“Civilizational Rupture”

About twenty-five years ago, I published a collection of essays titled Toward a World Where Meaning Disintegrates. It traced the social transformations unfolding in Russia, Western Europe, the United States, Uzbekistan, and Japan.

What I tried to argue there was that several of the core values that had sustained the modern world were beginning to lose their absolute authority.

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For example, some of the nation-states established in the seventeenth century were losing their ethnic and cultural cohesion and gradually turning into multiethnic states. Lofty ideals such as freedom and democracy were badly tarnished after the United States attempted to impose them by force—or through regime-change operations—on former socialist and Middle Eastern countries. The result was not prosperity but chaos, deeper poverty, and even torture, as seen in Iraq. More recently, the rise of a figure like Trump—at times almost fascistic in style—has further damaged the moral prestige of those ideals.

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Western Europe, meanwhile, had long preserved its cultural identity by treating Greco-Roman civilization as its spiritual homeland. Greek, Latin, and the classics were once central to higher education. But as those studies ceased to be required for university entrance, that cultural continuity faded, and Europeans themselves became increasingly shallow and flavorless.

That, broadly speaking, was the argument of my book above.

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Yet today, what I increasingly feel is not merely the weakening of the “modern age” created by the Industrial Revolution, nor simply the loosening of modern political forms such as the nation-state and democracy. What I sense is something far more fundamental: a complete shift of paradigm—not a gentle “civilizational transition,” but an actual dismantling, a “civilizational rupture,” perhaps even a rupture in the human species itself.

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It may become a transformation so radical that generations before and after it will no longer even be able to understand one another. At times it feels as though a massive tsunami is approaching, ready to sweep everything away. One is left with a strange emptiness, a feeling that perhaps nothing we do will prevent this.

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The spread of AI and robotics—making human labor increasingly unnecessary—is only one example of this rupture. More unsettling is the possibility that human beings themselves may cease to be human in the traditional sense. Genetic engineering is advancing rapidly. A society in which people can redesign both the appearance and internal makeup of the human body may be ideal in medical terms, but in every other respect its consequences are impossible to foresee.

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Before speaking further about humanity itself, however, it is worth considering how IT, AI, and robotics are likely to transform the very structure of corporations.

In Japan, companies and family businesses that survive for one or even two centuries are still regarded as admirable institutions. Yet the internet, robotics, and AI are likely to radically alter what a corporation is. Japanese society has long regarded admission to an elite university followed by employment at a large corporation as the supreme path to a stable life. But the traditional large corporation—with its vast internal hierarchy and self-contained functions—may soon become unnecessary, or even harmful, across many industries. Japanese banks have already undergone massive restructuring.

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Interestingly enough, even major consulting firms have recently begun large-scale layoffs. Until now, consultants largely existed to help giant corporations that had lost the ability to reform themselves. They proposed rationalization plans that management could use to crush internal resistance and entrenched interests.

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But the real challenge in management today is no longer how to streamline existing organizations. The question now is what entirely new products and technologies should be developed, produced, and sold—and how organizations themselves must evolve in response. These are problems that cannot be solved without deep technological knowledge. Many consultants lacking scientific or engineering literacy may simply have become obsolete.

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Take Fujifilm, for example. When it abandoned photographic film and shifted aggressively toward digital technologies and medical equipment, outside consulting firms probably had little meaningful advice to offer.

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Returning to the human question: sooner or later, physical appearance and even intellectual ability may become matters of genetic customization ordered by parents—or by individuals themselves. A world filled with Alain Delons, Catherine Deneuves, Einsteins, Trumps (if you wish), or three-meter-tall basketball players would resemble a permanent global cosplay convention. In such a world, it may become impossible to know what is authentic anymore.

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And what kind of society emerges when human life expectancy keeps expanding indefinitely? That lies beyond imagination. Companies where one still has a boss at ninety years old. A society in which active workers must support pensioners over 120. A world where eighty-year-olds still have children whose ages overlap with those of their eldest grandchildren. The mind begins to spin. Categories collapse.

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Meanwhile, while advanced countries race ever further into this future, they remain surrounded by societies that are, in many respects, still pre-nineteenth-century states. Many are only now constructing the earliest forms of the nation-state. They seek external expansion through state power, and some turn to terrorism or regional conflict against the advanced nations closest at hand.

Japan, in trying to defend itself against such pressures, faces a contradiction of its own: in preparing countermeasures, it risks falling back into premodern patterns of behavior itself.