Models of Adaption Success and Failure

This article was originally written for an Australian audience, but most of the context applies equally in the US.


When I was a student, 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.  The kinds of conversations that went on in those two societies very much parallels the sort of arguments we are now having throughout the developed world around climate change and alternative energy.

The extremely self confident and highly centralised Chinese mandarin bureacracy assumed a policy of denial and business-as-usual.  This was calamatous.  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, a strong but less stable Japanese dictatorship quickly collapsed when it failed to repel the foreign intrusion.  Its internal enemies grabbed their opportunity, overthrew it and moved to adopt modern technology, rapidly industrializing their medieval economy into a world power. At the same time, they were careful to preserve as many of their traditional and socially stabilizing customs as were portable into the new order. Thus the new production system was full of novelty, but society felt the same as it always had been.

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.  We need  50% more planet than we currently have to bring our ecological budget back into a 'fiscally' responsible balance.  This is as big a challenge for us as modernization was for the Chinese and the Japanese in the nineteenth century.

Global warming is but one of the unwelcome signs of very unpleasant coming change, if we do not meet this challenge.

And if the current industrial tradtionalists to be found running our majority media, business and politcal establishments are anything to go by, we are heading down the Chinese path.  Like the Chinese mandarins, who proudly counted their continuous and unassailably superor history back to circa 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, because for a mere 250 years, it always has.

The traditionalist nineteenth century Chinese mandarins regarded reform as a plot by Foreign Devils and aided by traitors, to undermine the oldest, most successful and civilized Imperial culture in history.  Their modern equivalents regard necessary change as a a scam/hoax concocted by an international conspiracy of left wing saboteurs, aided by local 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 forever, and get it up and running with the same kind of urgency. 

Unfortunately, today's scientific warnings of future disaster aren't as mind focussing for us, as were the warnings for the Japanese, as they watched their next door neighbors getting worked over by overwhelmingly well arrmed westerners, and their internal administration and political stability start to crumble.

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 just too small and the political greenies lamentably too left leaning liberal (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 is a radical and conservative one that makes only the absolutely necessary, albeit far reaching changes to save the country, but also saves as much of the traditional as is helpful in a difficult transitonal period.  It is 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 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 Tse tung became the first red emperor, China convulsed into the Taiping rebellion.  Failure and national humiliation gave people from outside the mandarin elite both the opportuninty and motive to challenge them, which led to one the most damaging 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 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

Traditionalist Chinese insularity and hubris eventually terminated its rule, destroyed the country and left their successors with insurmountable problems that compounded into full scale Japanes invasion, devastating civil war and the long and very difficult revolutionary period that followed.

And that is the way it looks to be going for us, because 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 incredibly tough.  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 amplify 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, bring back the smoke stacks of 'progress' and raise again the prospect of unfettered 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, that 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 and social degovernancing pressures, into militarily garrisoned administrative zones.

For a fuller exploration of these possibilities, read my 'Michael and Giordana: Post-Modern Heroes' at:
http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1810745-Post-Modern-Heroes-Michael...
Also look at 'A Post-Modern Sustainable Order' at:
http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1849413-A-Post-Modern-Sustainable-...
And if you are game, 'Meditations on Post-Modernity:
http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1576546-Meditations-on--Postmodern...

Personally, I really don't want to live long enough to see what happens, because I know where the road we seem bent on going down leads.  All the options drop down to survivability strategy as the best possible outcome.

I hope I am wrong.