Another nest of contumacious puppies. This month — apart from the opening thoughts on the dead pope — is a Japan special. There’s loads of stuff, so just dip in as you please.
The Nice Pope
Pope Francis was a decent fellow, I think we can all agree on that, can’t we? He seems to have walked his talk; he lived, as you probably know, in a very modest guest-house, and apparently he only owned three items. He was a kindly, well-meaning middle-class social[ist]-democrat down to the bone, and so, on the one hand, he called environmentalism ‘a moral duty’, described unfettered capitalism as the ‘dung of the devil’ (he had to do a fair amount of work to persuade people he wasn’t a Marxist) and called for an end to the annihilation of the Palestinians. On the other hand, he pushed for vaccines1, promoted open-borders and preached a gentle, pluralist relativism which both erodes spiritual truth and, at the same time, fuels the opposing fiction (or ‘opposame’) of reactionary absolutism.
Not that he was conscious of all that. Such good, decent, middle-class folk rarely are. They take their loving kindness and humility as a kind of absolute, like loving mothers do — I mean the kind of loving mothers who end up raising self-regarding monsters. They don’t realise that to be a parent demands both love and justice, or resolute, solitary, action. Consider what Francis, this good — and very powerful — parent of the Catholic Church actually did. He created the ‘Council for the Economy’ to oversee Vatican finances. He established the ‘Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors’. And he ‘Signed the Human Fraternity Document’ with Sunni Islam’s Grand Imam, condemning religious violence. What does all that add up to? Not very much.
Now, I’m far from being an expert on the papacy, so you’ll have to excuse a bit of guesswork here, but as far as I can tell he could have made serious moves to distribute some of the Vatican bank’s four billion pounds to the poor (to landless peasants for example).2 He could have forbidden Catholics under pain of mortal sin from owning private equity. He could have ordered a full independent audit of Church finances and published its findings. He could have done these things, or made serious efforts to, but he didn’t. Worse, perhaps, he appears to have done embarrassingly little to tackle the scandal of institutionalised sexual abuse3 — and didn’t even try to lift the monstrous ban on celibacy for Catholic priests.4
I’m not saying that he literally did nothing. He tried to audit the Vatican finances,5 for example, he offered Julian Assange asylum and he shared his warm-hearted decency with one and all. Nor am I saying that words and symbolic gestures don’t have meaning and power, they certainly do, 6 indeed they are far more important than politics, which the wise man tends to leave to idiots. Nor am I saying that it would have been easy to do something that really mattered, or even possible. If he had used his power, rather than his words, to attack capitalism, he would have been deposed by his bishops in short order.7 If his homilies had cut to the root our ills or if he had said anything which touched the quick, the living quick, of the spirit, he would have faced an aggressive retaliation — and certainly wouldn’t have the liberal press fawning over him. Don’t get me wrong, I really do like nice people, like Uncle Jezza and good old Bern. Lovely people. Bu let’s not forget that only these kinds of men, nice people who do little, say little, and who can do and say next to nothing, are ever allowed anywhere near power. Francis would not have made cardinal, much less be voted Pope, by the Catholic church (a blight upon this earth8) if he’d shown any signs of being greater — which is to say less likeable — than decent.
The democratic mass just will not have it, they cannot accept a leader who leads. As D.H.Lawrence wrote, ‘how can the anti-power masses, above all the great middling masses, ever have a king who is more than a thing of ridicule or pathos?’9 That is what they, the huddling hordes, demand of their leaders — mad imbeciles and psychopaths like Trump, Biden and Blair — or kindly, decent slightly pathetic men like Corbyn, Sanders and Francis — and so that is what they get. The mob-mind thirsts for violent control or reassuring sentiment — the fire and brimstone Christ of the Apocalypse or the meek little lamb of the Gospels — and so that is what they get. Above all groupthink seeks someone to reflect its collective needs, someone who will address social and political problems, never the primal anxiety of the divided self.10 A real leader, a true ‘aristocrat of the spirit’, both peace-loving (‘I come to heal’) and unsentimental (‘I come as a sword’), who speaks straight to the cold consciousness of the individual man or woman, is an impossibility in the world; as Jesus of Nazareth discovered to the cost of his life. As Lawrence said, Jesus spoke only to the individual, never to the mass; even his disciples were confused and disturbed by the man. Nietzsche may have been out of his tree, but he was right about many things, this perhaps above all, that the masses fear and hate the inner power of greatness, and so they must put force and sentiment in its place; their own force and sentiment. This is what the primal anarchist opposes, both the strong right-wing fiend and the weak left-wing nice guy.
The British Stand
Japanese social media is all-a-buzz with the British stand at this year’s Expo Osaka 2025. The drama is over the cafe, where the authentic British ‘Afternoon Tea’ turned out to be a tad disappointing. Customers were expecting the product on the left (not exactly an imperial offering to begin with), but found themselves presented with the selection on the right:
Speaks for itself, although eagle-eyed readers might recognise the stained Swedish flat-pack stand, and perhaps even the pink, defrosted, shop-bought Japanese cake. I don’t see why the Japanese are complaining though, these stands are supposed to represent the country in question. ¥5,000 (twenty-five quid) isn’t much to pay to get what really is an authentic British experience.