The Hidden Pleasures of Life by Theodore Zeldin

Author:Theodore Zeldin
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780857053671
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2015-05-21T04:00:00+00:00

[16]

Why do so many people feel unappreciated, unloved and only half alive?

WHY HAVE THE IDEALS OF Liberty, Equality and Fraternity been so difficult to turn into reality? Why have they failed to deliver all that they promised? If ideals inevitably lose their delicate and intoxicating flavour when frozen into laws, what future is there for them?

There have so far been two ways of keeping ideals alive after repeated disappointment. The first is to insist that it is good to have noble ideals, even if one cannot put them into practice. In Japan, in particular, many have come to this conclusion, that since failure is so much more common than success, the way you fail matters more than failure itself.

Though Japan has as strong a tradition as the U.S.A. of seeking success in the conventional sense, it has a parallel tradition that exalts noble failures and admires those who bravely defy established authority in the name of a worthy moral cause, ignoring the possibility or likelihood of failure. There was a time when the Japanese had riots or ‘smashings’ almost every ten years, which were often futile, but were repeated nonetheless. Some of the country’s most popular heroes are not the rich and powerful but these noble failures. Oshio Heihachiro (1793–1837) is one of them, a humble police inspector in Osaka who made it his mission to fight against corruption. When the chief magistrate of the city turned out to be corrupt too, Oshio resigned and devoted himself to teaching the public better morals, with the message that it was wrong and cowardly to resign oneself to injustice. Even if the power of authority seemed invincible, one should ‘do right for the sake of doing right’; one should not just know what is right, but act to assert what is right. He gave revolutionary meaning to the Chinese philosopher Wang Yang-Ming’s dictum, ‘To know and not to act is the same as not knowing at all.’ It did not matter if action was ineffective; a sage should not be afraid to act ‘like a madman’, foreshadowing what Mishima wrote a century later, ‘The journey not the arrival matters.’ So when in the 1830s a famine lasting four years had devastating effects and over 100,000 died of starvation, Oshio Heihachiro protested that the bureaucrats were in league with the rich merchants in keeping the price of food beyond the means of the poor. He sold his most precious possession, his library, and gave all the money away to the poor; then he started a rebellion, not to win political power, but to give expression to what most people ‘sincerely’ believed, that the wicked should be punished and that justice should reign on earth. What mattered above all was to act with ‘sincerity’, rather than to live a lie. He set his own house alight, so as to burn down the houses of the merchants around him, and ultimately 3,300 houses were destroyed and many shops looted. But his rebellion was hopelessly disorganised and easily and brutally quashed.

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