Giving Up the Car
I just finished reading Noel Perrin's "Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879" for the second time. The first time I read it was for a dinner party/discussion group with noted military history professor Dennis Showalter in 1998 while attending the US Air Force Academy. This book is very important for a number of reasons...
First, let's not pull any punches: Perrin's historiographical method is poor. Perrin didn't speak Japanese, and largely fails to discuss one key to Japan's successful "giving up the gun" was that Tokugawa had unified the country and eliminated the impetus for warfare that existed prior to the Shogunate.
That said, the book is really an in-depth exploration of the ability of society to effectively "turn back the clock," to set aside an available and known technology due to a cultural preference. In the end, Japanese society consciously chose to set aside the gun in favor of a less "efficient" form of military killing that better suited their desire to maintain the class and cultural status quo. Specifically, samurai found that their heroic stature on the battlefield, their cultural significance, and their place in Japan's feudal hierarchy were endangered by a weapon such as the gun that effectively leveled the playing field and allowed plebeian marksmen to mow them down at will. Because of their leverage within the Shogunate, and because of the prevailing desire to maintain cultural "harmony" by the elites, the gun was effectively marginalized.
Even when I first discussed this book in 1998, it was in the context of the ability of human society to set aside a technological possibility for the long term benefit to humanity of not pursuing the short-term gain promised by that technology. Then, the specific focus was nuclear armaments. I re-read the book for the same reason, but today my interest was in the ability of human society to set aside our energy-intensive culture for our own long-term benefit--whether that comes in the form of climate change, preparation for peaking of fossil fuel production, or simply maintaining a level of information processing and hierarchy that is compatible with the human genome. I still think that Perrin's book has valuable insight to offer on this question--a question that I think is increasingly critical for the future of humanity.
Unfortunately, after re-reading Perrin, I am more pessimistic about the ability of modern society to set aside our current reliance on cheap and polluting energy in favor of some more sustainable economic basis for society. Perrin's analysis of Tokugawa Japan highlights (in part due to his historiographical failings) one key feature that facilitated Japan's "giving up the gun" but that is not present in modern society: economic, political, and military power all unified within a shared cultural framework. In Japan, the feudal economic and military system was composed of individual who were also the key to the contemporary military order, who shared a common cultural ethos, and who uniformly benefited themselves by supporting the Shogun's efforts to maintain that system by marginalizing guns. Modern society does not enjoy this kind of "unified command" of political, military, and social elements. Rather, and especially in comparison to modern industrial society, Japan in the Shogunate was hegemonic and could effectively move in unity in a single direction provided that the class of power-brokers uniformly benefited. Today, if the US were to effectively transition to a sustainable economic footing, India and China would most likely just pick up any slack in the system, and would likely even leverage the short-term benefit they would enjoy in both economic AND military advantage. Similarly, if one corporation or one individual were to make such a transition to sustainability, others would likely exploit their short-term inefficiency (or failure to maximally exploit the environment) to their own advantage. It is a new twist on a classic "tragedy of the commons" scenario: the global commons in energy consumption and environmental degradation requires that all players maximize their near-term consumption and pollution or lose out in power to those who do, without actually preserving energy or the environment through their own sacrifice.
It's a poor analogue, but "giving up the car" may be the close to the modern equivalent of giving up the gun. Absent a modern Shogunate to impose upon the masses what may (ultimately) be in our own best interest--preserving our environment, embarking on some form of oil depletion protocol, minimizing impact on climate--we likely won't choose to do so on our own. And even if we could muster the political will to do so in America, or in Europe, someone else will recognize this for what it is--an opportunity--and their resultant increase in consumption/pollution will eliminate any positive effect of our sacrifice. Which leads me to Vail's 10th Law (I'm still working on the first 9): any "solution" that requires people or government to behave better than they have in the past is doomed at the outset to failure. Or at least doomed to working as well as that strategy has worked in the past...
If I had to boil down my thinking into a meta-theory, it is that the trajectory of human society is a result of the structure of that society, and not of the individual wills at work within it. Change requires changing that structure, not producing some "great man" to lead the pliant masses. Right now our structure doesn't allow us to "give up the gun," or to give up the car either. At least not voluntarily. We may be able to, as individuals, see that it would be the wisest long-term course of action, but that is a very different thing than taking that path, collectively, as human society...
First, let's not pull any punches: Perrin's historiographical method is poor. Perrin didn't speak Japanese, and largely fails to discuss one key to Japan's successful "giving up the gun" was that Tokugawa had unified the country and eliminated the impetus for warfare that existed prior to the Shogunate.
That said, the book is really an in-depth exploration of the ability of society to effectively "turn back the clock," to set aside an available and known technology due to a cultural preference. In the end, Japanese society consciously chose to set aside the gun in favor of a less "efficient" form of military killing that better suited their desire to maintain the class and cultural status quo. Specifically, samurai found that their heroic stature on the battlefield, their cultural significance, and their place in Japan's feudal hierarchy were endangered by a weapon such as the gun that effectively leveled the playing field and allowed plebeian marksmen to mow them down at will. Because of their leverage within the Shogunate, and because of the prevailing desire to maintain cultural "harmony" by the elites, the gun was effectively marginalized.
Even when I first discussed this book in 1998, it was in the context of the ability of human society to set aside a technological possibility for the long term benefit to humanity of not pursuing the short-term gain promised by that technology. Then, the specific focus was nuclear armaments. I re-read the book for the same reason, but today my interest was in the ability of human society to set aside our energy-intensive culture for our own long-term benefit--whether that comes in the form of climate change, preparation for peaking of fossil fuel production, or simply maintaining a level of information processing and hierarchy that is compatible with the human genome. I still think that Perrin's book has valuable insight to offer on this question--a question that I think is increasingly critical for the future of humanity.
Unfortunately, after re-reading Perrin, I am more pessimistic about the ability of modern society to set aside our current reliance on cheap and polluting energy in favor of some more sustainable economic basis for society. Perrin's analysis of Tokugawa Japan highlights (in part due to his historiographical failings) one key feature that facilitated Japan's "giving up the gun" but that is not present in modern society: economic, political, and military power all unified within a shared cultural framework. In Japan, the feudal economic and military system was composed of individual who were also the key to the contemporary military order, who shared a common cultural ethos, and who uniformly benefited themselves by supporting the Shogun's efforts to maintain that system by marginalizing guns. Modern society does not enjoy this kind of "unified command" of political, military, and social elements. Rather, and especially in comparison to modern industrial society, Japan in the Shogunate was hegemonic and could effectively move in unity in a single direction provided that the class of power-brokers uniformly benefited. Today, if the US were to effectively transition to a sustainable economic footing, India and China would most likely just pick up any slack in the system, and would likely even leverage the short-term benefit they would enjoy in both economic AND military advantage. Similarly, if one corporation or one individual were to make such a transition to sustainability, others would likely exploit their short-term inefficiency (or failure to maximally exploit the environment) to their own advantage. It is a new twist on a classic "tragedy of the commons" scenario: the global commons in energy consumption and environmental degradation requires that all players maximize their near-term consumption and pollution or lose out in power to those who do, without actually preserving energy or the environment through their own sacrifice.
It's a poor analogue, but "giving up the car" may be the close to the modern equivalent of giving up the gun. Absent a modern Shogunate to impose upon the masses what may (ultimately) be in our own best interest--preserving our environment, embarking on some form of oil depletion protocol, minimizing impact on climate--we likely won't choose to do so on our own. And even if we could muster the political will to do so in America, or in Europe, someone else will recognize this for what it is--an opportunity--and their resultant increase in consumption/pollution will eliminate any positive effect of our sacrifice. Which leads me to Vail's 10th Law (I'm still working on the first 9): any "solution" that requires people or government to behave better than they have in the past is doomed at the outset to failure. Or at least doomed to working as well as that strategy has worked in the past...
If I had to boil down my thinking into a meta-theory, it is that the trajectory of human society is a result of the structure of that society, and not of the individual wills at work within it. Change requires changing that structure, not producing some "great man" to lead the pliant masses. Right now our structure doesn't allow us to "give up the gun," or to give up the car either. At least not voluntarily. We may be able to, as individuals, see that it would be the wisest long-term course of action, but that is a very different thing than taking that path, collectively, as human society...
Labels: Anthropology, Energy
posted by Jeff Vail at 1:16 AM
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