IMAGINATION AND THE END OF HISTORY

Deprived of the hawk’s keen eyesight, the wolf’s olfactory prowess, or the tiger’s teeth and claws, the human animal was compensated with superior problem-solving capabilities instead. Put a chimpanzee in a room with two sturdy boxes and a banana dangling from the ceiling just out of reach, it will never occur to our monkey friend to stack the boxes and stand on them to get the fruit. A three-year-old human will.

What this means is a uniquely human capacity to conceive of things not as they currentlyare, but as they might be. We call this faculty “imagination,” and it very likely our greatest gift. Without the ability to first imagine, invention and problem solving cannot occur. Instead we are stuck with things as they are, reacting to our environments but not consciously acting upon them. Imagination is the single root of religion, art, and science (for despite the popular conception of scientists as unimaginative technicians, it’s frankly impossibly to hypothesize unless you can imagine what might be). Humanity owes practically everything it has to imagination.

Ironically, then, imagination is something we are quick to stifle in children and remain suspicious of as adults. Past a certain age, being a “dreamer” takes on negative connotations, and we push our adolescents to grow up and live in the “real world.” Public educational systems (at least the ones I have had experience of in America and Japan) seem far more content to focus on memorization and repitition than the active encouragement of creativity. Too often, even when schools do include art, literature, and music in their curriculums (such programs are nearly always the first to go when budgets get tight), they emphazise established art forms and encourage imitation of them. I am sure we all recall being told the “correct way” to interpret Shakespeare, “why” Mozart was a genius, and “what” makes Monet gifted. Far less time is given on activities that encourage students to imagine their own forms of self-expression.

This is not a criticism of teachers. The old addage about “those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach” is not only crap, it demonstrates the misplaced value society places on being the worker bee rather than the thinker. Teachers—particularly when they are young and new to the profession—seem hell-bent on encouraging imagination and creativity in students. It is not until the strictures of the system crush this out of them that they give up and start teaching by rote. Public education is ultimately in the hands of politicians, and this, frankly, is what is wrong with it. It is easy to assign blame to the teachers for failing schools, but we are quick to forget they are bound by rules and policies born out of re-election campaigns and not any real interest in nuturing minds. Invariably this is why alternative schools—allowed to break the rules—perform better.

Both in the United States and Japan there is tremendous anxiety over falling test scores and schools that seem to be in decline. But my suspicion is that there really has been no change in the school systems at all…and that itself is the problem. American public education was designed to create factory workers, people with basic skills who could work in the mills and assembly lines. Japanese public education—pre-war—followed the German model, which focused more on making soldiers (you see remnants of this in the military style school uniforms). After the war, it imitated the American model of producing workers. These systems are wonderful for industrialized nations and establishing economies…but what happens after? What happens when you have a populace trained to be obidient and compotent, but not imaginative or creative? Once the factories have all been manned and built, the world moves on but the educational system does not. It may be that neither of these school systems are in decline…they simply are not designed to deal with a post-Industrial world.

The horrible truth may be that what we know of human history is slowly coming to an end. For thousands of years, societies have required large populations of obedient workers who do what they are told and don’t ask questions. Creativity and imagination could safely be in the hands of the few. But when a single farmer can now harvest a field with the right machine—as opposed to requiring hundreds of hands—or when a factory line can be entirely automated, educating the populace not to think, dream, or ask questions is suddenly a liability. It was back in the late 1960s that Anton LaVey noted we were entering a new era in which one child who could create was infinitely more valuable that one hundred that could “believe” or “obey.” Unfortunately, societies have not caught up with him.

The rules have all changed, and I say, "viva la Apocalypse."

THE MATERIALIST MAGICIAN

While I await the appearance of Alan Moore’s “Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic” (which judging from his magnificent “Promethea” comic series is bound to be the best thing to hit the occult since Crowley, Spare, and LaVey), I thought I might spill a bit of virual ink on the subject myself

In his rather amusing Screwtape Letters, Christian apologist C. S. Lewis writes that Hell’s greatest achievement would be a “materialist magician.” That’s rather flattering of him, actually. It gives me a warm feeling inside.

It is not difficult to be a “materialist magician” if you have an understanding of what “magic” is and how it works. Indeed, atheism, materialism, and sorcery go very well together, the way strawberries compliment champagne. If you were to put me in a room, for example, with Richard Dawkins and Pope Benedict, I can guaruntee that two of us would find common ground, while the third would remain convinced we were both going to Hell. You do the math.

Naturally, we are not talking “Harry Potter” here. Before we go any further, it might be useful to define our terms. A definition of “magic” that would satisfy everyone from Yanomamo tribesmen to comic-book writing sorcerors like Grant Morrison and Alan Moore would be this; “the idea that ritual action produces specific results.” Essentially, magic is what prayer (“the idea that ritual action moves spiritual beings to produce specific results”) might look like after Ockham took his razor to it. It cuts out the middle-man. This is not to say that magic does not occassionally include the participation of spiritual beings, but the fundamental difference is that the magician is telling the spirits and not asking. In other words, the magician is the cause of the change, and not the spirit. This is significant because for prayer to work, the spirit must literally exist. It must have objective reality to hear the supplicant and grant the wish. For magic to work, the spirit need not “really” exist at all. Rather it can be understood as a symbolic device, an aspect of the magician’s own consciousness, or a pleasant hallucination. Indeed, the magicians who get themselves into trouble are the ones who start to believe the spirits are real. It’s a rookie mistake, but a lot of people make it.

The other rookie mistake is to expect too much from magic. The people who “do not believe in magic” are invariably those who A) never tried it, or B) tried it expecting the wrong effect. The shy, pizza-faced nerd who stands in a magic circle, chanting for the girl-next-door to fall madly in love with him, will inevitably become one of those who do not “believe in magic” when his spell fails. He will probably never understand what he did wrong.

To understand this, let’s first be clear that magic can be divided into two broad categories; the practical and the psychedelic. The two are not mutally exclusive, and often cross paths. By “psychedelic” we mean “a mental state characterized by heightened or altered perceptions,” from the Greek psyche or “mind” and delos or “manifestation.” By practical I mean something intended to produce a specific result. Where people usually fail in magic is concentrating too much on the psychedelic elements, losing sight of the practical.

Again with our nerd. After reading some New Agey books, he stands in a seven-sided heptagon drawn in green chalk on his basement floor, on a Friday night, scattering rose petals. He is calling upon Venus, the goddess of love, to deliever the girl-next-door to him, and the book said all those elements (the number 7, the color green, Friday, rose petals) are sacred to her. He recites some incantations, declares what he wants (“…I want Becky to notice me”), and then sits around on pins and needles waiting for the lovely Rebecca to dump her jock boyfriend and go head over heels for him. The problem, of course, is that all his ritual actions are geared towards the psychedelic experience of Venus, and have no real connection to getting into Becky’s knickers. He will achieve neither because he failed to differentiate between the two.

What he should have done was stew around for a week without jerking off, letting his libido build up to painful levels. Then on whatever night he decided to set aside for his magic, he should engage in some ritual activity that recreates the effect he wants. Forget Venus; our geek should vividly recreate in as much detail as possible mind-blowing sex with the girl of his dreams. Let him verbally describe all the naughty things he’d like to do with her, or draw pictures of them, or even just concentrate intensely on them in his mind. Let him wank off until he can’t see straight, until ever ounce of his pent-up emotion and frustration is expended. Then he should burn all the ritual materials, put Becky out of his head, and act as if he already had her. Done properly, Becky should be out of his system. If she should suddenly see him in a new light, wonderful. But if not it shouldn’t matter. He has scratched that itch. The real power of ritual magic is not in external effects, but in internal ones.

Now, there are certainly tricks of the trade--a cocktail combination of applied psychology, cold reading, and chicanery dubbed by the late Anton LaVey as “Lesser Magic”—our nerd could use to get closer to Becky and make her notice him. But ritual magic is meant to affect the subject, not the object. This is where most people get confused. Used in conjuction with each other, these two sorts of magic can have surprising results. But to rely exclusively on ritual magic to affect your object is a sure path to frustration.

It is this critical misunderstanding that spawns the whole “black” and “white” magic nonsense. A great number of practicing magicians out there whole-heartedly believe it is wrong or “evil” to do things like cast love spells or throw curses. They advocate only magic that helps or heals others. They have spectacularly missed the point. Down through history, magic has been the last recourse of the downtrodden, the held back, and the repressed because it gets negative emotions out of your system. You cannot take a gun into the office and blow your idiot boss away, but there is nothing wrong with fashioning a voodoo doll of him, visciously and vividly dismembering it while reciting all the horrible things you want to happen to the man. It is percisely this sort of thing that magic works marvellously for. It purges the system, and if some tragic accident does befall the rotter, so much the better!

It takes a certain type of personality to do this, of course. If you are not the type of person able to engage in an unihibited release of emotions, magic is not for you. But in reality, magic demands nothing from you that Mardi Gras or really good sex doesn’t. You just have to let yourself go within certain pre-defined parameters.

And there is, of course, the odd coincidence factor. Looking back, I think I can safely say that magic has appeared to reproduce objective results for me roughly 75% of the time. Naturally, such results may have occurred anyway, and I only attach importance to them because of the ritual connection. Further, I have seldom relied on ritual alone, prefering to follow ceremonial magic with positive action. But I’ve never really felt the need to dissect these things, and am comfortable with “happy coincidence.” And though I have had some extraordinary encounters with “spirits,” I have never seen anything to convince me that I am not dealing with projected elements of my own psyche (On some occassions I was tempted to go the opposite way, as one autumn when a “spirit” delivered messages to me in a complex numerical code. Never good with numbers myself, it took me some time to decide whether I was in contact with “something” or whether I had tapped into some part of my head that could produces number puzzles spontaneously. Ever a fan of William of Ockham, I decided the latter was probably the case).

Perhaps what Lewis meant about the materialist magician being Hell’s greatest achievement is that such a fellow would have no use for God. Armed with science to explain how we got here, and magic to fill the gap of “making us feel better” that prayer is supposed to, the Old Boy becomes a bit irrelevant. One can have all of the weird and wonderful fruits of mysticism without really being a mystic at all.

THE REAL WORLD

I overheard two mothers at a PTA meeting this week. One of them was discussing her son. A student of mine, he is bright, articulate, and inquisitive. He comes at problems from odd angles and his quirkiness is much appreciated in my class. His mother, however, was expressing concern over the fact that he reads so much. He enjoys novels, comics, etc. And like all kids his age he also enjoys video games, particularly the story-oriented role-playing ones. She told her friend—who nodded with great sympathy—that she wished her son would put away his books and live “in the real world.”

I have definite opinions about this. By the “real world” I can only assume she means the one in which he studies for the required exams, gets into the right schools, lands the correct job and makes a lot of money, all while paying his taxes and being a good little member of society. The only problem with this is that all of that—tests, schools, careers, and money—are just as fictitious as the novels he reads. They were invented by people too.

If there is a “real world,” it is the one of nature. The one where people eat, sleep, make babies and die. All the rest of it is, as Shakespeare observed, a man-made theatrical production in which we are all conditioned to play our parts. Politics, economics, borders, marriage licenses, and property are rules of a game we invented, dreaming it all up in our little human brains. They are no more intrinsically real than Middle-earth, Narnia, or Never-Neverland.

Much like “good” and “evil,” “real” is a damn tricky word. In a sense, we could define it as “physical things, things we can all see, hear, feel, taste, and touch.” Of course this excludes economics, politics, mathematics, and a million other things we generally accept as “real.” We could define it as “something we all agree exists,” but this is equally problematic. If the entire population of planet Earth suddenly decided we had two suns in the sky, there still would be only one. And perhaps the best definition, “something that is useful,” opens the door to all sorts of issues. Useful to whom? Useful why? Although, given the etymology of the world (“real” means “property,” as in “real estate”), this slightly sinister definition is probably the most accurate. Surely this is what the mother meant when she spoke of her son. She wants him to be useful.

People generally expect me to be an atheist, since I am so against fundamentalist religions. The thing is, I think the atheists are deluding themselves as well. I do believe in God, and Allah, an Vishnu, and Thor, and Santa Claus, and fairies out in the garden. I believe in them as ideas, which exist just as surely as quantum physics and geometry. I tend to think there are different levels of reality, by which I mean “categories” and not necessarily metaphysical planes. The stone in my garden may be “real” on a concrete level, but something like Santa Claus or God, which touches the lives of millions and motivates all sorts of human behavior, is definitely more “real” in the other sense. I tend to think that our private, inner universes are just as “real” as the outer one we all bumble around in together. Thus, if someone accepts Jesus as a personal reality, I have no issue at all with that. The trouble I have is with those who try to force him to be part of my personal reality as well. Where I take on the role of Adversary is when someone expects others to play by the rules of their own reality, and it doesn’t matter to me if that person is Pat Robertson, the Pope, Osama bin-Laden, Richard Dawkins, or a mother urging her son to live in the “real world.” The arrogance of thinking the nonsense you believe is better than someone else’s nonsense just gets under my skin.

And we all believe in a lot of nonsense. Some of us are just willing to admit it.

I do live in the “real world.” I pay taxes, rent, and teach little Japanese kiddies some skills I hope will serve them well down the line. But I have always found this “real world” dull in comparison to the landscapes that exist in my imagination. Whether it is a good novel, Second Life, a film or my writing, I spend a considerable amount of time getting out of the “real world” and feel no shame in it. This “real world” was, after all, invented by other people to box me in, confine me, and make sure I play by their rules. How could I not prefer to spend time in domains where the rules are mine?

There’s a pair of old esoteric terms that applies here; macrocosm, or the “big universe,” andmicrocosm which is the “little universe.” I believe in the big universe, in gravity, magnetism, electricity, and strong and weak nuclear forces. I believe in DNA and biological drives. But if you think your politics and economics, your religions and your rules are also part of the big universe, you are dead wrong. They are all features of our own inner little universes that mistakenly get lumped in with aspects of the big universe, but they are no more real than any fiction or personal belief.

They’re just more useful to someone else.

AN AMERICAN TEACHER IN JAPAN

THE PROS OF JAPANESE EDUCATION

After Finland, Singapore, and South Korea, the Japanese public education system is rated fourth in the world. As fingers get pointed in the United States as to why public education is failing, excuses range from a lack of sufficient funds (on the Left) and teachers slacking (on the Right). But having worked in both American and Japanese schools, it strikes me that the American public is dodging the real issue, the one that it simply doesn’t wish to face. Namely, the health of a nation’s public schools is a reflection of the health of its society.

Let’s get right into the finger-pointing. American liberals would have us believe that our schools fail because they don’t get enough money. And yet, Japanese schools run on shoe-string budgets compared to their American counterparts. The Japanese cut corners everywhere. School lunches are provided in elementary schools only; parents are responsible for feeding their kids after that. Hall lights are seldom used, leaving them usually dark and spooky, and most schools are constructed to make use of natural light so as to avoid electric bills. Textbooks are not provided by schools; the parents must pay for them. And very little money is poured into sports programs, which are generally viewed as a waste of funds. The kids do have P.E., and after school sports clubs, but again, for those they are expected to pay for their own equipment.

And then there is the question of staff. There are no school secretaries. The teachers and principals share a single office room with desks lined up much like the students, and if the phone rings, one of them jumps up and answers it. They manage to do this without whining about their degrees, or how they didn’t go to school for X number of years to answer phones. Likewise, there is a custodian to make repairs, but the students are responsible for actually cleaning the school. Three or four times a year, in addition, the kids and teachers all go out into the neighborhood to rake leaves, sweep sidewalks, and collect trash, and this all magically occurs without parents screaming “my child is not paid to do this!” Instead of spending money on more support positions, the teachers and students shoulder the load.

And this brings me around to the Conservative “blame the teachers” mantra. Asaf recently asked me about tenure in Japan and how they handled the “bad teacher” problem. The answer is, they don’t, largely because the “bad teacher” is a convenient scapegoat for the real problem, and they are aware of this. From the Japanese point of view, the teacher is really only 33% of the equation. His job is to direct the course of the students’ studies and to evaluate them. It is the students’ duty to study and the parents’ duty to ensure that studying gets done. Invariably, when the Japanese hear about the American public blaming it all on bad teachers, they question “what about bad students and bad parents?” And they are, of course, absolutely right. A teacher is not—one Japanese colleague said to me recently—a maker of automobiles. He is not manufacturing a product. Rather, he is like your doctor, who tells you what to eat and how to exercise. If you fail to follow his instructions, it is not his fault if your health fails. We can and should push for accountability, but not only for the teachers. The students and parents ultimately are responsible for the lion’s share of a child’s education.

This is the secret of Japanese public education; shared responsibility, “group” effort rather than individual achievement. Let me now get into some specifics:

1. THE TEACHER’S NAME IS NOT ON THE DOOR: In the States, I had my own classroom, my own office, and my own computer. In Japan, teachers share a communal office and computers. The students do not come to their class; the teachers go to the student’s class. Students are assigned to homerooms and remain in that room, with that same group of students, for every class for all three years (Japan divides middle and high school into 3 and 3, rather than 2 and 4). Naturally, they go to a music room for music and outside for P.E., but for the majority of the day they remain in the homeroom. They even eat lunch there (saving the need for extra money on cafeteria space). Every year there are talent shows, and sports competitions pitting homeroom against homeroom, building that group into a working unit or team. Naturally, the students are also responsible for cleaning and decorating the room. The message drilled into them is this is YOUR classroom and YOUR school and you are responsible for it. In addition, they are responsible to each other. Students good at science are expected to help those who are not. Those who excell in history tutor those who don’t. And while there are Special Needs classes, most students—depending on their disability—are mainstreamed right into the homeroom and the other students share the responsibility of helping them out.

1. NO ONE GETS RETAINED: In the States, if you fail enough subjects, you get held back. This never happens in Japan. No matter how badly a student performs, he stays within his peer group. Thou shalt not break up the team. This works only because in Japan, only junior high school is compulsory. At the end of their third year, the students must take entrance exams to enter the high school of their choice. If you fail those exams, and no school will take you, welcome to the workforce. There is a recognition that by fifteen years of age you need to start taking responsibility for yourself, and if you have goofed off for the last few years, only you and your family is to blame.

1. NOT ALL PEER PRESSURE IS BAD: Teachers in America are forced into wasting far too much time on “classroom management.” There are seminars and workshops “ad nauseum” teaching teachers how to hold the students attention and keep them “entertained.” In Japan, the teacher is responsible for teaching—a radical concept, I know. If a student acts out, his peers are responsible for putting him back in line. Failing this, the parents are. And if all else fails, there is the “senpai/kohai” relationship. In other words, older students are responsible for making sure younger ones behave. When I had trouble with a pair of particularly difficult boys last year, I went to some of the boys in the grade ahead of them. They shaped up very quickly. And yes, I know this horrifies some liberals. After all, the student is probably acting out because of difficulty at home. But this is not tutoring…this is PUBLIC education and I am ultimately responsible to the group, as is the student. Disruptive students harm the entire team. Or that is, at least, the mentality.

1. SHAME: This is, ultimately, the reason why three of the top four education systems in the world are in Asia. It is the cultural focus on “face” or “shame.” Students are pressured to do well because failure is shameful. They are pressured to behave because disrupting the class is shameful. They do not have instilled into them—as American children do—that they are all bright and shining stars, that they have all sorts of rights and no responsibilities, or that the world exists for them. Instead, the focus is on community, duty, and responsibility, and shame is a big part of that.

As I said before, the health of a public school system reflects the health of a society. I can’t speak for Finland, but like Japan, the other nations with top schools—Singapore and South Korea—also have phenomenally lower crime rates than the United States. This is not a coincidence. America has, unfortunately, embraced a culture where passing the buck and putting yourself first are widespread pastimes. We reduce the sentences of people who commit heinous crimes because they had bad childhoods, we sue McDonald’s because we were idiotic enough to drive with hot coffee and spilt it on ourself, we blame teachers despite the fact that I am a single mother working two jobs with three children and no father in the picture. Public education cannot work when it is all about “me” and “my child.” As much as teachers and schools have responsibilities to students and parents, parents and students are likewise responsible to the schools and to the other students and families. Until we get that, no amount of spending or blaming is going to solve the problem.

ENGLISH (AND OTHER CONS)

But all is not perfect in the Land of the Rising Sun, and while the Japanese katana may not be double-edged, the education system is.

For an education system rated fourth in the world, it is astounding that the Japanese spend at least six years studying English, pass all sorts of exams, and cannot use it to communicate at all. Or is it? Because the glaring flaw in a system focused entirely on the group is that it does little to encourage independent thought and self-expression. Thus the Japanese readily master mathematics and the detached, analytical scientific method; they can memorize all the required facts and dates of history. But mastering a foreign language, which requires a cycle of repeated failure and learning from mistakes is horrifying to a culture where failure is shameful, and using it to express your own individual thought is problematic in a place where (as the old Japanese proverb has it) “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”

The Japanese are not automatons. Over the last ten years I’ve laughed with enough of them, drank with enough of them, and slept with enough of them to know they are thinking, feeling beings like any other humans in the world. But Japanese culture as a whole is perfectly designed to operate with as little self-expression as humanly possible. It starts with the language. The Japanese usually omit themselves from sentences, or speak of themselves in the third person. Amerikajin desu translates nicely as “I am American,” but could just as easily be “He is American,” “She is American,” or “They are Americans” (a literal translation is “American person exists”). Most of the time, if a subject is dropped from a sentence, it is dropped because it is “I” or “myself.” The Japanese propensity for “removing yourself from the equation” is thus deep in the language.

As is awareness of your place and relationship to others. Delightfully egotistical, English speakers use “I” when speaking to their bosses, their leaders, their family, their friends, and their underlings. I, I, I. When the Japanese are forced to refer to themselves, however, they rely on a wide range of words—watakushi, watashi, atashi, ore, boku, etc—all of which mean “I” but depend on my relationship to the listener. To say watakushi to my drinking buddies sounds ridiculous. To say ore to my boss is insulting. They all translate as “I”. This means, of course, that the entire focus of language is shifted from myself to the group I am speaking to. Which is very Japanese.

The way English is taught then, is as something to be memorized and mastered with the same commitment to perfection that the Japanese extend to food preparation and flower arranging. It is not about you, it is about producing perfect grammatical structures and never ever making spelling errors. Combine this with a nation that isolated itself from the outside world for several centuries, and remains 99% ethnically Japanese, and the odds of using English to chat with foreigners are astromonically slim.

The Catch-22 inherent in this is that the Japanese desire to be perfect is the essence of their failure. Worse, now that the Koreans and the Chinese are getting into English, they are doing far better than the Japanese, which induces more feelings of shame. And this, ladies and gentlmen, is where I come in.

When I came to work for Yokohama’s city schools six years ago, I was assigned to a pilot school, a test case for introducing a “communication class” into the junior high school curriculum. The students would take regular English classes, but with this added communication class to boost their depressing speaking skills. I think what the school district was expecting was something along the lines of an eikaiwa, or “converstaion school,” a kind of Berlitz for Japanese speakers to practice English. But as the mysterious entity known as Mr. Don Cake will tell you (yes Don, I know you are reading this), what passes for English communication in these institutions is more often than not a joke in poor taste. With lessons like “How to Order in a Restaurant,” “What to Say at a Baseball Game,” or “Asking for Directions,” students are again provided with stock phrases to memorize and repeat like a freakin’ parrot. This is what the district expected.

I didn’t quite give it to them.

Instead, what I tried to do was take what I had learned from Mr. Cake (we worked together for several years prior to this, and even ran a small school together) and combine it with what I had learned teaching public school in America. This meant starting with a philosophy or definition (as Mr. Cake would have it) of “English education.” For me, this was that communication is the exchange of information, and that, like sex, it was something that required two to tango.

Thus, the first years students started by learning how to describe and explain things. While the regular English class demanded perfect grammar, I threw that out the window and replaced it with the students standing up in front of the class and speaking every time. One-word sentences were fine. Gestures were fine. Eye contact was demanded. And for the listeners, the rule was this; there is not always a correct answer.

Thus, a boy might stand in front of the room and say, “It is a fruit. Red. Sweet. Yummy.” Other students might guess “apple,” or “strawberry,” or “cherry,” but each answer was correct. You would be amazed how delighted students are with this…the idea that an ideacan have value even if it is not the right one.

As the first year moves on, the students are taught to discriminate on the quality of information, and to edge closer towards understanding. “It’s an amusement park” is fine, but “It has Space Mountain” is better. They also learn to think about the listener. “He helps Nobita” will instantly tell any Japanese listener under 80 that the subject is the robot catDoraemon, but an American listener might need “It is a popular Japanese cartoon character” instead.

As the year plays out, we describe people, places, things, and actions. The next year, we turn the tables and focus on asking questions and checking your idea. By the time they are third year students, we jump into action, spending the year with discussions on culture—what is Japanese, what is “foreign,” etc. They learn that cultural barriers are often a problem even if we understand each other perfectly. If I ask, “Do you like Conan?” an American listener will think of a barbarian and a Japanese listener will think of an elementary school kid detective. They need to learn skills to get around the problem.

In short, I am teaching self-expression in a school system that otherwise excludes it. Such a simple idea, really, but last week 45 teachers from across the nation came to watch. The consultant sent by the government said it was the best English class he had ever seen.

I never would have gotten anywhere with it if my immediate superior on the Board of Education hadn’t liked what I was doing and gave me carte blanche for five years. I had no standards, no textbook, nothing. By the end of that time, I handed them a three year curriculum that was a proven success, with our kids way ahead of anyone else in the district in listening and speaking skills. And from the evaluations the third years give me before they graduate, for many of them the experience is life-changing.

“I always feel shame about English,” wrote one. “It is so great language in the world and we must learn. Japanese is so small. But I learned in communication class not to feel shame. English is a just a skill like math and communication is useful in every language.” “I never thought before my idea could be good even if it was wrong,” wrote another. Or my personal favorite this year, “The most important thing I learned in Communication class was don’t be afraid to make mistakes. No other teacher ever told me that. I will never forget it.”

So in the end, what I struggle with here in Japan is to find that happy medium. How do we make students feel empowered without catering to them and making them lose a sense of community and responsibility? How do we all live together in the world without sacrificing our cultural identities? America fails because it is too ego-centric. Japan falters because it is not ego-centric enough. The greatest challenge and joy in my work is to find the thin line which holds the balance.

ON FAIRY TALES

I am a firm believer in the Fairy Tale.

As an art form, I mean. That fairy tales are global and universal should probably tell us something about how essential they are to the human condition, but it is easy to overlook in a modern society where there is increasing pressure upon children (and adults!) to focus on “the real world.” There is also a very modern conceit that our ancestors were foolish because they believed in such stories, but this is a leftover of bad Victorian era scholarship. The truth is, pre-modern people told fairy tales for the same reasons we should; not because they believed them to be literally true, but because they knew them to befundamentally true. To paraphrase G. K. Chesterson, the value of these stories was not in that they told people that dragons existed, but rather than dragons could be beaten.

Under “Fairy Tale” I would argue it is possible to lump the modern genres of horror, fantasy, and even comic book adventure so long as these conform to certain parameters. I would argue, for example, that Doctor Who, Dracula, and The Lord of the Rings are fairy tales while Battlestar Galactica, The Call of Cthulhu, and Howard’s Conan stories are not. Because it isn’t that fairy stories are aimed mainly at children—Dracula certainly was not—but because they all promise that no matter how dark, how horrible, and how terrifying the places they will take us into are, we will come back out into the light. You simply know, in a fairy story, that the dragon doesn’t get to win.

The dragon can’t win, because the fairy story is relentlessly humanist. The good guys beat the bad because this is how it should be, because it reaffirms our inate sense of justice. It doesn’t necessarily have to be easy, nor is it usually free. Stoker’s band of vampire hunters suffer horrific losses before defeating Count Dracula, and Frodo endures all manner of hardship in his quest to destroy the Ring. But there is never any doubt that Dracula will be dusted and the Ring melted down, and the reason people read such stories again and again and again is that they reinforce that most ludicrous and human of qualities…hope. When a child asks breathlessly to hear the same story again, it isn’t because he or she doesn’t know the fable word for word and line by line, but because taking the journey once more makes the world seem less random and impossible. It gives them hope.

As an intellectual I can extol the virtues of H. P. Lovecraft, because his horror fiction portrays an image of the world as it is. Not that nameless gods and unspeakable alien horrors surround us, but because Lovecraft understands that the universe is vast, mankind is impossibly small, and that the former doesn’t particular notice or care that the latter even exists. But as a magician I can never be satisfied by Lovecraft in the same way I can by Stoker, because Stoker is reaffirming the value of my humanity. This may well be an illusion, but it is an illusion we all need to get out of bed every day.

Mind you, not every fairy tale needs a happily ever after, so long as it affirms human standards and values. In the earliest versions of Red Riding Hood, the girl ends up eaten. But she was eaten because she willfully violated those two most sacred rules—keep to the path and don’t talk to strangers—and the message is still positive because it illustrates to the listener why these rules must be followed. Had Lil’ Red kept to the path, ignored the wolf, and been eaten anyway, it wouldn’t be a Fairy Tale…it would be a tragedy the likes of which fill the media everyday.

Perhaps because I am a cynic and a realist, I find fairy tales far preferable to the alternative. There was no doubt that the Bride would get her just revenge in Kill Bill, that Harry would eventually defeat Voldemort, or that the Doctor will defeat the Daleks every time. Joining them as they accomplish these things is both cathartic and healing, and I daresay even vital. Because if human beings did not—like Alice—dare to believe impossible things, we would all still be living in caves.

HOW DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS LED ME TO SATAN (A PERSONAL CONFESSION)

I first met Dungeons & Dragons back in 1981. "D&D" was seven years old. I was ten.

It was Virginia Nyahay, the G.A.T.E. ("Gifted and Talented Education") coordinator at my elementary school who introduced us. You see, at that time the game was in its second edition, an edition edited by child psychologist Dr. J. Eric Holmes, who argued it could be a valuable tool to stimulate cooperation, problem solving, communication, and math skills in adolescent brains. I've long suspected Ms. Nyahay must have heard about it through some sort of academic journal--it was not yet well known--and decided it was just the thing for the bright young minds in the G.A.T.E. program. However she found it, D&D (more through games that imitated it than the actual game itself) changed my life. Three decades later I still enjoy role-playing, and I think my skills as a writer owe a lot to those games.

Oh right. If forgot. I am supposed to be talking about the Devil.

It was shortly after I fell in love with the game that we all started hearing the whispered campfire tales that pass themselves off as "facts" on the lunatic fringe of the American Right. " D&D was a secret conspiracy to spread devil worship." Never mind that the game was about good versus evil, encouraging children to be on the former side. Never mind that it was more Tolkien than Torquemada. The same Evangelicals who would later decide that Harry Potter was the Left Hand of Satan had spoken. And so we had M.A.D.D. ("Mothers against Dungeons & Dragons") and Jack Chick. If you have never read Jack Chick's Evangelical comic strip "Dark Dungeons," widely circulated in the 80s, do yourself a favor and read it now. Here's the link. We even had an anti-D&D made for TV movie starring a young Tom Hanks.

Across the country, school D&D clubs were quietly shut down, all in the name of saving kids from the clutches of Beelzebub (or of simply avoiding protests and lawsuits by fools and fanatics).

But here's the funny thing. Several years later, when I was sixteen, I heard about this little book entitled The Satanic Bible, written by a man who had put together the first public, above-ground Church of Satan. You couldn't really avoid hearing about it, because the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s was in full swing. Between the talk shows screaming about it, and Geraldo Rivera's two-hour prime time expose of the devil in our midst, Satanism was unavoidable. And I can remember thinking to myself, in the midst of all of this, how the same people had been screaming about D&D a few years earlier. If they could have been so wrong about D&D, I thought, maybe they are wrong about "The Satanic Bible" as well.

Thus it was Jack Chick, Tom Hanks, and Mothers Against Dungeons & Dragons who led me to the Church of Satan.

I wonder if Hallmark makes a "thank you" card for that.

VOX DIABOLI: ANTON LAVEY AND THE CHURCH OF SATAN

In 1966, while TIME magazine asked the public if God was dead and the hippies preached the Age of Aquarius with free love and tabs of acid, one figure emerged from the shadows to found the first public, above-ground Church dedicated to the Devil. The idea took off like a rocket, drawing the attention of sociologists, capturing the media, and bringing in members from all walks of life. Within three years, the Church of Satan’s founder had performed a high profile Satanic wedding for a New York socialite, acted as a Chaplain at the funeral of a Naval Officer member of his Church, and released The Satanic Bible, a manifesto that has never been out of print and continues to sell well four decades after its publication. But the most shocking thing about Anton Szandor LaVey (1930 – 1997) was not the depraved orgies, human sacrifices, or raging insanity one might expect from the Devil’s Advocate. The most shocking thing was that he was a decent sort of fellow who made a lot of sense.

There is a strong degree of paradox running through the man and his philosophy. He was was a Satanist who didn’t believe in the Devil, a rational materialist who practiced sorcery, a magician who despised occultists, and a liar who believed in truth. “The essence of Satanism, and Satanic practices,” explained LaVey, “is the integration of apparent opposites. We blend magic and rationality together, without compromising either, in the same way he integrate different aspects of one person in the same body.” For LaVey, man was an animal, the biological product of long evolution with all the same bestial drives and instincts as his ancestors. But he was also a thinking animal, a creature capable of imaging and creating who needed fantasy in his diet just as much as meat ane vegetables. For LaVey, the Devil—an earthbound angel with both divine attributes and bestial features—was the perfect metaphor for this. He rejected conventional religious wisdom that man’s animal instincts should be repressed or labelled “evil;” instead, he advocated indulging them in a safe and private environment. If both the law and the social contract forbade you from killing your arrogant and heavy-handed boss, why not exercise your pent-up feelings of rage in the ritual chamber, symbolically dismembering and ripping him apart? LaVey saw in the traditional trappings of ritual magic—indeed, in all religious ceremony—psychodrama that appealed to the emotional side of man. Though he advocated complete rationality in life, he saw the ritual chamber as a place to “let go,” to indulge in dreams and fantasy, before returning to the normal world.

And while most occultists were very careful to draw a line between their practices and stage illusions, LaVey laughed in their faces. For him, the same techniques of showmanship and misdirection that entertained audiences on stage could be used in everyday life to manipulate others into doing what you want. Following the lead of actors, performers, and carnival acts before him, he advocated creating a look and an image that would dazzle, confound, and spellbind those around you. Thus for decades, “serious” occultists and religious opponents would denounce him as a former lion tamer and carnival huckster, expressing their opinions that his Satanism was not a serious religion but a scam. But to LaVey, “all religion is show business,” and his Church was at least not hypocritical about it. The Church of Satan never filed for tax exemption, and called for other Churches to follow its lead. Nor did it have collection plates or require donations from its members, challenging other faiths to follow suit. Scrupulously honest, this “liar” and “trickster” lived quietly off the profits from his books, but unlike so many other ministers, never got rich off his Church.

Indeed, even the structure of his Church was a paradox, frequently referred to as an “organization of non-joiners.” LaVey never sought converts, and to be a Satanist all one had to do was practice the philosophy in his books. Those who did actually join the Church were never required to attend Bible studies, services, or even to meet other members. LaVey was always very clear that actually membership had only symbolic value, a psychological token of commitment to an idea. More shocking, to some, was that LaVey handed out “priesthoods” based on real life achievements. His religion was based on worldly, rather than spiritual, concerns, and those who won earthly fortune or acclaim were more entitled to priesthood than those who simply memorized esoteric gobbledy-gook.

What is clear is that LaVey took his Church very seriously. Though it never made him wealthy, he spent his life promoting and defending its philosophy. “Satanism will never be a religion of the masses,” LaVey often said, “but of an alienated elite.” Like Uncle Sam LaVey was looking for a few good men and women, and those who did not measure up were quickly expelled. And when it became clear to him that the rapid expansion and open door policy of the early Church had let in too many that did not understand the philosophy, “hangers on” who were along for the ride but contributed nothing, LaVey shut it all down, dismantling all other branches of his Church in other cities and structuring the organization more along the lines of quiet, underground cells.

Many have questioned—especially after reading The Satanic Bible and his other works—if LaVey could legitimately be called a “Satanist” at all. There was, after all, no “Devil” in the Church of Satan, and LaVey was adamant about his followers being law-abiding citizens. There were no orgies, no drugs, and no human sacrifices, none of the horror movie grue the public associated with Satanists. But LaVey would have argued “yes.” Though the Church did not worship or even believe in a literal Satan, LaVey believed it was Satanic in the way that it was the “adversary” and the “opposite” of all spiritual religions. If they taught that God created man, Satanism responded that man created God. If they focused on community and altruism, the Church of Satan emphaszied individuality and rational self-interest. If their dogma embraced absolutes of good and evil, Satanism scoffed and answered with subjectivity. If religions preached spiritual “truths,” LaVey’s spoke of spiritual “fantasies” that despite not being real were nevertheless necessary to the psychological well-being of man.

Today, forty-five years after its founding and fourteen years after LaVey’s death, the Church of Satan still exists. Under the leadership of new “high priest” Peter Gilmore (whose collection of essays, The Satanic Scriptures differ in content and tone from LaVey but still support and underline his philosophy), Satanism has entered the 21st century. It survives as it always had, quietly and under the radar, an alternative religion for free-thinkers with a flair for the dramatic. Even in the 80s, in the height of the Satanic Panic that gripped America, neither Anton LaVey nor the Church of Satan was ever accused of a crime, unobtrusively going about its business (the same could not be said for its chief rival, the “Temple of Set,” founded by a disgruntled defector from the Church of Satan who quit when he realized Anton didn’t actually worship the Devil; this organization was targeted by police and its leader questioned). Today, with Islamic fanatics flying airplanes into buildings and religious extremists in the United States trying to tunnel under the wall between Church and State, the Church of Satan hardly seems “evil” at all. Instead, it comes off looking sane, positive, and downright rational.

And that, Anton would say with a grin, is very Satanic.