a tennis court were more warriorsall standing at attention with spears
and bows, their fierce masks staring at us, in ranks and files. We walked along,
as if reviewing the troops, as shafts a sepia light from the windows filled
with dust motes flashed between them. There must have been at least a hundred
of them!
I wonder how long they have been here? Patty wondered aloud. We speculated
that they might have been here as long as the palazzo, and it probably dated
from the 12th or 13th century. How did they get here? Marco Polo, was our first
guess, the Polo house was not far from where we were. But the Polos never went
to Japan. But the Jesuits did. They were there making money and coverts around
the time that hoards warriors in this sort of battle array were going at it
in sifting power alliances during the shogunate. But they were mostly Portuguese
Jesuits. It was a mystery, but the warriors had to extend as far back as the
earliest connections between Italian traders and Japan. They might have been
standing in this attic, at attention, for as long as five centuries.
These have to be authentic, I said. They must be worth a fortune today.
There was no doubt of their authenticity. Covered as they were with dust, it
was clear that the breast pates were made of lacquered bamboo finely woven
together with silk, the Darth Vader shaped helmets, each with different top
adornments, were metal and also lacquered. There was no doubt about the weapons.
Probably more than those Giacomettis down stairs, Patty offered. Amazing
that they have not ended up on some art black market after all this time.
There was certainly a story there. Perhaps some enterprising Italian trader
thought he could get a great price for these in Europe, or maybe some financial
backer behind a trading expedition ended up with them as loan collateral. Then,
maybe he was just holding onto them for speculation and then he died and this
curious army ended up standing at attention through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment,
revolutions and world wars, waiting for the call to battle.
I doubled the tip for the custodian (I think he expected I would do that
after what we saw), and we stepped out into who knows what time period, having
experienced the closest one can get to actual time travel. No other city quite
gives one that sensation as does Venice. In fact, Venice is a city that is
in many ways constrained from changing, a circumstance that is both its blessing
and its curse.
Back in the 4th century the founders of Venice escaped the barbarian hoards
descending to pick over the remnants of the Roman Empire by pounding some three
million larch piles into the clay of the lagoon and building their city on
top of them. The architecture of the city was deliberately lightenedhence
the lacey appearance of Venetian Gothic as expressed in the Palazzo Ducales
signature quatrefoilsto reduce the pressure on what is, essentially, a floating
city. Perhaps that reality is why Venice long ago ingratiated itself to its
watery surroundings by calling itself the Bride of the Adriatic and re-celebrates
its marriage in an annual event. But the Bride is now a dowager, and less than
a meter off the sea vulnerable not only to sinking, but to global warmings
effects on rising seas and storm surges. This time the aqua alta invaded Piazza
San Marco, the citys lowest point, to nearly five feet, one of the highest
floodings in many years, and perhaps a harbinger of a more imminent grim future.
I remember two occasions in the great piazza that have been highlights among
all my travel experiences, both of them unplanned coincidence of my being in
Venice. In 1979 the middle of the great square had a large wooden stage constructed
with sloping sides that gave it a modern form that contrasted with its surroundings.
The stage was for Danza Europe and troop that, on the evening of its performance,
came down the Grand Canal on barges performing ballets. They then occupied
the stage and emerged from trap doors in its surface to perform ballets that,
it being late into the evening, projects shadows of their dances on the faade
of the cathedral of San Marco. Among the dancers was the great ballerina, Carla
Fracci.
Several years later, I happened into the square on the evening of my arrival
in June to encounter Venice in the midst of its feast of the Redentore, of
the citys deliverance from the plague of 1576, and which is also the name
of the church by Palladio near the tip of the Giudecca. Huge speakers around
the square played Vivaldi, and the longest, most spectacular fireworks display
I have ever witnessed took place out over the lagoon. It was well worth it
to take as seat at a table at Florians Caf and enjoy the festivities over
a couple of over-priced cappuccinos.
The great square is no stranger to grand spectaculars; one can see those of
old commemorated in the paintings of Bellini, Carpaccio and Canaletto, among
other great Venetian artists. One day the aqua alta might come and not recede,
leaving only the memories that this unique city and its special piazza have
given me, and so many others. It is a painful prospect to consider, but Nature
cares little for our grandest creations or our precious memories.
_________________________________________________________
2008, James A. Clapp
54. 3: BEYOND BELIEF 12.10.2008
2008, UrbisMedia
I have no issue with the man or woman sitting beside me in a caf or on a bus
mumbling prayers to themselves because their back hurts, a loved one is ill,
or even if they think I am some demon or devil. I dont care if they are supplicating
God, Yahweh, Allah, Shiva, or Ron L. Hubbard in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic or jibberish
tongues. It doesnt matter if they are fingering rosaries, poisonous snakes
or prayer wheels, wearing beanies or phylacteries, goofy underwear or nothing
at all. I dont give a rats ass if they think shellfish is unsacred, having
sex on certain days is haram, practicing birth control is sinful, or that they
think they are reincarnated or thetans. It is done billions of times each
day.
As long as they keep it to themselves. Notice that I didnt write as long as
they keep it to their kind. Because that would be making the jump from individual
belief to collective religion, and in my view thats when the trouble begins.
Mind you, I think that believing in the stuff that people believe in is real
WMDwilling mass delusion. I personally believe, and this is a more empirically
provable point than most any religious belief, that most people just ingest
their beliefs by growing up in credulous societies. Mothers are saying God
bless you at your first sneeze, and then scaring the poop out of you by telling
you about devils and demonsboogey men. Every society has them. Belief in what
cannot be evidenced or proved is everywhere.
So, from the beginning we go into the same mode we go into when we read fiction
or watch a moviewilling suspension of disbeliefthere is no reason to believe
any of it because there is no reason in it. Belief is a social construct passed
on from generation to generation by habit, custom, environment, by hope and
fear, and by threat, by the sword at ones neck.
It might well be that, even if you excised these beliefs from societies, that
people would come to some sorts of beliefs anyway, conjuring up some spirits
or elves, or angels and devils, or whatever, to explain to themselves what
their brains are yet incapable of find cause for. After all, Nature can
be pretty amazing and mysterious; birds fly, rain falls, things grow up out
of the ground, volcanoes erupt, so why not believe that there are spirits and
demons and anything one might imagine behind it all.
That is where religion latches onto belief. It provides quick and easy answers.
What is so amazing is that, for all the wonder and complexity of Nature, that
religion comes up with such crappy nonsense, such lack of imagination, such
silliness and foolishness, as answers. And what is more amazing is that people
buy it. They swallow the simple-minded narratives that religion comes up with
easier than they would anything they might accept in the secular dimensions
of their lives. Why bother with trying to figure out gravity, the circulation
of the blood, the orbits of the planets, evolution, DNA, and all that. God
made it that way; thats all you have to know.
What religion quickly figured out is what a good business religion is. Nothing
to invent (other than the narrative); nothing to produce (other than the climate
of fear), no costs of distribution (other than a pulpit and a few prophets,
and now with television . . .). Nature does all the work, with
its mysterious cycles, seasons, birth and deathall you have to do is invent
a director and a story and willing suspension of disbelief will do the rest.
What a business!
Well, theres more to it than that, of course. There just might be some people
who want to spoil your businessdisbelievers, heretics, blasphemers and those
pesky scientists. So part of your business need to get rid of these pesky folk.
Inquisitions, purges, pogroms, witch hunts work especially well, particularly
if you promise your assassins a free pass to paradise for doing your dirty
work for you.
And then there is the competition, offering a different version of the product
of beliefall these different religions, with different names for their gods.
They can cost you money and power. Crusades promise the same paradise, but
any war will do. It is amazing just how easy it is to start wars over religion.
In fact, most wars are over religious differences, or religion figures into
it in some way or another. Killing the other guy in the name of your god is
a time-honored tradition in the history of religious belief. The amazing thing
is that most gods are presented as gods of peace and even that all men are
brothers under the same god. The key word here must be brothers.
Theological hegemony is why most religions seek out alliances with, or seek
to supplant, secular political power. It is the time-honored manner in which
religions become, officially, or unofficially, the state religion and thereby
can begin official, or unofficial, persecution, or expunging of competitive
religions. It also helps if religions can insinuate themselves into the military
dimension of society. Most recently in the United States this has been most
evident in the success Christian chaplains have been able to intimidate non-Christian
cadets at the Air Force Academy. All but needless to say, is that military
events and ceremonies are dominated by Christian, especially Protestant denomination
prayers and liturgies and have built a reflexive association with patriotic
expression and behavior. This process would be similar in, say, Muslim societies.
Thus, religions become an almost automatic influence upon societies, often
retarding social and intellectual progress with belief in scriptural notions
that are accepted uncritically. But there are even more subtle influences that
make for a credulous society. Fantasy has a strong association with religious
belief. It is required for the credulous to accept supernatural beings involving
miracles and preternatural powers, none of which need to be proven to be believed.
Some fantasies are necessary to establish narratives that give religion a pseudo-historical
character and provide its dramatic (conflictive) dimension. This has been evident
in the recent rise of entertainment fantasy in contemporary society. Some religions
have become concerned with the popularity of fantasies such as the Harry
Potter stories, which have been interpreted as involving witchcraft, and with alternate
realities and alternate worlds fantasies such as The Chronicles of Narnia and Lord
of the Rings narratives, and even the Star Wars futuristic fantasies,
that involve supernatural powers and events that are not related to the Biblical
narrative. The great popularity of computer games with fantastic creatures
and their doings has become a concern not only for religious authorities, but
secular (behaviorists, psychologists and psychiatrists) authorities as well
when (especially young) people spend large amounts of time participating
in realms of un-reality.
Whether the rise in popularity of such fantastic stories signals a corresponding
rise in belief beyond sense and reason in the current age remains to be seen.
Long periods of human existence have involved belief in the unknown and unknowable.
For long periods diseases and sickness were explained by demons and possession,
and persons were regarded as witches and in league with forces of darkness
and subjected to torture and execution. Humans have a great creative capacity
to substitute fantasy where there is a vacuum of knowledge or a need for certainty.
Large numbers of Americans believe in visitations to earth by extra-terrestrial
beings, a large subset of these in their own close encounters and abductions.
Much of these universally un-proven beliefs appears to rely upon a need to
believe, a need for explanation, that comes from great dissatisfaction
with existential personal life or with paranoia about political events
and circumstances.
We live in modern times, but it is astounding how much fantasy there is in
our lives. Fantasy and belief in that which is beyond the knowable are
part of being human, but they are not part of the rational capabilities
of being human. Many of us had imaginary friends as children, and were
afraid of the dark. Some grow up to have multiple personalities and strange
compulsions and are paranoid. Some grow up to believe in gods, angels,
devils and heaven and hell. Still others see in belief a good business
opportunity, a chance to wear silly hats and clothing, and means to exercise
control over the lives of others. I see them as a dangerous enemy of reason
and a threat to human development.
______________________________________________________________________
2008, James A. Clapp
54. 2: DESCARTES' BONES, by Russell
Shorto (2008) BR 12.5.2008
What happens to our consciousness after we die? What some people call a soul,
they believe, will head off for heaven, the afterlife, Elysian fields, nirvana,
or another round of reincarnation. Or, when we die it's game over; you got
your chance at being a unique and self-conscious arrangement of carbon atoms
for a period you no doubt considered too brief, but that's it, you and your
consciousness, or soul, or whatever, are history. It's a big, and unanswered
question, one that can make a big difference in how we conduct our lives. Most
societies, of course, have conjured a more sanguine, "see ya later," narrative
(except for that hot place, of course) because it's a more comfy way to think
about such things. Cogito.
Cogito, ergo sum is the way Rene Descartes, a philosophical reductio
that takes us right down to whether we are a mind and/or body that are here
in the first place. Descartes concludes in favor of self-consciousness, but
as Shorto affirms, the Frenchman who lived in the low countries and died
in Sweden did a lot more than that he basically gave birth to modernism and
ignited (or poured fuel upon) the debate between Faith and Reason, and mind/body
dualism. The philosophical conundrums are woven around the tantalizing mystery
of what really happened to the philosopher's bones.
These dualisms-faith and reason and mind and body-are comingled in the 17th
century mind, or at least those minds inclined to think about such things,
who were mostly churchmen and philosophers (this includes people we call scientists
these days). Mind, consciousness, what was closest to the locus of the soul,
had to be distinct and separate from the body (really the brain, in this case).
If not, the result was "materialism," the idea that mind and its thoughts exist
only in the physical brain, in its neurological connectivity. Ergo, when the
brain goes, so does the mind and, if mind is the "soul" of us, so it goes.
The Church, that is the Roman Catholic Church, of which Descartes was a baptized
member, if not much of an adherent, would not have liked that.
That debate remains, but its contenders in these times end to be among the
neo-Freudians and the Cognitive scientists and neuro-pharmacologists who have
found operative connections between emotions and brain chemistry. Even our
newfound digital phenomena comes into play, at least metaphorically (or until
we discover means to connect carbon-based life with silicone-based "life").
We might well ask ourselves if the software on our computers could exist if
not because it must reside on some sort of hardware. Where does our software
go when our hard drive crashes and dies? Remember how Hal 9000 felt when Dave
took apart his "mind" silicone chip, by silicone chip?
This is not my usual tendency to digress, but to connect the intellectual world
pried open by Descartes' cogito long ago with the creation of the modern world
for which Shorto rightly gives him considerable credit. Shorto drags the slight,
unhandsome philosopher out of your old Philosophy 101 class and smack into
the middle of the most pressing political and social issues of our times. His
approach is two-fold: one to engage us in a mystery (what happened o the bones?)
that allows him to connect the physicality of Descartes with issues related
to brain physiology (since the prime bone of concern is the skull of Descartes).
Second, he connects the secularizing influence of Cartesianism in the late
1600s and onward with the resurgence of religious fundamentalism and anti-modernism
in the present age.
Descartes raised hell, literally for Scholastic philosophers of his time, such
as Gysbert Voetius, and Aristotelian theologian and rector of the University
of Utrecht, who perceived the dangers of Descartes' influential 1637 Discourse
on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences,
Plus the Dioptric, Meteors, and Geometry, Which Ares Essays in This Method,
to the academic establishment. Voetius railed against The Method, linking it
with the other major challenges to an educational system that were dominated
by Roman Catholicism's problems with Galileo and Copernicus.
Descartes, a gifted mathematician who pioneered the application of mathematics
to physics and the use of algebra for geometrical shapes that would be the
basis of the calculus, was also, this reader learned, very much the rational
empiricist. After he decamped from Leiden for Stockholm at the invitation of
Queen Christina, he engaged in examinations of animal organs and vivisections
in order to learn about the relationships between internal organs. This was
a time when life expectancy in France and the rest if Europe was 28 to 30,
and half the children born in London were dead by age fifteen. Wars figured
in these statistics, but so did misunderstood and often fatal diseases that
were called ague, apoplexy, flux, dropsy, commotion and consumption. There
were a lot of mistakes; even Descartes believed that the heart's purpose was
to heat blood, not pump it. Physicians still employed astrology and phlebotomy
(bleeding), which is how Descartes himself, who first refused to be bled at
his final illness, but in weakness relented, was probably killed in Stockholm
in 1650.
Then began the curious and circuitous journey of the philosopher's remains.
He was first buried in a rather plan grave in Sweden (where probably much of
the putrefaction of the soft tissues must have taken place), but the French
wanted the man who was the most famous philosopher of his time back home. It's
a long story, but the skull might have been removed before the casket (the
bones were apparently separated to fit into a smaller box) was out of Sweden.
The French soon discovered this, but there wasn't much they could do about
it and even then there was the debate about where Descartes should come to
rest in Paris. He had a few different places of interment and spent time in
a Museum of French antiquities during French Revolution. The bones that ended
up a St. Germain-des-Pres may not even be the right bones, those having been
ground up when another church where he was buried, St. Genevieve, was torn
down and where the plaque was misaligned with the placing of the casket.
The skull of Descartes is another matter. It turns up later in Sweden and then
is passed on or sold many times, finally ending in France where it becomes
the subject of much speculation about brain size, the functions of the hemispheres
and just as much pseudo-science (Phrenology, for example) as real science.
Shorto lightly connects these interests to the works of Cassirer, Carl Becker
and Jurgen Habermas, among others, and speculates that, in some sense, the
skull figures into the foundation of psychology. Meanwhile, the mind of Descartes
is reconnected with its relationship to the battle between reason and faith,
and liberalism and absolutism. He even quotes Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's
letter (probably unread) to George Bush: "Liberalism and Western-style democracy
have not been able to realize the ideals of humanity. Today, these two concepts
have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering
and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems. .
. . the will of God will prevail over all things."
That question will likely be settled more by politics than philosophical discourse.
Even so, we will be left with the big question that is a corollary to the cogito-where
does it all go? We are not even certain that this skull once contained the
brain that "contained" the brilliant mind of Rene Descartes.
_________________________________________________________
2008, James A. Clapp
54. 1: DEATH IN BOMBAY; DEATH IN MUMBAI 12.01.2008
In 1992, my dear friend, Sue, and I flew into then Bombay (now Mumbai) from London on December 6, for a few days before taking ship to other Indian ports and eventually to Hong Kong. We transferred to the magnificent Taj Mahal hotel, beside the historic Gateway of India seen in these photos. Later, we transferred over to the Oberoi Hotel on the west side of the peninsula that Mumbai occupies.
Views of the gateway Arch to India from hotel room at morning and evening
.
Seeing these two hotels again, in the news, and besieged by terrorists who killed more than 150 people was a reminder of our own brush with terror in that visit sixteen years ago. Whether or not that incident, reprised from a posting I made in these pages on 01/07/2004, is related to the historical antipathies in India that continue to plague the country, is yet to be determined, but it is clear that, for all of its rich and fascinating cultural stew, India remains a country that can turn violent as quickly as a monsoon rain storm.
View from room in the Taj Mahal Hotel, and magnificent interior atrium design.
Bombay Jihad (December 1992)
The last thing I would have thought as the huge sewer pipes rolled ominously toward my taxi was that I might be done in by a dispute over a land use. After all, this was Bombay, and the land use at issue was nearly a thousand kilometers away in Ayodhya.
But this was India, and the land use was a mosque, one reputedly built on the site of the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama in 1,500 B.C. Never mind that the mosque was built over it only thirty years after Columbus discovered America. Like I said, this was India, and disputes go back a long way in these parts. And so do the antipathies over which god or goddess is the rightful resident of a piece of holy ground. The current controversy was precipitated when 4,000 fundamentalist Hindu "kar sevaks" pulled the Babri Mosque down with their bare hands yesterday, and now there were aftershocks all over India.
Fires were already burning in several parts of Bombay, in one of the areas of "chawls," where tens of thousands inhabit these ancient and rickety tenements at incredible densities, and in the teeming shanty-colonies that through squinted-eyes and pinched-nostrils, are indistinguishable, visually, olfactorily, and, socially, from (un)sanitary land-fills.
People were already dead, slain as much by religious bigotry and hatred as by the knives that are the preferred implement of dispatching their victims to Allah or to another round of Hindu reincarnation. Casualties of a holy land use war.
"Go for it!" I encouraged the driver, who seemed to be considering abandoning his taxi and fare as hundreds of others already had. So he weaved between and around the huge sewer pipes that could have crushed the taxi like a Pepsi can. The irony of it all wasn't lost on me: in a city that sorely needs some sewerage they use the pipes to block streets and conduct murderous riots.
That wasn't all. Here we were on my way back from a visit to Gandhi's house, the pacifist who had several times threatened to starve himself to death to arrest the Hindu-Muslim carnage that took more than a million lives after the British partitioned the sub-continent into India and two Pakistans in 1947. And one of the dioramas at Gandhi's house showed him being assassinated by a Hindu fanatic who belonged to the Hindu extremist faction that is precursor to the current kar sevaks. Not to mention that me, a lapsed-Catholic, had a good chance of being killed in an officially secular state in a war between two religions. Would it be preferable to have my throat slit by a mob of Muslims, or Hindus? Better not at all.
"Keep going!" I ordered the driver.
In the previous days' wanderings about this exotic and swollen city it had seemed there was little left to be disputed in the use of its land. In reflection of its social castes, the architecture and land use of Bombay co-exist and juxtapose in astonishing variance. Below our window in the renowned Taj Mahal Hotel reposed hundreds whose beds consisted of littered and feculent sidewalks. Here, and along most of the streets of this bustling metropolis, untold numbers live, eat, copulate, sleep, beg, and die, alfresco.
The Taj Hotel, like the Victoria Terminus train station, and the University of Bombay radiate the Gothic splendors of the departed British Raj, cheek by jowl with deity-festooned Hindu temples, and pitiable enterprises countless street vendors. On the west side of town splashy high-rise modern hotels garland the magnificent corniche of Chowpatty Beach, interspersed with derelict buildings and homeless. Soul-searing poverty and hopelessness taint every land use in Bombay. There is nothing, and everything, to fight and die for.
Our taxi pulled into the relative safety of the port the Bombay. The death
toll had reached seventy. Only as our ship glided past the Gateway Arch of
India did it occur to me that, for so many here there is probably little
more to hope for than a better afterlife. It seems like the only hope left
in a country that makes jihad over where their gods can reside.
________________________________________________________________________
Originally published in the San Diego American Planning Association Journal,
James A, Clapp, March, 1993. Posted: Wed - January 7, 2004