The Madeleine & Anvi Gallery of Excellent Effortposts

[politicus]

Sam Spade is damaged beyond repair, so I thought I would set up a new one. Please do not argue in it and no short posts.

[politicus]

Sorry this took me so long! Long week.




Christianity concentrates in the west, but not for the same reasons as Buddhism (or as we shall see in the next map, Shintō). This rather has to do with the directions from which missionization came during the Nanban Trade period, which basically set the plot for subsequent Japanese Christianity despite the two hundred and fifty-odd years of vicious persecution that separate it from modern Japanese Christian life. The missionization during this period came from the west and concentrated on what a lot of histories of Japan call, during this time and up to about the middle of the Meiji Era, the 'southwestern periphery'--Kyūshū, the southern half of Shikoku, and the westernmost tip of Honshū--and on the Seto Inland Sea, which at the time was the main avenue of trade and transport between the Spanish and Portuguese mission sites and the power centers in Kansai. For a generation or two in the late sixteenth and very early seventeenth centuries before the persecution started, parts of Kyūshū and Shikoku were majority-Christian. A lot of these Christians went into hiding, obscuring their faith in rituals that cosmetically resembled those of Buddhism and eventually drifting further and further away from orthodoxy due to their lack of priests and Bibles. Most of these 'Hidden Christians' rejoined the Catholic Church after the Meiji Restoration but some have persisted to the present day as 'Separated Christians', and are worthy of study and might make a fascinating thread topic some day in and of themselves.

Note that the most Christian prefecture is to this day Nagasaki. It’s the very dark red area in the far west, a group of barely-connected peninsulas and islands—that is in fact a prefecture and not just a bunch of overlapping lines and blotches! It's 5.8% Christian and was first the main hub of Catholic missionary work and later the only area that was partially open to Europeans throughout the Tokugawa bakufu. The insular portions of this prefecture are where the vast majority of the remaining Separated Christians live.

The Tōkyō Metropolis is the second most Christian prefecture because it's Tōkyō. Tōkyō has a lot of everything.

William Temple once said that the Church was the only organization that existed for the benefit of its non-members. This wasn’t even close to being true and it doesn’t even make Christianity unique among religions in that the formal Shintō shrine network exists to cater to the needs of as many people who don’t belong to it as possible as well. There are a few generally highly specific and arcane things for which formal membership in a shrine helps but in general in order to participate in most aspects of Shintō worship one basically just has to show up (or volunteer, in the case of things like carrying portable shrines at festivals). It’s enough of an ethnoreligion that people who are obviously not Japanese might get looked at a little askance but even that is not insurmountable. Indeed, I’m really not sure why anybody would feel the need to be a formal member of a Shintō organization exactly, other than clergy and their families; and indeed, few enough people are that this group is actually smaller than Christianity by some measures.

There’s a softer instance of the same general patterns from the Buddhism map in this map, but other than that what’s interesting here is basically just one prefecture, Kōchi. It, Akita, Tottori, Miyazaki, and Kagoshima are the only prefectures that stands out enough that it is basically impossible to argue that it’s statistical noise, and Kōchi (5.5% formal Shintō) stands out the most among these by a considerable margin. It stood out on the mushūkyō map too, so clearly the idea of Shintō over against other religions has some sort of strong appeal here. There are very specific, locally powerful shrine networks in these five prefectures, which rely partially on the religious equivalent of patronage, but I wasn't able to figure out exactly what the nature of these shrine networks is. Shimane Prefecture in the southwesterly part of the Sea of Japan coastline, the location of the Izumo Grand Shrine, is part of a cluster of prefectures with slightly higher rates of formal Shinto adherence than most of the country, but doesn't even stand out as much as neighboring Tottori does; Mie Prefecture between Nagoya and Kansai, the location of the Ise Grand Shrine, doesn't stand out at all, which surprises me.

[politicus]

Will the latest incarnation of this gallery be another way for people to repost opinions they agree with without having to enter the discussion themselves, inevitably engulfing this thread in bickering that could've been had elsewhere?

The idea with naming it after Madeleine and Anvi was too avoid it. Only genuine well argued and knowledgeable effortposts.

I will close it if it degenerates.

But now: Please stop arguing and post excellent posts!

(if you want to argue about the merit or lack of merit of galleries and mines then create a thread for that).

[politicus]

Most movements don't actually consider the human costs of disruption of norms on actual living, breathing people, for whom such disruptions are not statistical aberrations but real crises with real consequences. Inaction is always easy to measure and quantify, action is trickier to justify or examine because those policies have not yet actually been instituted.

There's the kernel of a good cautionary tale in the first sentence here, but the rest goes deeply off the rails super fast.  Like, seriously, the idea that people are good at measuring and quantifying the costs of inaction just flies so directly in the face of every piece of evidence we have.  I mean, yes, of course "action for action's sake" is not something we should do.  But I'm quite confident that's not the problem we have right now, and behaving as if it is overcorrects us into absurdity.

To take one example, it is easy to call for "saner" environmental policies,

Ooh, good example.

but to what degree can we be sure that the (real) harm caused to future generations by climate changes outweighs the (equally real and immediate) harm to those whose livelihoods are dependent on producing coal, oil, and natural gas,

Okay, what about the real and immediate harm our current system has on people who get asthma and cancer from particulate pollution, or lose their water supply due to fracking, or are already getting hit with desertification, aquifer loss, more and stronger floods, etc? This isn't just some future-generation thing, even by your ludicrous standards there ought to be justification for some action seeing as there are victims already.  Unless of course victims of the status quo don't count as real victims in your mind.

or to the massive costs needed to renovate the power grid,

You think infrastructure lasts forever?  We'd need to renovate that sh*t sooner or later anyway, you don't get to count that as an extra cost.  And, anyway, there are a lot of investments that would pay for themselves over a pretty quick timeframe anyway, but for whatever reason (inertia, lack of upfront capital, bureaucratic obstacles) don't get built.  I mean, do you seriously think that there are no such worthy investments to be made? Not even just w/r/t the power grid, but in general?

or to the extra expense of transportation to those struggling to get by as is?

Oh, god, really? This disingenuous rot? Protip: those people who are actually most struggling to get by wouldn't see their transportation costs rise under a sane enviro policy.  To make that claim requires both a stunning ignorance of a) the reality for millions of people, and b) the actual sorts of solutions that are being offered on this point.

Also, BTW, our transportation system as currently designed is quite literally a grisly horror show. People getting maimed and killed trying to cross the street is a real crisis with real consequences.  But that's just the way it is, so those victims don't count, amirite?

(One of these days I need to start a thread about the invention of jaywalking, BTW– which is an underrated and forgotten case of societal change being harmfully thrust on people in exactly the way you bemoan.  Let's be perfectly clear– some changes are bad, and I'm happy to decry them when they should be decried. But I guess in your mind, it's been made, we shouldn't fix it, too late no backsies?)

We cannot quantify the harm of inaction over the next century, so how do we know the consequences of global climate change then outweigh the costs of action now?

[citation needed]

If you want to say that we cannot pinpoint things to the dollar and cent, sure.  But we can– and do– have enough evidence to make a reasonable, and overwhelmingly compelling, guess.  The plausible range might be wide but even on the lowest end of impacts/costs there are a lot of things we'd need to do. (And, of course, wouldn't a healthy risk-averse conservativism behave as if to prepare for the worst-case scenario?)  I mean, I guess you can be a radical skeptic if you so wish, but at a certain point I have to wonder how you square that with the existence of industrial and post-industrial technology in the world today.

Either that, or you're engaging in the most sharply sloping time discounting I've ever seen, basically to the point where future generations hold no moral weight in your calculus.  But, of course, there are people alive today who are those future generations.  Apres moi, le deluge?

This bias of action or just doing something to look like you're doing something over the alternative solution of actually weighing whether the consequences of inaction outweigh the consequences of action is very distasteful.

Again, no such bias actually exists!  You've given me exactly zero indication that you take the "consequences of inaction" seriously– or that people in general take it seriously.

Of course the well-being of people can be improved by the efforts of other people. I'm distrustful of any attempts to do that on a systematic level. You improve people's lives by covering for your coworker when she goes to take her kids to the doctor or by volunteering at your local food bank. That doesn't make the world a better place, though. The world is neither good nor bad, the world simply is. You can make other people's lives more pleasant and your own more pleasant by extension, though.

Again, what counts as "systematic"?  Was the New Deal too "systematic" for you?  What about the introduction of an income tax?  Or the Voting Rights Act?  Fighting Jim Crow was a pretty systematic societal change, now wasn't it.  Freeing the slaves, now that was a shake-up, pity the poor plantation owners being disrupted.  Are you saying that anything worth doing, is worth doing solely through small-scale private charity?  Are we floating in a sort of timeless jelly where past actions have no impact on the present, where present actions have no impact on the future?

Look, I'm not saying that you should have to view the world as "good or bad".  I'm certainly not saying that human civilization has an inherent teleology, that "the arc of history bends toward justice" (Though I will admit that MLK's quote, while not necessarily accurate, is useful for those of us who give a sh*t about trying to keep it from bending toward injustice.)  I'm not saying you have to believe anything. 

I am merely saying that you should acknowledge that the observable universe seems to obey predictable laws.  And that we can draw inferences from those laws, and act accordingly. In short, as Gully said that there is such a thing as evidence, and sometimes the evidence really does say, loud and clear, that action is necessary.

[politicus]

Thanks for the thought, politicus!  I'm certainly not Sam Spade legend material, but I'm happy to know my sometimes very long-winded efforts are worth an occasional thread-title.    

You are welcome!

...

I started working on this while Julia Gillard was Prime Minister. How's that for an effortpost?

Beautiful!