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Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: The Case of Japan
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12248 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1987 |
8,077 Words |
| Author
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Richard L. Rubenstein
Richard L. Rubenstein is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished
Professor of Religion at Florida State University and
president of the Washington Institute for Values in Public
Policy. He is the coauthor (with John K. Roth) of Approaches
to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and its Legacy |
Few, if any, developments in the postwar era possess as great a significance as the rise of Japan. Normally, Japan's rise is discussed in economic or political terms. Its religious significance, especially for a nation such as the United States whose cultural inheritance is so deeply rooted in biblical religion, is seldom discussed, much less understood. Japan is the world's most successful nation with non-Christian roots. Even the Soviet Union has Christian roots. Marxist atheism is grounded in the very biblical tradition that Marxism negates. Moreover, the apparent conflict between the Western proponents of a biblically grounded attitude and a secular ethic takes on the appearance of a family quarrel when seen against the horizon of Japanese religion and culture. Far from being the antithesis of biblical region, the secular spirit that pervades so much of Western life is its unintended consequence. Wherever the biblical faith in a unique, exclusive, extramundane God penetrated, it was utterly destructive of indigenous gods and traditions. Sooner or later this polemical, desacralizing faith was bound to give birth to a consciousness that would not rest until all the gods without exception were dethroned. Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that a civilization as determined to preserve its own integrity as that Japan should marshal all its forces to resist both the believing and the secular manifestations of biblical religion.
The Japanese have created a thoroughly modern, highly technological, capitalist civilization whose religious foundations rest upon animistic and polytheistic traditions that adherents of the biblical regions normally assume to be discredited, primitive, and idolatrous--a remnant of a far earlier stage of religious "evolution." From the Japanese perspective, such views are, of course, utterly without substance.
We can perhaps best understand the long-range significance of the religious aspects of the challenge of Japanese capitalism (and it is a challenge) if we consider the role of religion in fostering the rise of capitalism in both Japan and the nations of the West. In the case of the West, no one attempting to understand the role of religion in the development of capitalism can ignore the work of the German sociologist Max Weber. As is well know, Weber set forth the thesis that the modern Western bourgeois-capitalist world is an unintended consequence of the rise of ascetic Protestantism in the aftermath of the Reformation.
Weber did not hold that religion by itself was the cause of modern capitalism. He regarded religion as a necessary but not sufficient factor in the origin of
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