近代の自己家畜化とノマドロジー、信仰と祈りSelf-Domestication, Nomadology, and Faith Without an Object
We persist in asserting, in various forms, the fact that the world is shaped by instability; yet, perhaps we are fundamentally astray in our grasp of this premise. That is to say, despite standing in a place that is perpetually "somewhere not peaceful," we dream of a tranquility yet unseen, thereby demoting the reality before our eyes to a mere waiting room where we simply endure. This dream has endured for centuries as the dream of modernity, but in truth it is not that the dream never existed. Humanity has already arrived at the dream of modernity. We stand at the far end of a dream already realized and left behind, and yet our discussion, for some reason, cannot move even slightly from the foundations of the modern.
Looking at history, one thing is plain: we can study history, but it is extremely difficult to examine the era we are living in as it happens. In the past, that world was at the level of the village; since the modern era, it became the scale of the nation; and since the 1990s, it has become planetary. It is therefore impossible to discuss such a dimension in a single, unified way, and to imagine one can lay out the whole picture of an era is sheer fantasy. However one discusses the nature of an era, there is always the absolute constraint of place.
All existence is created from place. Thus, discussion without place is empty theory. No matter how limitlessly one produces and reproduces this empty theory, it amounts to nothing more than a waste of time—humanity's greatest asset. The situation does not advance a single step, and we fall into a state of exhaustion on a human scale.
Try, for a moment, to imagine calmly how your own habits of thought are eating away at your spirit. Then ask yourself whether those habits truly come from you. For a person living today, nine times out of ten, almost none of them do. At that moment a yohaku (余白) for contemplation opens within your inner world, and in it opens an active, tranquil eye that truly gazes at the world. This is one form of enlightenment in our time.
To begin with, given that the majority of our day consists of unexpected events and friction with others, perceiving life itself as noise is synonymous with denying the majority of life. Whether or not we believe the lesson that maturity lies in eliminating trouble, keeping emotions flat, and proceeding efficiently, this is merely a norm of modern society. In such cases, a bad habit runs rampant: people are ashamed of the rise and fall of emotion as if it were a malfunction in a system, and they look away and seal it shut. Showing emotion is therefore seen by society as immature and a problem, and today many people, exhausted by how to handle it, fall into a state they cannot manage and lose their mental balance. This is because the technique of sealing away emotion to get by is deemed the mark of the social "model student," while those who do not conform are posited as having problems. Until now, being this model student was directly linked to income, but with the tides of automation and AI, the situation has begun to reverse rapidly. The stronger this era becomes, the more those who were previously ignored by society as "problematic" will stand on the side of creating new history. Culture is not born from model students.
First, no matter how much one tries to seal it away or pretend it never happened, such undigested emotion possesses the nature of constantly sedimenting at the bottom of one's heart. And the more one tries to suppress emotion, the higher the concentration of this sediment becomes. Before one knows it, even in response to something entirely unrelated in daily life, it connects at once with emotions accumulated in the past and erupts as an excessive reaction. This creates a vicious cycle that drives both body and mind further into an abyss of instability.
Irritation transforms into impatience, sadness into a sense of void, eventually inviting a state of paralysis where one no longer even knows what one is feeling. This is the true nature of the insomnia peculiar to the modern age and reasonless anxiety, and it is the greatest characteristic of modern society: self-domestication into the system.
Self-domestication into the system, though varying in degree, has now reached a dimension that no one can avoid. If we do not stand on the premise of admitting that the old method of escaping outside the system is now completely invalid, we lose sight of the essence of things. As I touched upon slightly in yesterday's article, the archaic method of escaping outside the system was indeed effective to a certain degree around the time of the Second World War. The core figures of the Beat Generation, who created the source of American counter-culture, redefined travel as a vanguard movement heightened to the most radical and anarchic dimension, exerting a profound influence on the subsequent world.
However, that is now a story of the past. As we can see from the digital nomads proliferating around the world, even if one realizes the old method of escaping outside the system through forms like travel or remote work, in reality, they have not escaped outside the system at all; there is no change in the fact that they are fundamentally internalized by the system. In other words, they pretend to have escaped outside the system, but in the self-domestication of the internalized system, they are no different from those who settle in one place. Certainly, digital nomads make physical movement possible, so it serves as risk management against an unstable world, and as a current of the 21st century, it should be actively promoted. On the other hand, however, physical movement is not the essence of nomadology. I view this as a fissure caused by the fact that the misunderstanding of "escaping outside the system"—a deeply rooted view of nomadology—has continued to the present day without being fundamentally questioned. Within this fissure, the rapidly growing numbers of digital nomads are struggling without finding an answer. In short, this is not the nomadology proposed by Deleuze and Guattari.
In this case, we must first ask from the premise: what is "movement"? We have a bad habit of behaving as if we know the meanings of words and concepts established in the modern era. The fact that we still prioritize knowledge in a present so permeated by AI, and that universities still function, is symbolic of this. However, what if you were to learn that the things you take for granted as "knowing" are actually merely dictionary definitions, and that you are creating a state of not truly knowing? What is needed here is not skepticism toward every modern concept but a view that asks again about their roots. Skepticism solves nothing and ends as an intellectual pastime.
Is "movement" simply crossing borders by plane with a passport and a laptop? Each of these polite inquiries into what is currently considered obvious becomes the foundation that branches into the digital nomads who will survive until the end (the future) and those who will be culled in the process. This is because the global trend of digital nomads has only just begun. Precisely because it has only just begun, the internal struggle to become a digital nomad who survives to the end becomes an asset, a weapon. Now, introspection is the greatest weapon. The population of digital nomads, already said to be 40 or 50 million, will increase dramatically, but that does not mean simply becoming a digital nomad ensures survival. Rather, the person who, before asking what a true digital nomad is, grasps the essence of nomadology and can carry it into the present will be the one who finally survives. Naturally, viewed from a different angle, it is a digital nomad bubble, and with the bursting of the bubble, the majority will vanish. To survive here and accelerate further ahead, asking these questions is extremely important. This is because everyone in the modern age, not limited to digital nomads in the sense imagined by the masses, faces a situation where they must suddenly live as nomads. In other words, if one does not think seriously about the problem of nomadology now, one will certainly be culled.
In the Book of Rites, one of the important classics of Confucianism, there is the phrase gori senri (毫釐千里). Put in modern terms, it teaches that a small difference at the beginning becomes a large difference later, so one must be prudent at the very start. Whether in scholarship or anything else, everyone's starting point is the same, and human beings do not differ that greatly; the wisdom lies in the fact that what divides the difference at the end is the mindset at the beginning. I believe this teaching should be applied precisely to the modern digital nomad, or rather, to nomadology. In a sense, digital nomads tend to sing the praises of freedom, but in reality, the fact that freedom is not entirely contained within physical movement is something the parties involved understand most viscerally. That is why I feel there is meaning in redefining nomadology from a Confucian perspective, from a somewhat unique vantage point of my own.
As a major premise, how sincerely can you answer the question, "For what purpose are you moving?" By everyone asking what "movement" in the 21st century truly is, the future will become visible, and it will become a theme on a human scale. And this is not a displacement of the concept itself, which rests content with its own sweetness, but a displacement that springs from thinking itself. However, at present, the people called intellectuals have been doing nothing but this displacement of the concept itself for decades. What they are doing is merely tinkering with the contents of various concepts grasped, posited, established, and expressed within a reality alienated from the real. What we who live in the early twenty-first century must do is recognize that this tinkering with twentieth-century concepts was the problem itself. We must look not only at "reality" (what people call the world, and what each of us calls the world) but at its root, "the real," and further still at the invisible realm of the alienation between the real and reality.
Yet now the knowledge of the world is staged and damaged by those who, as ever, see only what has been signified, can see only that, or try to see only that. That is why the world has rotted, why it is exhausted, why it has self-destructed; why people have rotted, become fatigued, and self-destructed. In short, the modern ideal of "changing the world" is completely finished. As everyone vaguely realizes, we cannot change the world. To be more precise, we cannot save the masses. As a result of everything becoming excessive and high-speed once again, or perhaps as a result of the sharpening of modernity, we have entered an interesting age in which we must once again ask what the essential characteristics of human beings are.
The twenty-first century is the era of religion and philosophy. When I say religion, I do not mean only the major religions of the last 2000 years, nor merely cult-like movements, but an age in which people with a religious temperament appear and vanish like liquid, one after another. I wanted to see the last appearance of the UK before Brexit, and further, I wanted to place myself once in London, a global city of the 21st century, so I lived there from 2018 until before the pandemic. There I felt a distance between my own sense and that of the many people of my generation I met who described themselves as "irreligious."
This is because "irreligious" is, in the first place, a quite peculiar word for human beings. Whatever the reason, from a certain period, the human brain suddenly hypertrophied, and we became humans as we are now; from that moment the sublime attribute of faith has been installed in us. In my view, faith is the root of the human, a characteristic of being human, and not something to be rejected for incomprehensible reasons such as being primitive. And faith for humans is not necessarily related to what has become globally massive like Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism, but is something that has been born and extinguished limitlessly in "place." Even if labeled as evil cults or obscene sects in each era, it remains unchanged that some form of religious sentiment is emanating from people. The view that the number of believers decides the legitimacy of a faith has been a pernicious error of the last two thousand years. People who cling to it are the majority worldwide, it is undeniable that even they possess their own form of religious sentiment.
That is why the easy use of the word "irreligious" makes me stop and think. Japanese people are often said to be irreligious, but in fact they are not. What this shows is that there is a view, rooted in one particular idea of religion, which holds that if one cannot name a specific religious order or denomination, it is not religion and it is not faith. This lurks at the root of conflicts over religion. However, there is no need to name a specific order or denomination; faith is inherently equipped in human beings. This is the standpoint of my faith. Hence, I am not inclined toward any specific order or denomination, have never belonged to a religious organization, nor do I have connections with such people, yet I live my days within a strong faith.
The phrase "the eight million gods" (八百万の神) is now used so casually that it invites misunderstanding, but the kami (神) to whom I offer prayers daily in my heart is not a specific, established object. Generally, what is called religion has a clear "object" to which prayers are offered. In my faith, this object itself does not exist. Readers accustomed to continental faiths might find this strange, but the object of prayer can be said to be "Nothingness," and this is equal to kami (I always think the concept to use here is kami, not God), and it can also be called nature. Therefore, my prayer has no object itself, and thus no name. It may be more accurate to say that my god does not take the place of a substance depending on the place, the time, or the moment, but changes within "nothingness = kami = nature." Thus, it has no form. Therefore, I have no need to go to a specific place for prayer, nor do I need any articles for prayer; I can offer prayer in faith anytime, anywhere.
In short, it is one form of nomadological faith. It does not possess a specific "object"—not in the negative sense of lacking, but in the state of not having one from the very beginning. Here, faith and prayer do not cause separation or division, so within myself, it remains in a primordial state, that is, undifferentiated and unseparated (Center-less Faith). In this state, no difference in faith or prayer arises between myself and others, and since there is no separation, one never reaches the greatest problem held by religion: conflict. Because there is no object in the prayer itself.
Thus, for me, prayer requires no special words. It does not cease at any time or place—whether brewing coffee, reading a book intently, walking while listening to techno in the cold winter night wind, traveling, or spending time with a loved one. Therefore, I go to shrines, I go to temples, I go to churches if I go to Europe, and although I cannot enter, I sit near mosques and gaze at them if I go to the Middle East. Rather, because I have a deep interest and respect for human religious sentiment, when I travel to Europe, for some reason I show no interest in the things my generation frolics in; I prefer to immerse myself in churches, watching the prayers and figures of the people visiting there for hours. And it does not matter if it is not a place of faith accompanied by substance. Shrines, temples, and churches are wonderful because the "traces" of countless people offering prayers over hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, have permeated the place. I consider quietly conversing with those "traces" in a foreign land to be the richness of travel.
So, from my perspective, the term "irreligious" is quite problematic. One of the reasons the younger generation suffers today seems to me to be a mechanism by which calling oneself "irreligious" leads people to let go of faith and prayer along with it. The problem when saying "irreligious" is that it is spoken of as a set equivalent to faith and prayer, and there is a strong, enigmatic obsession that being irreligious means discarding faith and prayer. But even without agreement with a specific, realizable religion, faith and prayer are things that cannot be discarded as long as a human is human. Perhaps the attempt to forcibly pretend this did not exist has torn the spirit apart, and now, I feel a violent confusion is occurring, centering on the younger generation. In fact, from this perspective, I sense a growing movement in many places to see the reinterpretation of Christianity, or the redefinition of faith, as salvation. But before that, if each person asked what religion is, what faith is, and what prayer is, the solution should become visible. The attitude of confusing these identically and rejecting them collectively is the cause bringing fissures to the spirit.
Therefore, when I met people claiming to be irreligious, I thought around the late 2010s that the more life progresses, the more this self-proclamation of being irreligious will become the primary cause of their own straying. The reason is that proclaiming oneself irreligious is nothing to be proud of, nor something to declare to others. Furthermore, the stance that one transcends faith and prayer by being irreligious, and can find truth through one's own will without depending on any order, can be called one of the roots of modern exhaustion.
In other words, the very way of thinking of "irreligious" is proof of confusing faith and prayer and failing to understand them. Thus, arguing that capitalism is the modern religion or ideology is the modern religion, engaging in the substitution of arguments as is done currently, solves nothing. Fundamentally, the way of thinking about religion is too fixed, and the problem lies in the fact that it has become excessively established, but there seems to be no sign of realizing this. That is why they move to deny (in fact, reject) religion, faith, and prayer. From the perspective of those living their days with true faith and prayer, it cannot be helped if they are viewed with a sense of "what are these people doing?" This is because while religion may need controversy (to acquire believers), faith and prayer require no controversy.
As I write like this, I realize that I began today's article from a completely different idea, and before I knew it I had arrived at faith... I will end here for today, hoping to finish tomorrow the thoughts I meant to write today.