How Christianity Became Elite in Japan ｜ Guest： Crémieux ｜ 11⧸12⧸25
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Summary
Grim joins me to talk about his piece on the role of Christianity in Japan's elite, and the impact it had on the country's history and culture. We talk about the role that Christianity played in shaping Japan's history, and how it continues to influence the country today.
Transcript
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Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
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Before we get started today, I just wanted to let you know that The Blaze has a new show coming out.
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It's got Chris Rufo and Jonathan Kieberman, or Lomez. Both of these are great guys that have been on the show before.
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Very interesting duo with a lot of deep insight, so make sure to check out Rufo and Lomez on The Blaze today.
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All right guys, so I stumbled upon a great piece talking about Christianity and the role that it plays in the Japanese elite.
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And since on this channel we are of course big fans of elite theory, the idea that ultimately elites drive culture and drive the way that our politics is dictated,
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I wanted to take a look at what a religious minority does in a foreign country, something that's displaced away from the United States,
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free of the dynamics that we see here, and look into that story and see what we can take from that, glean from that, and apply to our own situation.
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Joining me today to talk about that is the author of the piece with a name that I am absolutely positively sure to mispronounce.
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Absolutely. So in your piece you start out skipping over a little bit of the early Japanese history,
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because your piece is really more about kind of the post-World War II impact, or maybe the post-1800s impact of Christianity.
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But it was present. It was a force in Japan previously.
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So for those who might not be familiar with the Christian history in Japan,
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can you just give a brief primer on how Christianity came to that country?
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Yeah. So in 1549, the Jesuits arrived in Japan. Francis Xavier led a voyage to Kagoshima.
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He had some Japanese intermediaries he recruited. He got a bunch of early converts.
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There were language problems, like translating God as a Buddhist term is a weird thing.
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Then they had daimyos, which were the leaders of little regions in Japan, start converting.
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Omura Sumitada converted. They opened up ports, like Nagasaki, if I think it's a big one that they opened up.
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And they started allowing in trade. They started having a lot of conversions.
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And those conversions intertwined with Portuguese trade for all sorts of things, and specifically firearms.
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The people who embraced Christianity gained access to firearms, and that was something they really, really liked.
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In 1568 to 92, you had Oda Nobunaga being tolerant of Christians, mostly because he didn't like his militant Buddhist rivals,
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and he figured the Christians wouldn't actually be much of an imposition on him.
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He never converted, but he allowed institutions like the Azucuzhi Seminary, or I'm probably mispronouncing that, Azucuzhi or something like that.
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But then in 1587, Hideyoshi, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, issues this order saying that the missionaries have to go.
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He gets concerned because there are, at their peak in this period, there end up being like 300,000 Christians in Japan.
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I'm talking about Japanese Christians out of a population of 15 to 20 million.
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So potentially 2% of all Japanese were Christian at this point.
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The Shimabara-Amakusa Rebellion happens in like the 1630s.
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The tax cruelty revolt with some Christian elements.
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37,000 people get killed, and the shogunate excludes basically all Europeans, except for the Dutch at a certain port, from coming back to Japan.
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And they force all the Christians underground, and they become the Kakure Kurishitans.
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So there are very few Christians left in Japan after this, and the ones who remain hide everything.
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So we have this early period where there's Christians coming in.
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Obviously, the fact that you can adopt this religion and suddenly gain access to a massive military advantage is a huge incentive for people to start converting.
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One of the things that people look at Western culture and they say, oh, well, once something new comes by, once you get this evolution in technology, you kind of fall under the metaphysics of the washing machine, to borrow a phrase.
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You're going to end up in this progressive scenario that inevitably draws you towards kind of this technological and cultural revolution.
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But actually, there are many instances in history, and this is one of them, where a people decides to actually kind of smash that, to cut off ties to the outside, cut off the trade, to cut off the revolutionary possible cultural forces inside their society and kind of try to go back to their way of life.
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Now, it's interesting because we're going to see different versions of this later on in the Japanese story, but I just want people to recognize that while we assume there is an inevitability, and perhaps there is as we get deeper into the story, but there are periods where people can and do suppress these type of cultural evolutions.
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As a Christian, I prefer it not be of Christianity, but as an objective observation of the way that elites can limit this type of access, it's a very interesting scenario, because this is far from the only situation around the globe where leaders at first find a religious minority useful in displacing and opposing other rivals inside their country, inside their power system,
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but then suddenly find that ultimately they don't actually like the continued presence of that interest and that force being cultivated inside their society.
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Yeah, I mean, it's true. Under Iemitsu, in the 1620s to 30s, he started systematically oppressing the Christians. He surveilled them. He set up neighborhood watches against them.
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They did the fumi'i, the stepping on Christian holy images to expose believers. They wanted to crush the numbers, and they succeeded very, very readily.
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So then let's look at then the reemergence of Christianity. If it's so thoroughly suppressed, we have all of these attempts to drive it underground. Why does it return the way that it does?
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Yeah, so the return happens a few hundred years later. It happens more than 200 years later. I mean, it kind of starts in the 1850s to 60s.
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The thing that really gets it going again is the arrival of Commodore Perry. And for those unfamiliar, Commodore Perry was a U.S. Commodore who went to Japan and told him,
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you have to open up. He said, no more isolation. You are going to start trading with us. You are going to start letting, like, Americans, Westerners, all of us in.
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We want to interact with your country, which is a bizarre set of demands, very well worth reading about. It's an interesting thing to go and force open a country.
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But that's what he did. And shortly after that went into effect, the Tokugawa, the long-standing regime fell and the Meiji State began.
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And the Meiji State allowed foreign Christians to come into the country, and they encouraged them, in fact.
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They saw these missionaries as a way of helping to learn English and helping to translate texts, helping to make it so Japan was better known,
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helping to move people towards the mindset of what they perceived to be much more powerful nations.
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They thought that a lot of these values that were kind of brought up within Christianity were a means of making the West powerful initially.
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They thought that, like, the way they were powerful because, oh, they're so individualistic and universalistic,
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and they accept all these different things, and they're open to technologies, and they're open to things that we should be open to.
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And so in this period, also, the hidden Christians, the Kakarayi Krishitan that I just mentioned, a lot of them reemerge.
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So there's several thousand of them. They come out of the woodwork, and they go, they flock to urban areas, and they're like,
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oh, we are Christians, in however they're pronouncing it. They have, like, a distorted faith.
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A lot of them have mixed it with Buddhist stuff, and they've got, like, household gods sort of things going on in there,
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and it's very bizarre, but some of them actually did come around and become normal Christians.
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As soon as they came in contact with the missionaries, they, like, realized, oh, we're going to,
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there's a possibility of, like, continuing our faith here and doing it right,
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and so they actually did that. But this is just when it starts opening up, 1850s, 1860s.
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So this is a period that a lot of people refer to as gunboat diplomacy,
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and one of the really interesting things about this development is the philosopher Nick Land
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kind of talks about the way that capital revolutionizes different nations,
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and that tradition is really acts as a barrier to proto-capital,
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to keep it from becoming liquid, moving across borders, dissolving identities,
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introducing modernity. And what he kind of taught, when he references the gunboat diplomacy,
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he talks about it kind of ripping the rods out of a nuclear reactor, right? It just, once those
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traditions are gone, once those cultural barriers are gone, then all of a sudden,
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the entire thing just accelerates extremely quickly, right? So once that traditional regime
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falls and those traditional ideas about how society should be organized fall, all of a sudden,
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Japan has opened up to the idea that these other countries have become far too powerful,
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right? If someone can pull up and just put a superior naval vessel off your shore and totally
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revolutionize your entire country, then you've lost sovereignty by closing yourself out of the
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world's development. And this is a real problem for people who ultimately look at technical
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revolution and say, I'd like to stop this, right? Like, I want to put up these barriers
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and protect my country. This is often called the tank problem. Guys like Elul eventually recognize
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that as technology develops, if you have just sectioned yourself off from this, you're going
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to fall behind your rivals. And so everywhere and always, power and technology are an arms race.
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And you have the scenario where the Japanese are really just had that put to them at the finest
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point you can with a cannon. And so you have the scenario where they either adapt and they update
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or they get completely mauled. And of course, you know, this is happening in tandem with China
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basically falling behind in this, losing its sovereignty in this scenario. And then Japan says,
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well, we don't want to end up like China. We don't want to end up this backwater that gets ruled by all
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these Western powers. So we need to catch up. And so what you have is a revolution inside and outside
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the form where you have all of the government needs to change. All of the technology needs to change
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and an openness to Western information, Western learning, Western languages. And all of this is
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tied, of course, to Christianity, because that is what runs through all of this. So all of a sudden,
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you have a scenario where Japan needs to modernize as quickly as possible. And the only people who can
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ultimately teach them the things they need to do that are the Christians.
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Yeah. Now, can I remark something on the difference between China and Japan here?
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There's some very important differences that are institutional. So China is massive. They're huge.
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They are unified in large part because of the persistent threat of invasion from the steppes.
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It's been a historical thing, and they've been locked into big dynasties that actually don't govern
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very much. So the dynasty, for example, might try to enforce huku and then it fails. Or they might try to
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enforce blah, blah, blah, whatever restrictive law. But generally, the restrictions you see in China
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are limited, very, very limited. They collect their tax revenues were a small pittance of the total tax
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revenues collected in England, the Netherlands, France, because the regime was just so weak.
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Their government had so little to it because they're a huge realm. And to govern a huge realm
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with pre-modern state technology requires you to make a lot of concessions to leave people
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relatively free. So when they start introducing railroads and such, when they start introducing
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Western technology and incentives for people to interact with these people, they also introduce
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incentives to revolt, to question, to try to break away from the regime that has been.
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And the Chinese state actually started to suppress the production of railroads because railroads
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were aiding tax revolts. They were aiding people who wanted to blow up the central regime and they
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couldn't do anything about this. The choice they made was, okay, we have a weak state. We are going
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to, instead of adopting this thing and facing all of the problems and potentially getting knocked out
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of power, we're going to just limit it. We're going to stop. We're going to weaken ourselves and not
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develop. And then it leads to more problems down the line. Japan, on the other hand, I think
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they're really comparable to Germany. They have tons of little domains that are effectively like
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the Kleinstadt in Germany, the little states. And in the pre-modern world, your state capacity
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scales with distance. So if you have a small state you can manage, you can be totalitarian in that state,
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but if you have a large state you have to manage, in order to manage it, you have to federate a bunch,
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have lots of little lords doing things, and then that leads to its own problems. Or you have to be
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very, very lax, like the Chinese were. They just didn't govern very much because they couldn't,
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or else they would lose their power. The Japanese had small domains, governed incredibly rigorously
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and incredibly strongly. For hundreds of years, people were registered to a certain domain and
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not allowed to leave. Their families weren't allowed to leave said domain. It was incredibly
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restrictive. And they were set up to actually adopt all that new tech because they could go and
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suppress tax revolts. They could go and put down, and they did, I mean, they put down the samurai.
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So like that gives you a great illustration of the difference in institutional regimes here,
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why this kind of mattered for the early adoption of this tech, the interactions with Westerners and
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all that. So when you talk about them entering the new missionaries returning back in, you emphasize
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that they are restricted to the cities. And this is something, if you look across different domains,
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you make the comparison later on in the piece, but I'll make it now. Jewish people across Europe are
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often pushed into different mercantile pursuits, banking, educational pursuits, because working the
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land was considered something that belonged to the people, right? That land ownership is what was
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honorable, that farmer's life, that's what made you a member of the community. And so because Jews were
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often considered set apart, they weren't allowed to participate that own land, be a part of those
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professions. And so they get forced into these more academic and urban pursuits. Similarly here, we see
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Christians who- I would contest part of this, by the way. Okay, well, fair enough. That's often the way that
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it's crafted, but go ahead. Boticini and Eckstein, in their book, The Chosen Few, they actually reviewed
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this theory by looking through all the compacts for different areas in Europe where Jews were allowed, because
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when Jews arrived, you would set up a Jewish compact, and that would define what Jews could do, what
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their duties were, things they were limited from, and they couldn't find the evidence to support this
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idea of Jews being locked out of farming. That actually seems to have been something that emerged
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post-Martin Luther as a big belief, because Martin Luther famously wanted to put shovels in their hands
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and force Jews out of the professions they were in into other ones. And somehow people over the ages
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got that confused with Jews being not allowed to take part in those professions when Boticini and Eckstein
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couldn't find the evidence that they were actually not allowed to do that.
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So do you feel, I don't know if you're familiar with Thomas Sowell's theory of kind of the, you know,
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the minor minorities or the, you know, the minorities that are allowed to operate. Do you
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find that fallacious then? You don't, you don't feel like he was correct about that understanding?
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I think he had lots of good things to say, but there are some historical facts that have been
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clarified for more recent scholarship. And I think he could have, he could have easily been misled by
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earlier stuff. So I don't take any fault with him. He still had great theories and stuff, but
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a lot of the details are incorrect. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Well, that's definitely good to
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know. I guess either way, this is according to your piece, what happened with Christians,
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not that they were banned from necessarily, but they were encouraged just to stay inside the cities
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and them being inside the cities meant that they were going to be eventually the more influential
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people because the urban centers were going to greatly grow in influence given basically the
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industrial revolution that's going on inside of Japan. And this means that when they are there,
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they're some of the few people who are able to speak English, to teach different Western traditions
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and understandings. And so this becomes a place where a lot of the new, more educated expert class
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is going to have to filter through. And that means they, of course, are by osmosis going to be
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contacting with Christianity far more than they would have been if they were, you know,
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if Christianity had been spread out anywhere. Most definitely. And I can actually draw the
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analogy between Jews and the early Christians a little closer. So Jews became a literate religion
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after AD 63. Some people can test this and say, oh, it happened earlier. Oh, it happened a little
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later. Doesn't really matter. It's all, everybody agrees that it happened before Islam was a thing. So
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we all agree on that part. And that's the part that actually matters. So in AD 63, that's generally
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the day I accept because that's when Joshua Ben Gamla's decree that all Jews must educate
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their sons went out. And after that, if you did not educate your son, you were Ami Haaretz,
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you were people of the earth. You were a disgraceful person who was basically not a real Jew. And a lot
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of these people who could like educating your son at the time could account for a very large portion
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of your income. And most people lived, kind of hand them out. They were like, you know, on the verge
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of death all the time. Because in the Malthusian era, this pre-capitalism, pre-industrialization,
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it was most living standards were incredibly poor. Like people's populations went up and down with
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the harvest. It was a remarkable thing. But Jews started to become literate and the Jews that could
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not remain, could not educate their sons left the religion because Christianity appeared and became a
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thing that they could convert into. And the Romans then passed a law saying, oh, you can't actually
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convert back. After you convert to a Christian, you can't become a Jew again. Parents can't withhold
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like bequests. They can't, you know, say, oh, my kid doesn't inherit anything because they converted
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to Christianity. The Romans also banned the establishment of more synagogues and shuls.
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So they made it like even more expensive and harder to remove the cost pressure from those Jews. So
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they gave them a huge incentive to convert outwards if they weren't able to make the cut. So these elite
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Jews stay in the relatively elite Jews, stay in the religion, and the ones who are less elite go and
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become Christians. Then when Islam appears, the bottom of the funnel here is now Islam because
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Islam starts charging everyone the jithya, this head tax on every male in the family. So you are paying
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this tax to your Muslim overlord if you don't convert. If you convert to Islam, you're fine. And some domains
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in the Muslim world like allowed you to substitute like military service for some number of years.
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But it's big picture is you had to pay the head tax. Couldn't pay the head tax, convert to Islam or die.
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So these Christians, some of them, the ones that couldn't cut pay that tax started moving down and
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became Muslims. Some of the Jews who couldn't pay the tax were very few at this time because they had
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already become a literate religion that could handle all these big expenses of education, moved down and
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became Muslims too. They stopped becoming Christians because that's not the thing to become anymore.
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Oh, Muslim is the thing that is remunerative. But the Jews that could stay suddenly had these
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dual pressures put on them. And the Muslims wanted to develop their realms because they wanted to do,
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you know, finance their wars and whatnot. So they did these massive urbanization drives. And as it turns
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out, being literate is useful when you have cities. Being literate means you can, you know, document your
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orders and take orders and, you know, become a craftsman and do all sorts of skilled tasks. So the Jews
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were like ready. They were a pot ready to boil over because of this historical push to be educated
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that was just put in place for relatively random reasons, no real good reason. That education wasn't
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useful until the Muslims came along with their urbanization drives and suddenly Jews found a
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niche. And then that niche made them relatively rich within the realm. The samurai are similar. They
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were an existing scholarly order. They were the ones tasked by daimyos with recording the history of
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their states, with collecting taxes, with managing public works, with managing the granary networks
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that were throughout Japan that would help in like times of, you know, bad harvest and all that.
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They were an existing literate class, kind of like the Jews. And then when it came time to urbanize and
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interact with like a more modern civilization, suddenly, ba-bam, you have a good place in the market to fit in.
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They became a model minority of a sort in the market because they were able to. They were already set up
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for it. And the system had changed so that whatever skills they had were now very lucrative.
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Yeah, it was really important when you pointed out that for most people, samurai, you think of the
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movies, you think of a guy, you know, sword fighting, you know, executing himself because he wasn't
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successful in battle, overwhelmed by his honor. But in fact, you know, they were an aristocracy.
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They were not just warriors, though. That's usually the origin of aristocracy.
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But that extra time and that extra affluence also builds yourself into being administrators,
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learning, becoming literate, becoming familiar with philosophy or things that otherwise are going
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to be useful once it's time to scale. Because all of these things you're really talking about are
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the skills that become more useful with scale. This is Pareto's lions versus foxes that ultimately
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you're going to start with the martial skills being the most useful. But when you need bureaucracy,
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you're going to shift to a world where foxes and their ability to manipulate and build systems
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are the most valuable. And so you have a samurai system here where they're already being displaced
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by the fact that there's a social revolution. They, of course, you know, resent losing that status and
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they need a new way to carve that out. And that means that they need to hone that education.
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They need to become part of this apparatus. And the only people doing that are the missionaries,
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the Christians at that time. Now, one dynamic that you pointed out that I thought was really
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important and one that I think a lot of people miss, because in our minds, it's all about popular
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sovereignty, right? It's all about the masses. And once you have control of the masses, you have the
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support of popular opinion, you're going to win things over. But you specifically point out in the
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piece that the way that the samurai were converted, the way that so many of them became incredibly
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fanatical and really ardent Christians, very fire and brimstone, was off-putting to a lot of people,
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would actually slowed the popular growth of the religion. But at the same time, it actually
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gatekept it for the elites. And so instead of Christianity becoming this popular revivalist
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religion spreading throughout, evangelically throughout the land, it really became a niche
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and particular religion that only elite adherents would really come around to because the adherents
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that are already there were kind of so off-putting to a wider base. And so in a lot of ways,
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not becoming popular served Christianity to kind of become this elite function.
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Yeah. Yeah. It's really fascinating. So like in 1871, when the Meiji say that there's religious
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toleration, all the hidden Christians can come out, blah, blah, blah. They also confined the
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missionaries to cities and they limited the proselytism. So really the only way they could have contacted
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people was through these language admission schools. And those had fees and the samurais could,
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you know, put up the fees. They could make their way in there. They could, they made an effort to
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make their sons literate because they were already literate. The fathers are like, well,
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I'm going to go and get my son educated because I need him to be successful in all that.
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And they got themselves convert, like converted in the process. They, so the converts were urban
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by necessity because they couldn't go in the rural areas. They were literate because they came from a
00:23:54.840
literate class and they wanted to be literate so they could go from unemployment. So there were about
00:24:00.580
200,000 samurai in the country that were disemployed by the government's efforts. The Meiji took away
00:24:05.580
all of their historical rights and powers and privileges and stuff, which included stipends
00:24:10.500
for living on. And with that gone, they had to find jobs. So they wanted to maintain their state as
00:24:15.760
much as they could. So they went through this because it was like a clear path to good jobs.
00:24:20.540
And yeah, so everything became urban, literate, tied to Western educational pathways. And because they
00:24:27.220
hated the state so much, they actually really liked all the sort of implied antipathy Christianity
00:24:34.180
has for the way Japan was governed before, because Christianity does emphasize universalism
00:24:39.180
and it emphasizes individuality and God not having a predestination in some branches, not at all,
00:24:48.240
but like in some, like you, you have to make the non-Calvinists out there. Yeah. Yeah. So like a lot
00:24:53.540
of these people, they really, really liked the ideas that were coming from these Christians. They
00:24:57.300
were impressed by, uh, oh my God, you can actually just like make your own way and be this individual
00:25:02.100
who does things and be power. Great. I love it. Um, and they also tried to convert some of their
00:25:09.120
friends. So like some of the samurai knew like, oh, well my buddy here, you are also a samurai and you're
00:25:14.820
also upset with how the government has treated us. Why don't you come and get your son educated here?
00:25:19.440
And why don't we go to the seminary? And why don't we go to the block? Not the seminary, but
00:25:22.140
the schools. And why don't we learn? And why don't we take part in this? And then they, they spread it
00:25:27.280
within their small elite and resentful circles. Um, and this made the religion just incredibly,
00:25:34.240
incredibly elite. Uh, cause it was picking from an already elite and they were elite, not because they
00:25:38.640
had things, they didn't have things, they had things taken from them. They were elite because they had
00:25:42.380
that mindset and that breeding and that way of being that had come into place over a thousand
00:25:47.720
plus years. Um, it's a really wonderful transformation to hear about and not all of them
00:25:53.540
converted plenty did. Uh, and those gave the religion, it's early character. And they added
00:25:58.060
some zeal to everything. Cause these people were zealous by nature. Like they, they were samurai,
00:26:02.380
they were warriors. Uh, they, they already, you know, were like everything they were going to do
00:26:07.360
was already going to have a lot of zeal behind it. So the fact that they brought that to Christianity
00:26:11.440
is just a nice little feature. I do enjoy that. You know, at every, the kind of the
00:26:17.020
modernization of every civilization, you have that period where the aristocrats suddenly have to get
00:26:21.480
jobs. Uh, and, and sadly it always seems to turn them into managers. Uh, but, uh, that, that has been
00:26:28.780
the pathway over and over again. So one of the other things you talk about here is the cognitive
00:26:33.320
stratification that what becomes very important is to go out and drive the best and the brightest
00:26:39.100
into the city. So it's not just that cities are organically becoming more powerful because of the
00:26:44.340
way the, uh, government works, but they, they're going out into the hinterlands or trying to find
00:26:48.580
the best talent. Uh, this room is, if you've ever read, you know, Charles Murray, or if you've ever
00:26:53.360
read, uh, you know, some of these other sociologists, this process is going to sound very common to you.
00:26:59.100
This is, this is the IQ shredder. Uh, this is the concentration of talent across, uh, you know,
00:27:04.920
the entire, uh, nation into these urban centers. And so that's also increasing the power of
00:27:10.860
Christianity because it's not just the specific particular class that, that had become urban that,
00:27:16.280
you know, suddenly Christianizes, but anyone who would have been promising would have had
00:27:20.320
leadership would have had high intelligence or agency is being pulled out of those rural provinces
00:27:25.920
into these specific areas where education is occurring. And so you're not just securing, uh,
00:27:31.920
Christianity as the elite faith. Now you're basically like just systematically ensuring
00:27:37.220
generationally that it will stay that way because there is no other, uh, elite talent being left in
00:27:42.820
other areas that might've not Christianized. Yeah. So they even took from like, this really
00:27:48.640
deprived a lot of the most militant Buddhist regions of their most brilliant kids because the government
00:27:54.420
was like, uh, we don't have enough bureaucrats. They don't have no tax collectors. We don't have enough
00:27:58.080
people to run the government, to modernize things, to bring industry over, to set up factories and all
00:28:01.860
that. We just don't have enough. So we can't match the Americans, the Dutch, anybody. Uh, and we need
00:28:07.200
people to do these things. So they put out an order and they told the rural areas, um, send us your
00:28:13.680
most tall, like your most, uh, like well-equipped and able kids and we'll put them in boarding schools.
00:28:20.080
And the boarding schools were run by Christians. The Japanese government had not yet established their
00:28:25.900
own boarding schools. So they, at a very high rate, even relative to the conversion to the samurai,
00:28:31.860
uh, they converted these elite kids from out in the country in these urban areas, away from their
00:28:36.660
families into Christianity. And they just made it a very elite religion. Uh, it's a really, really
00:28:42.400
amazing development. And it just kind of favored the establishment of a very elite faith that was
00:28:47.860
very exclusive and was very confined to a small area. Um, and they also alienated these people from
00:28:53.760
their like rural families because now you're a Christian and your father's a Buddhist. Well,
00:28:58.160
might as well stay away from that. Might as well marry a urban girl and help to, uh, continue the
00:29:03.160
faith that you have adopted here instead of, uh, back where you're from. All sorts of things just
00:29:09.060
kind of compounded this. Right. And in another way we can, uh, you know, another comparison we can make
00:29:14.960
this is probably currently, uh, modern Catholics in the United States. It's gone, uh, noticed by quite a
00:29:21.380
few people and discussed, uh, by several, including myself on this show, uh, that Catholicism has become
00:29:27.600
this like elite conversion, uh, moment inside a lot of, for a lot of people, uh, especially on the
00:29:33.800
right now, uh, if you want to kind of set yourself apart, if you want to succeed, uh, then you, you,
00:29:38.980
it's, you know, the, the dirty evangelical, uh, you know, uh, that, that's something you want to step
00:29:44.280
away from. You want to become an elite Catholic. That's going to open up, uh, different avenues to you
00:29:48.980
that will separate you in a way from the people that you grew up with. Hard not to notice JD Vance
00:29:54.100
in this scenario. Uh, you know, I'm now, I'm no longer hillbilly. I'm now someone who can run for
00:29:58.800
vice president and I can marry, you know, uh, a Brahmin from another, uh, you know, from, from another
00:30:04.220
area because like, ultimately I've kind of transcended my roots and I've become this elite. Uh, so we can see
00:30:09.920
this dynamic again, you don't have to get wrapped up over any one religion. I know people are going to be
00:30:14.240
like, uh, Jewish people are Catholics or whatever in the comments. The point is,
00:30:18.980
that no matter where you are, what the religion is, we can reliably see these kinds of dynamics
00:30:24.920
play out. And that's really what I'm most interested in here is the way that elites form
00:30:29.860
and separate themselves. And it does seem, uh, whether people like it or not, that a alien or
00:30:36.160
a separate religion is a key factor in creating dominant elites on a regular basis. It does seem to,
00:30:42.480
in some way, even if not intentional, maybe, you know, I doubt very many of these people
00:30:46.900
specifically adopted the religion only for the purpose of cleaving themselves, you know,
00:30:52.800
from the herd. Uh, but the incentive structures just kind of reemerge over and over again in
00:30:57.620
societies. And we should recognize that if we want to do accurate analysis of how our political order
00:31:02.280
is structured. Yeah. Uh, we see this all over the place. There are tons of elite groups that have
00:31:08.120
formed, uh, even recently, but also in ancient times, like, um, the Roman nobles, they came from
00:31:13.380
the families of men who successfully rushed over the ramparts when they were doing sieges.
00:31:18.680
So if you were willing to put your life on the line of being the first one up a siege ladder and
00:31:23.140
you lived, you would be handsomely rewarded. Your family would go down in history. And a lot of the
00:31:28.120
early Roman nobles were people whose families distinguished themselves in that way. And then
00:31:32.020
they roll that over into, you earn some status, you get a great wife, uh, you make some businesses,
00:31:36.940
you keep mating with the other upper class people and it makes this elite.
00:31:40.280
I suggest we immediately apply that selection criteria to our current political class. Like
00:31:45.340
right now, like off the jump, everybody, everybody gets on the line. First one over, uh, over the wall.
00:31:51.880
If you make it, uh, Lindsey Graham, then you can, you can be president. If not, then we're getting
00:31:56.280
some young guy who jumped over the wall and cleared it, uh, in your seat. Uh, I think the founders
00:32:02.260
will love that. Um, well, yeah, we even see stuff like this more recently. Like, um, so for example,
00:32:07.880
the, uh, leading lights in the communist party in China, they are primarily descended from
00:32:13.500
mandarins who were dispossessed just a few generations ago by the Maoists. Like they were
00:32:18.860
locked out of their old positions and they were in some cases like moved away from their families,
00:32:23.980
uh, moved away from their historical regions of residence. They had everything taken away from
00:32:28.320
them and they managed to regain it. They transformed their status. They looked into, uh, well, in this new
00:32:34.720
regime, it'll be good for me. If I move to a city to the extent I can, uh, cause it's very limited
00:32:39.080
in China. Um, if I get an education to the extent I can, if I do whatever they can, that all these
00:32:44.300
paths that opened up and they transformed their elite, uh, they went from being the old regime
00:32:49.520
mandarins to being the new regime communist party officials. They've just, uh, it's the same elite,
00:32:56.360
but it's in a different face and they've picked their new ways to get there. And I guess what you
00:33:01.260
really see with all these elites is that they have a general talent that can be transformed
00:33:04.780
to meet the needs of the day. So like a talented person can go and do a great samurai can go and be
00:33:10.520
a great Christian. Uh, very simply go and be a great merchant. He can transform his talents into
00:33:16.600
whatever the day's needs are. And you see this everywhere. And if you're, if your country is
00:33:22.700
healthy, if you're, if your nation is going to survive, it has to have the flexibility to allow
00:33:27.600
for a circulation of elites. You can't freeze your elites in one section or another. That's one of
00:33:32.960
the problems we're seeing right now. Very clearly, I think across the West, but particularly the United
00:33:37.800
States is that, uh, we, we have, we have attempted to freeze out, uh, the best and the brightest from
00:33:43.580
our elite system. Uh, we're forcing a lot of guys who should have entered into university or should
00:33:48.900
have been political leaders. Uh, you know, they're, they're, uh, well, hosting things online,
00:33:53.060
uh, because they can't enter into established, uh, uh, institutions and kind of, uh, you know,
00:33:59.900
reinvigorate them, uh, with new talents and, and, and, and new ways to do things. And that's
00:34:04.780
always a dangerous place to be. This is what ends up creating counter elites and stoking revolutions.
00:34:10.280
Now, one of the things that you talked about also, can I add something to that? Oh yeah. Yeah. By all
00:34:14.860
means. I wanted to add, uh, they've also filled a lot of the institutions with garbage. They have, uh,
00:34:20.540
the, the rule of like the mass here where you have just everybody going to college now and everybody
00:34:26.140
thinking, Oh, I've earned the degree. Now I have, you know, I should get whatever job that entails
00:34:31.100
is horribly corrosive. You have, for example, there's been a pretty steep decline in the, uh,
00:34:38.460
IQs of military officers in the U S and the reason is almost entirely explained by more people being now
00:34:44.000
qualified to become officers and become qualified by getting a university education. So if you have a
00:34:49.320
degree and increasingly many people have a degree, you've diluted the pool. Uh, because if 40% of
00:34:55.680
society is going to have a degree now, the maximum IQ of the people who have degrees, if you went from
00:35:00.860
the top to the bottom, which we don't do, we do even worse, uh, is about a little under 115. There's
00:35:06.680
just simply no way for all these things that require a degree to remain elite. So you're flooding
00:35:12.880
them with people who are not cognitive elites anymore. You're making the institutions less respectful.
00:35:17.960
Um, you're adding problems to them. Yeah. This is one of the classic problems when you start to turn
00:35:24.160
something into a metric, right? The metric becomes, uh, instead of giving you a proper indication of
00:35:28.940
what it's supposed to, it becomes the goal that people, uh, re reorient themselves towards. So
00:35:33.440
originally the degree is supposed to replace aristocratic blood as kind of your credentialing
00:35:38.960
mechanism. Uh, and then once you open that up, people can just look at that metric. Rather,
00:35:44.480
it's something you can acquire. You couldn't have acquired, uh, you know, your, your, your landed
00:35:48.160
title, but you could have acquired a college degree. And now that that can be sold at cost
00:35:52.900
to people, you just increase the number of people who will have access to it. It no longer becomes
00:35:57.000
an indicator of the thing that you wanted to measure. Uh, as somebody who is a high school
00:36:01.020
teacher, I was painfully aware of, uh, the continued, uh, fact that you could barely breathe and pass
00:36:06.060
through a class. It was required. Everybody gets a high school diploma. It means nothing. So,
00:36:09.880
uh, the, the next thing that I really wanted to hit on that you talked about in the piece
00:36:14.480
was kind of this transition of Christianity and kind of the modern Japanese setting, because it
00:36:20.140
stops being something that is focused on just for schools, uh, because it kind of loses its elite
00:36:25.960
status inside education, or basically it's monopoly on elite education, but it makes up with that in
00:36:32.120
other ways by finding cultural loopholes that don't really exist in Japan. And so using different
00:36:37.640
organizations like the YMCA, which a lot of people around here just think is a gym,
00:36:41.340
but actually it's supposed to be a cultural organization, things like that actually start
00:36:45.720
drawing, uh, people in, in a different way into Christianity. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, as time
00:36:52.420
goes on, Japan develops more and more and more people have to come out of the countryside in order
00:36:56.040
to work the factories and work in the new white collar jobs that are emerging as a result of the
00:37:00.300
transition from feudalism towards whatever you would call the Japanese version of feudalism, uh, towards,
00:37:05.040
you know, industrial society like we have today. And this requires just a mass movement of people.
00:37:10.320
And Marx would say they're alienated. These people would say, I'm going because I want the job. Um,
00:37:16.960
and these people don't have the samurai's resentment of the government. They're a different
00:37:22.080
class of people who are now coming in large numbers into the cities. And some number of them
00:37:27.040
are seeking out educations because they know it's a way to move up. Uh, and they are just very,
00:37:31.600
very different. And right around this time, oh man, I'm sorry. I'm itching my nose. Uh,
00:37:36.400
the government also takes away a lot of the reason to go to these Christian schools because
00:37:39.920
they start establishing their own schools and they start alienating the Christian schools.
00:37:43.440
And they start saying, oh, well, you no longer have to know English to go to Tokyo university,
00:37:47.600
or you no longer have to do X, Y, Z different thing in order to make it to, uh, you know, a high
00:37:54.160
position of the government or a high position in industry or to earn the support of the government
00:37:57.920
and doing something or another. And this transforms the recruitment for, uh, about 15 years, nearly.
00:38:06.800
Um, the Christians don't really know how to respond to this. So the number of converts is
00:38:10.560
very small. Uh, the religion is actually like hemorrhaging people at points is not in a good
00:38:15.920
state. And then they rediscover that this new white collar group actually really enjoys a lot
00:38:21.680
of the stuff that happens outside of the schools, which now are dominated by the government.
00:38:25.840
They really liked the YMCA. They love the Christian student association. They love the
00:38:29.600
Christian summer schools, even like they love being able to send their kids off over summer
00:38:33.600
to go do stuff. Uh, and they find like modern reasons to do that because they are essentially
00:38:38.720
modern now. So like the parents need more time in the day to do work. Great. Uh, the school only has
00:38:44.880
them for a certain number of hours. Well, they can spend more hours going and doing those Christian
00:38:48.560
things. The government hasn't offered an alternative to this. They've offered nothing. So the
00:38:52.560
Christians fill in the little gaps there and this leads to more and more conversions and it leads to
00:38:57.440
more and more contact with Christians and it leads to just the modern rise of Christianity before,
00:39:03.200
you know, we get over to world war II era. So we have this scenario where a lot of the
00:39:09.840
little platoon type stuff, the, the, the, the kind of the, the small, uh, uh, voluntary associations,
00:39:17.840
uh, that de Tocqueville, uh, talked about kind of get transferred over into Japan, the, the situations
00:39:23.520
that, and they are really excel in the modern era, as you say, because you need to kind of, uh, you
00:39:29.520
know, find more time to work in these scenarios. You have all these spaces that ultimately would
00:39:34.160
have not been filled in the traditional Japanese culture and Christians come in and kind of fill
00:39:38.800
those spaces and there's no alternative in Japan. I think you even pointed at some point they have
00:39:43.280
to end up banning religious practice in schools because this is starting to like create so much
00:39:48.880
tension, right? Yeah. Yeah. So the government, um, doesn't allow even the Christian schools to,
00:39:55.520
uh, allow people to like participate in prayer during school hours. They become really alienating
00:40:00.560
towards all this. And that's more in the time when they, um, were like actively not able to convert
00:40:05.200
many people when they had a lot of trouble with it. They, and the government eases up on that after they
00:40:08.640
feel secure in themselves because a lot of what the government was doing when they came to, uh,
00:40:13.920
you know, they accepted and they reviled, then they became tolerant of Christianity again.
00:40:18.080
It was a short, like, you know, just a few decades period. And a lot of it had to do with the fact that
00:40:23.920
they felt insecure. They, a lot of the contemporary accounts emphasize that, um, the Japanese nation is
00:40:31.360
upset that they're not getting the recognition they want. They're not revising the unequal treaties that
00:40:36.400
have put them at a disadvantage relative to Western nations. They are upset that they're not considered
00:40:41.360
to be like a first class nation of the world. One that is, um, you know, just as capable in its own
00:40:48.320
right, just as able to assert its own cultural uniqueness and whatever else. Uh, so they ban all
00:40:55.360
this foreign influence again. And it seems like a common thing in Japanese history is they ban a lot
00:40:59.040
of foreign influence all the time, whenever it appears to be, uh, making headways in Japan.
00:41:03.600
Yeah. Now, an interesting thing, of course, you start off the piece with is that, uh, so many of
00:41:11.120
the post-World War II prime ministers are Christian. I think you said something like 20%, even though
00:41:17.440
they're only 1% of the population. So wildly, uh, disproportionately represented there. Now,
00:41:22.800
the first thing that popped into my mind, and you didn't quite touch it on the piece. So I'd like to
00:41:25.920
pick your brain about it here. Uh, what level of the American occupation is responsible ultimately for that
00:41:32.400
reality. I would say not very much. They didn't explicitly promote Christians into these positions.
00:41:38.000
Uh, they didn't make much of an effort. There was a lot of like Presbyterian stuff going into Japan
00:41:43.120
afterwards, but they didn't really have much of a say in who got elected where. Um, Christians often
00:41:48.080
were in good standing with the U S but like that didn't really stop, uh, people who have been bad
00:41:53.680
standing from getting in the government either. So, uh, I would say not too much. Um,
00:41:58.240
um, and a lot of these people are much later. Like they it's, it's interesting that like they've
00:42:04.160
continuously had this presence even up until the, uh, most recent prime minister before the current
00:42:08.800
one. Um, so what is it? Seven out of 35 of the prime ministers before the one that just came in a
00:42:14.880
few weeks ago were Christians, uh, the post-World War II ministers. And like, it was like nine out of
00:42:19.360
40 something before that or 50 something. Uh, if you count the like pre-World War II ones. Um, and I don't
00:42:25.440
think this had to do with promotion of anything because often these people will hide their face.
00:42:29.520
So there are actually a good number relative to their population size of Christians who are, uh,
00:42:36.160
elected officials in Japan, but they don't say it. They keep it hidden. It is something to admit
00:42:42.480
because there is still anti-Christian discrimination. There is that you still do get the second looks
00:42:46.960
and everything. And you still do get people like losing employment opportunities and whatnot in Japan
00:42:51.440
because of their Christian faith. So people hide it. And we would probably, if we had an honest count,
00:42:57.760
find more Christians than we expect, uh, in a lot of really elite positions in Japan. But for the ones
00:43:03.200
where we do have any level of indication of, uh, how we lead it or how we lead like an elite position,
00:43:10.720
how Christian it is, it does seem like Christians are overrepresented, but it's probably more than we
00:43:14.080
think that's seven out of 35. It's probably, it's the lower bound. They're probably more.
00:43:18.240
Yeah. It is interesting. A lot of people don't think of a place like Japan as one that would
00:43:23.360
have a high degree of Christian prosecute or persecution, obviously less now than there
00:43:28.320
was before, but of course they were killing Christians. They were driving them underground.
00:43:31.600
You know, a lot of people, just because Japan releases a lot of cute cartoons now, they forget
00:43:36.000
that like, no, they were like raping their way across China and, you know, you know, like murdering,
00:43:40.640
like lots of like very, very good at oppressing and dominating and, and, and genociding people. Uh,
00:43:45.920
you know, Japan has as a far more violent history, uh, than, than I think a lot of people will,
00:43:51.360
will kind of place on them, uh, today. Just look at all, a lot of the early artistry about
00:43:56.480
Christianity in Japan. A lot of it depicts the 26 martyrs of Nagasaki, uh, where they just like,
00:44:01.760
they crucified 26 people in Nagasaki. Ooh, eerie. So what, what is the modern state of Christianity
00:44:11.280
today in Japan? Does it still wield that level of influence? Is it more acceptable now? Does it
00:44:16.960
seem to be growing or shrinking? Is the elite influence more or less? How would we assess its,
00:44:22.320
its modern development? It is definitely more acceptable than it used to be. I think we can
00:44:26.480
all agree on that in a very broad sense because they're not getting, uh, pushed. Nobody's getting
00:44:30.400
crucified. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No more crucifixion. That's so definitely more acceptable. Um,
00:44:35.680
there are a lot more quasi Christian cults than there used to be. Uh, this is a mostly post-World
00:44:42.240
War II development. So you have like the Moonies for example. And I know actually, um, I'm shocked
00:44:48.240
by the number of a cat, like prominent, uh, accounts on Twitter who post about like fertility
00:44:53.760
and such, who are actually, whose parents were, even if they're white people were members of the
00:44:59.120
Moonie cult. Like they, it's, it's wild. Uh, this is the unification church thing. Um,
00:45:03.760
and these, this is like a, I don't want to insult it by calling it like a perversion of Christianity,
00:45:08.880
but it's some sort of bizarre Christian ripoff. I don't know how you would describe it, but it's,
00:45:13.840
it's a weird. Honestly, I don't, I don't know enough about the Moonies if you want to share what you
00:45:18.400
know by all means. Like I know they exist, but that's about all I know about them. Yeah. Um,
00:45:23.520
so Korean guy surname Moon, which is common in Korea. Um, or maybe it's his person. I really
00:45:29.440
don't know. I don't know too much about it. Cause it's so bizarre to me, but they're practically a
00:45:33.600
fertility cult. And my understanding is that they would like to, and I I'm probably wrong on this.
00:45:39.040
I'm going to butcher it, but, uh, cause I've, I've been told so many times by different Moonies
00:45:43.040
about like how they grew up and stuff. And it's all just so baffling. Um, but the ones I've been
00:45:49.680
told this stuff by are like white people whose families moved to Japan to join this fertility
00:45:54.640
cult, Christian Christianity thing. And, uh, they seem to believe that eventually if you just all,
00:46:02.400
everybody breeds amongst each other, you will all be one big United family. And that'll be some sort of
00:46:07.520
Christian good thing. I really, okay. So, so sadly a classic Christian heresy. Yeah. Yeah. It's a,
00:46:14.640
it's bizarre. And there are a shockingly large number of Christian heresies in Japan now.
00:46:19.680
Um, they have small membership individually, but, uh, and small membership in total,
00:46:24.720
but they're, I think they're a growing portion of all of the Christians in Japan because Christianity
00:46:30.800
in Japan seems to be, uh, not as like, well, let me give you a contrast. So in Taiwan, uh,
00:46:37.360
their Christian population has a pretty high fertility rates above replacement, if I recall correctly.
00:46:42.320
And, um, at the TSMC, a lot of their guys who work there are Christians and I believe they have
00:46:47.760
had, and I don't know if they still have the requirement to at least believe in a God.
00:46:51.840
Uh, and like young guys, Christian, probably gonna have a lot of kids. That would be a faith that grows
00:46:58.080
at least in influence, if not in the exact, like total numbers or proportion of the population.
00:47:02.560
Um, I don't think you see as much of that in Japan. I think they're actually somewhat declining or
00:47:07.840
stagnant. Uh, the population just doesn't seem to be growing very much for Christians. And it what,
00:47:12.000
to what extent it does, it's, I think it has more to do with the weirdo Christians
00:47:17.120
than it does with the historical, like samurai based ones, uh, the church of Christ guys,
00:47:22.160
the Protestants, the, all of that. Um, so it's not a huge thing. It's less than 1% of the country.
00:47:30.080
Well, I would certainly not encourage anyone to be in a fertility cult, but given Japan's fertility rate,
00:47:35.200
uh, you know, you, you can kind of see why there might be some demand, uh, you know, that that could
00:47:40.800
be met there. Uh, but that said, this has been a fascinating walkthrough. I think this is a really
00:47:46.880
interesting way. Like I said, you can come at it from the outside. You don't have to impose
00:47:51.440
all of the American or Western, uh, dynamics and baggage. You can just see the way that religious
00:47:57.360
minorities, faith, elites, uh, literacy, scale, urbanization, modernity, all these things
00:48:03.680
interact to drive elite formation. Um, and then of course we can take, I think some of those lessons
00:48:09.360
and transplant them back to where we are. So I really appreciate you writing this piece. Cause
00:48:14.560
I thought this was a, it was a very interesting way, uh, to take a look at this topic. Uh, I think
00:48:19.520
we have a few super chats before we get to them. Can you tell people where to find your piece,
00:48:23.840
everything else that you do? Yeah. So if you would like to read more about this,
00:48:27.440
go to Cremieux.xyz. That is C-R-E-M-I-E-U-X dot X-Y and then Z-Z. Um, and that'll bring you to
00:48:37.200
there. And the, uh, second most recent story is about this. The first most recent one is actually
00:48:41.120
related to this. It's about general class sorting where societies that are free enough, they tend to
00:48:47.920
have people, uh, who are like, for example, if you are smarter than your dad, you tend to move up.
00:48:52.880
If you are less intelligent than your dad, you tend to move down. It's a very common thing. And
00:48:58.160
what makes the Japanese Christian thing like fit with this is that they became distinct. So when
00:49:04.240
you add that distinctive element, that natural class sorting that occurs in society because of
00:49:08.480
whatever pathways we've set up to achieve success, uh, it becomes this creation of elite. It becomes
00:49:14.560
this creation of an in-group that can actually, you know, augment this, uh, their eliteness because
00:49:20.720
they might breed amongst themselves or support each other. Like a Christian might help another
00:49:24.480
Christian and that can make them even more elite and give them more opportunities. And you can
00:49:27.440
translate that upwards. So like, for example, there's a really cool paper. It used data from
00:49:32.240
Norway and great Britain. They had these big biobank scale data sets and they found this is super
00:49:37.520
fascinating. Um, there's a birth order effect on success. So people tend to be more successful if they're
00:49:44.480
earlier in the birth order. So like firstborn sons tend to be more successful than later born sons.
00:49:48.240
And this isn't just due to inheritances. This occurs before inheritances even go out.
00:49:52.480
This is a thing that is related to like how they're reared and it's an environmental effect.
00:49:57.120
And this gets translated into genes because those firstborn sons, they managed to get somewhat
00:50:02.800
better wives. Uh, and those wives tend to be a little better off genetically. So like,
00:50:06.480
for example, they'll have a polygenic score, a predictor of, you know, skill capability, whatever,
00:50:11.040
that is a little higher than the ones you'll see for the spouses of the later born sons.
00:50:15.680
And just this class transformation, this, uh, structuring of eliteness is a universal thing
00:50:21.520
that is, uh, I don't know if it's typified anywhere, but it is just universally on display.
00:50:28.160
And it's, it's fascinating. Uh, and I think I'll be writing a lot more about this with different
00:50:31.600
groups in the future. Excellent. Well, like I said, this, this piece was particular is great,
00:50:36.000
but I'll definitely check that one out because it continues to be a topic I am definitely interested
00:50:40.400
in. And guys, if you are interested in it as well, you should definitely be checking out
00:50:43.920
his work. All right. Let's see here. Oh, well, no, it's not super chat. It's just a donation,
00:50:48.480
but we'll put that up there. Thank you very much. Blood based. Appreciate that quite a bit.
00:50:53.840
All right, guys. Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up. Once again,
00:50:58.320
thank you so much for coming on, man. It's been a fantastic conversation. Great talking with you.
00:51:03.280
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