I think the only part of Shintoism that will catch widespread attention in the U.S. is the part where they catch Pokemon and make them fight. Probably heading toward legalizing cock fighting for those who want to step away from electronics.
I thought that the peak-fear of Japanese influence had passed long ago in the 1980s.
Isn't it time now for Americans to get worked up about China?
GOOP already tried that. The best they could manage to turn into a marketable product was a jade egg for the vagina.
Shinto barely has any ideology, even on paper. (It used to be nationalist/imperialist but that was removed postwar.) It's a very functional religion, focusing on preserving local sites, spiritual cleansing, and personal prayers/rituals. OP prediction not impossible, but someone would need to do a major overhaul first.
If it can't be used for imperialism anymore, is it really functional?
Japanese cultural influence is at its peak. There are like a zillion animes on Netflix now, for example. Shinto seems like a good choice because it is ideology free. It's vaguely spiritual without requiring much.
British influence is also at its peak, but we're not going to be adopting state Anglicanism anytime soon.
Contrarian investors are buying Presbyterian futures.
My impression is Shintoism in practice involves huge amounts of time spent sitting uncomfortably while people in weird clothes chant interminably and ring little bells. I assume the average American would die from HFCS withdrawal in the course of such a ceremony.
I didn't understand what heebie was getting at, but then I read the Wikipedia page on Marie Kondo.
One day, I had a kind of nervous breakdown and fainted. I was unconscious for two hours. When I came to, I heard a mysterious voice, like some god of tidying telling me to look at my things more closely
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Kondo#Personal_life
The postwar function of Shinto is to pacify your discarded umbrellas so they don't come back as kasa-obake.
I assume the average American would die from HFCS withdrawal in the course of such a ceremony.
You forget about our Puritan roots.
We'll need a bigger obi, that's certain.
7: Brexit will change everything. Get ready for the Greater East Anglican Co-Religiosity Sphere.
My impression is Shintoism in practice involves huge amounts of time spent sitting uncomfortably while people in weird clothes chant interminably and ring little bells.
This is my impression of most religions.
In some, you have to rotate stand-sit-kneel.
Anyway, I think the Asian cultural moment is arriving, but won't reach the masses until somebody figures out how sell a sushi roll with fries on it.
I have been hoping that the fact that the public face of atheism is a bunch of sneering right-wing assholes will lead people who dislike sneering right-wing assholes to rejuvenate mainline Christianity. There's all these great churches downtown in every city, they are mostly run by nice liberal people, join the team!
I'm told that clubs are having a mild resurgence in the boom cities because they have downtown real estate and some of them aren't unbearably sexist or Christianist. What would be next but churches? So much room!
13 Japanese culture certainly seems to have an unlimited supply of various types of ghosts, goblins, fairies, and that sort of thing.
I'll never not make fun of Goop, but some of the recipes in Paltrow's cookbooks are good and practical.
I think we're more likely to get a mass turning away from religion or irreligion as an interesting concept at all.
I'm just insinuating religous Americans don't have the self control to sit through a lengthy ceremony where no one tells them they're the bestest.
We need a taxonomy of religions based on common ritual stances.
Thinking about increased Japanese influence, especially in a naturalistic way, just feels so retro. Like something KSR would write in the 90s. The non-naturalistic bits of Japanese culture are already so prominent here. Anime, manga, video games, hell, even non-Japanese stuff like K-pop is just a second-wave reflection of Japanese forms.
British cultural influence surely peaked in the 1750s, though?
Or just saying it straight out apparently.
26: The Greek Orthodox can give us tips.
I predict Japanese cultural influence in the US will plummet once enough Americans learn the writing in the background of The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife is dialogue.
12: there's also the possibility that your cat will get so old it turns into a yokai with multiple tails. I guess you have to kill it first to be sure?
Speaking of animism, I was just surprised trying to label a bunch of bank transactions - after about twenty, Excel thought it understood what I was doing and tried to fill in the rest for me. It mostly got it right, with weird exceptions like "PegPlar" instead of "PayPal".
I take it back, over time it got worse and worse including things like "Reacrtable expense".
Has any animistic system ever spread by proselytization? Catholicism and Buddhism absorbed various local animisms, but they started with ideology.
"I have been hoping that the fact that the public face of atheism is a bunch of sneering right-wing assholes will lead people who dislike sneering right-wing assholes to rejuvenate mainline Christianity"
Unfortunately the public face of Christianity is also a bunch of sneering right-wing assholes.
4. last: did you notice what the SBC did to the faith of John Bunyan? Major overhauls happen all the time.
British cultural influence surely peaked in the 1750s, though?
Surely not. Most of what is now the USA had minimal British cultural influence in the 1750s. The population of most of it had probably never even heard of Britain.
Not so strangely enough, the Association of Shinto Shrines (Jinja Honcho) is also dominated by right-wing assholes (Abe and 15 of 18 cabinet members are members of Nippon Kaigi, a revisionist organization associated with the Jinja Honcho that wants to "restore" Japan, including relaxing the separation of religion and state).
One day, I had a kind of nervous breakdown and fainted. I was unconscious for two hours. When I came to, I heard a mysterious voice, like some god of tidying telling me to look at my things more closely
So she is basically the interior-decorating version of Hong Xiuquan.
This worries me slightly.
You know what this means? Gangs of extremely neat thugs bent on Ethnic Tidying. (In the words of the Leader: "When I see someone who does not spark joy, I reach for my revolver. No person, no problem.")
Future historian: "In many ways, the Tidy movement's ideology represented continuity with the 20th century rather than a radical break. Nazism, Communism, Wahhabism, Bitcoin, Neoliberalism, and centrist or social-democratic ideas of managerial technocracy all shared visions of a world of order, whether imposed by central fiat, designed by expert planners, or emerging as a system-level property from the interactions of autonomous individuals and firms. [Alternatively] But this was a fantasy. We now understand that chaos is the only morally acceptable state of society. The entire spectrum of ideas was tainted by this original delusion...[Or] The tragedy of the Long Crisis was in the end that people who shared so much slaughtered countless millions of lives over the correct interpretation of a vision as simple and intuitively convincing as...tidiness. We have to face up to the tidy within us."
These Tatars do not spark joy
"Their whole way of life, almost their every thought, was illuminated, guided and governed by their single religion/philosophy: a belief in order, place and a kind of holy rationality... at its most mundane, their belief could be expressed as a certainty that there was a place for everything, and everything ought to be in its place. Once everything was in its place, God would be happy with the universe, and eternal peace and joy would replace the current chaos.
The Idirans saw themselves as agents in this great reordering..."
Surely you mean the Great Interior Decorator of the Universe? *rolls up trouser leg for special handshake*
Extract from Survey Report, Site 20790/A: Due to a residual radiation level of ~2 R/hour, positive test for Cordyceps A and Sarin contamination, and unconfirmed conventional UXO status, the site investigation was limited to 4-way LIDAR and mmWave SAR imagery before the exceptionally interesting results led us to deploy a Diggerbot and eventually risk briefly entering the structure. Hazmat and CBRN protection was used for all participants with the exception of two graduate students, as required by the institutional review board's ethics policy. The Board of Rectors of the University expresses its condolences. Those robots are expensive.
We find this site, a probable residential apartment that may also have been the scene of religious rites, to present the classic features of the Tidy mythical landscape, a means by which the values and ideologies of Tidy were expressed in the organization of domestic and other spaces. The notion of place in Tidy provides a lens for the critical understanding of such spaces...
40: A 2016 NYT profile emphasizes tidying as something that came naturally to her, through childhood, college, and after. Consistently with that, when I followed your link to its source, I found a leading sentence someone had omitted from it: "I was obsessed with what I could throw away." So I don't think it was intended as a "this is where it all began" explanation.
OK. Kondo is not a millenniarian cultist destined to lead a vast army of fanatics against the Celestial Emperor. She is just an Idiran sleeper agent.
45 has me wondering, and not for the first time, just how many SCP incident reports Alex has authored.
Going way back in the thread, and much less entertainingly than my compatriots, undogmatic religions can't make converts in the way that dogmatic and monotheistic religions do. The whole point of credal statements is that -- because they're empirically nuts -- they cut you off from your old social place and give you a new tribe. I think the Muslim profession of faith is the perfect development of this: say the magic words and you're one of us and can join in the slaughter of the infidel and share out their booty. This use of a verbal formula was later imitated by Protestant Christianity, which, at the time Mohammed was borrowing from it, used baptism rather than credal allegiance alone to mark the moment of conversion.
Polytheists and animists can't do conversion in the same way, because they're not tidy about Gods.
cut you off from your old social place and give you a new tribe
My impression is that for most conversions in most times and places this wasn't really true, because conversion was usually top-down. The credal declaration didn't (entirely) cut the speaker off from their community, it gave them a connection to external forces which they could use to advance their own interests. So under the Abbasids people converted for entrée to the new ruling class; in East Africa (and I think basically everywhere, to the present) Muslim merchants pressured their employees and households to convert; when Tai aristocrats in the SEA highlands converted to Buddhism, it usually came with fealty to a Buddhist court in Burma or Siam, which materially didn't mean a lot, but enough that people did it.
Also my impression is that exclusive credal statements weren't often honored, because people kept on with their old practices in parallel, at least in some settings. The Tai rulers for instance didn't lose their roles as leaders in the local animist and ancestor cults, they kept that role and added another running the local Buddhist monks, giving themselves more rights and more patronage to dispense.
Early Roman Christianity (pre-Constantine) wasn't top-down though, was it? Not my period but my impression is that it spread among the lower orders (slaves, women, foreigners) first.
"most times and places"
The entire field isn't my period.
"What have you got there?"
"The Tomb of Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Mohammed pbuh."
"Does it spark joy?"
"Yes."
"Dynamite the fucker."
"Right you are."
53 Wahhabism in a nutshell. Brilliant
Yes, it's basically going through everything you have, asking whether it sparks joy, and if so getting rid of it. Anti-Kondoism.
Rather like matter and antimatter with the distinction that rather than annihilating each other, together they would annihilate everything else.
"And what is this?"
"This is my wife."
"Does she spark joy?"
"Well, yes, we're very fond of each other. And everyone in the village likes her."
"Put a bag on her head and never let her speak to anyone or leave your house again. And what is this?"
"A musical instrument."
"Does it spark joy?"
"When my brother plays it, sure. He's really good."
"Burn it. And this?"
"It's a bacon sandwich."
etc etc.
In fairness the living pig, as opposed to the finished bacon or the living cow, sparks little joy.
59: How can you say that, Mossy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LXg7xrNeFU
Does that clip come with smell? Didn't think so.
I spent a few days working in a hog confinement barn. The smell is really something else. But a couple of unconfined piglets shouldn't smell that bad. Probably worse than a cat, but less than most dogs.
Of the four major monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and PETA), my work history and dietary habits only pass with the one.
59 For Sam Neill the pig most definitely sparks joy.
My impression is that for most conversions in most times and places this wasn't really true, because conversion was usually top-down.
I think with evangelistic religions there's an long introductory period where "break out from old conflicts and start again as one big community" is very compelling and sparks the bottom-up conversion NW describes - both Christianity and Islam (viz. the situation Mohammed found in Medina). But then once it's institutionalized and associated with powerful states it gets that national/political transition aspect you describe, and that may well account for more conversions over deep history.
(Not to say missionizing doesn't continue to play a role - a lot of Japanese were becoming Christian in a more bottom-up way before national politics took a turn there.)
64 is splendid. And lots of things smell atrocious in confined spaces but still spark joy. Fourme d'Aumbert. Outboard engines. My niece, on occasion.
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If you're going to bully the fat nerd until he goes home to cry, make sure he's too scared to tell his momma.
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OT: Sometimes I worry that all of the stress of life and politics is going to leave us with an incoming generation that is too glum. Sometimes I think they'll be just fine.
64 Sam Neill's twitter feed is the one that most consistently sparks joy.
Heebie, this is truly an amazing post. It's really a posting masterpiece.
There is a good Chris Brookmyre riff AIMHMHB , in I think "Not The End Of The World", where he goes through a typical day in the life of the most harmless and benign sort of person he can imagine - a Glaswegian granny - and points out how almost everything she does would antagonise one sort of religious nutter or another to the point of frenzy. She's just coming home from shopping (SHE'S BEEN OUT ON THE STREET ALONE WITHOUT A MALE GUARDIAN??) and she takes her woolly hat off (HER HAIR WAS ON DISPLAY??) and unpacks her shopping; copy of the Catholic Herald (THE PROPAGANDA OF THE ROMAN ANTICHRIST!) (WAIT SOMEONE TAUGHT HER TO READ??), packet of pork sausages (PORK??), the Daily Record, which she buys for the horoscope (WITCHCRAFT!), and so on...
According to the Chinese zodiac, my birth sign is "metal pig."
That makes sense. Metal does indeed come in pigs. (Iron, lead, even silver.)
And so your Chinese birth sign is itself a pun.
I should get soup dumplings tonight.
Is that a xiao long pig joke that I'm now ruining?