An Axis of Good

What nations today are the strongest and truest exponents of democratic and Enlightenment values?

The US is teetering on the brink of authoritarian government and theocracy, so it can’t qualify. Anyway, our Constitution perpetuates minority rule. Today it’s getting worse—much worse—with gerrymandering, voter suppression and the filibuster’s massive overuse. A democracy struggling to survive is hardly a shining example. (We won’t even mention the epidemic of gun violence that makes Americans feel unsafe.)

Latin America’s largest “democracy,” Brazil, is busy burning down the Amazon, the Earth’s lungs, under the toxic masculinity of Jair Bolsonaro. Britain left the solidarity of the EU under a buffoonish Boris Johnson, now gone. Under Liz Truss, it’ll apparently be walking backward toward a Reaganesque “trickle down” economy. India’s current Hindu nationalism and marginalization of its huge Muslim population (bigger than Pakistan’s!) hardly qualifies it. France has failed to stand up well against the world’s latest violent bully, Putin’s Russia. And Australia (the world’s coal baron), Canada and New Zealand each have too few people to carry much weight.

So, as ironic and strange as it may seem, the two strongest and truest champions of democratic values today may be the old “Axis” powers, which lost in World War II: Japan and Germany.

This truth hit me hard, while watching a recent PBS Newshour feature. It told the story of aging Jewish refugees from Ukraine, survivors of the Holocaust. They found refuge from Putin’s atrocities, a warm welcome, and temporary succor in Germany, of all places—the long-ago author of the Holocaust and the nation that had once massacred their relatives and most of their townspeople.

Historical ironies abound. But let’s look at the facts today, in Germany first. Under Angela Merkel, Germany completed its contrition for its wartime atrocities. It has monuments to the Holocaust. It teaches its children all the horrors of the Holocaust and makes it a crime to deny them. Gilded paving stones in every city and town mark the names and deportation dates of people sent to the Death Camps.

But contrition for past sins is only the beginning. Germany led Europe in accepting and successfully assimilating over a million migrants from Africa and the Middle East. Under its Energiewende (energy transformation) Germany leads Europe in moving toward renewable energy. Today, albeit after a slow start, it’s leading Europe, if not the world, in transitioning from Russian gas and oil to pressure Russia to stop its atrocities in Ukraine. As time goes on and fossil fuels begin running out and getting more expensive, these efforts will only increase the relative strength of Germany and the EU that it now leads.

Germany’s democratic strength extends to its workers. It has strong labor unions, which appoint directors to most of its major corporations. Those directors have real influence. As a result, the ratio of CEO to average-worker pay in Germany in 2018 was about half that in the United States, and the difference is even more striking today.

Germans have a justifiable fear of debt and inflation, stemming from the horrendous Weimar Inflation that motivated Hitler’s rise. Nevertheless, they’ve been going into debt to help keep their less fiscally sound partners in the EU afloat. Olaf Scholz may lack charisma, but he leads a powerful, wealthy, technologically advanced nation that daily promotes cooperation with its neighbors and other democratic and Enlightenment values.

Japan is less well known to most Americans but better known to me. While teaching law in Hawaii for eleven years (1986-1997), I traveled often to Japan. I even learned to read its two alphabets and about 300 of its unique Chinese characters (kanji). Three things stick in my mind.

First, Japan has a unique system for distributing goods internally. It has mostly resisted the inroads of big-box stores like Costco and Wal Mart, as well as online retailers like Amazon. In their places, Japan relies on a vast sea of small, local stores, at least one in every neighborhood. These are run and staffed by people who know their customers intimately and can give them personal service.

Japan has saved this seemingly outdated system for good and human reasons: it provides full employment for a large and aging population, and it serves the needs of customers on an intimate, personal level. Think about that the next time you’re on the telephone with a useless AI repeating the same useless “information” for the nth time and refusing to connect you to a human being.

In one of these stores, which sold stationery among other things, I once found a stack of brightly colored envelopes with colored fringes that folded over to close them. I asked the store owner, who spoke some English, what they were for. He explained that they are used to send cash through the mail, in crisp, new 10,000-yen notes (each worth about $100), as is the custom in Japan. The brightly-colored envelopes, he said, reveal their contents so that postal workers can take special care of them.

The third thing to note is an experiment I made on my last trip to Japan, just pre-pandemic, in the Meguro district of Tokyo. I wanted to see how Japanese pedestrians avoid bumping into each other on Tokyo’s jam-packed sidewalks. So I feigned being drunk or sick and stumbled around in random directions, avoiding eye contact with everyone.

No one touched me. No one bumped into me. The endless stream of fast-walking pedestrians parted for me as if they were the Red Sea and I was Moses. I concluded that Japanese look out for each other as an ingrained part of their culture, at least on the crowded sidewalks of Tokyo.

Two more incidents cemented my understanding of the Japanese sense of responsibility and accountability. In one, my heart sank as I left a crowded Japanese shinkansen (bullet train) only to realize that I had dropped my wallet inside. My heart rose again as a Japanese passenger—a complete stranger—emerged from the train, bowed, handed me my wallet, and went back in just as the doors closed. In the second, a clerk at a hotel accidentally broke the glass inside my insulated bottle while helping me put ice in. Asking me to wait a bit (“Chotto matte, kudasai!”), he literally ran across the street to a department store. He returned minutes later, bowing, with a larger, more expensive, brand new insulated bottle made entirely of stainless steel. Of course he would not think of being reimbursed. (In another similar incident, a taxi driver who had trouble finding my hotel wouldn’t let me pay.)

Perhaps we Americans can learn better from Japan’s uniquely Asian culture. But both Japan and Germany rely more on community and collective values, and less on individual ego, than we do. Maybe a culture that raises Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, the latest song or film star, and You Know Whom to the status of gods can learn something about democracy from both.

At the end of the day, it’s not hard to make the case for Germany and Japan as global bulwarks of democracy. After the US under Joe Biden, Germany is leading the resistance to Russian depredation in Europe. Japan is a bulwark against Chinese bullying in Asia. The two governments and their respective cultures are the antitheses of a brutal Russian autocracy and a Chinese totalitarian state that electronically “grades” its citizens on (among other things) whether they jaywalk and how reliably they charge their cell phones.

What I want to know is why, at this particular moment in history, if you had to choose national saviors of democracy, you would choose these two old Axis powers. What makes them special?

What are Germany and Japan both known for, worldwide? What has characterized both, about equally, since the War? Isn’t it the quality of their engineering and manufactured products? But why should that matter? I have a theory, so bear with me.

In another essay, I have outlined how the “financialization” of the US and Britain—i.e., their transitions to mostly-service-based economies, especially reliant on finance—is weakening them. Abandoning manufacturing to low-wage nations is hurting the Anglo-American “democratic” world economically, militarily, and practically. But there’s yet another facet of this weakness, in the mind.

When you work with tangible things with your own hands, tangible evidence of cause and effect, aka “responsibility,” is never far away. If you don’t wear your gloves, you can cut or burn your hands. If you don’t temper a metal piece after firing, it can grow soft. If you don’t tighten all the fasteners, a part can come loose or break. More generally, if you cut corners, things can go wrong.

Practical experience with things also teaches you about the relative likelihood of causes for effects. It teaches you about Occam’s Razor (the simplest reason is probably the right one) or what doctors tell themselves in diagnosing illness: “If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”

If a joint is weak, it’s probably because of the screw whose threads you stripped but which you didn’t replace, not metal fatigue. If parts you make don’t fit together, it’s probably because you calculated or measured wrong, not because your tools or machines are defective. As you work to solve tangible problems that you see, you learn to distinguish real from bogus causes, and your ability to tell the difference gets better with time.

Working with practical, tangible stuff trains you to detect cause and effect automatically, by observation and experiment. It also trains you “see” with both your eyes and hands. It lets you estimate the likelihood of different possible causes for an effect and to eliminate proposed “causes” that are too exotic or don’t make sense.

Finally, working with tangible things keeps you honest with yourself. If your three-legged stool tilts, you can’t just wish or explain the tilt away; you have to shorten the offending leg. If your bicycle rattles, you have to find and eliminate the source of the noise.

In contrast, when you work with abstractions, as many do in a “service” economy, there’s no easy way to see when a cause for an effect is unlikely to be the right one. Does pandemic relief cause inflation, when it barely replaces lost salaries, if at all? “More money raises prices,” sounds plausible, but does it make sense when the money granted doesn’t replace even what was lost? Money doesn’t gain some special magic quality because it comes from the government.

There’s no tangible proof of the flaws in this sort of logic, like the tilting stool. And so economists and pundits neglected the elephant in the room: the fact that our Fed and the European Central Bank have been holding interest rates at historic lows (mostly fractions of a percent) for most of fourteen years. (Both the Fed and the ECB appear to be correcting this error by raising rates and promising to do so again.)

Unfortunately, software doesn’t help. The ongoing transition from mechanical control to controlling computers and devices with software only makes the problem of thinking worse. Why? Because software is nonlinear. It doesn’t work like tangible things. Errors are not proportional to the things that cause them. A single missing parenthesis in a line of code can make a whole program nonfunctional. An error in logic can produce bizarre results that take thousands of hours to diagnose and fix. An error in the theory underlying the logic may take even longer. (See Elon Musk’s Autopilot.)

Like our bodies, our brains evolved in a physical world. We can see and feel cause and effect there. When we move on to the abstractions that we have created in our writing and our software, discerning the right or even the most likely cause gets harder. And so we come to extreme views of causation like those in conspiracy theories about Jewish space lasers and Democratic pedophile rings. It could happen, right? And there’s nothing in the tangible, visible world to give it the lie.

My hypothesis here is that people who work with both their hands and their minds acquire a better, more sensible, grasp of cause and effect because our brains evolved to handle tangible things and escape from visible, tangible threats. People who only provide “services,” who live and work in a sea of abstractions, can come to, or passively accept, some really bizarre conclusions.

So maybe there’s a correlation between Japan’s and Germany’s reputations for excellent engineering and superior physical products and their current status as the world’s best exemplars of democracy and Enlightenment values. After all, democracy, full employment, workers’ rights and human rights are not just abstractions pulled out of the blue. People seem to work better in societies that give them a say in their governance and treat them with respect. Businesses seem to work better when they pay workers adequately and treat them as people, not inanimate factors of production or inputs to another abstraction called profit. Maybe people and cultures that actually make machines work better can understand these truths better than others. It sure seems that way.

Endnote: A Possible Linguistic Reason. There is another possible reason for Japan’s and Germany’s uniqueness as exemplars of democracy: their languages. To my knowledge, Japanese and German are unique languages (at least among major powers) in putting their verbs at the end of sentences. To me as a native speaker of English, that’s a case of delayed gratification, linguistically and culturally enforced.

In recent years, psychologists have proven that young children’s ability to delay gratification is highly predictive of their success in later life, in things as varied as school, career, lifetime earnings, marriage and family. (The testers give a child, alone in a room, one piece of candy with a promise to provide a second if the first has not been eaten when the tester returns after a few minutes.) If a child’s ability to delay gratification can predict later success throughout life, what about a culture whose language enforces a kind of delayed gratification in the very act of speaking, writing, and thinking?

Neither Japan nor Germany invented democracy. Neither had it in its early history; ancient Rome the ancient Greeks were first. Both Japan and Germany learned it late in their long histories, starting in the early twentieth century. Yet today the two are the strongest remaining exemplars of democracy in a very turbulent and troubled time. Can the facts that both are also seen as global leaders in engineering, and that both have languages uniquely incorporating delayed gratification, be mere coincidence?


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Permalink to this post