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Most of the population of Japan were sad, angry, and humiliated in 1945. They blamed traditional society (in general) for having failed them. The result was th
by pjlegato 11y ago
Most of the population of Japan were sad, angry, and humiliated in 1945. They blamed traditional society (in general) for having failed them.
The result was that most people discarded traditional social value systems and customs on a wholesale basis. The traditional ways of interacting with others began to be seen as horribly old-fashioned, conservative, imperialist, stodgy, and above all profoundly unfashionable.
However, they failed to create a coherent new system of customs and values to replace the ones they discarded. The result was the atomization of society, the lack of the shared mores, norms, and contexts that traditionally produced the conditions necessary to find friendship.
Something very similar happened in California with the mass adoption of countercultural criticisms of traditional society in the 1960s and 1970s, which now manifests as a sort of pervasive social awkwardness and atomization.
The trend lags a few years behind Tokyo, but I imagine before too long, San Francisco too will have "rent-a-friend" services to fill the void created by the lack of shared social mores and customs that traditionally allowed people to make friends.
- kough 11y agoI can't comment on the societal changes of post-WWII Japan, but I see what you've described playing out right now in the US. There is a lot to dislike about American "traditional values" (like, I don't know, racism? sexism? tons of things) but as more and more people lose these traditional values and the social networks that came with them (e.g., church), I think we'll see this play out the same way in the US. It's already starting -- there was a great article in the Atlantic a few months ago that's well worth reading (http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/white-working-class-poverty/424341/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/white-wo...).
- pjlegato 11y agoAny human-made system is bound to have both good and bad in it -- including all new propositions for replacing traditional systems. Humans aren't perfect and never will be. The problem is that the baby is too often thrown out with the bathwater. Specific criticisms of specific areas, however valid they may be, are almost imperceptably broadened, bit by bit, year by year, until they become categorical condemnations of "traditional society" ("the Man") in general, no longer in regard to any specific thing but as a generic reified abstraction to be combatted.
- kough 11y agoHuh, it's almost isomorphic to the problem of old code: total rewrite, or careful maintenance and update? One's a lot sexier and more interesting for the people doing the work.
- lzecon 11y agoBesides the influx of tech people moving to San Francisco in the last 5-10 years (many of whom disappear in a downswing, ask anyone living in SF for 99-05), I haven't heard or seen anything that suggests the mass adoption of countercultural criticisms have at all influenced social awkwardness or atomization in CA. It's a BIG state.