Darkness and Light
Two pieces that came out last weekend provide a cautionary tale and, to my mind, a bolt of light.
The cautionary tale is about Japan and how it has fallen in the last twenty years. Martin Fackler at the NYT looks at not only the technical reasons for the fall - deflation being the biggest, evidently, although it's hard to tell if that's a symptom or a disease. But more interestingly he writes about the failure of Japanese grit.
Japan’s loss of gumption is most visible among its young men, who are widely derided as “herbivores” for lacking their elders’ willingness to toil for endless hours at the office, or even to succeed in romance, which many here blame, only half jokingly, for their country’s shrinking birthrate. “The Japanese used to be called economic animals,” said Mitsuo Ohashi, former chief executive officer of the chemicals giant Showa Denko. “But somewhere along the way, Japan lost its animal spirits.”
The light, to me, is from a piece in the weekend Journal by Jonathan Haidt that associates the Tea Party movement with karma. It corresponds with everything I've seen about this middle class movement of people who are sick of our failure to accept consequences. These are the folks who don't buy the idea that every kid on the team gets a medal and every team wins the league. They are prepared to accept their own failures, but don't want to pay for everyone else's. Losers should lose, gracefully, and winners should win, gracefully, so long as everyone plays fair.
Putting the two together - optimist that I am - I am persuaded that we Americans can pull out of this slump because we have the stones. We can suck it up, roll up the sleeves, and believe in the future. But crappy handouts will not work, nor will get-out-of-jail-free cards, and unless our leadership stops offering them, it will be sayonara for the next decade.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Why I Read Paul Tillich
"...there is no other way of judging time than to see it in the light of the eternal. In order to judge something, one must be partly within it, partly out of it. If we were totally within time, we would not be able to elevate ourselves in prayer, meditation and thought, to the eternal. We would be children of time like all other creatures and could not ask the question of the meaning of time. But as men we are aware of the eternal to which we belong and from which we are estranged by the bondage of time."
From "The Eternal Now" (1963)
"...there is no other way of judging time than to see it in the light of the eternal. In order to judge something, one must be partly within it, partly out of it. If we were totally within time, we would not be able to elevate ourselves in prayer, meditation and thought, to the eternal. We would be children of time like all other creatures and could not ask the question of the meaning of time. But as men we are aware of the eternal to which we belong and from which we are estranged by the bondage of time."
From "The Eternal Now" (1963)
Monday, September 13, 2010
Chop Chop Square
Eons ago, in 1982, I was doing a stint in Saudi Arabia for my law firm. Riyadh was dreary. When it rained, which was very seldom, it rained mud. The law practice was like a war campaign; long periods of boredom interspersed with brief episodes of frantic activity.
One way to relieve the boredom was to go to the gold souk, but on an associate's salary the trip couldn't last long. Or, near the souk, on Fridays after prayers, there was Chop Chop Square, where they beheaded people.
Curiosity took me there only once. There was a big, shouty crowd, all men, mostly Arabs. Agitated and looking for entertainment. Lore had that I would be pushed to the front - they'd show the Westerner how they do it in the Kingdom. Not me, but they did part as I approached. I thought it was simply because I was viewed as an alien, which I most certainly was.
They brought out only one proposed victim, a terrified-looking young man. The handlers struggled to keep him upright, as if he'd lost his ability to stand. (He was probably drugged, I was told later.) The crowd's noise swelled in anticipation. After what looked like final rites, a flurry of consultation among the handlers. Then they marched him back out of the Square and it was over. The crowd was not happy; I figured it was a good time to move on.
Someone later told me it had been a kind of shock-punishment - take him to brink, then let him live. Maybe it was. Or maybe his crime (I have no idea what it was) had a victim, whose family may have settled for a last-minute cash payment.
A medieval atmosphere, and one which modern Saudi Arabia must have outgrown over the last 25 years, right?
Nope. Chop Chop Square, at least as of 2009, is still in operation.
Eons ago, in 1982, I was doing a stint in Saudi Arabia for my law firm. Riyadh was dreary. When it rained, which was very seldom, it rained mud. The law practice was like a war campaign; long periods of boredom interspersed with brief episodes of frantic activity.
One way to relieve the boredom was to go to the gold souk, but on an associate's salary the trip couldn't last long. Or, near the souk, on Fridays after prayers, there was Chop Chop Square, where they beheaded people.
Curiosity took me there only once. There was a big, shouty crowd, all men, mostly Arabs. Agitated and looking for entertainment. Lore had that I would be pushed to the front - they'd show the Westerner how they do it in the Kingdom. Not me, but they did part as I approached. I thought it was simply because I was viewed as an alien, which I most certainly was.
They brought out only one proposed victim, a terrified-looking young man. The handlers struggled to keep him upright, as if he'd lost his ability to stand. (He was probably drugged, I was told later.) The crowd's noise swelled in anticipation. After what looked like final rites, a flurry of consultation among the handlers. Then they marched him back out of the Square and it was over. The crowd was not happy; I figured it was a good time to move on.
Someone later told me it had been a kind of shock-punishment - take him to brink, then let him live. Maybe it was. Or maybe his crime (I have no idea what it was) had a victim, whose family may have settled for a last-minute cash payment.
A medieval atmosphere, and one which modern Saudi Arabia must have outgrown over the last 25 years, right?
Nope. Chop Chop Square, at least as of 2009, is still in operation.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Thursday, September 09, 2010
Labor Day
We all used to read old Karl Marx, back when his thinking seemed to control 50 percent of the world's population. One thing that struck me was his exhaltation of the value of individual work - its nobility, even, although I doubt he would have said it this way.
It seemed to belie one line of critique about socialism - that the system does not spur, did not reward, people's work. Hard workers thrive under capitalism, so the thinking went, while in a socialist world they would just be suckers.
He also seemed, from the lofty vantage of an enthusiastic teenager in the '60's, to be celebrating something that sounded pretty much like a drag. I figured he was touting the value of work only because it gave him cred.
It added up, so I thought, to a kind of a fraud. He really didn't believe that work was a virtue, or that the system he proposed would reward it. He just used the idea to get across his larger pitch, that he had an inside track on how the world's societies would evolve.
A lot later, I now think he was not at all fraudulent. Completely wrong, as to how the world really works, but not fraudulent. Or at least I agree with the idea - individual work is noble. When you are really really rolling you go into the flow, and if you could build a society around that, you'd have something.
We all used to read old Karl Marx, back when his thinking seemed to control 50 percent of the world's population. One thing that struck me was his exhaltation of the value of individual work - its nobility, even, although I doubt he would have said it this way.
It seemed to belie one line of critique about socialism - that the system does not spur, did not reward, people's work. Hard workers thrive under capitalism, so the thinking went, while in a socialist world they would just be suckers.
He also seemed, from the lofty vantage of an enthusiastic teenager in the '60's, to be celebrating something that sounded pretty much like a drag. I figured he was touting the value of work only because it gave him cred.
It added up, so I thought, to a kind of a fraud. He really didn't believe that work was a virtue, or that the system he proposed would reward it. He just used the idea to get across his larger pitch, that he had an inside track on how the world's societies would evolve.
A lot later, I now think he was not at all fraudulent. Completely wrong, as to how the world really works, but not fraudulent. Or at least I agree with the idea - individual work is noble. When you are really really rolling you go into the flow, and if you could build a society around that, you'd have something.
Sunday, September 05, 2010
Bliss
Feeling pretty good, I Googled "bliss". Tells you a lot.
Mostly cosmetics. Some restaurants. But as to sites that might really glorify it - address it - locate it - or debunk it, for chrissake - thin, really thin.
I lost interest after about page five. Not much more than a 21st century version of thumbing through the Yellow Pages.
Feeling pretty good, I Googled "bliss". Tells you a lot.
Mostly cosmetics. Some restaurants. But as to sites that might really glorify it - address it - locate it - or debunk it, for chrissake - thin, really thin.
I lost interest after about page five. Not much more than a 21st century version of thumbing through the Yellow Pages.
Saturday, September 04, 2010
Earl the Swirl
Hurricane Earl. (What comedian names these things, anyway? The last one through here was Bob.) Earl missed us by a lot last night, here on the Rhode Island coast, and so today we sheepishly drag our lawn furniture back out on the lawn and witness a sparkling, windy day, very blue sky, grey-green sea, big surf, scrubbed beaches with neat piles of stone. A good end to a hurricane.
Hurricane Earl. (What comedian names these things, anyway? The last one through here was Bob.) Earl missed us by a lot last night, here on the Rhode Island coast, and so today we sheepishly drag our lawn furniture back out on the lawn and witness a sparkling, windy day, very blue sky, grey-green sea, big surf, scrubbed beaches with neat piles of stone. A good end to a hurricane.
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