Public Toilets and Social Norms
There are a lot of things that distinguish Japan and America. One is public toilets.
Where I live in the states, Seattle, there are very few public toilets and using them is hazardous. Such a facility is almost certain to be in multiple states of disarray. The fixtures will have been vandalized and broken. There will be graffiti all over the place. Amid other trash, will be drug paraphernalia and needles. And the stench!
In Japan public toilets are the opposite. They are plentiful and relatively easy to locate. They are clean and absent offensive odor. They are graffiti-free, and the basic appliances are in excellent working order.
One might stop there and just say, the Japanese do public toilets well and we don’t. But it seems to me possible to generalize from this particular to illuminate some deeper issues we face today. Japan, to this visitor, seems a place where there are strong social norms that make things work. In the U.S. many of the social norms that make life tolerable have eroded or vanished altogether.
Edmund Burke, arguably the father of intelligent conservatism, addressed the importance of norms and institutions as the people across the English Channel were undoing their own in the French Revolution of 1789.
Burke’s starting point was a particular view of human nature.”Man,” wrote Burke, “is not only ruled by evil passions, but his rational capacity is severely limited as well.” I’d call that a “low anthropology.” Burke did not see humans perfecting themselves or society anytime soon, actually never. Given that, we benefit from norms that bridle our passions and from a humility that does not overvalue our own enlightenment. Human beings need guardrails. We need the wisdom of those who have gone before us. We need help.
Burke continued, “Without the warm cloak of custom, tradition, experience, history, religion and social hierarchy — all of which radical man would rip off — man is shivering and naked. Free man from all mystery, demystify his institutions and his intellectual world, and you leave him alone in a universe of insignificance, incapacity and inadequacy.”
Based on my admittedly brief visit to Japan, it strikes me that Burke could be the patron philosopher of this island nation. The “warm cloak of custom, tradition” and all the rest cited by Burke are most evident here. One aspect of that is that people are, generally speaking, polite and considerate. This is suggested by the common practice of a slight bow to acknowledge another person, as well as fulsome expressions of gratitude for help and interest.
Yes, of course, there are two sides to all this. The “warm cloak” of custom and tradition can become a heavy weight. Social expectations can become oppressive and stand in the way of needed reform.
But for the moment, my point is that there are social norms that make common life, not to mention functional and pleasant public toilets, possible.
Burke’s contemporary, but opposite number philosophically, was the Frenchman, Jean Jacques Rousseau. “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains,” said Rousseau. He believed we humans are born good, but are ruined by institutions, namely the family, schools, religion, government and social customs and norms. For Rousseau these corrupt and oppress the basic goodness that is the human birthright. We need no socializing or moral formation. Away with it all that so that people’s intrinsic goodness may be free to thrive and realized. This would be a “high anthropology,” a very high one.
If Burke might be described as a philosophical patron saint of Japan, Rousseau might fit that bill for America. Custom, tradition and social norms are, among us, often thought the enemy of freedom and authenticity.
It’s not my claim of course that contemporary Americans are big readers of Rousseau. But what we do get are the popularized versions and adaptations, from “Free To Be Me” to “I Did It My Way” to the last twenty-five years of Disney movies, the common catechism of American children. Those regularly feature a hero, most often a young woman, who must overcome the will of a patriarchal father, of her family and an expected social role in order to be herself.
Seldom to never do we hear stories in popular culture of people benefiting from, even thriving, in strong cultures and institutions with humanizing norms and wisdom that hold and sustain the individuals within them.
If you have managed to read this far, you may be thinking, “Tony, do we really need all this about philosophers and philosophizing? Aren’t America’s public facilities a mess because we have so many mentally ill and drug addicted people roaming our streets?” Or you might be thinking, “Okay, so you’ve been to Japan. Don’t romanticize it.”
Point taken. But those objections beg the question. Why do we in America have such high rates of depression, loneliness, drug and alcohol addiction, not to mention dangerous anti-social behavior, ranging from gun violence to road rage to vandalism? Why do we have so many “deaths of despair?” Why are so many American men in their “prime working years” out of the workforce altogether?
Did Burke foresee our plight, “shivering and naked . . . left alone in a universe of insignificance”?
Could it be that Roussean liberation, whether in its leftwing or rightwing version, when pushed to an extreme leaves people not only “shivering and naked” but, at least some, angry and violent? Consider teenagers, whose job it is to test the limits . . . but who also like to know that there are limits. A world where it is up to each individual to come up with their own system of meaning and to create, curate and market their unique identity is a big ask, an overwhelming one for most of us.
Think of Burke and Rousseau as marking out a spectrum. Japan tilts toward Burke. Social norms, rituals, ceremonial behaviors abound. American tilts toward Rousseau. No norms shall bind. No institutions shall command our loyalty or participation.
As America has faced the multiple challenges of the 21st century, we have doubled down on our go-to. Forget social norms and responsibility to others — go big, go hard, go fast, go bad. Donald Trump has made flaunting social norms, custom and institutional restraints — not to mention all sorts of anti-social behavior — his stock-in-trade, energizing a large part of the electorate in support.
What if we had gone, and might yet go, the other direction, leavening our Rousseau with some Burke? A comeback for norms, restraint and decency? What if we believed children needed — not liberation — but social, spiritual and moral formation? What if we thought everyone, not just immigrants, needed to know the basics of the U.S. Constitution, how the republic is to work and our job as citizens? What if contributing to the community were a prevailing social norm? What if decent manners were a good, and not a stupid, thing? Instead of self-assertion and self-actualization, perhaps what we really need is to yoke ourselves to something beyond our selves — beyond our flaws and toward an unnatural goodness that exceeds our desires.
Well then, maybe, we too could have nice public toilets?