The metanarratives of today
I am re-watching Sailor Moon with my two-years old daughter, an episode per night, before sleeping. Sailor Moon is so good it hurts. I can only imagine what it must have felt like, to be involved in the production of something that’s so awesomely spot-on, so correct (in the sense of Wittgenstein’s æsthetics). There has been nothing like this in anime for a long time; perhaps it cannot ever happen again, because we lost the innocence — we cannot go back to not being ironic about anime; today’s Sailor Moon is, inevitably, Puni Puni Poemi.
One thing Sailor Moon got me thinking about are metanarratives. There is some variation in the metanarratives employed for male education; Jump-style is, of course, “becoming strong”, while Western-style is “being strong” — a subtle but very important distinction; Spider-man and Superman and He-man don’t get their powers through arduous training like Goku or Ryū or Naruto; they’re either born with them, or receive them magically, but in any case it’s a gift. The Western boy-fiction often requires the help of godlike authority figures (Gandalf, the Sorceress, the Dungeon Master), while the Japanese substitute this for the importance of friends or “comrades” (nakama). Social implications of these differences are left as exercise. In any case, both the Japanese and American boy-narratives boil down to fighting; to killing dragons.
The female metanarrative is different, and, in both cultural contexts, reflects an earlier era where women were supposed to make products out of themselves and market the result to the best bidder — to “score a good husband”. So the fiction for young females everywhere is about finding true love. Boy fiction: if you just win the battle, everything will be fine. Girl fiction: if you could just get him to like you, everything will be fine.
It’s interesting that the female metanarrative is carried pretty much intact to adult life, while its male counterparts undergo metamorphosis. The themes of struggle and victory have, necessarily, to be abstracted, because almost no one is actually a warrior or a hunter. (I suspect this metamorphosis doesn’t happen with, say, children of religious guerrillas; they can carry on the wars of childhood heroes verbatim). The literal dragons of boyhood become Chesterton’s dragons (“Fairy tales are true, not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be killed.”) But what are the dragons, exactly? In post-capitalist society, it is marginality. You’re supposed to be mainstream. Being a wino or a bum is obviously a contemporary sin, but so is being a NEET. The mystique of marginality, as celebrated by the beats and the hippies, now falls short; you’re allowed to identify as a “punk” or “artist” just as long as you keep being “mature” and “responsible” and “law-abiding” —.i.e. you’re allowed to deviate just as long as the deviation is fake. As Pink Floyd puts it, the metanarrative of our era is “get a good job with more pay and you’re OK”. People voluntarily strive for “self-improvement” — not to empower themselves in the Stoic sense, but to get a good job. It’s like slaves started to train themselves to better please their masters.
The problem with these narratives is, it’s all lies.
Both the male and female metanarratives are empty promises. Find the perfect Other, get in a prestigious university, buy a big house and life will stop sucking. But if you do it, you’ll find life will keep on sucking, about as much as it does right now. Go on a stroll with your soulmate, and you’ll meet the Buddha’s three men in the park—the sick, the old, the dead, Nature’s way of reminding you of your own death clock. Sleep in your big new house, and Sartre’s nausea will be waiting for you 2AM with a cup of insomnia. What are you supposed to do then? Improve your relationship, buy a larger house. Only the ever-flashier distractions we created for ourselves prevent us of seeing the obvious folly of all this striving-for.
As a parent, what can I do about this sorry, pedestrian state of affairs? Philosophy, for starters. Go to a library and find any “introduction to philosophy” book. Don’t read it; they all suck. But browse the table of contents. Mainstream society is still entangled in the first chapter. The best parts of it stopped at Descartes. We need more Rousseau, more Goethe, more Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucalt, Lacan, Baudrillard, Dogen, Zhuangzi (not trying to be exhaustive or to brag here, just to give a sampler of what’s lacking in the worldview described above). It would be silly to try to preach society about what they’re losing, so the best we can do is to help individual people to find their own calling. The most important thing to teach children is thus how to not bow down to social pressure, and the most important virtue is egoism.
Another important task is to deconstruct the work/husband narratives from early on; say, by exposing data on suicide by the rich and how romantic infatuation burns off quickly.
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