“Is there a parallel between a dying Christianity in the West and the death of Japan’s prewar and wartime faith? When nations lose their sense of mission, their mandate of heaven, the faith that brought them into this world as unique countries and cultures, is that when they die? Is that when civilizations perish? So it would seem.”
- Pat Buchanan, in The Death of the West, commenting on Japan’s aging population and echoing Mishima’s sentiments about the abandonment of Japan’s unique spirit and culture in favor of modern Western ideals and materialism.
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Nietzsche has a similar theory in Anti-Christ:
“To be sure, when a people is perishing, when it feels how its faith in the future and its hope of freedom are waning irrevocably, when submission begins to appear to it as the prime necessity and it becomes aware of the virtues of the subjugated as the conditions of self-preservation, then its god *has* to change, too. Now he becomes a sneak, timid and modest; he counsels “peace of soul,” hate-no-more, forebearance, even “love” of friend and enemy. He moralizes constantly, he crawls into the cave of every private virtue, he becomes god for everyman, he becomes a private person, a cosmopolitan.
“Formerly, he represented a people, the strength of a people, everything aggressive and power-thirsty in the soul of a people; now he is merely the good god.
“Indeed, there is no other alternative: *either* they are the will to power, and they remain a people’s gods, *or* the incapacity for power, and then they necessarily become *good.*” (Nietzsche, Anti-Christ, Ch. 16)
I gained many enemies in the Japanese department at my alma mater by writing a paper insisting that Japan had de-balled itself after the Pacific War and had turned Shinto into a spineless excuse to creep around and autoflagellate while pretending to still maintain tradition. Needless to say I was not liked by the time I graduated, hence the career change to Rhetoric, where I can get letters of reference.
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Excellent and highly appropriate comment.
Every time I hear about someone with views even slightly to the right of moderate going to college to study in the humanities, their story leads me to believe that I would be swimming upstream ideologically and pay a fortune to have my intelligence insulted by covert Marxists.
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And a good many open Marxists as well.
Literature and Creative Writing are often the departmental prima donnas at many institutions, while Rhetoric, which unabashedly lays bare the art and science of propaganda — the use of carefully crafted writing and speech to motivate, inspire, and influence — is considered to be of questionable necessity. Deliberate attempts to infuse writing with a partisan message (read: a right-wing, conservative, or traditionalist message) are considered shameful things to be outed, exposed. After all, we have the phenomena of Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, and GLBT Studies, the host departments of which are obligate partisans. Their agenda, AFAICT, is to dismantle traditional structures and paradigms, which they view as threatening.
Rhetoric, if studied, however, obliges you to engage in society as an active participant, and it empowers you and makes you able to challenge the hydra that is politics. We can’t have that if we’re all going to be good boys and girls.
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