A Successful Failure

Global capitalism is teaching the whole world about can-do. But what about failure? The concept of failure is not about money, TV appearances, adulation, trophy spouses or power. Failure is all about style. And, as Enrique Fernandez explains, there are ways to fail nobly, elegantly and beautifully. If only we could better teach our culture how to fail.

Once in Vermont, lingering in the living room of a poet, I picked up a book on a Japanese attitude: the cult of failure. Explaining such phenomena as hara-kiri ritual suicide and the flights of kamikaze pilots, the book - its title and author I have forgotten - explained how in traditional Japanese culture a noble failure is no less noble for having failed.

On the contrary.

The poet on whose coffee table I had found the book was, as are so many American writers, a bit of a tippler. And his drinking, again as in the case of so many American writers, was a symptom of his failure.

Oh, he was a serious poet, all right. But how many American poets have a chance of being successful in American terms? After all, American success means superstardom, and by those standards we’ve had only two in the century, Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost.

Or at least I suspected that it was a sense of failure that had driven the poet to acquire the book, read it and leave it casually on his coffee table, waiting for some unsuspecting tormented soul like myself to pounce on it.

The Japanese cult of noble failure, the author admonished, was badly needed in American culture, with its take-no-prisoners cult of success.

The poet was certainly more Japanese than American in that respect. He was elegant and courtly, he was respected but not idolized, he was drinking himself slowly to death.

When a Japanese man gets depressed, he closes the windows in his house and kills himself; when an American gets depressed, he opens the windows and kills everyone else.

That’s how a saying goes.

We certainly are having our share of depressed American killers these days.

Lost my job? Kill everyone at the workplace.

Can’t support my family as I should? Kill my family.

Considered a loser by the other school kids? Kill the school kids.

Suicide is an option too often taken after the above-mentioned homicides. What is lacking in our culture is the reverence for failure that would make a loser drink tea, write haikus, cultivate a style of elegant despondency. What is overabundant in our culture is the reverence for success.

We are the can-do people. In many parts of the world, probably in most, the prevailing attitude is what we here in the United States call fatalism - in those parts of the world they just call it the way things are. I understand that fatalism can do some damage. It can prevent the taking of corrective measures to solve a problem until it is too late and the problem becomes a catastrophe.

It leads not to progressive democracy but to guerrilla warfare and revolution. It allows ossified class and caste systems to persist. It blinds people to obvious, simple solutions.

That was the message of an influential book, “The Ugly American” (the term fell into the language as a way of describing Americans acting ugly abroad, when, in fact, the eponymous character is sensitive to foreign customs, he just happens to be ugly looking).

Inspired by its message of how the American can-do attitude could be exported, JFK put together his Peace Corps. Americans teaching the underdeveloped world how to succeed.

But there was no need for JFK’s overoptimistic program. Global capitalism is teaching the whole world about can-do. With that and Prozac, everything will be all right.

Or will it?

We can foresee a world where everyone who fails will open the windows and open fire.

Perhaps the Japanese, whose contribution to global capitalism is immense, should start their own Peace Corps and teach the rest of us how to fail. We can’t all be multimillionaire star athletes, as conscientious African-American sports figures have been telling kids for years, trying to dissuade them from unrealistic expectations. We can’t all be movie stars, rock giants, CEOs or even poets whose names are household words.

But any of us can fail elegantly. It’s not the money, the TV appearances, the adulation, the trophy spouses, the power. It’s style.

The loser kids who killed the kids who snubbed them were on the right track by cultivating a style.

But they couldn’t see how deeply satisfying that could be, so they had to get the guns and use them.

The culture failed them by not teaching them how to fail. Nobly. Elegantly. Beautifully. To the envy and admiration of the unimaginative, bovine seekers of success.

This sidebar appeared with the story: NOBLE FAILURES?

Do you have a noble failure to tell us about? Some failure at work, home or in your community that actually ended up being a good thing, filled with life lessons? Let us know about it. If we get enough responses, we’ll return to this topic on a future Perspective page.

Write: Noble failure/Rebecca Nappi/The Spokesman-Review, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210-1615. Or e-mail: Rebeccan@spokesman.com.