MITI and the Japanese Miracle

MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975, Chalmers Johnson (Stanford University Press, 1982).

I've been interested in East Asian economic planning bureaucracies ever since reading Joe Studwell's How Asia Works (briefly glossed in my review of Flying Blind). But even among those elite organizations, Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) stands out. For starters, Japanese people watch soap operas about the lives of the bureaucrats, and they're apparently really popular! Not just TV dramas; huge numbers of popular paperback novels are churned out about the men (almost entirely men) who decide what the optimal level of steel production for next year will be. As I understand it, these books are mostly not about economics, and not even about savage interoffice warfare and intraoffice politics, but rather focus on the bureaucrats themselves and their dashing conduct, quick wit, and passionate romances... How did this happen?

It all becomes clearer when you learn that when the Meiji period got rolling, Japan's rulers had a problem: namely, a vast, unruly army of now-unemployed warrior aristocrats. Samurai demobilization was the hot political problem of the 1870s, and the solution was, well…in many cases it was to give the ex-samurai a sinecure as an economic planning bureaucrat. Since positions in the bureaucracy were often quasi-hereditary, what this means is that in some sense the samurai never really went away, they just hung up their swords — frequently literally hung them up on the walls of their offices — and started attacking the problem of optimal industrial allocation with all the focus and fury that they'd once unleashed on each other. According to Johnson, to this day the internal jargon of many Japanese government agencies is clearly and directly descended from the dialects and battle-codes of the samurai clans that seeded them.

This book is about one such organization, MITI, whose responsibilities originally were limited to wartime rationing and grew to encompass, depending who you ask, the entire functioning of the Japanese government. Because this is the buried lede and the true subject of this book: you thought you were here to read about development economics and a successful implementation of the ideas of Friedrich List, but you’re actually here to read about how the entire modern Japanese political system is a sham. This suggestion is less outrageous than it may sound at first blush. By this point most are familiar with the concept of “managed democracy,” wherein there are notionally competitive popular elections, culminating in the selection of a prime minister or president who’s notionally in charge, but in reality some other locus of power secretly runs things behind the scenes.

There are many flavors of managed democracy. The classic one is the “single-party democracy,” which arises when for whatever reason an electoral constituency becomes uncompetitive and returns the same party to power again and again. Traditional democratic theory holds that in this situation the party will split, or a new party will form which triangulates the electorate in just such a way that the elections are competitive again. But sometimes the dominant party is disciplined enough to prevent schisms and to crush potential rivals before they get started. The key insight is that there’s a natural tipping-point where anybody seeking political change will get a better return from working inside the party than from challenging it. This leads to an interesting situation where political competition remains, but moves up a level in abstraction. Now the only contests that matter are the ones between rival factions of party insiders, or powerful interest groups within the party. The system is still competitive, but it is no longer democratic. This story ought to be familiar to inhabitants of Russia, South Africa, or California.

The trouble with single-party democracies is that it’s pretty clear to everybody what’s going on. Yes, there are still elections happening, there may even be fair elections happening, and inevitably there are journalists who will point to those elections as evidence of the totally-democratic nature of the regime, but nobody is really fooled. The single-party state has a PR problem, and one solution to it is a more postmodern form of managed democracy, the “surface democracy.”

Surface democracies are wildly, raucously competitive. Two or more parties wage an all-out cinematic slugfest over hot-button issues with big, beautiful ratings. There may be a kaleidoscopic cast of quixotic minor parties with unusual obsessions filling the role of comic relief, usually only lasting for a season or two of the hit show Democracy. The spectacle is gripping, everybody is awed by how high the stakes are and agonizes over how to cast their precious vote. Meanwhile, in a bland gray building far away from the action, all of the real decisions are being made by some entirely separate organ of government that rolls onwards largely unaffected by the show.

Losers and haters are perpetually accusing the United States of being a surface democracy. Enemies of the state ranging from Ralph Nader to Vladimir Putin are constantly banging on about it, but this is a Patriotic Substack and we would obviously never countenance such insinuations about our noble republic. So there’s absolutely no chance it’s even the slightest bit true of the US, but…what about Japan?

Well, awkwardly enough, it turns out that the central drama of preindustrial Japanese history was the growing power of unofficial rulers (the shoguns) who ran the country in reality while the official rulers (the emperors) gradually devolved into puppets and figureheads. A “surface monarchy,” if you will. Of course that all ended with the Meiji Restoration of 1868 (c’mon, it says “restoration” right there in the name) which returned the emperor to being fully in charge…which is why when the Japanese declared war on America in 1941, neither the Emperor Hirohito nor the parliament was even consulted. Hang on a minute!

In fact, yes, prewar Japan may have been reigned over by a monarch, but it was ruled by the deep state — especially the career military general staff and the economic planning bureaucracies. I know it’s hard to believe that drab agencies regulating coal and steel production were able to go toe-to-toe with General Tojo, but just imagine that they were all being staffed by fanatical clans of demobilized samurai or something crazy like that. When MacArthur rolled in with the occupation forces, he had a goal of creating total discontinuity with Japan’s past and utterly bulldozing the government. But a guy needs to pick his battles, and so he obviously focused on getting rid of all those nasty generals and admirals he’d just spent years fighting. The harmless paper-pushers, on the other hand, how much trouble could they be? Maybe they could even help organize the place.

The chapter about the post-war occupation is one of the deadpan funniest in Johnson’s book. The American occupiers are genuinely trying to create a liberal democracy out of the ashes, but have no idea that the friendly, helpful bureaucrats they’ve enlisted in this quest were the secret rulers of the regime they'd just conquered. The stats bear this out — of all the officials who controlled Japan’s wartime industry, only a few dozen were ever purged by the Americans. The most striking example of continuity has to be Nobusuke Kishi, but there were countless others like him. These were the men charged with translating the occupiers' desires into policy, reconstructing Japanese society, and finally drafting a new constitution. Then eventually the Americans sailed off, and the bureaucrats smiled and waved, and went back to ruling as they'd done for hundreds of years, behind the scenes.

Okay, but how well does that version of history line up with the reality of Japanese government in the second half of the 20th century? Johnson brings a lot of evidence to back up his claim that Japan is still secretly ruled by the bureaucracies, chief among them MITI. He points out, for example, that hardly any bills proposed by individual legislators and representatives go anywhere, while bills proposed by MITI itself are almost always instantly approved by the parliament. But MITI’s authority isn’t limited to the government, it's pretty clear that they control the entire private sector too. That might seem tautological — if MITI’s will always becomes law, then they can unilaterally impose new regulations or mandates that can destroy any company, with zero recourse, so everybody will naturally do what MITI says. But it’s subtler than that — the real mechanism is tangled up in MITI’s dynastic and succession customs.

Remember, this may look like an economic planning bureaucracy, but it’s actually a secret samurai clan. So they’re constantly doing the kinds of stuff that any good feudal nobility does. For instance, the economic planning bureaucrats frequently cement their treaties by marrying off their sister/daughter/niece to a mentor or to a protegé. They also sometimes legally adopt each other, ancient Roman-style. Naturally they also have an extremely complicated set of rules governing their internal hierarchy, rights of deference, etc. But remember, this isn’t just a secret samurai clan, it’s also a government agency! Agencies have rules too — explicit rules written down in binders, rules governing promotion and succession and all the rest. Sometimes, the official rules and the secret rules conflict, butt against each other, and out of that friction something beautiful emerges.

The highest rank in MITI is “Vice-Minister” (the “Minister” is one of those elected political guys who don't actually matter). But it's also the case that somebody who's been at MITI longer or who's older than you (these are actually the same thing, because everybody joins at the same age) is strictly superior to you in seniority. But that can create a paradox! What happens if a young guy becomes Vice-Minister? He would then be more senior than his older colleagues by virtue of office, but they would be more senior by virtue of tenure, and that would mean either an official rule or a secret rule being broken. To resolve this impossible conflict, the instant a new Vice-Minister is selected, everybody who's been in the bureaucracy longer than him resigns immediately, so that his absolute seniority is unambiguous and unquestionable. And then...the first act of the new Vice-Minister is to give everybody who fell on their swords powerful jobs as executives and board members of the biggest Japanese corporations. The entire process is called amakudari, which means “descent from heaven.”

Amakudari is really a win-win-win-win: the new Vice-Minister has unchallenged power within the agency and a whole host of new friends in the private sector, the guys who resigned all have cushy new jobs that come with better pay and perks, the companies that are descended upon now have an employee with great connections to the agency that controls their fates, and MITI as a gestalt entity can spread its tentacles throughout the economy, aided by cadres of alumni who think its way and help translate policy into reality.

I joked before about refusing to tolerate speculation about the US being a surface democracy like Japan, but joking aside I think even the staunchest defender of the reality of popular rule would concede that things have moved in that direction on the margin. Compare the power of agency rulemaking, federal law enforcement, spy agencies, or ostensibly independent NGOs now to where they were even 10 years ago. It would be a stretch to say that the electorate didn’t have influence over the American state, but can they really be said to rule it? Regardless of exactly where you come down on that question, it’s probably safe to say that you'd give a different answer today than you would have twenty, fifty, or a hundred years ago. Moreover, the movement has been fairly monotonic in the direction of less direct popular control over the government. And in fact this phenomenon is not unique to the United States, but reappears in country after country.

by John Psmith, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. When I was coordinating the cleanup of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, every once in a while I had to brief visiting dignitaries/representatives on topics ranging from the length of commercial and sport fisheries closures, to seafood tainting and testing, to the biological implications of various cleanup methods/products and other issues. These briefings included everyone from U.S. Senators/Representatives, to the shipping insurer Lloyds of London, to national journalists (NY Times, Rolling Stone, Scientific American), and large environmental groups (Sierra Club, Audubon, Wilderness Society, etc.) and anyone else who had enough standing at the time to disrupt my schedule (not trying to sound self-important here, it was just an extremely busy time). Of all such briefings, the most intense involved a trade delegation from Japan (Lloyds, maybe second). I believe they were with or mostly affiliated with the Japanese Commerce Dept. or Trade industry somehow, it wasn't clear. Of course, Alaskan seafood products at the time represented quite a significant segment of the Japanese market - in the hundreds of millions, if not billions. I don't know if the dozen or so people who grilled me for a couple of hours were MITI, but who else? Secret samurai businessmen! Ha! Definitely some serious people.]

Pat Metheny & Lyle Mays

[ed. Lyle. Gone but not forgotten.]

Fame

[ed. It's a bitch.]

AI Turing Test

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[ed. Not part of the test, but still kinda cool. See: How did you do on the Ai Turing Test (ASX):]

"Last month, I challenged 11,000 people to classify fifty pictures as either human art or AI-generated images.

I originally planned five human and five AI pictures in each of four styles: Renaissance, 19th Century, Abstract/Modern, and Digital, for a total of forty. After receiving many exceptionally good submissions from local AI artists, I fudged a little and made it fifty. The final set included paintings by Domenichino, Gauguin, Basquiat, and others, plus a host of digital artists and AI hobbyists. (...)

What Did We Learn About Art?

Alan Turing recommended that if 30% of humans couldn’t tell an AI from a human, the AI could be considered to have “passed” the Turing Test. By these standards, AI artists pass the test with room to spare; on average, 40% of humans mistook each AI picture for human.

What does this tell us about AI? Seems like they’re good at art. I’m more interested in what it tells us about humans."

Humans keep insisting that AI art is hideous slop. But also, when you peel off the labels, many of them can’t tell AI art from some of the greatest artists in history. I’ve tried to be as fair as possible to these people, proposing that maybe they’re just expressing frustration with the proliferation of the DALL-E house style. And maybe some really do have an amazing eye for tiny incongruous details.

But it also seems very human to venerate sophisticated prestigious people, and to pooh-pooh anything that feels too new or low-status or too easy for ordinary people to access - without either impulse connecting with the actual content of the painting in front of you."

Haruki Murakami - Writing Mode

via: Ilan Lampl

[ed. Probably why people like Twitter/X. Only 280 characters.]

How To Win a Nobel Prize

How to win a Nobel prize (Nature)

The Nobel prize has been awarded in three scientific fields — chemistry, physics and physiology or medicine — almost every year since 1901, barring some disruptions mostly due to wars.

Nature crunched the data on the 346 prizes and their 646 winners (Nobel prizes can be shared by up to three people) to work out which characteristics can be reliably linked to medals.

Each circle here represents a Nobel laureate, a person who has received a Nobel prize. (...)

• You can greatly improve your chances of winning a Nobel by working in the laboratory of a scientist who already has one or will in the future, or by working with someone whose mentors won. Prizewinners often beget or emerge from the labs of other laureates2. They frequently share mentors or mentees — those who supervised them or their students, or their students’ students.(...)

• You might expect lots of separate clusters to emerge as distinct academic families. But it turns out that almost all Nobel laureates share some connection, however distant, as represented by this sprawling network.

An incredible 702 out of 736 researchers who have won science and economics prizes up to 2023 are part of the same academic family — connected by an academic link in common somewhere in their history.

by Kerri Smith & Chris Ryan, Nature | Read more:
Image: Chu-Chieh Lee

[ed. See also: Yes, scientific progress depends on like a thousand people (partial paywall, Intrinsic Perspective).]

Self Defense For Dummies

Things you need to know: how to defend yourself against assailant armed with a spatula

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[ed. Funny.]

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New Fusion

 

Mike Bono

Kinga Glyk

Matteo Mancuso

[ed. From my Fusion playlist.]

The Seeds of Social Revolution: Extreme Wealth Inequality

The seeds of social revolution have been sown and sprouted. What we harvest is up to us.

If there is any potential catalyst for social upheaval that attracts less attention than extreme wealth inequality, it's mighty obscure. As I noted yesterday, the present extreme of wealth inequality draws an occasional bit of lip service or handwringing, but very little serious focus, despite ample historical foundations for its role in sowing the seeds of social revolutions.

As I tried to explain in yesterday's post, extreme wealth inequality might not be the spark that ignites a revolution, but it is a tectonic shift that destabilizes the social order. For extreme wealth inequality isn't a consequence of fate or sorcery; it is the consequence of policies that favor the few at the expense of the many, a reality that is exceedingly uncomfortable for those benefiting from the asymmetry.

For a rundown of the policies that have exacerbated wealth inequality, consider the following excerpts from Time magazine, September 2020: The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% -- And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure.

"There are some who blame the current plight of working Americans on structural changes in the underlying economy--on automation, and especially on globalization. According to this popular narrative, the lower wages of the past 40 years were the unfortunate but necessary price of keeping American businesses competitive in an increasingly cutthroat global market. But in fact, the $50 trillion transfer of wealth the RAND report documents has occurred entirely within the American economy, not between it and its trading partners. No, this upward redistribution of income, wealth, and power wasn't inevitable; it was a choice--a direct result of the trickle-down policies we chose to implement since 1975.

We chose to cut taxes on billionaires and to deregulate the financial industry. We chose to allow CEOs to manipulate share prices through stock buybacks, and to lavishly reward themselves with the proceeds. We chose to permit giant corporations, through mergers and acquisitions, to accumulate the vast monopoly power necessary to dictate both prices charged and wages paid. We chose to erode the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and the bargaining power of labor. For four decades, we chose to elect political leaders who put the material interests of the rich and powerful above those of the American people."

In other words, extreme wealth inequality is not the result of economic forces outside our control; it's the result of our policy responses to changing social, political and economic conditions. While those benefiting from the policies attribute the asymmetric distribution of the economy's gains to "forces outside our control" such as globalization and automation, those losing ground sense that this is an excuse for taking advantage of the situation, to the detriment of the national interest.

We can best understand extreme wealth inequality as the destabilizing result of one set of competing economic interests gaining dominance over other economic interests: broadly speaking, the balance between labor and capital has collapsed in favor of capital. To take one example, consider the minimum wage, which did not kept up with inflation for decades as a policy decision.

The different interests within each sector can also destabilize into asymmetric distributions. For example, within the broad category of capital, there are many competing interests: industrial capital, financial capital, land-based capital, domestic and global interests, and so on. Within labor, there are blue-collar and white collar interests, and gradations of skills, regional interests, and so on.

Broadly speaking, globalization and financialization greatly increased the share of some interests at the expense of others.

The social boundaries of what's acceptable and unacceptable change, enabling or restricting financial policies. For example, in the postwar boom of the 1950s, corporate CEOs earned multiples of their average employee that by today's standards were ludicrously low, as present-day CEOs routinely take home compensation (including stock options) that are in the tens of millions of dollars annually.

In the broad sweep of history, extreme asymmetries in the distribution of the economy's output are rebalanced one way or the other, if not with policy changes than by the overthrow of the status quo. The book The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century breaks down the various pieces of this complex puzzle.

The history and data are too varied to be easily summarized, but we can start with humanity's innate sense of fairness in social organizations: we sense when our contributions are getting short shrift while others are grabbing shares that are not commensurate with their contributions--despite their claims to "earning" their outsized shares.

Some write this off as envy, and to be sure envy is an innate human response, but fairness and envy are two different things. If someone strips us of power that we once held to benefit their own accumulation of wealth, our sense that this is unfair is not envy.

We seem to be approaching the point where a rebalancing of extreme asymmetries is at hand, and so we have to choose between policy changes and social upheaval. Those benefiting from the current asymmetrical distribution naturally feel that all is right with the world, while those whose purchasing power and political power have been stripmined feel that regaining what was taken from them is only fair.

by Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds |  Read more:

Image: Lon Tweeten/Time

[ed. This has been obvious for a long time, yet continues to persist and actually worsen. Why? The post following this one - A New Phase of Cultural Conflict explains a lot, especially how deceptive allegiences (a lying billionaire con man, hero to the underclass?) can generate popular support (and electoral victories) while hiding true intentions.]

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15 Observations on the New Phase in Cultural Conflict

Back in 2014, I sketched out a widely-read outline of an alternative interpretation of cultural conflict. Curiously enough, the conceptual tools I used came from a 1929 book from philosopher José Ortega y Gasset entitled The Revolt of the Masses—a work that offers surprisingly timely insights into our current situation.

That article stirred up a lot of debate at the time, but the whole situation has intensified further since 2014. Everything I’ve seen in those eight years has made painfully clear how insightful Ortega had been. The time has come to revisit that framework, summarizing its key insights and offering predictions for what might happen in the future.

Here’s part of what I wrote back in 2014:

First, let me tell you what you won’t find in this book. Despite a title that promises political analysis, The Revolt of the Masses has almost nothing to say about conventional party ideologies and alignments. Ortega shows little interest in fascism or capitalism or Marxism, and this troubled me when I first read the book. (Although, in retrospect, the philosopher’s passing comments on these matters proved remarkably prescient—for example his smug dismissal of Russian communism as destined to failure in the West, and his prediction of the rise of a European union.) Above all, he hardly acknowledges the existence of ‘left’ and ‘right’ in political debates.

Ortega’s brilliant insight came in understanding that the battle between ‘up’ and ‘down’ could be as important in spurring social and cultural change as the conflict between ‘left’ and ‘right’. This is not an economic distinction in Ortega’s mind. The new conflict, he insists, is not between “hierarchically superior and inferior classes…. upper classes or lower classes.” A millionaire could be a member of the masses, according to Ortega’s surprising schema. And a pauper might represent the elite.

The key driver of change, as Ortega sees it, comes from a shocking attitude characteristic of the modern age—or, at least, Ortega was shocked. Put simply, the masses hate experts. If forced to choose between the advice of the learned and the vague impressions of other people just like themselves, the masses invariably turn to the latter. The upper elites still try to pronounce judgments and lead, but fewer and fewer of those down below pay attention.

This dynamic is now far more significant than it was eight years ago. So I want to share 15 observations on the emerging vertical dimension of cultural conflict—these both define the rupture and try to predict how it will play out.

(1) Analysis of cultural conflict is still obsessed with left-versus-right strategizing, but the actual battle lines are increasingly down-versus-up. A lot of work goes into hiding this, because both left and right want to present an image of unity, but both spheres are splintering into intensely hostile up-and-down factions.

(2) The frequency with which you hear the “lesser of two evils” argument is an indicator of how powerful this up-and-down rupture has become. This is the argument used by Ups to retain the loyalty of the Downs. You have to stick with us, even if we are tainted elites, or else we both lose.

(3) When commentators give any attention to down-versus-up, they usually reduce the conflict to income disparities, but that is misleading. Down-versus-up is more attitudinal than economic. Sometimes the tension manifests itself along traditional class and wealth lines, with disputes focused primarily on money, but that’s only a small part of the conflict. Down-versus-up is multidimensional and adapts rapidly to current events. Adding to the complexity, rich people frequently act like Down members, while people with tiny incomes can be fiercely loyal to the Up worldview.

(4) The essence of down-versus-up is that a numerically large group of dissenters focus their anger on a small number of elites who they view as antagonists, perhaps even evil villains. These Down movements cut across left-versus-right political ideologies, and thus encompass seemingly incompatible groups such as Occupy Wall Street, the truck convoys, Black Lives Matter, the Tea Party, ANTIFA, cryptocurrency fanatics, and a host of other cohort groups in the news. In every instance, these groups have proven capable of mobilizing intense energy among members—much greater energy than the Ups can ever hope to match. Participants seem to appear out of nowhere, leaping almost instantaneously into action.

(5) There will be more groups like this next year—and every year from now on. As strange as it sounds, an organization that doesn’t even exist today is likely to transform the entire sociocultural landscape in the near future. I’m not sure what it will look like, but one thing is certain—it won’t arise from any legacy institution.

(6) The targets are people at the top of the heap, but that can include a dizzying array of individuals—including wealthy CEOs, DC politicians, celebrity TV newscasters, law enforcement authorities, experts of all stripes, Ivy League academics, hedge fund managers, tech titans at huge Silicon Valley companies, movie stars, etc. A key element of the narrative is not simply that these people have different agendas than those at the bottom, but even more to the point, these elites are depicted as inherently untrustworthy—they don’t play fairly, they have sold their souls to the Dark Side. Hence the Down opposition feels the need to take extreme measures. The critiques brandished by the Downs are often reduced to the banal, mind-numbing explanation that people on the Dark Side do bad things and must be stopped. The very banality of the message makes it all the more viral.

(7) The members of the Up group want to rebrand themselves as Down adherents. They work tirelessly to do this. Hence you see billionaires proclaiming their alignment with all of the leading Down agendas. Politicians see that Down constituencies are the most energized voters and curry their favor—proclaiming at every opportunity that I’m just like you. Even the most established DC insiders with the most elite backgrounds must act as if they aren’t really members of the Up cohort. Media personalities, in particular, take every opportunity to act as Down as possible, realizing that this is the only genuine street cred worth having in the current moment.

(8) When well known political figures move from right to left, or vice versa, many onlookers are surprised. But in almost every instance, the Up maintain their Up allegiance, and the Down retain their Down status. It's much easier to make the psychological shift from one party to another than to abandon your emotional attachment to the Down or Up worldview.

(9) All of the cultural energy right now is on the bottom. And that energy has been intensifying. The attempts to distort this conflict into conventional left-versus-right battle lines has prevented opinion leaders from grasping the actual dynamic at play. Any ambitious agenda that doesn’t take into account down-versus-up is doomed to failure.

(10) This is not just a political shift but also impacts arts and entertainment. Reality TV, for example, is a manifestation of legacy institutions trying to capture the vitality of the Down lifestyles in faux narratives that emulate non-elites in everyday situations. Music genres each have their own up-versus-down positioning—just consider your mental images of the audience for rap, classical, country, jazz, etc. (But genres can move: jazz was once Down, but it has become Up.) Art forms that seem to be in crisis—sculpture, the novel, the symphony—are always aligned with the Up cohort. Nobody ever claims that Down genres are in crisis.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: via the author

[ed. See also: I told you so (Numb at the Lodge).]

Valerius De Saedeleer (Belgian, 1867-1941, b. De Kat, Aalst, Belgium, d. Oudenaarde, Belgium) - Paysage d'Hiver (Winter Landscape), 1931, Paintings: Oil on Canvas

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Benoît Maubrey (American, b. 1952, Washington D.C, USA) - Torii Gate made of speakers in Kamiyama, Tokushima, Japan.
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Guitarist Tim DiJulio, ‘Seattle’s Best-Kept Secret’

A beloved Seattle guitarist takes the spotlight on his first major tour (Seattle Times)

Images: Jennifer Buchanan

[ed. Nice story, nice guy. Tough business. See also: Guitarist Tim DiJulio, ‘Seattle’s best-kept secret,’ has stars for fans (ST).]

Deeply Thoughts

(from Samuel Johnson’s definition of the word cant)

A while back I put up a tweet saying “‘Deeply’ is the new ‘very,’” but to my shock and dismay the world paid no attention. My little jape failed to quell the rising tide in the usage of the d-word in all sorts of public-facing discourse. Now “deeply” has become the universal adverb. Since I am otherwise in a bit of a midsummer lull, I thought I would take up my cudgel once more and square up to this menace.

“Very,” the feebler predecessor of “deeply,” was one of those words that editors and English teachers automatically red-pencilled into oblivion whenever they saw it on the page. Of course, people used it anyway, because they believed it made their sentences stronger. Why wouldn’t it? Something that’s very big must be bigger than something that’s merely big, right? So, commonsensically, putting “very” in front of an adjective should intensify it.

It didn’t actually work out that way, though. Readers came to understand, at some probably subliminal level, that “very” was just a marker for weak or tendentious writing. Serious people just didn’t use the word. The New York Times might write of “severe flooding” in a disaster area, for example, but you’d never see them use the phrase “very severe flooding.” A politician trying to plead for disaster relief funds might say “very severe flooding” and be quoted as such. But in actual coverage, the newspaper of record would never use “very.” Instead it would present facts and statistics, leaving the readers to judge for themselves the level of severity.

Sophisticated readers thus came to understand that “very” was a marker for lazy writing. Users of “very” were trying to bring you around to a certain point of view without earning it. That’s why editors and English teachers hated it.

“Deeply” has inherited all of the badness of “very” but piled on some additional noxious qualities.

A couple of years ago I set a personal policy that when reading anything at all—a tweet, a press release, a newspaper article—as soon as I encountered the word “deeply” I would simply stop reading and turn my attention elsewhere. I don’t think I’ve missed anything as a result. On the contrary, I’m pretty sure that the rigorous enforcement of this rule has improved my quality of life and upgraded the flow of information coming into my brain.

What “deeply” has that “very” didn’t is the overlay of pious moralism. You can easily get the idea by comparing these three statements:

1. I was offended by this tweet
2. I was very offended by this tweet
3. I was deeply offended by this tweet

Of course, (1) is by far the strongest version. Seeing this, I might roll my eyes at yet another person claiming to be offended by something, but I might keep reading just to see what they’re on about.

(2) is weaker despite—in fact, because of—the attempt to strengthen it by addition of “very.” That’s okay. It’s just a poorly written sentence. The world’s full of those. I might keep reading on the off chance that this is just an inept writer honestly struggling to make a good point.

(3) has all the weakness of (2) but attempts to make up for that by implicitly suggesting that there is some underlying moral cause for taking offense that is impossible to gainsay. Only a monster would refuse to take with the greatest seriousness the concerns of a person who was deeply offended! I stop reading (3) as a matter of principle.

It’s a little bit aligned with how the word “sacred” gets used. Both “deeply” and “sacred” are shorthand for “under no circumstances is it acceptable for anyone to fail to take seriously, let alone disagree with, what I am about to say. All within the sound of my voice must now put on their Serious Faces and hastily knuckle under.”

“Deeply” is, in other words, a marker for cant: a wonderful old word that has been used in various related senses since the 1500s.

Cant’s definition #6 in the OED is so spot on that I can make this essay a lot shorter merely by quoting it here. It is

“To affect religious or pietistic phraseology, esp. as a matter of fashion or profession; to talk unreally or hypocritically with an affectation of goodness or piety.”

Dr. Johnson’s definition is the one shown in the image at the top of this post. Just as a side note, it is fascinating that 270 years ago this sort of talk was a common enough feature of the rhetorical landscape that the likes of Dr. Johnson were absolutely nailing it with one four-letter word.

by Neal Stephenson, Graphomane |  Read more:

Image: Samuel Johnson

[ed. I am deeply nonplussed (ha!) that one of my favorite authors spends time worrying about this stuff.]

A Single Green Feather

Brody Atwell’s fascination with Carolina Parakeets began in the ninth grade. Mrs. Jenkins had shown them a painting of a bird he’d thought existed only in jungles or on pirate ships. They were here, in these mountains, she’d told the class. Scientists say they are extinct, but I hope they are wrong. Brody hoped so too.

Whenever outdoors, he was watchful. A flash of bright feather brought a moment of possibility, only to reveal a bunting or goldfinch. His interest in all birds grew. At NC State Brody majored in biology before returning to Enka to teach high school. His interest in the parakeet remained, evidenced by the Audubon print hung on his classroom’s wall.

Although there had been reported sightings as late as the 1920s, the last confirmed Carolina Parakeet died in 1916 at the St. Louis Zoo. Fifty-three years. Yet there was so much wilderness left in these mountains, miles and miles of national parkland and large individual holdings. Several students had relatives who swore they’d recently seen panthers, though biologists claimed the big cats had also been absent for decades. Brody wanted to believe, even as astronauts gazed down on earth, recently left their footprints on the moon, that the world yet concealed some secrets. However, science demands evidence, his professor, Dr. Willard, had said, declaring that the Ivorybill Woodpecker and the Carolina Parakeet were extinct until proven otherwise. Unlike Saint Paul, the professor had continued, we cannot believe in things unseen. Now, on a Thursday morning before homeroom, Brody remembered these words as he stared at the green feather laid on his desk.

“It looks like it could of come off one of them parakeets,” Lester said, nodding at the Audubon print.

With many students, Brody would have thought it no more than some high-school prank, a dyed feather pulled off a souvenir from a Cherokee or Boone tourist trap, but though Lester was more interested in hunting and fishing than schoolwork, he was a quiet, respectful boy. Brody picked up the feather. Holding it by the quill, he moistened his free hand’s thumb and forefinger, rubbed the inner vane. No dye smudged his skin.

“What do you think, Mr. Atwell?” Lester asked.

“It’s not a bunting,” Brody said, turning the feather slowly, inspecting it with a jeweler’s attentiveness. The tinge of yellow on the outer vane was significant. Lester’s family had lived in the county for generations, so it could be an heirloom passed down from an older relative, or perhaps detached from a grandmother’s once-fashionable hat. However, as Brody brushed a finger across the feather, he found it not brittle with age but soft and pliable.

by Ron Rash, Salvation South |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Studio Blackburn & Nirvana / Euro 24 – Cheers to the Beautiful Game / Packaging / 2024

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