I'm reading David Brin's essay collection Tomorrow Happens. Brin's vision of technology and its possible effects interests me. On top of that, I consider his views both practical and optimistic, which is a rare combination.

It even makes me willing to mostly forgive his total and utter inability to plot out his stories if they're longer than one volume. I won't buy another trilogy from him, but neither will I excoriate him for making such a mess of the one he's already published. Very often.

I can't help wondering, though, what would happen if he spent a year or two in Japan.

You see, his practicality and optimism are both extremely, almost archetypally, Western. His vision of what would be a good world tries to balance individuality with community, but starts out from the basic assumption that individuality is priviledged and cannot, under any circumstances, be sacrificed. The one short story of his I've read that was set in Japan was a caricature of suicidal overachiever-ness in a society prone to drone-ness.

So I kind of wonder whether he would actually manage to grok wa, or just spend a year or two feeling uncomfortable and vaguely smug.

He says he wants a culturally neutral philosphy/politics/psychology. And I can't help consider that a bit naive, because I can't quite bring myself to believe such a thing could exist. And if it did, I think it would have to abrogate his other desire for a philosophy/politics/psychology that honors and celebrates diversity. I really think the best we could do is an awareness of the differences from one culture to the next, and an ability to switch around among them.

(Tangentially, I'd forgotten what a pain it is to type "philosophy" on a QWERTY keyboard.)

Brin doesn't like cultural relativity, and I can sympathize. Often it becomes an excuse not to take action or make judgements. But I think he's lost sight of the fact that, yes, all ethical systems and politics and so forth really are completely relative. We are all situated somewhere. Someone wrote those stone tablets, they didn't just appear hand delivered by the Universal Truth. People don't seem to think very often about the reasons behind the easy right and wrongs, like "it's wrong to murder someone" (a perennial favorite among the disputationally challenged, because it seems so self-evident). But I think we should. Why is it wrong to murder someone? "Just because" is not a useful answer. Neither is "because God/my mother/the government said so", at least not for an adult who can presumably make her own decisions. "Because I wouldn't want people to do it to me" is better, and that's often what this one comes down to if you push people on it. On the other hand, that is more or less the basis, as far as I can tell, for anti-homosexual legislation. That's relativity in a nutshell for you. And I think that is what Brin's optimism leads him to overlook.

He'd like for all of us to understand one another, which would, ideally, lead to all of us having the same basic moral system. What I'm not sure he's capable of seeing is the way in which that desire leads him straight to Japan. Because, of course, when you get right down to it, the moral system he wants everyone to have is basically his own, which differs from the more prominant Japanese sets. And around and around we go.

And that's humanity in a nutshell for you.