The Secular Fundamentalist

Models of Adaptation Success and Failure

Chapter 16: Adaptation Success and Failure - The early modernizing and late modern experiences

When I was at university, I did a comparative study of the nineteenth century struggles of China and Japan to deal with the threat and challenge of militarily and industrially aggressive modern western societies.  Over time, it has gradually occurred to me that the kinds of conversations that went on in those two societies very much parallels the sort of arguments we are now having throughout the late modern world around issues of history, culture, identity, economics and our relationship with the environment.

The extremely self confident and highly centralized Chinese mandarin bureaucracy assumed a policy of denial and business-as-usual.  This was calamitous.  Despite reluctant and belated efforts to deal at the margins of the problems posed by western aggression, traditional China started to crumble and finally succumbed to internal political and social chaos, warlordism and intensifying encroachment by the foreign invaders.

On the other hand, the strong but less stable Japanese military dictatorship quickly collapsed when it failed to repel the foreign intrusion.  Its internal enemies had ascertained what was necessary to militarily catch up with the Western imperialists, grabbed their opportunity, overthrew the dictatorship with foreign technical help and moved to adopt modern technology and institutions wholesale, rapidly industrializing their medieval economy into a world power.

Modern societies are now being forced to deal with an equally intractable and threatening fact of life; that they are living wildly beyond their ecological means.  The already referred to ‘Living Planet Report’ of 2012, sponsored by World Wildlife Fund, Zoological Society of London, Global Footprint Network and the European Space Agency, is as big a challenge for us as modernization was for the Chinese and the Japanese in the nineteenth century.

And if the current industrial traditionalists to be found running our majority media, business and political establishments are anything to go by, we are heading down the Chinese path.  Like the Chinese mandarins, who proudly counted their continuous and unassailably superior history back to well before 2000 BC, the modern corporates are equally cohesive and blithe in their assumptions that the modern project will just keep going, no matter what the threats or challenges are.

The traditionalist nineteenth century Chinese mandarins regarded modernizing reform as a plot by Foreign Devils and aided by traitors, to undermine the oldest, most successful and by far the most civilized Imperial culture in history.  Their modern equivalents regard necessary change as a scam/hoax concocted by an international conspiracy of left wing saboteurs, aided by local do-gooders and calculated to undermine the most dynamic and successful economic system in history.

The Japanese imported new technology and western government/corporate institutions wholesale to create an instant modern economy, in part because they had already seen what had happened to the Chinese.  Their modern equivalents want to create a balanced and robust sustainable economy that can go on indefinitely, and get it up and running with the same kind of urgency.
 
Unfortunately, today's scientific warnings of future disaster aren't as mind focusing for us, as were the warnings for the Japanese, as they watched their next door neighbors reeling under the blows of overwhelmingly well armed western barbarians.

Just as the Japanese agents of change removed their long standing medieval military dictatorship because it blocked the road forward, their modern successors need to do the same to an ever more expensive and damaging fossil fuel economy and unnecessarily energy intensive lifestyles. Regrettably for today's reformers, existing green industries are presently too small and the green political lobby lamentably too left leaning liberal ‘progressive’ (and therefore too politically marginal) to make much of a dent on the status quo, no matter how bad the environment gets.

The Japanese road was a radical and conservative one that made only the absolutely necessary, albeit far reaching changes to save the country, but also saved and ported as much of the traditional as was helpful in a difficult transitional period.  It was a road that was able to carry Japan through the trauma of modernization with a minimum of social conflict arising from fear of the future and loss of the past.  And it is a road that could carry us to a profitable new world of capitalism ‘lite’.

The Japanese journey into modern times was engineered and directed by sections of its traditional samurai intelligentsia.  Similarly for us, parts of our existing corporate elite are well qualified to orchestrate such a journey with a minimum of fuss and maximum palatability, breadth of social support and chances of success. What we don't have, and the Japanese did, was a large section of their elite waiting and ready to go, the day the foreigners smashed in their national front door.

Sadly for China, while the Japanese were getting into the swing of modernization, just under a hundred years before Mao Zedong became the first red emperor, China convulsed into the Taiping rebellion.  Failure and national humiliation gave people from outside the mandarin elite both the opportunity and motive to challenge them, which led to one the most damaging and bloody wars in history.

This quasi socialist and Christian movement fought a 14 year war against the Imperial government in Beijing. It cost between 15-20 million mostly civilian lives and was eventually crushed with British and French help.  Whether they would have been modernizers, had they been successful, is doubtful, but the conflict that they brought with them gives us some inkling of what could happen to us, if we fail to respond to the historical forces that are now applying themselves to our future.

We do not have the willing forces available to pull off the kind of corporate coup that propelled Japan into the modern world, and whose absence left China to play out a ghastly dance of death for well over a hundred years.

Failure by the corporate elite to read the winds of change means all the alternatives become unpleasant.  The eventual grim mid twentieth century success of the Communist revolution in China was not just the result of the cruelty of misfortune, but the inevitable way that accumulated errors of judgment and losses amplified each other over time.

Right now, the path forward isn't looking good, as our state and corporate mandarins work to close down environmental reforms, reinforce the smokestacks of  'progress' and raise again the prospect of unfettered energy and capital intensive economic growth in a closed environment, scientific advice and common sense notwithstanding.

My view is that in the absence of significant players with a real interest in building capitalism lite and the clout to make it happen, the best we can hope for is the emergence of smaller self strengthening movements.  These might be armed with some of the 'power suites' which have traditionally characterized religious organizations, which could enable the building of resilient and secure people and communities in the face of post-modern devolution.  They might be able to kick start appropriate smaller scale production and technology shifts in more localized theatres, even as capitalism 'heavy' starts to unwind and cantonize under ecological, emerging criminal, insurgent and social degovernancing pressures, into militarily heavily garrisoned administrative zones.

There were similar local self strengthening movements in China.  They didn’t alter the country’s disastrous trajectory, but they were better than nothing and provided some of the resources that eventually enabled the country to galvanize itself, when larger national forces that did have the capacity to save the place, started to assert themselves.

We might be able to hope for as much.