The End of History and the Last Man is famously talked about more than it is read; as a teenager, however, I did not know this, so after seeing it referenced on multiple blogs, I assumed I had to trudge through the thing. My brain at the time was, I suspect, so plastic and receptive from steeping in its warm hormonal bath that any book with a bit of force to it would’ve made a deep imprint. As it happened, Fukuyama’s work of political theory hit me with a degree of angst that would have more appropriately been spent on The Catcher in the Rye, or The Sorrows of Young Werther.
I finished it quite convinced that all grand ideological possibilities had been exhausted, and thus that no more truly political struggles were possible. But it was 2020, which brought with it a complication; vicarious political struggle was about the only thing that my friends and I, idling away in suburban Maryland, could get passionate about. With that snatched away, I was plunged into an adolescent ennui for a period of several months.
When Fukuyama released a memoir last month, I expected that, thanks to my unusually violent exposure to his first book, I’d be able to sympathize with him like nobody else could. If the end of history so affected my teenage self, then how strong must’ve been his vertigo, to be emerging from the intellectual thick of the Cold War and realize that nothing this heady would ever happen again?
If the memoir is anything to go on, not very strong at all. In the Realm of the Last Man reads rather like a series of loosely related op-eds, and Fukuyama’s character is present only as a light touch. He’s certainly not wrestling with the angel on the printed page.
In fact, if the book has any central theme, it isn’t politics, or even Fukuyama’s life story. This is a book about hobbies. We learn in the second chapter that Fukuyama’s grandmother, Shizu Yokota, played piano and koto, and painted watercolors. His grandfather practiced calligraphy and horsemanship. His intellectual mentor, Allan Bloom, collected vinyl and CDs. The third chapter details Fukuyama’s lifelong experience woodworking, and the fifth gives us his thoughts on sports and music. The tenth is about art photography; the twelfth about woodworking again; the 25th about building computers.
Some reviewers are perplexed by this choice of focus. Samuel Moyn quips that “chapters about his interest in photography and power tools do not quite compensate for the absence of any detail on the author’s emotional life or personal relationships. But then, Fukuyama has always said that history’s afterparty would be boring.”
But as he reminds us in chapter eight, Fukuyama is indirectly a student of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, and any good Straussian knows that when an author makes a seemingly unjustifiable writing decision, he’s really trying to point you to a secret. Rather than being banal, then, the minute description of Fukuyama’s woodworking projects must contain a thesis too explosive to put directly to page. And here, I’m lucky that The End of History and the Last Man was seared into my mind so completely. Because I know what the secret is.
It’s an easy book to misremember. The big thesis is, of course, that History is Over: liberal capitalism has proven itself to be, if not perfect, then better than any possible alternative at satisfying human needs. This being the case, there will never again be any titanic, life-consuming struggle between ideologies. This is the argument of the first half of the book, and it is what has led, whenever some big historical event has happened since, to many people mocking it as naïve liberal triumphalism.
However, the second half of the book—the “Last Man” half—intentionally complicates the triumphalist story. Liberal capitalism, Fukuyama argues, isn’t just the consummation of human progress since it satisfies our material needs. Drawing on the French philosopher Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, he contends that more than food, warmth or pleasure, we thirst after recognition, the approval of our society and our peers. Liberalism, by making everyone an equal citizen, has solved this equation by distributing a nice even chunk of recognition to everyone.
Yet there’s something a bit pathetic about this situation. If everyone is equally worthy, then all opportunity for greatness has been pressed out of the world, and there’s nothing left to do but chase pleasure like an animal. Fukuyama predicts this might get so unbearable that some will revolt: a pent-up Männerbund starting conflict just for the sake of a conflict, even though, since liberal capitalism is history’s end state, any changes they achieve can only leave the world worse off. This part of the book gets more attention these days. Some people say Fukuyama predicted Trump.
I doubt all that much of contemporary political strife can be traced to a stirring of suppressed thymos, but the claim does show some real psychological acuity. We’ve all met a Gen Z guy who will tell you he wants to bring back fascism—or at least start a war with Mexico—just to have a reason to go die gloriously.
Before reading the memoir, I assumed that Fukuyama was attuned to this particular neurosis of our time three decades out because he himself had felt the way utopia could make someone nostalgic for bloody, convulsing History. But the memoir gives little hint of this. As the last chance for real human achievement sank into eternal night, Fukuyama was apparently content to keep on playing with motherboards and lathes.
After all, thymotic revolt is only one possible reaction to the End of History. Nobody really remembers this, but in The End of History Fukuyama also proposed one other way of responding. It comes near the end of part one, in a paraphrase of a footnote Kojève made after visiting Japan in 1958:
After the rise of the Shogun Hideyoshi in the fifteenth century, Japan experienced a state of internal and external peace for a period of several hundred years which very much resembled Hegel’s postulated end of history. … But rather than pursuing love or play instinctively like young animals—in other words, instead of turning into a society of last men—the Japanese demonstrated that it is possible to continue to be human through the invention of a series of perfectly contentless formal arts, like Noh theater, tea ceremonies, flower arranging, and the like … [they are] an arena for megalothymia in the form of pure snobbery: there are contending schools for tea ceremony and flower arrangement, with their own masters, novices, traditions, and canons of better and worse. It was the very formalism of this activity—the creation of new rules and values divorced from any utilitarian purpose, as in sports—that suggested to Kojève the possibility of specifically human activity even after the end of history. Kojève playfully suggested that instead of Japan becoming Westernized, the West (including Russia) would become Japanized.
The chapter after chapter of his memoir that Fukuyama devotes to his hobbies are anything but a digression: they are his response to living “in the realm of the last man.” In one of the few stories from his childhood, he recounts finding his father’s stash of Playboy magazines. The centerfolds titillate the ten-year-old boy, but he finds himself drawn away to a glossy, full-page feature of high-end cameras. Even at that young age, perhaps, Fukuyama glimpsed in amateur photography the open path for the human spirit that Kojève saw in the tea ceremonies of Kyoto.
After that anecdote, Fukuyama proceeds to lovingly recount the make and model of the cameras he’s owned over the years: a black Nikon F2a; a Leica M3; a Kodak Ektachrome E100. And then he finally sounds the elegiac note I had been expecting from the book: “unfortunately we’re at the end of a road for still photography, both on the hardware and creative sides. … It is hard not to believe that still photography as an art form has reached its own local end of history, with every conceivable innovation having been tried by someone over the years.” This seems to have saddened him more than the end of political history.
●
Fukuyama does have political interests, of course. The chapters on arts and crafts are broken up with episodes from his intellectual development. Cameras are followed by French poststructuralism, which he spent the early Seventies studying in Paris. The Yom Kippur War is ongoing at the time; Fukuyama notes that the oil embargo made for a frigid winter in Europe. The poststructuralists also left him cold. “My father had once dismissed the kind of hyperintellectualized realm I had entered as ‘intellectual masturbation,’” he recalls, “and I began to see his point.” Determined to study something more relevant to the “great ongoing struggles,” he leaves for Harvard, to study under the political philosopher Harvey Mansfield.
Mansfield, like Fukuyama’s other mentor, Allan Bloom, belongs to the intellectual tradition of Straussianism. More than any specific doctrine or set of ideas, Straussians are united by the practice of reading and interpreting the great books. They use a particular set of hermeneutical techniques: looking for intentional contradictions, noting omissions just as much as what is written explicitly, performing occasional numerology with page numbers. In fact, press a believer on what exactly they’ve discovered by reading old books in this way, and they’ll tell you it’s that the highest good in human life is contemplation—or in other words, that the highest good is to perform more Straussian readings of old books. It’s method all the way down.
Crucially, it’s a method supported by a whole social world. Like poststructuralism, Straussianism provides the “contending schools, masters, novices, traditions, and canons of better and worse” that Kojève thinks makes practice so exciting. In a way, it’s a sort of intellectual flower arranging; just one more of those perfectly contentless formal arts with which to whittle away the long afternoon of post-history.
Fukuyama climbed that Straussian social ladder quite high, which made it all the more admirable when he chose to break with the community over their support for the Iraq War. He remarks that many friends stopped talking to him after that. Still, he’s dismissive of theories that link Iraq in any essential way to Strauss’s ideas. And he’s equally dismissive of the argument—made by Samuel Huntington, among others—that the War on Terror represented some great civilizational struggle between the West and Islamism that disproved the End of History; Islamism, Fukuyama thinks, was never a serious contender.
For his part, he seems quite content these days without any great civilizational struggles. And while reading In the Realm of the Last Man, I found myself forgetting why I ever felt otherwise. I hardly felt like there was a void in the man’s life just because there wasn’t a chapter about the glory of defeating his enemies in the political agon. Perhaps we don’t need a political fight for recognition. Perhaps, the book seems to suggest, woodworking and the great books are enough.
●
They’re certainly better than other responses to civilizational ennui. My own end-of-history blues ended quite suddenly in 2021. School was online that year, so I spent nearly all my time at a computer, chatting with friends over Discord as we played video games or watched Twitch streams. Come January 6th, the livestreams showed a mob storming the Capitol. This was the most exciting thing to happen in a long time, so everyone immediately joined a virtual powwow to make arguments or jokes. “Hey, isn’t Landon at a rally in D.C. today?” someone asked, and soon enough our friend FaceTimed us from right beside the Capitol stairs to complain about getting teargassed.
I, of course, scolded all my conservative and apolitical friends for being insufficiently outraged. But in my heart I felt a secret thrill. Wasn’t this what history looked like? It certainly had the visuals I associated with “real politics,” a sort of collage my mind had assembled from the trappings of the eminently political eighteenth through twentieth centuries. Mobs, banners, smashed windows; the collective will made tangible through physical force. As I watched the feed, I felt the gloom Fukuyama had laid over me break into a sunburst of exhilaration. Liberalism was spinning in the air, and there were real stakes to where (or if!) it landed.
Some people get hooked on this sort of feeling. You can slip, if you aren’t careful, from being energized by a clash between liberalism and its enemies to actively rooting for those enemies to win. Thankfully, my own excitement quickly subsided in January 6th’s rather banal aftermath. But my political ennui never really returned. Soon enough I went off to college, read Tennyson and Pater, and had my native melancholy safely directed away toward the arts.
In retrospect, my teenage feelings of civilizational boredom had much more to do with spending all of my waking hours on Discord and Twitch than it did with the existence or nonexistence of the Soviet Union. Here, I suspect I would’ve done better to follow Fukuyama’s practice than his theory and taken up woodworking or art photography or great books—or any practice more artistically and socially rewarding than computer games. To the young man disgusted with the cropped-down society that democracy has created and who longs for a manly, aristocratic spirit to return to the West, I say to you: stay well away from politics and focus on the real aristocratic way of life—studiously useless aestheticism.
●
Just a couple years after I put Fukuyama’s thesis behind me, nearly the whole cycle of emotion I felt toward the end of history recrudesced in a surprising way. Like many others I was startled by the rapid progress of AI development, and the quite thinkable possibility of perfectly superhuman computers. Here was something genuinely novel, and under radically different technological conditions liberalism until the sun goes out began to look like a less sure thing.
On the other hand, if AI boosters believe that history is once again in motion, they also are confident that it has a destination. The post-scarcity utopia they prophesize looks remarkably similar to the end of history supposedly reached by liberalism: all our problems and needs are tended to by the market in one case, the computer in the other, with neither leaving any grand conflicts for the human spirit to hurl itself against. The horror of AI is much the same horror that Fukuyama described thirty years ago.
Whichever way things go, I remain quite palliated by the idea of an eternal Edo Japan. To live this out I’ve recently taken up ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arranging. My teacher is a retiree named Elizabeth who picked up the hobby in the foreign service. Under her guidance, I mostly practice the shoka shofutai, one of the traditional forms that goes back to that period of peace under the Tokugawa shogunate. Accordingly, it’s extremely formalistic. In the front, you place a small flower called the tai, representing the plant in its first season of life. In the back goes the soe, a taller flower that must arc backwards toward the imaginary position of the sun. The tallest stalk, the shin, is put in between the other two. It should curve with the soe toward the sun at around a third of its height but return to crest in a point directly above the center of the arrangement.
There are more rules than these, of course—about additional branches, about the height and orientation of leaves, about what plants can be used in what season—which all makes for a very satisfactory exercise in idleness. And then there are the many different schools, like the modernist sogetsu, or like the ohara, who believe in horizontal arrangements.
Elizabeth has recently been encouraging me to join the school that she belongs to, the ikenobo. It’s the oldest of the schools, run out of the Rokkakudo temple in Kyoto, where the headmaster lives. The position is hereditary, and predates most European nations: the current headmaster, Sen’ei Ikenobo, is the 45th. The organization hosts exhibitions and will occasionally develop new styles of arranging for members to use.
Most importantly, though, it has developed a rigidly bureaucratic system of distributing status that would make Kojève proud. There are fourteen ranks to ascend through, which determine what styles you may study, display and teach. Elizabeth is a level nine. One of the main benefits, she told me, happens whenever you advance a rank. “Headquarters will send you a certificate, handwritten in gold calligraphy.” She paused, mulling over, I suppose, the more intangible delights of the art, and after a few seconds, she added, “It’s nice to be recognized.”
The End of History and the Last Man is famously talked about more than it is read; as a teenager, however, I did not know this, so after seeing it referenced on multiple blogs, I assumed I had to trudge through the thing. My brain at the time was, I suspect, so plastic and receptive from steeping in its warm hormonal bath that any book with a bit of force to it would’ve made a deep imprint. As it happened, Fukuyama’s work of political theory hit me with a degree of angst that would have more appropriately been spent on The Catcher in the Rye, or The Sorrows of Young Werther.
I finished it quite convinced that all grand ideological possibilities had been exhausted, and thus that no more truly political struggles were possible. But it was 2020, which brought with it a complication; vicarious political struggle was about the only thing that my friends and I, idling away in suburban Maryland, could get passionate about. With that snatched away, I was plunged into an adolescent ennui for a period of several months.
When Fukuyama released a memoir last month, I expected that, thanks to my unusually violent exposure to his first book, I’d be able to sympathize with him like nobody else could. If the end of history so affected my teenage self, then how strong must’ve been his vertigo, to be emerging from the intellectual thick of the Cold War and realize that nothing this heady would ever happen again?
If the memoir is anything to go on, not very strong at all. In the Realm of the Last Man reads rather like a series of loosely related op-eds, and Fukuyama’s character is present only as a light touch. He’s certainly not wrestling with the angel on the printed page.
In fact, if the book has any central theme, it isn’t politics, or even Fukuyama’s life story. This is a book about hobbies. We learn in the second chapter that Fukuyama’s grandmother, Shizu Yokota, played piano and koto, and painted watercolors. His grandfather practiced calligraphy and horsemanship. His intellectual mentor, Allan Bloom, collected vinyl and CDs. The third chapter details Fukuyama’s lifelong experience woodworking, and the fifth gives us his thoughts on sports and music. The tenth is about art photography; the twelfth about woodworking again; the 25th about building computers.
Some reviewers are perplexed by this choice of focus. Samuel Moyn quips that “chapters about his interest in photography and power tools do not quite compensate for the absence of any detail on the author’s emotional life or personal relationships. But then, Fukuyama has always said that history’s afterparty would be boring.”
But as he reminds us in chapter eight, Fukuyama is indirectly a student of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, and any good Straussian knows that when an author makes a seemingly unjustifiable writing decision, he’s really trying to point you to a secret. Rather than being banal, then, the minute description of Fukuyama’s woodworking projects must contain a thesis too explosive to put directly to page. And here, I’m lucky that The End of History and the Last Man was seared into my mind so completely. Because I know what the secret is.
It’s an easy book to misremember. The big thesis is, of course, that History is Over: liberal capitalism has proven itself to be, if not perfect, then better than any possible alternative at satisfying human needs. This being the case, there will never again be any titanic, life-consuming struggle between ideologies. This is the argument of the first half of the book, and it is what has led, whenever some big historical event has happened since, to many people mocking it as naïve liberal triumphalism.
However, the second half of the book—the “Last Man” half—intentionally complicates the triumphalist story. Liberal capitalism, Fukuyama argues, isn’t just the consummation of human progress since it satisfies our material needs. Drawing on the French philosopher Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, he contends that more than food, warmth or pleasure, we thirst after recognition, the approval of our society and our peers. Liberalism, by making everyone an equal citizen, has solved this equation by distributing a nice even chunk of recognition to everyone.
Yet there’s something a bit pathetic about this situation. If everyone is equally worthy, then all opportunity for greatness has been pressed out of the world, and there’s nothing left to do but chase pleasure like an animal. Fukuyama predicts this might get so unbearable that some will revolt: a pent-up Männerbund starting conflict just for the sake of a conflict, even though, since liberal capitalism is history’s end state, any changes they achieve can only leave the world worse off. This part of the book gets more attention these days. Some people say Fukuyama predicted Trump.
I doubt all that much of contemporary political strife can be traced to a stirring of suppressed thymos, but the claim does show some real psychological acuity. We’ve all met a Gen Z guy who will tell you he wants to bring back fascism—or at least start a war with Mexico—just to have a reason to go die gloriously.
Before reading the memoir, I assumed that Fukuyama was attuned to this particular neurosis of our time three decades out because he himself had felt the way utopia could make someone nostalgic for bloody, convulsing History. But the memoir gives little hint of this. As the last chance for real human achievement sank into eternal night, Fukuyama was apparently content to keep on playing with motherboards and lathes.
After all, thymotic revolt is only one possible reaction to the End of History. Nobody really remembers this, but in The End of History Fukuyama also proposed one other way of responding. It comes near the end of part one, in a paraphrase of a footnote Kojève made after visiting Japan in 1958:
The chapter after chapter of his memoir that Fukuyama devotes to his hobbies are anything but a digression: they are his response to living “in the realm of the last man.” In one of the few stories from his childhood, he recounts finding his father’s stash of Playboy magazines. The centerfolds titillate the ten-year-old boy, but he finds himself drawn away to a glossy, full-page feature of high-end cameras. Even at that young age, perhaps, Fukuyama glimpsed in amateur photography the open path for the human spirit that Kojève saw in the tea ceremonies of Kyoto.
After that anecdote, Fukuyama proceeds to lovingly recount the make and model of the cameras he’s owned over the years: a black Nikon F2a; a Leica M3; a Kodak Ektachrome E100. And then he finally sounds the elegiac note I had been expecting from the book: “unfortunately we’re at the end of a road for still photography, both on the hardware and creative sides. … It is hard not to believe that still photography as an art form has reached its own local end of history, with every conceivable innovation having been tried by someone over the years.” This seems to have saddened him more than the end of political history.
●
Fukuyama does have political interests, of course. The chapters on arts and crafts are broken up with episodes from his intellectual development. Cameras are followed by French poststructuralism, which he spent the early Seventies studying in Paris. The Yom Kippur War is ongoing at the time; Fukuyama notes that the oil embargo made for a frigid winter in Europe. The poststructuralists also left him cold. “My father had once dismissed the kind of hyperintellectualized realm I had entered as ‘intellectual masturbation,’” he recalls, “and I began to see his point.” Determined to study something more relevant to the “great ongoing struggles,” he leaves for Harvard, to study under the political philosopher Harvey Mansfield.
Mansfield, like Fukuyama’s other mentor, Allan Bloom, belongs to the intellectual tradition of Straussianism. More than any specific doctrine or set of ideas, Straussians are united by the practice of reading and interpreting the great books. They use a particular set of hermeneutical techniques: looking for intentional contradictions, noting omissions just as much as what is written explicitly, performing occasional numerology with page numbers. In fact, press a believer on what exactly they’ve discovered by reading old books in this way, and they’ll tell you it’s that the highest good in human life is contemplation—or in other words, that the highest good is to perform more Straussian readings of old books. It’s method all the way down.
Crucially, it’s a method supported by a whole social world. Like poststructuralism, Straussianism provides the “contending schools, masters, novices, traditions, and canons of better and worse” that Kojève thinks makes practice so exciting. In a way, it’s a sort of intellectual flower arranging; just one more of those perfectly contentless formal arts with which to whittle away the long afternoon of post-history.
Fukuyama climbed that Straussian social ladder quite high, which made it all the more admirable when he chose to break with the community over their support for the Iraq War. He remarks that many friends stopped talking to him after that. Still, he’s dismissive of theories that link Iraq in any essential way to Strauss’s ideas. And he’s equally dismissive of the argument—made by Samuel Huntington, among others—that the War on Terror represented some great civilizational struggle between the West and Islamism that disproved the End of History; Islamism, Fukuyama thinks, was never a serious contender.
For his part, he seems quite content these days without any great civilizational struggles. And while reading In the Realm of the Last Man, I found myself forgetting why I ever felt otherwise. I hardly felt like there was a void in the man’s life just because there wasn’t a chapter about the glory of defeating his enemies in the political agon. Perhaps we don’t need a political fight for recognition. Perhaps, the book seems to suggest, woodworking and the great books are enough.
●
They’re certainly better than other responses to civilizational ennui. My own end-of-history blues ended quite suddenly in 2021. School was online that year, so I spent nearly all my time at a computer, chatting with friends over Discord as we played video games or watched Twitch streams. Come January 6th, the livestreams showed a mob storming the Capitol. This was the most exciting thing to happen in a long time, so everyone immediately joined a virtual powwow to make arguments or jokes. “Hey, isn’t Landon at a rally in D.C. today?” someone asked, and soon enough our friend FaceTimed us from right beside the Capitol stairs to complain about getting teargassed.
I, of course, scolded all my conservative and apolitical friends for being insufficiently outraged. But in my heart I felt a secret thrill. Wasn’t this what history looked like? It certainly had the visuals I associated with “real politics,” a sort of collage my mind had assembled from the trappings of the eminently political eighteenth through twentieth centuries. Mobs, banners, smashed windows; the collective will made tangible through physical force. As I watched the feed, I felt the gloom Fukuyama had laid over me break into a sunburst of exhilaration. Liberalism was spinning in the air, and there were real stakes to where (or if!) it landed.
Some people get hooked on this sort of feeling. You can slip, if you aren’t careful, from being energized by a clash between liberalism and its enemies to actively rooting for those enemies to win. Thankfully, my own excitement quickly subsided in January 6th’s rather banal aftermath. But my political ennui never really returned. Soon enough I went off to college, read Tennyson and Pater, and had my native melancholy safely directed away toward the arts.
In retrospect, my teenage feelings of civilizational boredom had much more to do with spending all of my waking hours on Discord and Twitch than it did with the existence or nonexistence of the Soviet Union. Here, I suspect I would’ve done better to follow Fukuyama’s practice than his theory and taken up woodworking or art photography or great books—or any practice more artistically and socially rewarding than computer games. To the young man disgusted with the cropped-down society that democracy has created and who longs for a manly, aristocratic spirit to return to the West, I say to you: stay well away from politics and focus on the real aristocratic way of life—studiously useless aestheticism.
●
Just a couple years after I put Fukuyama’s thesis behind me, nearly the whole cycle of emotion I felt toward the end of history recrudesced in a surprising way. Like many others I was startled by the rapid progress of AI development, and the quite thinkable possibility of perfectly superhuman computers. Here was something genuinely novel, and under radically different technological conditions liberalism until the sun goes out began to look like a less sure thing.
On the other hand, if AI boosters believe that history is once again in motion, they also are confident that it has a destination. The post-scarcity utopia they prophesize looks remarkably similar to the end of history supposedly reached by liberalism: all our problems and needs are tended to by the market in one case, the computer in the other, with neither leaving any grand conflicts for the human spirit to hurl itself against. The horror of AI is much the same horror that Fukuyama described thirty years ago.
Whichever way things go, I remain quite palliated by the idea of an eternal Edo Japan. To live this out I’ve recently taken up ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arranging. My teacher is a retiree named Elizabeth who picked up the hobby in the foreign service. Under her guidance, I mostly practice the shoka shofutai, one of the traditional forms that goes back to that period of peace under the Tokugawa shogunate. Accordingly, it’s extremely formalistic. In the front, you place a small flower called the tai, representing the plant in its first season of life. In the back goes the soe, a taller flower that must arc backwards toward the imaginary position of the sun. The tallest stalk, the shin, is put in between the other two. It should curve with the soe toward the sun at around a third of its height but return to crest in a point directly above the center of the arrangement.
There are more rules than these, of course—about additional branches, about the height and orientation of leaves, about what plants can be used in what season—which all makes for a very satisfactory exercise in idleness. And then there are the many different schools, like the modernist sogetsu, or like the ohara, who believe in horizontal arrangements.
Elizabeth has recently been encouraging me to join the school that she belongs to, the ikenobo. It’s the oldest of the schools, run out of the Rokkakudo temple in Kyoto, where the headmaster lives. The position is hereditary, and predates most European nations: the current headmaster, Sen’ei Ikenobo, is the 45th. The organization hosts exhibitions and will occasionally develop new styles of arranging for members to use.
Most importantly, though, it has developed a rigidly bureaucratic system of distributing status that would make Kojève proud. There are fourteen ranks to ascend through, which determine what styles you may study, display and teach. Elizabeth is a level nine. One of the main benefits, she told me, happens whenever you advance a rank. “Headquarters will send you a certificate, handwritten in gold calligraphy.” She paused, mulling over, I suppose, the more intangible delights of the art, and after a few seconds, she added, “It’s nice to be recognized.”
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.