Ask Nathan Anything: Quarantine Edition

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

How comparable have Japanese and, broadly-speaking, "European" political structures been, pre-1945 (let's say going back to the 1600s or whenever)?  Additionally, was Japan more or less comparable than other notable contemporaneous non-European political organizations?

We of course use the term "feudal Japan", but I have no idea how accurate a characterization that is, and some (Barrington Moore Jr.) have even compared the late stages of Japanese militarism to fascism (though there is substantial reason to be skeptical).

I tend to be pretty generous about drawing parallels between Japanese and European political developments, certainly more generous than with other Western/non-Western parallels. The way I was taught about medieval Japan indicated that the system there genuinely was very similar to European feudalism. You have the same structure of theoretical overall hegemon, de facto (i.e. armed to the teeth) political leadership of the country, lords, vassals, peasants, nascent urban middle class, and so forth, right down to the polycephalous moral authority-cum-power broker role of "the church"--although Japan had a diversity of Buddhist denominations as opposed to Europe's Catholic/Orthodox duopoly. One interesting difference is that in the producerist-inclined Confucian-ish class system the peasants were nominally "above" the artisans and merchants; however, in practice it didn't work that way.

I tend to refer to Japan's 1932-1945 period as fascist when speaking with non-specialists and ultranationalist (the currently-preferred scholarly term) when speaking with fellow Japan studies people. In my reading of the history involved, it had most of the same features as European fascism but with a stronger religious element (the religion of course being State Shinto, an unwieldy chimera with next to no meaningful theological resemblance to previous stages of Shinto's development) and (relatedly) without the claim to have broken from the more "traditional" hard right.

So it seems that "ultranationalist" Japan lacked fascism's "revolutionary" claims. There are a few other key points that I'd probably consider key to "fascism", not being an expert in it myself--namely, the idea of a mass-mobilizing party (a.k.a. the adaptation of reaction to the modern age of mass participation in politics). Was some form of this present in Japan?

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

How do we reconcile the Judeo-Christian Fall of Man with the fact that, so far as we know based on history and evolution, the events in the Garden do not appear to have taken place? I think there's something to be said for, perhaps, the growth of independent consciousness, but I'd like the take of someone who's far more theologically minded than myself, and the defense there is probably flimsy.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

How comparable have Japanese and, broadly-speaking, "European" political structures been, pre-1945 (let's say going back to the 1600s or whenever)?  Additionally, was Japan more or less comparable than other notable contemporaneous non-European political organizations?

We of course use the term "feudal Japan", but I have no idea how accurate a characterization that is, and some (Barrington Moore Jr.) have even compared the late stages of Japanese militarism to fascism (though there is substantial reason to be skeptical).

I tend to be pretty generous about drawing parallels between Japanese and European political developments, certainly more generous than with other Western/non-Western parallels. The way I was taught about medieval Japan indicated that the system there genuinely was very similar to European feudalism. You have the same structure of theoretical overall hegemon, de facto (i.e. armed to the teeth) political leadership of the country, lords, vassals, peasants, nascent urban middle class, and so forth, right down to the polycephalous moral authority-cum-power broker role of "the church"--although Japan had a diversity of Buddhist denominations as opposed to Europe's Catholic/Orthodox duopoly. One interesting difference is that in the producerist-inclined Confucian-ish class system the peasants were nominally "above" the artisans and merchants; however, in practice it didn't work that way.

I tend to refer to Japan's 1932-1945 period as fascist when speaking with non-specialists and ultranationalist (the currently-preferred scholarly term) when speaking with fellow Japan studies people. In my reading of the history involved, it had most of the same features as European fascism but with a stronger religious element (the religion of course being State Shinto, an unwieldy chimera with next to no meaningful theological resemblance to previous stages of Shinto's development) and (relatedly) without the claim to have broken from the more "traditional" hard right.

So it seems that "ultranationalist" Japan lacked fascism's "revolutionary" claims. There are a few other key points that I'd probably consider key to "fascism", not being an expert in it myself--namely, the idea of a mass-mobilizing party (a.k.a. the adaptation of reaction to the modern age of mass participation in politics). Was some form of this present in Japan?

They tried. In 1940 all remaining legal political parties were dissolved into something called the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (Taisei Yokusankai), which was supposed to be a mass-mobilizing organ similar to the Fascist Party and the NSDAP. It never had the same hold on the Japanese consciousness, though, for reasons I don't completely understand (perhaps it didn't have to, since in Japan the top military brass was actually calling the shots and driving the ultranationalist project itself, as opposed to the Italian and German brass who were "merely" fully complicit enablers?).

How do we reconcile the Judeo-Christian Fall of Man with the fact that, so far as we know based on history and evolution, the events in the Garden do not appear to have taken place? I think there's something to be said for, perhaps, the growth of independent consciousness, but I'd like the take of someone who's far more theologically minded than myself, and the defense there is probably flimsy.

First of all, "Judeo-Christian" is an inappropriate term here because most Jewish theology doesn't understand Adam and Eve's sin to have drastically changed human nature. The concept of original sin is absent and in some Jewish interpretations so is the idea that the expulsion from Eden was even an unmitigated bad thing. So the Fall of Man as you and I understand it is a specifically Christian notion.

The Church teaches--maybe not as de fide dogma, but at a fairly high level of theological certitude nonetheless--that original sin does come from a specific sin that a specific common ancestor committed at some point in human prehistory. The detailed blow-by-blow of the Genesis 2 and 3 account is maybe not The Way Things Were in every particular or even in most particulars, but we know, to the extent that we "know" anything in the natural sciences, that common human ancestors did exist, so the aspects that are actually binding Catholic teaching aren't refuted. The 1950 encyclical Humani generis asserts that this isn't incompatible with the idea of that ancestor having himself biologically evolved. By the end of the twentieth century John Paul II was treating the coexistence of both of those concepts as established fact.

Personally, I have a crankish pet theory that the Fall changed the history of the universe, so to speak, retroactively, in the same way that the Atonement preserved Mary from original sin retroactively, but that's my fantasy-novelist self talking rather than something I would advance in actual theological argument.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Thank you. This was only vaguely touched on in my own religion classes and your explanation helps to round out the idea.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

How similar would you say Atlantic Canada is to New England?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

How similar would you say Atlantic Canada is to New England?

I'm not familiar enough with Atlantic Canada to say how similar it is today, but I can tell you that the two regions are intimately connected by history and that I personally do feel that their fates are in some sense intertwined. I'm not sure if I'd say I feel a kinship with Nova Scotians that I don't with Texans, but I'd definitely say I feel a kinship with Nova Scotians that I don't with Manitobans.

[Antonio the Sixth]

What are your thoughts on the Avignon Papacy (both in its legitimate and schismatic incarnations)? Did anything good come out of it, theologically, culturally or politically, or was it the unmitigated moral and PR disaster that it's usually portrayed as?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

What are your thoughts on the Avignon Papacy (both in its legitimate and schismatic incarnations)? Did anything good come out of it, theologically, culturally or politically, or was it the unmitigated moral and PR disaster that it's usually portrayed as?

I honestly don't know quite enough about it to say. I do know that Clement VI, the Pope during the Black Death, was an Avignon Pope, and from what I know he handled the plague about as well as any continent-wide leader could have and made an effort to stop the worst of the social reactions to it (such as the various pogroms). Characteristically for an Avignon Pope, he was also wildly corrupt and appointed dozens of members of his extended family to high Church positions, in addition to being hackishly pro-French even by Avignon Pope standards. So I wouldn't be surprised if there were other Avignon Popes too who, while staggeringly corrupt, were also on some level public-spirited and even devout.

[Cassius]

Thoughts on William Jennings Bryan?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Thoughts on William Jennings Bryan?

The tl;dr is that I have a more positive opinion of Bryan than not, and probably a more positive opinion of him than most modern American leftists do, but with several very serious qualms. But I want to take the time to give this a fuller and more considered answer. Watch this space.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Okay. William Jennings Bryan.

The first thing to keep in mind about Bryan is that he was a true #populist in a way that nobody in America today, with a political life that revolves around balancing interest groups as delicately as possible without pissing off campaign donors, could ever be. Bryan believed in (as this article about a very different Christian political thinker, L. Brent Bozell, puts it) "identifying an 'us' who must not be ruled by a 'them.'" I have mixed feelings about his analysis, in the political environment of the 1890s, about who the "us" and the "them" were. He was a ruralist who put very little effort into building bridges between the Western and Southern farmers he spoke for and industrial workers in the Midwest and Northeast; the ruralism appeals to me on an emotional level but it was counterproductive in an election in which a unified working-class front might have done better against what McKinley represented. (Admittedly, we'll never know how 1896 would have gone if the election had been held to today's standards for "free and fair"; many industrial workers voted for McKinley in part because their bosses threatened reprisals if they went for Bryan. But I still don't think Bryan would have won.) On the other hand, Bryan's Presidential campaigns were harbingers of what later became standard progressive policy in the US, such as a freer money supply and public-sector relief efforts in natural disasters and economic crises. (This article about Laura Ingalls Wilder talks a bit about how astonishingly coldhearted American policymakers were towards disaster survivors before 1896. Gilded Age America was a dark and cruel place and we need to resist efforts to drag us back to it at all costs. I'd be shocked if Bryan's Nebraska constituents' memories of "the Grasshopper Year" didn't help shape his views.)

About Bryan's brief, troubled tenure as Secretary of State under Wilson, I know less. Foreign policy isn't my area of expertise or greatest interest when it comes to American political history, other than what I consider no-brainers like "Mexican-American War bad; World War II mostly good (for the US); Cold War mixed bag". I admire Bryan's anti-war stance and I think his anti-imperialist stance was far ahead of its time, but I'm not as convinced that World War I neutrality was the right policy as are most people who lean non-interventionist. On the other hand, Secretary of State Bryan helped Wilson push through many of his first-term domestic reforms such as progressive income tax, and for that he deserves a ton of credit. Apparently he was also ahead of his time when it came to international arbitration, but I just read that on his Wikipedia article today and I don't know a ton about it.

Bryan's late career is generally looked upon as an embarrassment, but it's important to remember that there were what we'd recognize today as left-wing reasons to take some of the stances he did; Prohibition in particular presented itself as a "reformist" movement (although it was also of course a deeply bigoted one). People actually tend to forget this today partly because of the association of Bryan's late-period causes with the retrograde hick caricature a lot of people have of him. I don't fully agree with either the traditional ("Menckenian") view or the revisionist view of Bryan's creationist activism; I believe that it's true both that Bryan correctly opposed the way evolutionary theory was being used to justify unjust social hierarchies and that he was a dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalist seeking to make his religious views everybody else's problem. People are complicated.

A harsh critic of Bryan, Irving Stone, argued in They Also Ran that he was one of the crudest and most dangerous minds to come out of the nineteenth century; I don't agree with that at all, especially given some of the candidates Stone does think would have made good Presidents (Horace Greeley? Seriously?!). I agree with Michael Kazin that Bryan's greatest flaw is his rarely discussed--and at that time near-universal among white Democrats--acceptance of Jim Crow. Taking into account the context of the times, I think it's a far graver problem than any of the religious moralizing Bryan's more (in)famous for.

So. That's my take on William Jennings Bryan.

(Thanks for asking me this, btw; I had fun writing this answer. This is my second-favorite question I've gotten in this AMA so far, after "top ten hottest saints" back on the first page.)

[Lord Halifax]

Does Japanese culture lose anything valuable if sumo wrestling dies out or is it just a freakshow with archaic rules?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

What's your opinion of this song/lyrics?

(My opinion by the way is the song musically is a 10/10 utter classic....but HORRIBLE lyrics.)

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Does Japanese culture lose anything valuable if sumo wrestling dies out or is it just a freakshow with archaic rules?

The loss of a freakshow with archaic rules is always on some level a tragedy (temperamentally conservative, normal, insane).

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

thoughts on this video?

[All Along The Watchtower]

Favorite Gulf monarchy.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

What's your opinion of this song/lyrics?

(My opinion by the way is the song musically is a 10/10 utter classic....but HORRIBLE lyrics.)

I actually agree with you. Pretty good instrumentation, but geez those lyrics are awful.

thoughts on this video?

Good takeaway. A pretty good history/sociology lesson.

I'd correct the video on one point: The Vermont Republic's "legitimacy" isn't really what's in dispute; what's debatable is its sovereignty, since (just like the Texan and Hawaiian republics) it was formed with the full expectation that it'd be admitted to the US eventually.

Favorite Gulf monarchy.

UGH UGH UGH. Oman by process of elimination.

[Antonio the Sixth]

How familiar are you with the online left-wing media? What's your assessment of the role they've played in US politics since 2016, and what role do you envision for them going forward? What should an effective counter-hegemonic media strategy for the American left look like?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

How familiar are you with the online left-wing media? What's your assessment of the role they've played in US politics since 2016, and what role do you envision for them going forward? What should an effective counter-hegemonic media strategy for the American left look like?

By my own design, I know very little about online left-wing media with the sole exception of Current Affairs (which I like for the most part). What little I know about the rest of it makes it seem absolutely dreadful. An effective counter-hegemonic media strategy for the American left would perhaps not orient itself around emotionally immature extremists swearing constantly on podcasts.

ETA: I don't mean to be dismissive; online news/nonfiction media just isn't a genre that enthralls me as much as it does most people our age. I don't even like listening to podcasts very much (ironic since I'm writing one). The majority of what I read and watch is fiction and has been for a long time; for example, I've read about a dozen novels in the past three months, but it's rare that I sit down and read a whole nonfiction book, whereas you seem to be reading one more often than not.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I recently played Steins; Gate. Have you either played the VN or watched the show (which I haven't seen yet)?

I adore Steins; Gate, despite a few aspects I don't approve of.

I saw the show years and years ago, I want to say maybe in the spring of 2012, in my undergrad alma mater's anime club (Et in Arcadia ego...). I liked it a lot; I appreciate that it's usually pretty irreverent but is willing to shift into a more sentimental register when that's what's called for. (The "relativity theory is so romantic and sad" scene is undiluted bathos without sufficient context--readers of this thread will have noticed this based on the fact that "relativity theory is so romantic and sad" is an actual line that a character in this show says out loud--but becomes startlingly effective once you do have that context.) The show is also often laugh-out-loud funny, and it doesn't pull punches about what kinds of people in modern Japanese society would be liable to become Doc Brown LARPers fooling around with physics equipment in a walk-up apartment.

I haven't played the VN and I don't really feel like I'm missing much; something about the visual novel medium doesn't appeal to me even though I know plenty of great stories are being told in that medium.

I forgot that in my mid-to-late teens I actually was quite familiar with the VN series Umineko no naku koro ni, a beyond-tacky and utterly deranged but oddly affecting gothic romance* that got a pronouncedly subpar anime adaptation in 2009. The basic premise is that a guy gets kidnapped by a supernatural being and forced to watch her perpetrate the mass murder of his family over and over again in a time loop until he can prove there was a human culprit; also she keeps inserting her dominatrix fetishes into the time loop as a way of flirting with him. It made a big impression on teenage me, partly because of the femdom aspect (which is...pronounced, although never outright pornographic) but mostly because at the time I was also reading a lot of the Golden Age mystery novels that the murders in it are a pastiche of. A few nights ago I saw something that reminded me of the series for the first time in a long time and I've been going on a nostalgia binge of fan content and memes from it since.

*A tendentious designation for the story's genre, but I'm willing to back it up if challenged

[T'Chenka]

Can you share some of your general thoughts on Canada?

[afleitch]

Which party would you vote for, or against in Scotland?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Can you share some of your general thoughts on Canada?

In general I'm fond of the place and I've had good experiences on the occasions I've been there. I like a lot of the paradigmatic/stereotypical "Canadian foods"--maple and maple by-products, poutine, Tim Hortons. One of my favorite songwriters and poets, Leonard Cohen, was Canadian, as was my favorite right-of-center political philosopher, George P. Grant (mentioned up-thread). The province I'm most familiar with is Quebec, which is the easiest to reach from Western New England; I've been to both Quebec City and Montreal and had a great time in both. I don't have a ton of love lost for Quebec's political scene, though.

A few months ago I ran into a Quebecois woman selling maple syrup at a kiosk in a Christmas market in France; I felt as if she was "from home" much as I would have felt about somebody from the Northeastern United States. I think this ties back into what I was saying to TimTurner earlier about feeling a certain affinity for people from Atlantic Canada, too.

If I were approaching Canada as a cultural critic I'd observe:

1. that the Canadian self-stereotype of decency and politeness is really a national myth along much the same lines as "entrepreneurship" in the US; it's a way of asserting moral superiority for what's fundamentally a country much like any other in the developed world
2. that the series of views that Americans call "social liberalism" being as culturally hegemonic in Canada as it is, seems to be causing deep simmering resentments by circumscribing public discourse.

I wouldn't commit to either of those criticisms because I'm not Canadian, but those are the criticisms I would make.

Which party would you vote for, or against in Scotland?

Ideally I'd vote for Scottish Labour but in the current political environment I'd probably suck it up and vote SNP to stop the Tories despite really not "getting" the Scottish nationalist project.

[afleitch]

Ideally I'd vote for Scottish Labour but in the current political environment I'd probably suck it up and vote SNP to stop the Tories despite really not "getting" the Scottish nationalist project.

That seems fair. There's a 'want' to vote Labour for a lot of people I know but the party hasn't stepped up to the mark. Scottish Nationalism is probably the strongest expression of working class Catholic identity in Scotland for a hundred years (and probably deserves an essay) that it would be curious to see how you would have been affected by the discussion that was had; but it would depend on a whole lot of factors it's hard to grasp unless you're from here

[T'Chenka]

If I were approaching Canada as a cultural critic I'd observe:

1. that the Canadian self-stereotype of decency and politeness is really a national myth along much the same lines as "entrepreneurship" in the US; it's a way of asserting moral superiority for what's fundamentally a country much like any other in the developed world
2. that the series of views that Americans call "social liberalism" being as culturally hegemonic in Canada as it is, seems to be causing deep simmering resentments by circumscribing public discourse.

I wouldn't commit to either of those criticisms because I'm not Canadian, but those are the criticisms I would make.

There is some truth to #1, though on average I'd say Canadians use the brain God gave them more, are more decent and more polite. We have plenty of people that don't fit that description though.

#2 is very accurate IMO, to which our non-silent majority would say to the far-right Canadians, "womp womp".