Offshore accounting

[imomus]

When I'm traveling I often read The Economist. It's less depressing, more oriented to the present and the future than some sad old Retro Necro rock mag (oh God, is that what Neil Young looks like now?). And since the style press (in the shape of Monocle) is trying so desperately to ape The Economist just now, why not go straight for the real thing, with all those lovely pie charts and graphs (and terrible illustrations)?

The current issue has a 14-page report on business in Japan. According to the various articles in this, Japan's business world is an anomaly combining the stability of the old with the dynamism of the new, Western with domestic models, and capitalism with social values. There's some evidence that Japan's current concern -- reflected in statements by the new prime minister -- is to slow down the rate of Koizumi-style reforms which have only served to increase social inequalities in Japan. The overall picture that emerges is of a return to something we could call "Swedish" in its commitment to social care: with the proviso that Japan is perhaps more "Swedish" than Sweden in this respect.



An article entitled "JapAnglo-Saxon Capitalism" describes how Japanese capitalism is a weird and anomalyous hybrid of capitalist styles: "A lot of Asian countries are saying: 'We hope Japan will succeed, so we have a new model that combines capitalism with social values,'" says Hirotaka Takeuchi of Hitotsubashi University. Does that mean something like the European model? Yes, but not identical, because taxes are lower and the state is smaller in Japan -- and unlike in France, Germany or Scandinavia, companies provide a lot of social support. Another difference with many parts of Europe is that in Japan business is regarded as a respectable pursuit that provides social goods rather than a necessary evil."

That bit caught my eye, because the post-Japan ("Japanized") me is particularly frustrated by the way we in the West continue to designate certain things as "evil", and therefore make them so. We do this because we like to think we're outside certain things, getting our hands dirty touching them only when we have to. We do this with our necessities and our pleasures. Business is "a necessary evil" and pleasure is "guilty pleasure". As a result of this thinking (we call it "critical thinking", marked by "critical distance") we mark almost everything we do with distaste, cynicism and disgust.

Distaste for business in the West might come from a Marxist-Socialist tradition (mine certainly does) or a Calvinist tradition or academia. In all three cases, these traditions depend on "creative accountancy" -- we could call it "offshore accounting" -- to make their cases. They each employ a notional, imaginary space -- a sort of margin outside of current reality -- to justify their distaste for currently-existing material reality. In the case of Marxism, everything in the present is seen from the imaginary space that will exist "after the revolution". In Christianity, of course, it's heaven and hell, the "offshore" places we reach after death. In academia it's the idea of critical distance -- the idea that there's a neutral space you can step into, a sort of cupboard from which you can spy on the world without being a part of it, without being tarnished by its values. And what underpins all three of these ideas is the Platonic message that ultimate reality is both higher than what we see and yet remote from what we see -- true reality is distant, invisible, not-yet-here, "offshore". What's here and visible is low and dirty and contingent.

Although there's some of this asceticism built into Buddhism, my sense is that Japan has never really bought into these forms of detachment, these methods of "offshore accounting", this idea of a neutral margin, or heaven, or revolution which justifies your disgust for what's in front of you. As a result, guilty pleasures or a sense that business is a necessary evil are refreshingly absent from Japanese life. The basic attitude towards business in Japan seems to be summed up by maneki neko, the lucky cat who beckons you to come and buy.

I come from a rather un-businesslike family; we're all teachers, academics, librarians, creative performers. Hisae's family is much more canny; her mum's life is a perpetual business trip, shuttling between China, Korea and Japan buying and selling clothes, running stores in Osaka. Now, I won't say that one of these lives is more ethical than the other. What the Economist article suggests, though, is that in the West ethics comes from outside (from an "offshore" class of teachers, politicians, ministers) whereas in Japan it's much more integrated and structural: ethics comes from business itself, it's built into everyday logistics. Justice is not something you bolt on afterwards, or shout about from some place offshore or outside the daily structures. A Japanese company is a bit like a family; it looks after its own, and thinks about the world (The Economist's symbol for this is the Toyota Prius hybrid car, and Japan's world lead in solar paneling).

I was sitting in Smart Deli reading Hisae bits of the Economist article, telling her my idea that we in the West are undermined by our sense that both business and pleasure must be "evil" in some way. Then I picked up Exberliner, the Berlin English-language listings magazine. It only seemed to confirm my worst fears. Here's a bit from Exberliner's article on shoplifting, for instance:

"Another shoplifter, 32 year-old Christian, has a habit of occasionally nicking shirts and watches from big department stores. "It's fun to beat the system and get away with it," he says. "I never take anything too pricey but whenever I do steal stuff I stick a mental finger up at corporations. Once in a while this materialistic society prompts these things."

Christian (what a perfect name!) only takes material things, it seems, as a protest against people taking material things. His attraction and his disgust are the same thing. He clearly has a basic problem with his relationship to the system of production.

A few pages later there's a piece on "Shopping Addiction" in which "Germany's top specialist" Professor Dr Gerhard Raab says: "Nearly all shopping addicts suffer from low self-esteem. They try to compensate for it with this act of shopping. Said simply, they feel very good for that short period of time. Then they realise that their behaviour wasn't right and they feel low self-esteem and the cycle begins again." Needless to say, this article is full of drug metaphors: shopping is an addiction, need is a needle. Again, there seems to be a fundamental problem in the way we relate to our own need, and to the production system that exists to fill it.

Later still, Exberliner reviews "Loveless" by Japancakes. "One could imagine parts of this album being sold as background in a bank commercial," grumbles D. Strauss. "In New York City," he concludes with sinister darkness, "there's a bank on every corner now". It's clearly a bad review, because it mixes music up with everyday production system stuff like banking. Music is sacred, and mustn't get mixed up in the material world, production, money. It's the sort of guilt-by-association I'd imply myself, probably. But I love how people don't do that in Japan. People don't slight commercial art by pointing out that it's -- gasp! -- commercial. They don't damn something in the consumerist system by pointing out that it's in the consumerist system.

I won't say there aren't oddities of consumption -- anorexic-bulimic patterns -- in Japan. A project like Kyoichi Tsuzuki's photo-documentation of collectors, Happy Victims, shows oddly unbalanced consumption patterns in Japanese too. But at least these people are, as the title says, happy.

There's an interesting interview in Tablog with Nakako Hayashi, who started Here and There magazine and more or less runs it (printing just 1500 copies) singlehandedly. Actually, Hayashi does condemn mainstream magazines for their emphasis on bling:

"Most of the time," she tells Tablog, "I don’t like most magazines. So there is a contradiction, because magazines that you can get the most work from are the magazines for the ‘nouveau riche’. Often they will ask me to do an art story, but it's very strange because I receive the magazine and I don’t like what I see, this strange new rich lifestyle. I feel very bad after reading it. If you buy it, it's expensive, and also makes you feel bad because you can’t have this lifestyle in your daily life, you can’t live like a wealthy Hong Kong mother. It’s strange to spend all this money and feel so bad after reading it."

What Hayashi seems to be worried about there is another form of "offshore accounting" we forgot to list earlier: the whole bling-celebrity thing which substitutes unlikely and unjust concentrations of wealth (in certain super-rich celebrities) for heaven, or academic distance, or the revolution. "When I'm super-rich like they are, all will be right in the world..."

Hayashi has some interesting thoughts, too, on the famous Japanese "lack of critical thinking": "I like it when the editors are really curious, really want to find something out, and I think most of the Japanese are really curious editors. I don’t know if they are more critical, but they just want to show the mood."

This emphasis on curiosity and information rather than critical judgement (the desire to investigate what is rather than what should be) is also, thinks Hayashi, what prevents the Japanese embracing contemporary art: "We see some exhibitions in museums of modern art but I think Japanese people are not ready for the conceptual art scene. They can try to do it but it's not really from the bottom of their hearts. Maybe the Japanese don’t need this conceptual way of thinking or critical point of view so much."

Why? asks Tokyo Art Beat Blog. Is it a kind of discovery without judgment?

"I don’t know," says Hayashi, "I think Japanese people are not so much trying to think in a critical way, they just feel out what’s new, what’s nice, interesting."

But is that a good thing?

"Well I don’t think it’s a bad thing."

I'd like to finish Hayashi's thought. When critical thinking becomes a way to condemn the system of production we depend on, to cast both business and pleasure as "evil", it can indeed be a bad thing: a sort of judgement without discovery. A production system branded as evil begins to operate in evil ways. If you say and I say and everyone says (on the left and on the right) that business is all about the benefit of shareholders and has no social responsibilities, that's the kind of world you, I and everyone else will end up living in. Justify it all you like with offshore or posthumous ideal worlds, but your denigration of reality will lead to a degradation of reality. Maybe "discovery without judgement" isn't such a bad way to relate to the world. Take it from a pirate; stay onshore.

Comments

You don't have to have an extra finger on each hand to work here, but it helps!!1

[barnacle.livejournal.com]

Does Tokyo Art Blog really indulge in the slightly vapid rhetoric of "good thing"/"bad thing"? I was rather hoping that only we in the UK had to suffer it, through such outlets as Jeremy Vine and Thought for the Day. After all, we're the ones who are obsessed with moral absolutism....

I agree that a lot of our notions about business are deep-seated. I wouldn't say that they necessarily assign morality to commerce, however, but there's definitely an idea that business isn't really on the side of the employee. But regardless of whether the idea begets the reality (as you suggest) or reality convinces one of the idea (as I would suggest) or some chicken-egg inbetweener, unchecked UK businesses do behave in a thoroughly reprehensible way. You only have to look at their concerted efforts as expressed through such vile bodies as the CBI.

We would only be able to steer a more ethical course by means of either a sudden jolt or stealthy drifting: otherwise, the good ship UK Commerce would react violently against the change, and the most vulnerable employees would fall overboard. And so as a stopgap we have things like health and safety legislation, and the UK is a better place for it, for the most disadvantaged people who used to just lose digits to faulty machinery, or fall off ladders, or fall sick from Weil's disease; and then ironically then become a burden on all of our pay packets.

These people didn't complain as loudly back then, as the hooting Tories do now at the legislation, because they just thought that was the way business was run. And maybe you're right: we all still sort of do, in our blackened little hearts. But even if we start to recognise other ways of looking at business, business itself would laugh mockingly at the notion that simply our point of view might dictate its behaviour.

(It'd be nice to see some direct, unbiased comparisons of welfare in different countries, ranked against each country's own opinion of how well welfare is handled by non-state methods. I've worked in places in the UK that rather patronisingly considered themselves one big happy family, and like any big happy family there were plenty of people who stayed in their metaphorical bedrooms, and everyone else avoided talking about them devant les enfants. And I never trust the Economist: they often don't byline what are effectively opinion pieces, which is bad journalistic form.)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

By the way, I've now got Monocle entirely sussed: it's a better-designed parody of The Economist in which Tyler and his assistant Fiona make up all the facts and figures.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ha, and perhaps it was The Economist that gave them the "making it all up" idea in the first place!

[signorphibes (from livejournal.com)]

This:
"By the way, I've now got Monocle entirely sussed: it's a better-designed parody of The Economist in which Tyler and his assistant Fiona make up all the facts and figures"
made me laugh out loud...
but on the other hand
The Economist answered Tyler's game with this:
http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/
SP

[insomnia.livejournal.com]

"A production system branded as evil begins to operate in evil ways. If you say and I say and everyone says (on the left and on the right) that business is all about the benefit of shareholders and has no social responsibilities, that's the kind of world you, I and everyone else will end up living in."

I was with you, up until this point. It's a real leap to think that having a critical perception of business practices leads to their worst excesses.

In some ways, Japan is extremely harsh on those caught acting in irresponsible, corrupt ways. The social pressure is far greater than in the United States, certainly, to the point that leaders resign in disgrace or flat-out commit suicide (http://news.monstersandcritics.com/asiapacific/news/article_1310151.php/Japans_scandal-tainted_farm_minister_commits_suicide__2nd_Lead_). This article (http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2007/sept/04/yehey/opinion/20070904opi2.html) from the Manila Times links it to a quality of perceived social/societal responsibility that they call "delicadeza".

The United States is ranked #102 out of 150 (http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=509430) for income equality, whereas Slovakia is ranked at #1 for income equality (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0908770.html), followed by Belarus, Hungary, Denmark, Japan, Sweden, Czeck, Finland, and Norway. Italy is at #12, Germany at #19, Canada at #23.

I don't know whether it can be said that all of these places view issues such as corporate greed and the environment as not being evil or something to protest against. Rather, many have systems in place that curtail such behaviors, and several also have a fairly developed, established cultures of looking out for people and for the environment.

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

Japanese companies are greedy, exploitative and polluting. They just hide it and don't talk about it like in the west. When they eventually get caught doing something stupid, everyone pretends to be shocked, but they keep right on doing it and try to hide it better.

[(Anonymous)]

These are relatively old stats. Japan's absolute poverty ranking was .1% less than the United States in the last OECD report on Japan. The Gini coefficient for Japan is still less than the US but now much greater than Western Europe. So, yes, Japan did have pretty good levels of income equality, but not so much anymore. You can probably blame Western-style capitalist reforms for that, although they were implemented because the old-system of bribing the countryside and intentionally creating inefficiencies in the system to raise prices stopped working.

It's good to remember that Japan has always had rich people and poor people and meaningful socioeconomic distinctions. They are just much more subtle than the ghettos and mansions in the US. Within Japan even, the American and British standards for class distinction were used to make any domestic inequalities much smaller. You often hear, "Sure they are rich people but not America rich!"

Marxy

[scola.livejournal.com]

heh. Neil Young is OLD. And ULGY! Hahaha! Stupid rawk mags... don't they know old, ugly people have nothing to contribute!

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

You're breaking my heart.

[vertigoranger.livejournal.com]

OMG Satire!!1!

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

Japanese companies work their employees to the bone. Is that "taking care of one's own" or is it closer to the turn-of-the-century exploitation of the masses by the robber barons of the American Steel and Oil industries?



Japan is permanently stuck in 1965 and nothing short of Godzilla smashing it to bits will get them to reset and live in modern times.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You know, Cerulicante, you make my job as a Japan booster so much easier. Because no matter how unsubtle my boosts are, your zings are so much cruder!

[(Anonymous)]

The 50s and 60s were the last time the United States had any degree of relative economic equality. I say, bring it back on... at least our kids will have decent places to go to school without us having to be in the top 2% earners.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

I find it interesting that when it comes to immigration Japan and Sweden are completely different. Japan doesn't seem to welcome immigration (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBWsLdDlyI4), yes, but what about America then? In the slaughterhouses/slaughterfactories several latin-american workers are employed with close to slave like conditions. If they accidently hurt themselves while doing this extremely dangerous job they either can tell about the bad security to the public, or write a contract that they won't tell the public and get free medical care from the company.

I'd like to add, too, that in Sweden immigration is getting more and more frowned upon. But we have accepted immigrants in this country for much longer than the middle of the 20th's century. There where nine different languages spoken in Sweden before the 50's like Hebrew and Finnish. So, the attitude problem towards immigrants is nothing unique to either Sweden, America or Japan. It is global I guess.

[(Anonymous)]

"Freedom" is sacrosanct in the West. It's an "enlightenment value"! To see your company, class, family, or your race as an organism bigger than your own personal impulses is to give up freedom and submit to tyranny.

The Marxys of the world may try to get Japan to "update" itself. But it grew up differently. What we see as a naive public ignorance is an essential faith in society.

As children, we submitted to a greater force. We did what we were told. Were we so miserable as children?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

"Essential faith in society". Yes! It's the big, sexy "yes" from the big, sexy "we", and it's something neither left nor right in the West seems able to see the value of. The right thinks it's communistic, the left thinks it's conservative.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"what underpins all three of these ideas is the Platonic message that ultimate reality is both higher than what we see and yet remote from what we see -- true reality is distant, invisible, not-yet-here, "offshore". What's here and visible is low and dirty and contingent.

Although there's some of this asceticism built into Buddhism, my sense is that Japan has never really bought into these forms of detachment, these methods of "offshore accounting"

In Europe, Christianity has shaped our society. It's a religion of guilt and repentance; Just being born is a sin (original sin). Its a constant struggle between the earthy desires and heavenly purity. I believe as a society, although we've become much more secular, we still carry this "mood" with us in our ethics.

Japanese religion is very different. Japan's two main religion are shinto and Buddhism.

At the heart of Shinto is the worship of the forces of nature, known as kami: "Shinto is a collection of rituals and methods meant to mediate the relations of living humans and kami". Its a very primitive religion, nearly all early societies worshiped nature at some point in their history. Although very few Japanese people believe in Koshinto (that is, ancient shinto revolving around "kami/gods of nature") Modern Shinto thrives. I believe it thrives because the underlying principles are very easily reappropriated for today:
"Failure to show proper respect can be seen as a lack of concern for others, looked down on because it is believed to create problems for all. Those who fail to take into account the feelings of other people and kami/nature will only bring ruin on themselves."

In a world were we are all concerned about the planet, taking time out to think about and appreciate the importance of the nature and people around us is still very relevant today.

Buddhism is harder to sum up because the different sects have different views. However, Mahayana buddhism is the predominant buddhist influence in Japan, and Zen buddhism had the earliest influences. Although some buddhist sects outside of Japan have (IMHO misguidedly) turned into religions of rituals and gods, at the heart of Japanese buddhism is the philosophy of mahayana, that is dualities dont really exist (good and bad, right and wrong), theyre both sides of the same coin, and that there should only be focus on "the now" as opposed to preoccupation with the past or the future.

What you have is a society that has been shaped by a reverence for the forces of nature and the wider world around, and an sort of philosophical mixture of Existential and Determinist aspects. The focus is very much on the present rather than the guilt/repentance cycle and "rewards to come" mentality of the christian west.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting point about mahayana Buddhism and the disappearance (or dialecticization) of dualities. In a world where everything is just a facet of everything else, and opposites dissolve into synthesis, there's no point wasting your time debating with binaries as we tend to do in the West, especially when it just leads to accusations of "hypocrisy" (which tends to mean "the binaries say you can't believe those two things at the same time!").

We call this kind of charming behaviour "critical distance", but is it really so critical when it accepts binaries at face value, as if they were "real"? And is it really so distant when it gets us into so many scraps?

And yes, Christianity has so much to answer for here.

[(Anonymous)]

In academia it's the idea of critical distance -- the idea that there's a neutral space you can step into, a sort of cupboard from which you can spy on the world without being a part of it, without being tarnished by its values.

I'm surprised at this coming from someone whose brother is a Derrida expert. The idea of some neutral critical space hasn't been much aired in humanities departments in at least the last thirty years.

This notion of having some essential faith in society and its institutions is entirely contingent on the society and the institutions though, isn't it? I mean, you'll find plenty of cheerleaders for the American way of life and business, etc. Within living memory, Japan was the kind of society you wouldn't want to have too much essential faith in.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

But the pendulum has swung once again in academia, as I understand it, towards people like Alain Badiou (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badiou), of whom Zizek says:

"Badiou is clearly and radically opposed to the postmodern anti-Platonic thrust whose basic dogma is that the era when it was still possible to ground a political movement in a direct reference to some eternal metaphysical or transcendental truth is definitely over, and, the experience of our century having proved that such a reference to some metaphysical a priori leads to catastrophic "totalitarian" social consequences, the only solution is to accept that we live in a new era deprived of metaphysical certainties, an era of contingency and conjectures, and in a "society of risks" that renders politics a matter of phronesis, of strategic judgments and dialogue, not of applying fundamental cognitive insights. What Badiou is aiming for, against this postmodern doxa, is precisely the resuscitation of the politics of (universal) Truth in today's conditions of global contingency. He would thus rehabilitate, in the current conditions of multiplicity and contingency, not only philosophy but the properly meta-physical dimension: the infinite Truth is "eternal" and meta relative to the temporal process of Being; it is a flash of Another Dimension which transcends the positivity of Being."

That sounds to me remarkably like the rehabilitation in academia of exactly this notion of neutral critical space -- the return of what I'm calling "the offshore".

On your second point, sure, it depends on the society. But social positivity is always, I would say, inherently sexy. That's why it can be so dangerous when the wrong people get a grasp on it.

[road-rage-bunny.livejournal.com]

This was a great piece. thanks for writing it. it actually helps me put a lot of ideas in to perspective as i'm living in japan and am trying to put reason to the things i see every day but at the same time i should be putting reasons to the every day i see back in the west.

[(Anonymous)]

As an American working for a Japanese corporation ... in America, I almost envy the social roles the Japanese have in their work. The younger employees make coffee for the older ones, etc. I mean, if you spend your entire life working hard every day, it creates some sense of belonging... even if it's just an exotic illusion I have of it as ye olde Westerner. I know Japan's having the same kind-of temp employee revolution as here, but social roles seem to have some benefit.

I mean, what else is there? We're humans, social creatures that extend beyond our immediate families. Unfortunately we're in a post-Reagan/Thatcher era where it's not only our right but it's our -duty- to screw over everyone but ourselves and our wives and kids. 27 years on we're in a period of the greatest economic inequality since the Gilded Age when 8 year olds with TB would get their hands mangled in factory gears.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh yeah, now is worse than then because at least you could get ahead if you were smart. Now there's both inequality -and- hierarchy in America, meaning if you're poor you're stuck. Good times.

[akabe.livejournal.com]

>Maybe the Japanese don’t need this conceptual way of thinking or critical point of view so much.

i don't buy this thing i keep hearing about japanese people lacking in conceptual and critical thinking and stuff. the only thing i could say , compared to the so called west, is that on one hand it is probably less speculative , on the other that many things that are taken for granted not considered worth thinking about in the west are often heavily conceptualized (marxy would probably call this orthopraxy but it's not)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, TABlog's next interview is with a Japanese conceptual artist, Yukihiro Taguchi (http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/2007/12/emergence-of-relationships.html). His work sort of contradicts Hayashi's view about the Japanese and conceptual art. Then again, he had to leave Japan to make it (here lives here in Berlin, I know him slightly through mutual friends). But he doesn't think that's because of a different attitude to conceptual art or critical thinking, it's more to do with Berlin's Slow Life:

"Just from looking at the art scene outside Japan it seemed easier to present works than in Japan. So I decided to take on this challenge. Since I got to Berlin I have a lot more meaningless time, or rather time where I have nothing to do and therefore I end up thinking and working on the production of my works. It’s a place that naturally provides me with that kind of time frame. Of course the fact that I came over here with the specific aim to produce art works is a further incentive to concentrate on working. I don’t know, it’s hard to say what specifically has changed, but there definitely has been a change."

buddhism

[(Anonymous)]

Your descriptions of belief in an inaccessible true reality describe Buddhism as well, if not better, than either Christianity or Marxism. Specifically, the parable of the burning house comes to mind. The idea that subjective reality is fleeting, provisional, worthless etc. is pretty much at the center of Japan's interaction with Buddhism. Genji, for instance, is full of admiring phrases about people who have completely rejected the world; you don't have to look very hard in Mishima's Kinkakuji, either.

Is your hypothesis that Japan has never really "bought into" Buddhism itself? If so, are Murasaki, Mishima, and, I don't know, Murakami Haruki all just anomalies?

Maybe the Japanese population's "uncritical" consumption has more to do with their particular historical moment than some inherent Oriental social characteristic - ne?

Neo Confucianism

[funazushi.livejournal.com]

In this discussion I think we have to include Neo Confucianism as part of the mix, especially as it applies to education in Japan. Critical thinking is not a skill that is valued or taught in the Japanese education system. My wife, who was very successful academically in Japan, has told me she doesn't have the skills to carry on a critical discussion. She was never taught to do anything with the information she received. She tells the story of a teacher who suggested that students memorize a dictionary page by page, eating the page when it was committed to memory as a way to acquire knowledge. That being said, she can be very critical in her consumption of food, so perhaps the teacher was making connections that I don't understand.

[(Anonymous)]

"Maybe "discovery without judgement" isn't such a bad way to relate to the world. Take it from a pirate; stay onshore."

Nick, if you really believed this statement, this blog would not exist. Click Opera IS "discovery with judgement". I think it's funny how this entry begins with a judgement.

"When I'm traveling I often read The Economist. It's less depressing, more oriented to the present and the future than some sad old Retro Necro rock mag (oh God, is that what Neil Young looks like now?)."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Good point, and one that I'm often aware of when writing these things. The problem is that if I endorse something I do do, it looks like I'm my own ideal, which is narcissism. If I endorse something I don't do, I look like a hypocrite, possibly with side-orders of naivete and orientalism.

I tend, as you know, to opt for the latter. I don't believe in "hypocrisy" anyway -- it's a word used by people who don't understand the importance of dialectics.

[(Anonymous)]

And what underpins all three of these ideas is the Platonic message that ultimate reality is both higher than what we see and yet remote from what we see -- true reality is distant, invisible, not-yet-here, "offshore". What's here and visible is low and dirty and contingent.

But you're not really escaping Plato's cave here. You're just replacing one transcendental with another one. "The real real is the here-and-now." That's not so simple and self-evident as it sounds. We're animals who spend a fair amount of our lives in imaginary worlds, in memories of the past, in hopes for the future, etc. You want to cordon off one aspect of our consciousness, our experience of the here-and-now, and call that the real deal.

[(Anonymous)]

http://www.newsweek.com/id/73236/page/1

Newsweek article entitled "Why Apple Isn't Japanese"

[nagrom-the-pink.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in this comment: "music is sacred", which you say without reservation.

It's something I've been thinking about since reading this: http://www.stockhausen.org/ksadvice.html (awfully timely considering the news)

What's the basis for this assertion? I won't be insulted if you reply with a link or point me towards some book or another.

[nagrom-the-pink.livejournal.com]

“Music is no different from opium. Music affects the human mind in a way that makes people think of nothing but music and sensual matters. Opium produces one kind of sensitivity and lack of energy, music another kind. A young person who spends most of his time with music is distracted from the serious and important affairs of life; he can get used to it in the same way as he can to drugs. Music is a treason to the country, a treason to our youth, and we should cut out all this music and replace it with something instructive.” -Ayatollah Khomein, 1979

heh, I just refound this.