S. asks me, why my blog is named Tang Dynasty Times when, "so few of the posts have little to do with the name." The short answer, of course, is that many-- even if not most-- do in fact have much to do with the Tang dynasty.
Years ago, at a time when I was reading book upon book of Song dynasty history- indeed my daytime thinking was almost entirely concerned with, perhaps obsessed with that period of time; at night, especially just before falling asleep, it was bits of history and slices of culture from the Tang times that seemed to float in front of my eyes: Lady Yang and her rainbow dance, Kuchan drums and the Sogdian whirl; heavenly fragrant incense clocks, detailed astronomy and highly accurate ancient calendars... Sometimes I think that all roads lead back to Ajanta. Mostly, though, I think they lead back to Tang times.
As I said, that was years ago...
Nowadays, I find myself drifting back again and again to the Tang dynasty for different reasons. There are two things I tend to like thinking about these days. Neither are anything I think I can solve-- in fact, I probably cannot even say anything intelligent or coherent about these matters. And yet, I find I like to think about them.
The first is concerned with a kind of multicultural internationalism as symbolized by the Silk Road of the Tang dynasty. I already wrote about this idea at length here. Of course, we are talking of a time over a thousand years ago, so no one can actually say what things were really like, and yet we have these very intriguing hints of a time when trade and cultural borrowings happened along a two-way street-- as oppossed to the one-way superhighway that ideas seem to move along nowadays; where even liberal democracy, in the words of my favorite Qing historian, is seen as something to be marketed and franchised.
In one sense, what I am pondering really comes down to not throwing away the baby with the bath water. I suppose you could call it a kind of Old World hesitation. I never thought the day would come, but in the past several years, megastores, Cosco and Starbucks have arrived even in my small corner of Japan.
Yes, it is the end of the world, and small shops and independent stores have most probably seen their fates sealed in their own blood. For people by necessity tend to choose the economically efficient, but is the economically efficient always the the high road? Huge amounts of "stuff," made mostly in China are shipped across the oceans and skies to fill big warehouses- and what is even in those coffee drinks anyway?
Old World style versions of internationalism and cosmopolitanism versus New World "globalization as Americanization"--I think you almost have to live abroad-- or at least read internationally--to understand just how much people around the world talk about this issue, and it can be as much about American materialism ("the neon glow of KFC around nearly every corner") as Chinese communist-style culture-obliterating city-building; Stalinism in Eastern Europe, etc. Pax Roma, Pax Mongolica, Pax Americana...
In my own work, I am even seeing from the usually mild-mannered Japanese: "Why do we have to play by all American rules in business? American-style capitalism is not the only game in town." In particular, it is the stress on short-term quarterly earning dividends etc. that seems to irk the execs; or a scholar who wonders how much has been lost by the wholesale adotion of Western concepts to his field to the point that "anyone trying to work outside these concepts quite simply doesn't get funded or published" In this sense globalism is less about a sophisticated understanding and respect of other cultures as it is about the creation of one world with a shared culture made up of shared values. Many people are probably thinking, "well, that's a good thing, isn't it?"
On a different level, also at the same time connected to this idea of value pluralism (which is different from value relativism), I have found myself increasingly intrigued with our pre-conceived notions of history itself. I have already mentioned Chris Hedge's statements concerning the fallacy of "progress"-- or rather, to repeat S's summary of Hedges that material (technological and economic) progress without moral progress only raises the stakes (see this interview at salon for example). Which brings me to my man in England. Alan Saundars recently interviewed the British philosopher John Gray (who is so politically interesting you can hardly believe isn't French) on the June 28 edition of the Philospher's Zone. While I could not make any sense of his Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, still, with regard to my own project, I have enjoyed pondering his ideas concerning history.
For example:
But you can invert the beliefs, you can get rid of the beliefs but still have the patterns of thinking. You just emptied Christianity, if you like, of its transcendental content, and you're left with the same structure, so along one of these patterns, what is the idea of history as a kind of process of the sort I've described, which is continuous, enriched with potentially a kind of culmination, not necessarily a huge Utopian transformation, it can be more incremental, more slow, but most people I would say in the post-Christian societies of the West, inherit the idea that the world is moving towards, or can be made to move towards with collective human action, collective human endeavour and enterprise, a situation in which the whole world is, so to speak, unified by certain values and the whole world accepts perhaps a single word that may be based on science of something of that kind. And the whole world is in some ways better than it's ever been in the past. And indeed, I think for many people the meaning of their lives really depends on that belief. If you strip out that belief in progress, if you start thinking of the world in the way in which the ancient pre-Christian Europeans did, or the Buddhists and the Hindus or the Taoists of China do, many people think that's a kind of despair, I don't know how many times I've been told 'If I thought that John I wouldn't get up in the morning. And if I agreed with you, John, that history had no pattern of that kind, I wouldn't get up in the morning.' I said, 'Well stay in bed a bit longer, you might find a better reason for getting up.'
And that's a kind of example of the way in which a view of history which comes from Christianity, and which really doesn't have much sort of coherence, because after all, humanity is not an entity that can choose or act. We have international institutions like the United Nations and world trade organs, but humanity never does anything. Humanity is simply six or seven billion human beings each with their own dreams, hopes, projects, illusions, delusions, fantasies, beliefs, values, projects etc. Humanity doesn't do anything at all. And I expect the future of humanity or the human animal, the human species, to be in ethical and political respects, much like the past. There'll be new inventions, new knowledge, if there are any phenomena, new for humans at least, like global warming, it's happening now, it hasn't happened before in this way in human history or pre-history, but basically the future will be like the past, history will go on. Oddly enough, when I tell people like that, they say, 'You mean we're all doomed?' I say, initially I became rather puzzled by it, what I'm saying is that we carry on coping the way we did in the past.' 'Do you mean we're all doomed?'
Doomed to go on indeed!
Indirectly along these lines, I have found that having a second calendar inside my head (here, having the Tang dynasty as a kind of ground zero and there- at my other place-- framing everything in terms of the Chinese calendar) has been very renewing for me. I wanted to borrow a phrase that I just read in one of my favorite magazines, Kyoto Journal. John Einarsen is interviewing Tokyo photographer and artist, Yasu Suzuka. Toward the end of the interview, Suzuka says,
The entire Chinese calendar is inside my head. It is a means of deciding travel days and destinations related to the Chinese philosophy of yin yang. Simply put, although time has been decided to be "nine-to-five," I believe there's nothing wrong in making myself come alive in this other way. This is the world born of ancient Chinese philosophy, in which there is circulation in nature, and in which humans act in harmony with nature. You should not ignore your mind or body when it comes to deciding how and when to decide things.Since you are connected to the cosmos you must pay atention to your balance within it.
Choosing to come alive in a different way....
Did I answer your question, S? You know, the name I really wanted was already taken...
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