Just as the Haitian earthquake was followed by a welter of religious interpretations (fundamentalist Christians blaming sinful Haitians for it, Vodoun practitioners weighing in on the events, etc.), so the Japanese quake-tsunami-meltdown trilogy is offering evidence of humanity’s interpretive propensities.
You may have already seen the YouTube troll video satirizing right-wing Christian responses, which scandalized so many viewers that the young videomaker has apparently gone into hiding. I won’t link to it, since it doesn’t really deserve all the hits, but it’s easy enough to find. The gist of it is that “God is soooo great — we prayed for him to smite his enemies and there he did, smashing those godless Japanese to smithereens.” A lot of viewers couldn’t seem to tell the difference between satire and the real thing, which apparently follows Poe’s Law: one can’t satirize fundamentalist religion without it being taken by some as the real thing, because there are enough instances in which the real thing is as bad as that (Glenn Beck being only the tip of the iceberg).
Here’s Tokyo’s mayor saying it was divine punishment for Japanese “egoism and populism,” and then apologizing for it. (He is a mainstream Shinto/Buddhist Japanese; the three terms are difficult to extricate from each other in many circumstances.)
More representative of a traditional Shinto perspective is Martin Palmer’s articulation in an interview with the BBC’s William Crawley. Palmer is Secretary General/Director of the Alliance for Religions and Conservation, founded by Prince Philip in 1995 as “a secular body that helps the major religions of the world to develop their own environmental programmes, based on their own core teachings, beliefs and practices.” (I’m not sure why Crawley chose Palmer rather than a direct representative of Shinto, but Palmer’s knowledge of Shinto and other religious understandings of nature is excellent.) In my friend Michael York‘s summary, the interview goes like this:
Palmer, in discussing the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power stations’ meltdown from a Shinto perspective said that for Shinto nature is considered infinitely more powerful than human beings. It is not an ethical matter; it’s just what happens. Referring to a famous painting of the 1820s and the great wave image within traditional Japanese religion, Palmer cited the wave as the heroic element; the wave is a divine force.
The tsunami is a work of the kami – the spirits that inhabit every part of nature. We are at the mercy of nature but also we are protected by nature. Nature does not consider humans to be the most important thing; the kami, the spirits, are the most important. They can also be maverick; they can be concerned with their own affairs. There is with Shinto no sense of punishment, no philosophical problem of suffering. Palmer pointed out that this is a very different understanding of human significance than that which prevails in the West. In Shinto, we are here by the grace of the gods, but we are not their main concern – we are not the centre of the story. We are not why the gods exist, we are not why creation exists, and we are not why these events exist. These natural disasters occur because this is just how nature is.
Crawley then pointed out that there are two things here: natural disaster and a linked technological accident. To this, Palmer replied that the Shinto had been opposed to the nuclear power stations from day one as being not a good idea. If the stations had been built on sites that were chosen according to traditional Shinto rituals and understanding of the forces that live within the land, they would not be over dangerous cracks in the earth and easily attacked by nature. He referred to “a remarkable arrogance and disrespect for traditional understandings of the power and spiritual forces that reside in the land.” It was here that Crawley cut Palmer off because the programme needed time to present the Dalai Lama’s abdication of political power.
The full interview can be heard here.
All of this resonates with an immanence-based process-relational perspective: nature does what it does, it includes the “good” and the “bad” (which are relative to their perceivers), we are part of it and sometimes we get struck down in it. (Careful readers will know that when I say that good and bad are “relative to their perceivers,” this doesn’t mean that “everything is relative, anything goes, and whatever you think or do is as good as anything else.” The world is layered and folded: perceivers share their perceptual situations with other perceivers, so my “good” is closer to your “good” than it is to the good of an amoeba, a viral bacteria or cancer cell, or an asteroid whipping through the solar system. Hitler’s actions may have seemed “right” to him, but in a human context they come off as psychotic and grotesque. And as for “nature,” if it includes everything, becoming a fairly meaningless term, so be it. It corresponds to what, in an East Asian context, is thought of as “the way,” ziran, an active and unfolding “suchness,” or what Gregory Bateson called “the pattern that connects.”)
What I’ve only occasionally written about on this blog is the importance of the arts of imagining and ritualizing in our ability to carry on in the face of events like these. (Those arts figured importantly in my first book and will have more of a place in Ecologies of Identity.) Foucault referred to such practices as “arts of the self,” but confining them within “the self” is too limited, and in fact too modern, an understanding of them; they are affective and bodily, individual and communal, micropolitical and cosmopolitical. Today our authorized rituals tend to be scientific or political (in a conventional sense), but these aren’t involving enough; and our collective imagination is in a wild flux. When the dust settles from the twenty-first century, we will be in a cosmopolitical space that’s barely imaginable today.
See The Wild Hunt and Street Prophets for more insightful commentary on religion in the wake of the disaster.
“they are affective and bodily, individual and communal, micropolitical and cosmopolitical.”
Indeed. I think Confucian reflections on li (ritual propriety) are very important here–especially when one sees li as a form of both enacting and scaffolding/extending to the social-empathic intelligence that in part constitutes the space of our shared humanity (jen).
Also, here’s John Cobb’s process theological response:
http://www.jesusjazzbuddhism.org/god-and-the-sendai-earthquake.html
I like your comment that “our authorized rituals tend to be scientific or political (in a conventional sense), but these aren’t involving enough” and I like the way you associate “the way” with localized understandings that may or may not be linked to religion. Such statements open space for and, I think, underscore the importance of rhetoric, especially those rhetorics concerned with affect, body, space/place, and conceptions of community that extend beyond the human subject.
In this post, I read a strong sense of kairos at play/ work. Even though the “timing” might bring actions and activities together in what appear haphazard ways, your reference to “the way” might also be understood as rhetoric’s “method.” (meta + hodos, which derives from the Greek “way” though more like “path.”). As you suggest, then, the way of things is not reserved or occulted from human understanding, but involve incommensurate understandings: religious knowledge in this case rather than scientific. Perhaps incommensurate is too strong since many scientific minds have spoken about how their work is certainly NOT antithetical to religion or spirituality, but in fact, speaks to the very same truths and wonder. Still, the two don’t often link up and this is part of “the way” things are. Nonetheless, this places an expanded notion of rhetoric at the heart of human (and non-human?) activity. Building potentially disastrous facilities in a tsunami zone might be as rhetorical as the wave that knocked out the power to its pumping mechanisms.
But, if we follow this (Latourian-inspired) view, does that relegate PRT to a “rhetoric,” albeit not one found in Classical or even Modern times? And, if so, what ethics are involved since it would seem to be the case that Glen Beck’s rhetoric, connected as it is to mass media technology, corporate power, and the media ecology, is just more of “the way” of things. Doesn’t this still leave unanswered the question of what might be effective activities that lead people to accept paralogical answers to seemingly logical (rational-scientific) problems? Does it matter to have a pragmatic answer at all? I agree we will certainly be in a vastly different cosmopolitical space in 100 years, but I can see one as barbarous as one more civilized.
David – You’ve beautifully woven rhetoric into this whole matter – made rhetoric matter (in multiple senses of the word). Thanks for that.
“Building potentially disastrous facilities in a tsunami zone might be as rhetorical as the wave that knocked out the power to its pumping mechanisms.”
Indeed. There is an art to how we converse with and against the world (and to how the world converses back).
You write:
“But, if we follow this (Latourian-inspired) view, does that relegate PRT to a “rhetoric,” albeit not one found in Classical or even Modern times? And, if so, what ethics are involved since it would seem to be the case that Glen Beck’s rhetoric, connected as it is to mass media technology, corporate power, and the media ecology, is just more of “the way” of things. Doesn’t this still leave unanswered the question of what might be effective activities that lead people to accept paralogical answers to seemingly logical (rational-scientific) problems? Does it matter to have a pragmatic answer at all? I agree we will certainly be in a vastly different cosmopolitical space in 100 years, but I can see one as barbarous as one more civilized.”
Yes, it may be more barbarous, but I think the possibilities remain open – which is the best place to be.
I think MDM’s point about “li” (ritual propriety, etiquette), if seen in a more-than-human context – as the etiquette of living in particular places – helps address the question of “what ethics are involved.” There are a number of different ways one could arrive at a process-relational ethic that would help us decide between Glenn Beck’s rhetoric, or nuclear-capitalist rhetoric, and their alternatives. One would be a fairly traditional (in this case, Christian) Whiteheadianism like John Cobb’s (thanks for that link, too, MDM!) which sees the possibility of greater beauty as luring us in particular directions as opposed to others. We don’t, of course, have to respond to those lures – and Whitehead’s idea of “beauty” is much more complex than the word suggests – but that does suggest that certain rhetorics may be more attractive, appealing, and fulfilling, ultimately, than others, and if we act on our hunches (and our reasoning) we can suss those out.
(I tend to prefer the more non-theistic, naturalist variants of Whiteheadian process philosophy to Cobb’s theism, since I think the ‘God’ language tries to accomplish too much, while, ironically, leaving other dimensions of religion obscured. But that’s a longer argument…)
I like Peirce’s notion that ethics arise out of aesthetics. (Aesthetics, for Peirce, is the ‘first’ to ethics’ ‘second’ and logic’s ‘third, all of them making up the normative sciences, which themselves are the ‘second’ to phaneroscopy(Peirce’s categories)=first and metaphysics=third.) Aesthetics, in this sense, concern ‘what ought to be’ in relation to feeling, while ethics (2ndness) concerns what ought to be in relation to conduct, and logic (3rdness) – in relation to thought. There are no simple answers to whether a nuclear power plant or a wind power installation is more aesthetically ‘admirable in itself’ (as Peirce would say), or if Glenn Beck’s antics are more admirable than, say, Bill Moyers’s or the Dalai Lama’s. These are matters of judgment that take time to be internalized and developed; they take their meaning from how they are interpreted and taken in by perceivers, and from the habits (of feeling, action, and thought) they give rise to. But I think that an expanded concept of reason like Peirce’s, one that’s rooted in aesthetics and ethics and that unfolds in real social (and political-ecological) contexts, can help us navigate these questions.
I realize it’ll take a lot more for that to sound convincing. But thanks for raising the questions.
Levi McLaughlin has a good article on religion in the aftermath of the disaster:
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/4399/tokyo_governor_says_tsunami_is_divine_punishment%E2%80%94religious_groups_ignore_him/
Thanks for this post. M. Palmer’s interpretation about the nuclear power station is just a fictive and supposed one. I admit that he is right in the shinto interpretation about Tsunami. It has existed since Norinaga MOTOORI. But I don’t think it is representative of today’s Shinto.
Japanese established religions have not set up any religious interpretation over this disaster yet. However, they do have their own interpretations implicitly though one cannot express overtly because it would be a target of criticism. Ishihara’s remark is exceptional.
Religious interpretation was rare In the past Hanshin-Awaji Big Earthquake. Humanistic relief by religious group was more prominent. So I suppose it will be the same this time, too. There may be an occultist interpretation implying eschatology or ascension, and popular or folk stories about prediction of the earthquake or encounter with ghost.
In Japan, religion does not offer a rigid world view but a pattern or ritual to accept death.
From Japan
I am really surprised that people would associate this tragedy with an “act of God”. If God was angry with any society it would have to be the U.S>
This sheds light on a concern that I and a number of my colleagues have sought solutions for. Thanks for covering it with so much cogency.