Confronting Decadence and Decline

I

Bird droppings have never had particularly good press, ever since poor Tobit of the tribe of Nephtali, worn out after a long day of grave-digging, nodded off and “as he was sleeping, hot dung out of a swallow’s nest fell upon his eyes, and he was made blind.” Tobit’s hollow eyes were healed by a plaster of fish gall, but the high levels of uric acid present in avian excreta continue to pose problems for the rest of us, giving rise to entire industries devoted to mitigating the damage inflicted on building exteriors, bronze monuments, and vehicle surfaces by roosting pigeons and passing gulls. Parks and recreation officials wage an unending and largely futile war against the geese who befoul fields with their tubular green droppings, produced at the rate of one pound avoirdupois per day, while public health officials fret about the presence of Escherichia coli, Histoplasma capsulatum, Campylobacter jejuni, Cryptosporidium baileyi, and Giardia intestinalis, among other pathogens and parasites, in the fetid accumulations of bird droppings piling up all around us in cities and suburbs.

In Japan, bird droppings have a rather better reputation, even imparting a bit of luck when deposited on one’s person, owing to the pure coincidence that the Japanese word for faeces, fun, sounds like the word for good luck, un, so that the phrase fun ga tsuku, or “You’ve been pooped on” closely resembles the more felicitous phrase un ga tsuku, or “You’ve had good luck.” Some of the finest Japanese haiku concern, of all things, bird excrement:

The sticky droppings of a kite fall right on an iris petal (Buson)

On the sprout of a reed, the old s—t of a wild goose — a fond memory (Kyōtai)

Even the bird that s—ts on the camellia blossoms takes a rest on its journey (Sentoku)

An evening shower — I can read the stupas covered in bird s—t (Onitsura)

The bush warbler taking a s—t on the dead branch of a plum tree (Onitsura)

A single cry — the little cuckoo feeds on the droppings of a bush warbler (Baijun)

The bush warbler — s—ting on a rice cake from the top of a chestnut tree (Bashō)

Vanishingly few Westerners, one suspects, have given much consideration to the matter of bush warbler droppings, but as the poet and essayist Masaoka Shiki observed in his 1900 essay “Haiku on S—t,” published in the influential literary magazine Hototogisu (“Lesser Cuckoo”), “[S]—t from bush warblers is said to refine the skin and it is used in rice bran sponges — so, of course, it does not evoke a feeling of filthiness.” Japanese bush warbler droppings, along with those emanating from the  cloacae of nightingales, have from time immemorial been used as whitening ingredients in uguisu no fun, literally “nightingale faeces” but better known as the “geisha facial,” and are also employed as kimono stain-removers, leading Shiki to conclude, seemingly counterintuitively to our benighted eyes, that “by nature, bird s—t is not such a filthy thing.”

Bird feces of course has more than merely cosmetic applications. The Japanese farmer and philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka (1913–2008), a noble practitioner of no-till and pesticide-free farming methods, determined that foods “grown in soil balanced by the action of worms, microorganisms, and decomposing animal manure are the cleanest and most wholesome of all,” and so relied mainly on the judicious administration of straw, clover, and chicken manure to produce his abundant fields. Yet the greatest bird poop enthusiast in Japanese history was neither a poet nor an organic farmer, but a Tokugawa-era philosopher and politician by the name of Kumazawa Banzan (1619–1691).

II

The son of a masterless samurai (rōnin), Banzan had a peripatetic youth, born in Kyoto Inari (now Kyoto’s Shimogyō-ku ward), sent to serve as a page in the Okayama Domain, and living for a while with his grandfather in Kirihara (now Ōmihachiman) before returning to Okayama. Bold and noble ideas were always working in his mind, like yeast, and he fell at an early age under the spell of the Japanese Neo-Confucian school of thought known as Yōmeigaku, or Yangmingism, which stressed the unity of inner knowledge and action. As the school’s Ming-era Chinese founder Wang Yangming had argued, “[N]owadays, many people treat knowledge and actions as two distinct things. They think the need to know first, only then can they do something in this area. This lead them to do nothing, as well as to know nothing.” Banzan was determined to be a man of action as well as learning. While heading an artillery unit, he spent his spare time organizing what he called a Hanazono-kai (花園会), or “Flower Garden Association,” where the common people might be educated, something of a novelty at the time. He also studied hydrology and engineering, and after Okayama Domain’s Bizen Plains were devastated by floods after the typhoon of 1654, the Neo-Confucianist scholar strove to improve the canals, dams, and ponds of the region as part of his program of “Making Mountains Luxuriant and Rivers Run Deep.”

Banzan’s greatest cause célèbre was the reforestation of the “bald mountains” that enclasped the rural flatlands of Okayama, mountains which had been stripped bare by the needs of Japan’s growing cities, resulting in landslides and clogged rivers and unsightly vistas. Cedars and cypresses were to be planted to prevent further erosion, but first he ordered that:

Depending on the extent of the valleys and peaks, 30, 50, 100, or even 200 koku of millet should be sown, and then on top of that, dry grass and reeds should be spread. Various birds would come to feed on the millet. Bird droppings would soon mix in with the soil so that trees planted would grow well there. The dried grass covering the millet would make it difficult for birds to get, forcing them to stay longer. Moreover, the millet would not be washed away by rain, and should grow well in the mountain soil. If done in this way, in only thirty years mountains would be covered with various trees. With luxuriant growth of mountain forests, nearby villages would not lack firewood. When this approach becomes well established and widespread, mountains will be lush and firewood in lasting abundance. Until such luxuriant growth is realized, pinewood cut from mountains and chaff from rice fields should suffice for fuel. Pines are not beneficial for mountain soil or arable rice land. But even in rocky, poor ground where grasses and trees do not grow, pine trees will. If we simply focus on what benefits us now, we will be ignoring the harm that comes in later years.

In his 1687 treatise Daigaku Wakumon, or Responding to the Great Learning, Banzan summarized his program: “Water, plants, seeds and nutrients all fall and flow from the high places to the low places, and especially the high places become poor, but sometimes, with the help of birds, we can make it all flow from the low places to the high places.” Thus did rootedness defy the laws of entropy and Newtonian physics. As the anonymous Tokyo-based blogger and traditional architecture enthusiast Wrath of Gnon put it, “Isn’t that a nice image of localism/cyclical economy/ecology/holistic thinking, all rolled into one?”

It certainly is, but Banzan was never afforded the respect he so richly deserved from the shogunate. His advocacy on behalf of small-scale farmers, his education reforms, and his support for promotion based on merit instead of heredity did not appeal to the feudal daimyō lords. His imaginative public works projects, expected to bear fruit years and even decades down the road, did not impress the corrupt, myopic Edo bureaucracy. Ever the Confucian, Banzan railed against the issue of “soft evil” (jūaku, 柔悪), which prevailed when “the cycle of sophistication reached an extreme,” and was to be contrasted with the “hard evil” (gōaku 剛悪) of war, internecine strife, tyrannical oppression, and the like. Decadence had set in, to the detriment of the common weal. The shogunate’s coffers were empty, the people suffered from disasters natural and man-made, agricultural yields were down, and dedicated servants of the people (like Kumazawa Banzan) were incarcerated and sent into internal exile. “In the present,” he wearily concluded, “people are numerous, but there are no good men.”

III

Another free-thinking samurai, the Buddhist monk Suzuki Shōsan (1579–1655), would have agreed on that point at least with his Neo-Confucian near contemporary. The founder of his own school of Zen Buddhism, which he called Niō Zen or Guardian King Zen, Shōsan likewise stressed the importance of combining inner enlightenment with good works. Regardless of whether you are busy “tilling fields, or selling wares, or even confronting an enemy in the heat of battle,” he maintained, “direct enlightenment will occur at key moments of one’s day to day life.” Yet the Zen monk would be just as disappointed by Tokugawa decadence as the Yangmingist Confucian civil servant.

Shōsan was even stronger in his condemnation of Tokugawa Japan than Banzan, complaining that “Buddhism is in full decline, the direction has gone wrong, and nobody’s really alive. Everyone’s dead.” His solution was to “dispose myself so as to conquer all things with a buoyant spirit, twenty-four hours a day,” with the aid of the “unshakable energy of the Guardian Kings or of Fudo,” those benevolent deities that can drive away evil spirits. His advice for his contemporaries was deceptively straightforward: “You have to make sure you get out of the starving ghosts and beasts, and at least become a human being.” In an era of spiritual crisis, this was perhaps easier said than done.

For the Neo-Confucian Kumazawa Banzan, the decadence and decline of his society was the result of incompetent and venal governance, and could be addressed technocratically. For the Zen Buddhist Shōsan Suzuki, the parlous state of Tokugawa-era Japan was the consequence of a spiritual crisis. They were both correct. Nations falter and fail for a variety of reasons, some them politico-economic, some of them psycho-socio-culturo-spiritual. Richard Edwin Smith, in his magisterial treatise The Failure of the Roman Republic (1955), demonstrated how the breakdown of Roman republican society in the 1st century BC was a consequence of failed provincial and foreign policies, the high-handedness of elites and magistrates, and in-fighting between the Equites and the Senate. Yet it was also a profoundly spiritual crisis:

Instead of the self-restraint of earlier times, we find an an almost total lack of restraint on the part of most men and women in the attainment of their wishes and a reluctance or refusal to submit to the discipline of society; selfishness and individuality are the dominant traits of this period, combined with a growing lack of moral self-control, the result of the loosening grip of Roman religion and the Roman code of morals.

Society, as Smith concluded, is a:

sensitive organism; remove or destroy the unifying element, and it breaks into a thousand pieces; men still live together, but the cement which bound them into one is gone…once the faith is shaken and destroyed, it cannot be replaced to order; it can only be won again by suffering and experience. For a time things can seem to be well, until the last of the spiritual capital is spent; but when the final cheque has been drawn, society is bankrupt, and the consequence must ensue; before the society can come together once again, fresh capital must be created.

Fortunately for the Romans, this did eventually come to pass, when the “Roman spirit, conservative, instinctive, emerged from the carnage of the civil wars to regain itself, and though it could not exorcise the past, it tried to link itself to the further past to create a better future.” I pray we have the capacity to do the same, as we confront our own era of decadence and decline.

IV

Republican Rome, the Tokugawa Shogunate — polities separated by the long, rolling waves of Time from each other and from our own world, but which demonstrate the eternal truth that society is a sensitive organism, and one prone to desensitization. Shōsan Suzuki looked around and saw a civilization in which “nobody’s really alive,” and “everybody’s dead.” Kumazawa Banzan perceived a land in the grips of “soft evil,” stifling everyone and everything. And their words of warning still ring true today, for has there ever been a world more beset by soft evil than our own?

Soft evil is everywhere around us. We find it in our relationship to the natural world, a topic near and dear to Banzan. Soft evil is when we saturate the soil beneath us with toxic endocrine disruptors. Soft evil is when the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases fund experiments in which scientists graft the scalps of electively aborted fetuses onto newly “humanized” rodents; in which beagle puppies have their heads locked inside cages filled with diseased sandflies; in which baby monkeys are systematically and callously subjected to abuse at the NIH laboratory in Poolesville, Maryland. There is a soft evil at work when green energy boondoggles wreak havoc on avian, chiropteran, and cetacean populations; a soft evil at work in our treatment of livestock in concentrated animal feeding operations; and, yes, a soft evil at work when an innocent eastern gray squirrel is euthanized by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to no rational purpose whatsoever. “It can truly be said,” wrote Schopenhauer, that “Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are the tormented souls,” and when that proves to be the case, as it is so often, you can be certain that soft evil is abroad in the world.

And then there is the soft evil we perpetrate against each other: the aesthetic soft evil of brutalism and other forms of soulless modern architecture that spoil our built environment; the soft evil of plainly idiotic COVID-era vaccine and mask mandates, and school and church closures, the effects of which will be felt for years to come; the soft evil of urban anarcho-tyranny; the soft evil of social contagions that are in direct contravention of basic human societal and biological norms. It is this all-pervasive soft evil that has produced, to quote the traditionalist commentator Wrath of Gnon once more, “a medical system that doesn’t heal, an agricultural system that doesn’t nourish, a defense system that doesn’t bring peace, a financial system that multiplies debt, a homeownership system that can’t house. Our modern world is truly the greatest of evil spectacles.”

It doesn’t have to be this way, and there is now an unprecedented opportunity to roll much of this back, to make our nation healthy again, to make our public buildings beautiful again (like anyone of any aesthetic sensibilities, I am eagerly looking forward to the passage of the Beautifying Federal Civil Architecture Act, S. 1943, and the issuance of related executive orders), and to make sure that the Freudian Todestrieb (death drive) of civilizational self-hatred and self-immolation is firmly repudiated. 

We should look to luminaries like Kumazawa Banzan, who struggled against the odds to forge a society operating in tune with the natural world, in which rootedness might prevail against erosion — both literally and figuratively. The playwright Plautus understood that pulchrum ornatum turpes mores pejus cœno collinunt — “bad conduct soils the finest ornament more than filth,” a phrase that might have come from the brush of the Neo-Confucian Banzan, and, as we have seen, there is nothing filthy about a life lived in accordance with the exigencies of Nature, nothing retrograde about a life lived in accordance with the conservative, instinctive values that heretofore sustained us. In spite of all of the obstacles thrown in his path, Banzan still hoped that with “good administration” there would be a return to what he called the “clear and bright, Vital Stuff of cyclical spring” and an end to the soft evil that so tormented him. He never abandoned his faith in the possibilities of benevolent governance, and neither should we. 

READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky:

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