Ruth Benedict, Herbert Spencer, and the Alien Asian between them

Ever since this blog entry, way back in Japan, I’ve been wanting to read Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, to go back to the source, as it were. I don’t know if I’ll have time to really read it deeply, but even just dipping into the thing has been revelatory, so a couple quick notes. First of all, this isn’t just a war-time book, this is a book that is so fundamentally shaped and driven by American wartime imperatives that to call it anthropology, you pretty much have to admit that the discipline of anthropology is a continuation of warfare by other means. For example, the book begins with the phrase “The Japanese were the most alien enemy the United States had ever fought” and goes on to explain its reason for being written in the problem that this incommensurable difference posed for the war effort: “Conventions of war which Western nations had come to accept as facts of human nature obviously did not exist for the Japanese…[and] we had to understand their behavior in order to cope with it.” The chapter is entitled “Assignment: Japan” and the book was commissioned by the Office of War Information, who she thanks for the opportunity in the Acknowledgements section.

It is a propos, of course, to note that the book was written not via participant observation, not by actually living with and trying to understand actual Japanese society, but by writing down what Japanese immigrants to the United States were telling her about the Japanese society they had left (and which their adopted country was now at war with). Moreover, given the US practice of rounding up and interning Japanese-Americans at the very time Benedict was writing her book, it takes a remarkable leap to imagine that the sorts of things Japanese-Americans told her about Japan would be scientifically reliable, as opposed to a very strategic effort to establish themselves as good Americans. After all, the logic behind interning Japanese-Americans the already widespread belief that Japanese immigrants were so alien that it was impossible to assimilate them into American society; in wartime, went the argument, they had to be separated from the rest of society to keep them from impeding the war effort. So it’s not surprising that, first of all, Benedict comes up with the novel idea that the Japanese are a fundamentally alien culture, nor is it surprising that, second of all, she was able to find Japanese-Americans who were willing to indulge her in this fantasy. Would it surprise anyone to learn that there were German Jews who were willing to confirm the Nazi’s worst racialist fantasies, given the conditions they found themselves in? So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Benedict was able to find Japanese Americans who were willing to tell her whatever she wanted to believe.

That said–and I think it‘s worth saying–making Benedict out to be some kind of hack lackey of the OSS is too easy; it might be a tasty fruit, but it’s low enough to the ground that no one needs me to pick it for them. I guess I just don’t want to deny the book’s particular savvy, either; after all, although it strikes me as a deeply racist text, the book has also been surprisingly popular in Japan. There are many ways to explain that apparent incongruity, but I think it is worth taking into consideration. One way would be simply to observe that Japan has never been in the position of cultural inferiority that an actually colonized society has, such that the sorts of racism that sting in other contexts (like Japan’s former colony Korea, for example) are less deeply felt in a country still rather inclined to consider itself the peak of the social evolutionary ladder.

On that note, in fact, it’s worth reproducing a passage I find hard to simply diagnose and move on. As she’s describing the ways that Meiji reformers went about modernizing their country and culture in the late 19^th century (a fact that runs directly contrary to the notion that there is an “age-old” Japanese identity), she writes:

“Meiji statesmen were quite conscious about their objectives. During the eighteen-eighties Prince Ito, framer of the constitution, sent the Marquis Kido to consult Herbert Spencer in England on the problems lying ahead of Japan and after lengthy conversations Spencer wrote Ito his judgments. On the subject of hierarchy Spencer wrote that Japan had in her traditional arrangements an incomparable basis for national well-being which should be maintained and fostered. Traditional obligations to superiors, he said, and beyond all to the Emperor, were Japan’s great opportunity. Japan could move forward solidly under its ‘superiors’ and defend itself against the difficulties inevitable in more individualistic nations. The great Meiji statesmen were well satisfied with this confirmation of their own convictions. They meant to retain in the modern world the advantages of observing ‘proper station.’ They did not intend to undermine the habit of hierarchy.”

I find this interesting, if only because of the suggestion that Spencer was the nineteenth century version of a development expert. But more importantly, the example is fascinatingly counterintuitive, since it illustrates simultaneously how Japan was making itself and how it was a product of its own underlying culture. In other words, Benedict is here straddling a contradiction that has fuelled much debate on “cultures” such as Japan: is the “Japanese Mind” a historical constant that you can look to as an explanation for things that Japanese people do, or is it better to think of it as a contingent product of underlying social forces and conflicts? Does culture make or is culture made?

There isn’t an easy answer to this question, since either conclusion leads you into some pretty sticky problems: if culture makes, then what do you do with all the people who worked so hard and diligently to define and demonstrate what kinds of culture needed to be taught to the people? A book like Gluck’s Japan’s Modern Myths wonderfully demonstrates how successful the Meiji reforms of the late eighteenth century were at inventing and imposing a variety of very new ideologies (even if they recycled and repackaged old ideas like Shinto or Buddhism) on the newly forming Japanese society, which is to say, first conceptualizing new ways of being Japanese and then convincing the inhabitants of the islands that they were Japanese in those terms. Gluck does a great job of both demonstrating the incredible energy that went into this project (an energy and anxiety, she deduces, which implies resistance) and showing some of the contradictory and incoherent ways that Japanese culture makers produced the idea of Japanese culture: first adopting Shinto, then dropping it in favor of Buddhism, then switching back to Shinto, and so forth. On the other hand, if culture is simply made (a kind of facile superstructure model), then its always an epiphenomenon, an outgrowth of the real determining factor, be it economics or something else. And you then fall into the trap of dismissing culture as essentially superficial. If it seems to you that I’m thinking this through with the example of Kenya in the back of my mind, you’re right: “tribalism” whatever it is, both causes the violence and gets caused by the violence, in a way that defies the style of facile analysis that both the mainstream media and academia tend to favor.

So I would call attention to the fact that Benedict is able to see Japanese culture coming into existence (the manner in which Meiji statesmen reformers are making their society) even as she relies on a kind of cruder culturalism by which the Japanese mind is the explanation for what Japanese people do. One answer to this problem would be that you can’t have it both ways, but another would be that you have to have it both ways, that both are partly true even if they‘re insufficient on their own. So rather than choosing between flawed alternatives, I instead set her before you as a failed but nevertheless interesting assault on a problem that we don’t exactly have the answer to either.

In other words, for all her problems (and the complete militarism of her project seems to be a pretty huge one) it’s hard to dismiss someone like her unless you have the answer yourself, and I’m pretty sure the only people who think the have the answer are delusional in their own particular and interesting ways. For example, I’m inclined to thing that Benedict is making a certain kind of hay out of Herbert Spencer’s reputation; after all, by finding the influential British scientist to be in full support of Japan’s “traditional arrangements” she can reproduce a kind of rogues gallery of anti-individualistic feudalisms for America to be better than, lumping feudal England into the same category as feudal Japan. I mention this because I think she’s using the example as a means of distinguishing the American imperialism of the Macarthur years (in which the imperative is national self-determination on American terms) from the already failing European imperialism, which was all about civilizing savagery. Japan is a great rock on which to smash European belief in a monocultural concept of “civilization.” After all, if even Herbert Spencer recognizes the stability and civilizational value in their system of aristocracy, then the European model of doing empire starts falling apart: if they aren’t merely savages, but are, as Benedict proclaims again and again, a civilization both worth respecting and alien from anything we could ever understand, then liberal modes of doing empire (where everyone in the world has to find their own unique way of becoming the modern, how there are many roads but only one destination) get a big boost. We have to teach them to find their own culturally-specific way of creating a country, flag, government, etc. Which is sort of what MacArthur was charged with doing in Japan, what the post-war American effort to sponsor decolonization in Africa, for example, was all about: the US, with its new found global hegemony tried to both liberate formerly colonized nations and pull them into the Western capitalist democracy fold. Be yourself, claimed the Americans, but let us show you how to be yourself.

So there are problems with it. But what then do you do with someone like Benedict, and with the observations she made in service of this mission? What do you do with the Japanese who bought the Japanese translation of her book and found it not nearly as objectionable as I do?