LISTEN. "Japan is a syncretic culture in which different philosophies and religions meld," writes Julian Baggini in How the World Thinks (192), but Confucian pro-sociality (not anti-individualist conformism) is primus inter pares for its demotion of personal egoism and preferred emphasis on group context, relationships, and the welfare of the whole community.
Syncretism, "the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought," is a five-dollar word for what I usually just call cherry-picking. Be a stoic and a pragmatist, a freedom-loving Spinozist and a free-willing Jamesian, a fatalist and a meliorist, tough and tender by turns.
"Usually," says Kazashi Nobuo of the Japanese way, 'I' is not necessary and not welcome." There's no I in team. The I's achieve their personal best, westerners typically construe the cliche, when they play as an integrated unit, a we. The professional I's will be remunerated and the amateurs at least appreciated for their team sacrifice. The Japanese construction is less overtly concerned with the personal payoff. It's all about social harmony and the relational context that binds a people, a group, a team. It's not about I-me-mine. You gotta have wa, is both a prescription and the title of a funny cross-cultural comparison of conflicting attitudes and culture clashes that emerge when Americans play baseball in Japan.
But mind, the gap's not so great as you might think. Westerners may be more concerned to express than necessarily to instantiate their distinctive individuality, to seem rather than always to be so different. Real uniqueness is pretty rare.
Speaking of teams and wa...
Yesterday was the first time all season, the truncated MLB season that started just two months ago I mean, when I was able to be excited for the trivial pleasures of my favorite game. I haven't been able to watch them play in empty stadia, it was just too surreal a reminder of how strange these days of COVID have been. "The times feel apocalyptic," I tweeted, "the climate's going to hell, there's a lunatic in the White House... and today I'm happy my team squeaked into the postseason. Thank goodness for the green fields of the mind." The old renaissance scholar/baseball commissioner Bart Giammatti understood that we need our games, our fantasy escapes, and our symbolic pastoral spaces, especially when the world is dark and foreboding.
And so I was especially receptive to Grandfather Philosophy's baseball analogy, posted in reply to my mention of Spinoza's and Einstein's god and my skepticism that a rationalist pantheist could be a fully-engaged and effective environmental activist.
The one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that a change in attitude is the first requirement of dealing effectively with the climate crisis. We need to change our thinking, and then act accordingly. So let us concede (for a moment) that Spinoza is not the best man in the lineup to drive home the winning run. But a winning team is just that; i.e., a team. And if I am the GM and am building a philosophical climate change team, I want him on it. Spinoza broke with prior thinking and held that what we call volition is just a mode of thinking; just another moment in the causal chain. But isn’t a mode of thinking about climate change based on rational thought a necessary prerequisite for willful action; a necessary moment in the causal chain?
Who else would I want to acquire? Probably Wm James (although I’ve got a lot to learn here). Correct me here: James’s big moment was when he chose to believe in free will. His thinking was changed after reading Renouvier’s definition that free will is the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts. Was he not just adopting a different mode of thinking, `a la Spinoza? Maybe James can be our designated hitter, and Spinoza the motivational coach?
We'll have to tinker some more with that line-up, to find the most winning formula, but for now just put me in, coach, I'm ready to play. It's all about the team.
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