What's normal?

William Gibson (previously discussed here) gave an interview to the science fiction site io9 recently in which he discussed the politics of his latest book, Spook Country.

One comment in particular caught my eye. Asked about Canada, his adopted home since fleeing the US to escape the draft, he said:

Canada is set up to run on steady immigration. It feels like a twenty first century country to me because it's not interested in power. It negotiates and does business. It gets along with other countries. The power part is very nineteenth century. 99 percent of ideology we have today is very nineteenth century. The twentieth century was about technology, and the nineteenth was ideology.

This got me thinking about Japan's "normal nation-ists." While Gibson's characterization is a bit too simple — ideology obviously "bled" into the twentieth century, technology had as transformative an impact on the nineteenth as the twentieth — a "normal" nation in the late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries is not the same as a normal nation in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries.

A normal nation in the late nineteenth century, the salad days of the nation-state, was obsessed with national power, constantly looking to enhance its own power and sizing itself up against other nation-states. It shaped its domestic institutions to enable it to draw on the wealth and bodies of its citizens to build up a modern army and navy and conquered weaker nations for reasons of wealth and honor (and to compete with others, of course). War was the great proving ground of the nation. As Theodore Roosevelt wrote in The Strenuous Life, "If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world."

In their thinking about war and Japanese society in the twenty-first century, Japan's conservatives — the "normal nation-ists" — still see the world through these eyes. To be a normal nation is to compete with other nations, to not "shrink from the hard contests." This is why so many of them want, as Abe Shinzo said, to leave the postwar system behind. In their eyes the postwar system is abnormal, as it led Japan to opt out of the contest for power. It weakened the resolve of the Japanese people for competition internationally. (At least military competition, the only competition that matters; to be a merchant nation, to exert power through money is ignoble, hence the shame of so many Japanese over the country's response to the Gulf crisis in 1990.)

Japan as it exists today is a normal nation. It is peaceful, has abstained from intervention in the internal politics of other countries, and is non-nuclear. It is a signatory to major international treaties and an enthusiastic participant in international regimes. This is normal behavior for a country in the twenty-first century. Japanese, like Europeans, are from Venus (in Robert Kagan's formulation), but Venusian behavior is increasingly normal, even in East Asia, which, despite the persistence of dangerous flashpoints and despite the stirrings of an arms race, is still remarkably peaceful.

Accordingly, the program pushed by the conservatives is the road of an abnormal nation. Perhaps because they take the United States as their model, they assume that US behavior is normal. It isn't. (MTC implies this in this post.) Martial America is almost unique in its adherence to nineteenth-century norms of behavior. American power has played a positive role in supporting international order — there is no denying that. But the motive power behind it is straight out of the nineteenth century, leading to abnormal behavior like the invasion of Iraq. (That the US launched the invasion despite the opposition of much of the world would suggest that the war was "abnormal," i.e. in contravention to a prevailing norm against aggressive, preventive war.)

So it is a misnomer to describe the revisionist advocates of a more robust Japan free of constraints on the use of force as advocates of a normal nation. Prime Minister Fukuda's emphasis on, in MTC's words, "contributing to world security through leadership on disease control, global warming, combatting poverty" looks increasingly like the foreign policy of a normal nation in the twenty-first century. It is also a mistake to describe them as nationalists. Nationalism need not be associated with military power, although nineteenth-century nationalism is. Why can't a twenty-first century nation be proud of more pacific achievements, whether domestic (a society with a low crime rate or high literacy) or international (a commitment to creating a more peaceful, orderly world)? The revisionists do not have a monopoly on pride in their country. Defenders of Japan's postwar system have plenty of which to be proud.

"Contemporary reality is like an overlapping set of dire science-fictional scenarios"

When I was younger, I was a flat-out science-fiction nerd. I think I have this in common with a lot of other policy wonks: there's something about memorizing numerous details about imaginary worlds that translates well into memorizing details about the slightly less imaginary but no less bizarre worlds of Washington (and in my case, Tokyo).

Accordingly, with the news cycle in its August nadir, I couldn't resist a post on some recent sci-fi odds and ends.

First, William Gibson, the famed coiner of the term "cyberspace," has just published a new book — Spook Country — that like his novel Pattern Recognition is set in the post-9/11 present (early 2006 to be precise). There is some overlap between the novels, with the enigmmatic Belgian adman Hubertus Bigend serving as a facilitator for at least one plot line. I can't say that I enjoyed SC more than PR — I thought it dragged in some places, in fact — but I have nothing but praise for Gibson's writing style and for his sense of the present. His fictional world is populated with people, objects, and concepts stripped from our own, and it is hard not to look at our world differently after reading both of the aforementioned novels. As Gibson noted in an interview in this weekend's NYT Magazine, "Contemporary reality is like an overlapping set of dire science-fictional scenarios." (In SC, he tries, successfully I think, to bring the Le Carrean cold-war spy thriller into the twenty-first century, a shift that is appropriate because, as Jay Kinney observes in an essay posted at Boing Boing, we're in the midst of a "conspiracy boom.")

Second, I want to direct you to a review by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker of the Library of America's new volume of four Philip K. Dick novels from the 1960s (HT: Boing Boing). Philip K. Dick was one of my first great favorites as a reader of science-fiction. I was certainly a committed fan years before the explosion of interest in his writing that has followed in the wake of the latest round of films adapted from his novels and stories (most of which aren't particularly good, I should add). Gopnik's review is serviceable but I regret that he passed over what I think is Dick's best novel, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said on the way to discussing either his grand epiphany or his descent into madness, depending on your point of view.

The gist of Gopnik's review is that in Dick's novels the focus is not on wondrous new technologies but rather on how frail, immutable, mean humanity will suffer the same faults regardless of our technology: "Although 'Blade Runner,' with its rainy, ruined Los Angeles, got Dick’s antic tone wrong, making it too noirish and romantic, it got the central idea right: the future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on. Dick’s future worlds are rarely evil and oppressive, exactly; they are banal and a little sordid, run by a demoralized élite at the expense of a deluded population. No matter how mad life gets, it will first of all be life." (One of my problems of Blade Runner is that for all the grime, it left out a more interesting concept from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: kipple, "unwanted or useless junk that tends to reproduce itself.")

(Incidentally, for more background on Philip K. Dick, as a high school student I did a phone interview with Frank Bertrand, a sort of guardian of Dick's legacy, who posted the interview online.)

What does it say about our age that science-fiction writers, long dismissed as mere genre hacks by the mainstream literary establishment, often have more to say about the way we live now than that establishment? (Look at how Second Life has leaped straight out of the pages of Neil Stephenson, another favorite of mine.)

Anyway, apologies for the nerd moment. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.