Some conflicts in cultural policy are complex. Others are not. While we may argue about a lot of ultimate aims in cultural policy, caring for the elderly is a no-brainer as a moral value. But to do this well does call on us to meet the most difficult challenge in cultural policy: to bring public action in line with our most heartfelt values. The caring we feel so easily as individuals is the hardest to manifest in our cultural institutions.
Let’s look at how community leaders faced an urgent problem of their isolated, elderly community and got to work. Comprising just 370 mostly elderly residents, Babanakayama is a small village that clung to the coast of Japan, backed by mountains, until it was devastated by the tsunami in March 2011 — the world’s most costly natural disaster to date.
Common sense dictated rebuilding on higher ground, outside the now well-established devastation zone. Spearheaded by one of the village’s two chiefs, villagers quickly moved to make it so, not waiting for the central government before they cleaned up the wreckage and made plans to rebuild. Their can-do spirit brought them attention on NHK, Japan’s national broadcasting network, as a role model for others.
The mountainous terrain of coastal Japan presented few buildable alternatives when new sites were scouted, making the choice fairly easy, and preliminary work began on a road that would lead there. Village leaders dubbed it “the Road to the Future.” Some 50 property owners in the hilly path of the road were approached, and almost most agreed — all but one, in fact. But this one dissenter was the other village chief.
Personal insecurity was the reason this man would not consent to the plans forged by other village leaders. His home’s location in the hilly upland spared him from the total devastation that befell most others. He explained to a New York Times’ correspondent, “I’m now 60 years old. Even if we’re allowed to move to high ground, how will I build a house there? What bank is going to lend me money at the age of 60?”
Despite its praiseworthy early response, the village is now torn by controversy. Right now, the Road to the Future appears to be going nowhere.
Once consensus had broken down, the insecurities of age moved other village residents to seek private solutions to their village’s public problem. Another older resident explained why she had her son start building a modest new home last August on a lot where a larger home had been swept out to sea: “I’m already 80, and I may not have that many years ahead. That’s why I decided to move back here.”
In truth, the scarcity of suitable flat land — the very reason that so many Japanese lived in communities clinging to the coast, regardless of the tsunami threat — meant that the costs of recovery are likely to be high. This is where the state, as our most powerful and definitive social mechanism, has a responsibility to intercede, at least by clarifying its cultural-policy commitments. Social mechanisms can achieve practically anything that citizens deem to be of deep cultural value: the state, the commercial sector, and the nonprofit arena provide all the actors needed for the most remarkable achievements of human history. There remain only the problems of raising consciousness, deciding on the best path to take, and mobilizing the various actors required to achieve what’s needed: not trifling obstacles, but no excuse for abandoning our most cherished, fundamental human values. The state’s role is key, as the only authoritative mechanism for defining democratic policy.
Of course, states have a reputation problem. Governments that aspire to democratic values can be stymied by dissension. They suffer from all the dangers against which the prickly French philosopher Jacques Ellul warned: their tendency to ensnare us in bureaucracy. But state action is the most powerful mechanism we have at our disposal: look at the period when the U.S. government disgorged its most generous subsidies (no, not the Thirties, regardless of what the Reaganistas say): the Fifties. Generous education and housing benefits and the largest public works project in human history — the interstate highway system — fueled unprecedented prosperity: wise state investment in times of need truly benefits the public.
As should be expected of effective political leaders, Babanakayama’s moved forward with dispatch: “We didn’t depend on the government, we moved first,” said the village chief who led the recovery effort. Of course, he meant the national government: implicit in the village government’s action was the idea that where there is a will, there will be a way.
But when that way is not made clear by higher-level policymakers, the consensus people can achieve in local communities is too easily undercut by insecurities. That Babanakayama’s residents are elderly created the two dysfunctional responses quoted above: build in a devastation zone, in a gamble with the (short-term) future, or sit tight in your privileged position, fearful of the future.
That Babanakayama’s population is elderly is no coincidence. In recent decades, its children have mostly moved away, seeking better opportunities elsewhere. In truth, the national government might have declared a national policy of relocation, rather than rebuilding; but it has not. Babanakayama’s own leaders might have banned construction in the devastation zone, as other affected municipalities have; but the same independent spirit that fueled their early response often goes hand-in-glove with a disinclination to limit the individual’s liberty to do what seems patently — well, out of the respect to the elderly — inadvisable.
Supporting the victims of the catastrophe has been the national government’s main talking point. Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda has been quoted as saying most of the rebuilding will be completed in five years, with the national government spending 19 trillion yen ($243 billion) over that period. Meanwhile, their attention — and the world’s — has gone to the deeply disturbing, headline-grabbing problem of the meltdowns at Fukushima and attending to the needs of larger communities like the provincial capital city, Sendai. (Building nuclear reactors in an earthquake/tsunami zone is a whole other kettle of cultural-policy fish.)
Even in larger cities, citizen choices have been made in a policy vacuum. Taking a break from repairing his own home in August — just when the 80-year-old woman in Babanakayama started rebuilding — a resident of Sendai expressed the citizen’s dilemma:
Only 30 percent of people affected in Sendai have received money. The government says this is a really massive disaster so people should understand it’s slow, but it’s very frustrating. If the government would say that here is not a good place to live, that you can’t live here, I wouldn’t fix this house, I would leave. But the traffic signals are being fixed just over there. So it seems like we can still live here. No one knows.
A public effort as massive as Japan’s in rebuilding after the Tohoku earthquake are inevitably complex and detailed; but priority must be given to stating the policy values that will guide action, to give decentralized actors the confidence needed to move forward.
Clearly, Japan’s national government has bigger fish to fry than a village of elderly people. And in fact, Japan is often cited as an example of a state where the elderly are held in the highest regard. Yet it is Japan that provides our simple example of national policy failing to make its cultural policy clear in an urgent case with unique real-life consequences for the elderly: when times are tough, it’s often possible to dishonor even the deepest cultural commitments.
The insecurities of age are clear factors in Babanakayama’s dilemma, but similar economic forces and the lack of assurance in cultural policy that the nation will care undermine security of people everywhere. Were there no other heartfelt factor involved, simply assuring citizens that they will be helped in meeting inevitable and unique challenges faced in the final phase of life is fundamental to the sense of security and well-being — not to mention national pride — that this assurance provides to people of all ages. This is why, despite the anti-state fever that Republicans have promulgated with a vengeance since Reagan, Social Security remains one of the United States’ most popular public programs. Even Tea Party fanatics carry signs paradoxically (and ignorantly) insisting, “Keep your government hands off my Social Security.”
Mahatma Gandhi is widely attributed with articulating the common wisdom that “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” In an historic moment when cold-heartedness limits our own federal efforts to bail-outs and tax breaks for businesses and rich people, we would do well to return to warm ourselves by the fire of real compassion and make a dignified place there for those among us who are most isolated and vulnerable. Let’s build a Road to the Future, and not reduce our weakest to scrapping together half-lives in the zone of certain devastation.
