Ethics, Education, and Religion
Apologies for how many asides there are. This topic seemed to really branch out in my head.
Eventually, every country wants to set up schools so it can have an educated population that can run the country and produce more income. (The Khmer Rouge is the exception that proves the rule, I should think.) They also help to manage the state, which is most obvious in the ancient Chinese and Korean system of exams to take a public office, which has been replicated, at least in principle, worldwide. Exams no longer include quite so much philosophy, but still expect you have jumped through certain social hoops.
In the West, the social function of education is more obvious, because of its religious roots. If you have a holy book, then you need people to be able to read the holy book. Literate people tend to be educated on other matters, are able to do bookkeeping, and therefore end up running the state's bureaucracy. Clerical jobs used to be occupied by clerics.
So that gets to the second function of education: cultural integration into society. You learn the values that are important to people, be they religious or secular. Acculturation through molding young minds to be a part of the society in which they live. For better or worse, it's always a bit coercive, now that education has spread beyond the upper classes. The grades are merits, useful for entering society; but the stick to this carrot includes mandatory attendance and various punishments, possibly including corporal.
So when we talk about education, what we're really talking about is the values of the culture that they want to pass on to their children. From our canon, we know essentially nothing about the educational systems of the Moon Kingdom of the Silver Millennium, nor are we wiser about life in the Crystal Tokyo. We do, however, know a lot about the values of the people who are important in the kingdom, so we can start there.
So let's talk about the prima facie virtues first: love and justice, passion, beauty, courage, and exams. Damn it Ami, really? "Love and Exams"? Okay, fine. Shiken 試験 could also mean "test" as in "experiment", but really we're back on the imperial examinations story. We could just pretend she said "wisdom" or "knowledge" or "sophia" instead. However, you do get some other meaning from tests: scientific method, merit, and impartiality. Still, love is not impartial.
We have some additional virtues from the introduction speeches of the Outers: embracing, flight, ruin and birth, and revolution. I don't think we really see those in the characters quite the same way, however. In Pluto, I think we see patience in spades. In Saturn, there is some hope that never dies. Uranus follows her dreams, no matter the cost. And in Neptune, I see some prudence, though she sometimes stretches that into compromising too far.
These virtues are, for the most part, completely uncontroversial. Love, on the other hand, love is going to be an interesting thing to try to teach at school. It's the very foundation of the ethical system, but it's the hardest thing to nail down. And the question of who is to be loved looms large.
Because of the release of The Odyssey in the past month, everyone has been talking about ξενία, or xenia in our alphabet. Xenia is the moral obligation between guest and host, the idea that outsiders must be treated with hospitality, but so too must the visitor treat the people he meets with respect.
From all accounts -- except the most recent translator of the Odyssey, Emily Wilson, who just doesn't seem to get the movie -- The Odyssey is a film about xenia. The theme is present in Homer's adaptation, but in Christopher Nolan's adaptation, it's the central pillar. Essentially, the Trojan Horse presented by the Greeks is a breach of hospitality, so much so that it has ripple effects through culture. Everyone starts to think that it's okay to abuse hospitality to get what they want, guests become suitors/power-seekers in Ithaca, and guests among Odysseus's crew kill their hosts to make it home alive (it doesn't work). And it ripples beyond this, to the extent that the social fabric itself falls apart.
An event I mentioned some posts above, the Late Bronze Age Collapse, is mentioned at the end of the movie in an attempt to fully drop the anvil, because audiences of our benighted age apparently need it. The Greeks become the Sea Peoples, whose raids nearly collapse all Western civilization. We were the baddies all along, it seems.
It's a refreshing contrast to the nationalist myth in the previous post, right? It's not the outside force that caused our people to lose their former glory, it's our own failure to live up to our own virtues. That doesn't seem to be true for the Moon Kingdom, which really was destroyed by outside force – and at the very least, Serenity I herself doesn't remind me of one of those asshole kings in the Iliad. But it's almost certainly what happens to Endymion's kingdom, where the corruption is viscerally present through the Youma.
The virtue of xenia, of hospitum, of hospitality, is probably old enough to date back to the time of the Moon Kingdom, based on the dates I gave in the previous post. And it's certainly, documentedly old enough if you choose the later date (documented in The Odyssey, of course).
Here, an advantage of being an English speaker: we've been talking about relations between guest and host, but in PIE they're the same word, *gʰóstis. In fact, ghost and geist are the same as guest and host as well, they're all about a foreign presence. The stated logic for xenia is that the stranger may well be a god in disguise. The Holy Ghost is that presence, right?
Christ extends xenia further in his teaching, via Matthew 25: "For I was hungry and you gave Me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave Me something to drink, I was a stranger and you took Me in ... Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." Offering hospitality in pagan thought is "in case a god comes in disguise, therefore protected by Zeus Xenios"; in Christian thought, it's literally "the divine is present in all strangers!"
(Three aside thoughts: (1) It's really hard to overstate the influence that Jesus had on modern ethics. (2) This is an example of how C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien found meaning in pre-Christian pagan ethics. (3) If that's the teaching, how did we end up where we are in the West? *sigh*)
I've gone on about this one concept quite a bit because this is the core ethical conflict in Sailor Moon. The Outers instinctively distrust strangers, the Inners instinctively welcome them.
The theme of the Stars season is xenia. In the Stars season, the Outers distrust the Kinmokuseijin to such an extent that they're suborned by the real baddies. (The manga is quite different, and will be addressed below.) On one hand, you have the strangers who come in friendship, but are pursued by other strangers who would do them harm (and harm the whole galaxy, it turns out). Some choose to help the agressors to keep their safety, others protect the emissaries from those who would happily kill everyone. The moral is clear, if the lesson is hard learned.
For all of the time I spent defending Maruka and Hichiru's ... uh, Haruka and Michiru's point of view in the S season, that sometimes sacrifices must be made, what they do in the Stars season is unforgivable. Absolutely unforgivable. They chose to break xenia, to work against their monarch and her guests on a divine mission, in order to seek temporary safety -- which was always an illusion, anyway. Allegiance to Galaxia always meant death. Prudence gave way to compromising, and finally turned to perfidy.
I'm honestly not sure that this was intentional on the part of the writers, because they don't really explore the concepts very well. Stars is very questionable as an anime season. Stuff happens, Mamoru disappears for literally months while Usagi is pining for him, with no one to notice he's kidnapped – then the plot finally ends, and we get our "Congratulations Usagi" moment at the end. But breaking hospitality is the temptation they wrote their characters into.
The manga versions of Haruka and Michiru don't have this problem; they only act as antagonists because they are dead, and their bodies/star seeds reanimated to battle against their friends to inflict extra despair damage. They each die in an ambushes set for them as they try to activate ancient defenses for the solar system, and die as heroes. Maybe the plan of splitting up was bad, but they're still heroes. They don't like the Sailor Starlights at first (probably from jealousy), and suspect them of working with the enemy (not entirely unreasonable). But on their own choice they never break hospitality, and they have learned the lessons from the S storyline about who is in charge.
But it's still about xenia. Phobos, Deimos, Luna, and Artemis all came from other worlds and helped their new host planet, where Tin Nyanko and Lead Crow come under false pretenses to win a victory. Galaxia is all to willing to exploit friendship to gain power. Her quests for power only gains her ever more thirst for power. The second half of the Stars manga is about the nature of evil and how corruption can only never be appeased or controlled, only rejected, over and over again.
There's also a lot of overt Christian imagery in the manga: a Christian graveyard, crucifixion of three, Galaxia's castle being an over-the-top gothic cathedral (most similar to Cologne Cathedral, but just more, plus added rose window), and of course the messiah in serafuku. But also souls as physical objects which are subject to rebirth, which suggests a bit of dharmic influence – which, since this is from Japan, probably means Buddhism. The Sailor Crystals come from the connection between tama meaning jewel and tamashii meaning soul, revealing the Shinto roots too. Rei has Shinto magic even while attending Catholic school.
Just a brief aside: this is a manga for schoolgirls, and they're killing off most of the main characters and putting 'em on crosses. And Galaxia's body count has to be in the trillions if you think about it for more than a minute. No wonder they didn't adapt it to screen back then. They decided to make their adaptation about xenia instead, which is somehow familiar.
These religiously-tinged events are going to affect all of the sailors, not just Rei. As time goes on, the people will think of her more and more as the Goddess-Queen of Moonkind. So too will the ethical lessons learned at great cost be prominently held in the lunar society. The founding myth is important, and (rolling it all back to the top), will be taught in schools.
And the founding myth is simply dripping in religious, sacred meaning. The messiah and her 12 apostles (8 planet sailors, Mamoru, Chibiusa, Artemis, Luna) (which I suppose makes Naru the Mary Magdeline of this metaphor?), who is the daughter of a goddess. The one scene at the end of S, where Usagi holds the infant Hotaru has layer after layer of symbolism. In one way, she's the Madonna with child, but her shell-shocked face invokes the grief of the cross. But also, she is Pharoah's daughter, saving the infant Moses from doom, but also embodies Moses himself, saving his people from Pharoah(90)'s wrath. And again, she is a Bodhisattva who returns again and teach love and justice, passing through the Galaxy Cauldron with wisdom into rebirth. Oh, and they all have names of pagan gods.
The founding myth is one of light versus darkness, and shows the heroes in their true form. The period where they all lived on Earth, in exile from the heavens (i.e. during the manga) becomes like the Hijrah to later generations of Crystal Millennium people -- a time when right and wrong were pure, and all of the chosen people lived in the same community, not spread out across time and space. Beryl and Galaxia made pacts with the devil at terrible cost, but were defeated by friendship, love, and the ultimate sacrifice. If Sailor Moon is a true story, then there's really no secular way to tell it. It's religious from beginning to end. And as I said in the nationalism chapter, this founding myth what a nation is built around.
Nations are built in homes, in media, and in the schools – anywhere people tell stories about themselves. At first I thought Ami-chan would build the school system out, and she likely would do all the initial planning. But it's too important to leave it just to exams girl. Makoto wants people to learn useful things for life, like cooking and economics. Minako wants school life to be fun, to have sports and clubs and festivals and performances. And Rei, well, Rei knows that children need to learn virtues, ethics, and stories. This makes sense, because you want to build balanced children, and to some degree each of the Inners represent one aspect of the ichirei shikon, which in Shinto thought you want to have in balance.
We find ourselves at a really interesting point, where the state doesn't really want to impose an official religion, but it is an official religion. Those stained glass windows of Usagi I mentioned a few posts back? Well, here they are. The sailor guardians don't seem like the kind of people who need temples for worship, but there will still be civic spaces that need art and expression, and a good deal of the civic art will celebrate their sacred leaders. If there comes a time when the princesses pass away but the Moon Kingdom endures, proper temples will surely be built. Look at the Lincoln Memorial or Lenin's tomb to see how secular societies build temples to their founders, and it will surely be more intense in an explicitly religious society.
But not a monolithic, enforced religion. Sailor Moon has a postmodern, syncretic plot that accepts elements of several religions, and even Rei interacts with multiple religions. It's hard to see this set of people restricting bona fide religion (though Ami may want to double-blind test those Scientology e-meters first). But once we start teaching kids about the eternal battle between light and darkness as history, we're in the zone of state religion.
As an author, you have a lot of freedom here. Maybe the state faith all works great. Some citizens will take it more seriously than others. But the word that comes to mind for me is "schism". Like every religious corpus, people will identify with the parts they like. Some will praise Usagi's kindness to outsiders, while others exalt her adamant defense of the homeworld. The immigration debate today, but with added religious overtones. Well, I guess the overtones were already there, since you can take xenia, or Christ at his word above – or otherwise, you can take a more Calvinist interpretation that only the Elect are really worthy of this treatment.
But Usagi herself is still alive, as are her apostles. It's harder to get into debates about WWUD? when she is around to tell you what she would do. Of course, with my experience on the internet, people will still debate "what she really means" and it will all be a little maddening. Such is the nature of temporal power, such is life.
A distant Moon Kingdom that outlives the heroic generation, past the Crystal Millennium, will eventually have to deal with these problems. Miniskirt Pirates a.k.a. Mouretsu Pirates is effectively a Sailor Moon fic set in this era (or are we really supposed to believe that the blondes of the Serenity royal family wearing odango are completely unrelated?), and it wrestles with the problem of royal legitimacy and purpose after the death of the founders. Yes, you can set a fanfic in this era too! The neat thing about Sailor Moon is the the setting's scope is functionally unlimited, so long as your heroes believe in love and justice.
The IR implications of the Moon Kingdom being a religious society are pretty boring, no matter what assumptions your story makes about the status of Earth nations or alien empires. A country which has a state religion but free practice otherwise is functionally Sweden or the UK. The UK has enemies, but it's not because of Anglicanism, it's the long history of colonialism. Any state that doesn't like another because of the religion is probably going to come into to conflict for one reason or another anyway – values, resources, not liking the cut of their jib. On Earth, religious conflicts are usually about other things, stolen land or cycles of retribution, none of which apply here. Unless the story includes China (e.g.) building a moon base on the haunted ruins of the Silver Millennium, there's really no cause for conflict.
Back on education: we now have a state value system, which verges on a state religion, which we want to be taught in schools. There's an important reason for this: Acculturation is best accomplished when young, as basically every state and religion has realized. Some people never change their minds, so the first crack is an unmissable opportunity.
So how do they do that? Public or private education? The Japanese model of independent schools. My first inclination is that they'd be government run, but it turns out we have a tiny bit of canon to lean on!
If you accept the canon of people's lifespans getting extended by ten times, that will likely lower the birth rate a whole lot. Women might delay having kids until their 80s or 90s to ensure they are secure enough to have kids. And schools will be even rarer than in Japan today. (Free fanfic idea: All of the secondary students in Crystal Japan attend one normal-sized boarding school, and get sorted into houses based on which sailor senshi they like the best.) Outside of immigration and population boom periods, the market for education will be pretty small, with not a lot of room for competition.
Which means the set of schools will be pretty small, well-funded, and closely observed by the state, no matter who is the ostensible operator of the school. If the primary threat to the security of your state is women making pacts with the devil, you're going to watch this all very closely, right? No really, that is the primary threat. This is the prime time to instill values, to stop bullies before they start in the name of love and justice. The princesses want people to build a sense of camaraderie that they shared, and let them discover themselves and make lifelong friends.
For primary education in this regime, well, have you seen Non Non Biyori? In that show, the little agricultural town no longer produces many children, so all five of the school's kids across all six grades attend classes together – most of which is self-study, because their teacher is kind of lazy, too. Mixing ages tends to have good effects on education. It's also more like the environment our tribal ancestors were educated under, where the whole community educates the next generation. Ami likes exams, so there will be some standards, but I suspect most of that will be pushed on the older kids. What you really want to teach kids at this age is basic survival facts, and ways of thinking. Mathematical reasoning, reading, social skills, and culture – enough to build upon in adolescence.
This is probably the age when they get tested on their knowledge of the anime of Sailor Moon, and do worksheets on the themes of each episode. In our setting, the anime already exists because the characters crossed universes. In a more canon setting, you'd expect that it would get made in the early Crystal Millennium. Rei and Usagi will ensure that, and it's great for teaching morals to kids. (The guy who will have made the Sailor Says segments will be exiled to Nemesis.)
For higher education, with long lifetimes one would expect most people to get it eventually. For some, right away, but some people might get to it 120 years later, when they're looking for a change in their life. Unlike on Earth, university incomes really cannot be driven by enrollment, because there's not enough people. It really has to be the state funding it, and the primary function will be producing research, not graduates. Truly a paradise for the professors.
But because people can enroll multiple times, and we'd expect a portion to do so over the course of centuries, total enrollment in secondary schools may be something like double that of high schools. Certainly, you'd expect doctors to go back to medical school every two or three decades simply to keep up with advances. (And pray they actually use the new techniques.)
The best academies are on Mercury, of course, and Earth as well. There's a great agricultural school on Ganymede. You know, that kind of setting-building, which should be easy for anyone.
With long lifetimes, there's another big problem here. You know the adage, "science advances one funeral at a time"? Or in the words of Max Planck, who is smarter than me and felt the problem more deeply:
This will be a deep, core problem that faces the Moon Kingdom, because 10x longer life spans make this mechanism work 10x slower. It's a problem with human nature. Can people really think themselves correct for fifty years, then come around to a new opinion in the face of evidence? Our lives right now suggest otherwise, with boomers educated in the era of "maybe global cooling is a thing?" still cannot accept the overwhelming evidence that we have had a decade of global record or near-record high temperatures. People killed by global warming in Europe this year are going to their graves thinking that global warming isn't real. Imagine someone with attitudes that are 950 years out of date! Okay, you don't have to imagine, Pete Hesgeth has a "Deus Vult" tattoo.
This problem is not limited in education, but it will be felt most deeply there. I don't know how lifetime tenure of professors survives in a society like this, but at the same time, how does a compassionate society turn people out of jobs that have become their identity? Especially for males, jobs are identity.
What is the purpose of education? Is it to produce new ideas? As Friedrich Nietzsche would have it, to produce those men who write new values and new law-tables? Or is it to produce the same society over again? Like almost all of our pre-industrial ancestors, who saw less change in their lifetimes than we see in half a year, they simply wanted to reproduce the tribe. Is education for the Dreamtime, the eternal past interacting with the present? Was our modern period the Age of Heroes the time in history when everything could change, mostly inaccessible to those born a half-millennium into the reign of Neo Queen Serenity? Or does society continue its rapid expansion of learning, leading to new forms of enlightenment?
I don't really know, and I'm not writing into this period of future history. I'm writing at the early part, where education will depend largely on initial conditions. In our setting, much of the education will take place on Earth like it does today. And on the Moon, Moonbase Alpha will bootstrap its own schools first, when the first Alphans have children. It may go through a period of people being shipped back to Earth for anything advanced, or be very expensive on the Moon. And finally university research outposts give way to actual schools and universities. As an American, this is not hard to imagine, it's only 170 years back for large swathes of our country.
Of course, people should be able to see some of the upcoming challenges, just as I predict them here. (Obviously, unpredictable things should happen too.) You might expect some of the princesses to avoid long-term planning, but not Ami, Setsuna, nor Artemis. There will be plans to avoid the problems in advance, some of which even work!
So just by changing human lifespan, we create the conditions to stratify and ossify society further. (Honestly, I hadn't even thought of these problems until I finished writing about grade schools, and asked myself what happens at the universities. Essay writing is fun sometimes.) I can actually start to see where the Black Moon Clan's criticisms come from now. Long life spans really do change the balance of power, keep corrupt people in, and make it nigh impossible for the younger generations to surpass the old. But remember the Black Moon truthers are all kind of dumb and Demande is basically an incel – the normal kind of dude who sees life, believes he should have a shortcut, and blames his problems on other people. The Moon Kingdom might have its problems, but the Black Moon Clan doesn't have the solution.
But maybe Usagi does have the solution. To bring that earlier aside into the main text, another messiah, Jesus had major effects on ethical thought, to the extent that we no longer recognize the source and humanists claim it as their own. For instance, take slavery, where Jesus didn't say much about it directly, but left ample hints in the parables. The lessons were clear from the beginning, but people just didn't have the mindset to hear it. (Jesus lampshaded this.) Yet even by the 300s people were talking about how slavery was unjustifiable if all humans are God's children. It set in motion a very long chain of events which led to the end of officially sanctioned slavery in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Maybe Usagi, too, may manage to put something in motion that makes the problem less, or even moot. The gift of life might be the easy part for her, when was is needed for her kingdom is nothing less is a revolution in their hearts. History shows that messiahs can do so, and have done this already. The moral arc of history doesn't just bend towards justice on its own. Someone bent it.
And we, too, bend history with the ethics we choose to uphold and pass on, and those we excuse ourselves from. Going back to ancient Greece, it's hard to say how much of the Trojan War actually happened as shown in the Iliad. (Odysseus is an unreliable narrator, so much of the Odyssey of course didn't happen.) We know Troy was sieged several times from archaeology. We know it fell around the same time. We know the Bronze Age Collapse happened, and suspect that the "Sea Peoples" in Egyptian records are actually Greek raiders. We know that in this time, the Greeks lost their writing system entirely, and eventually made a new one based on the Phoenician one.
Part of the explanation from Homer, which comes to him from oral tradition, is that the Trojan Horse broke xenia in a spectacular fashion. Moreover, most of the kings were self-centered rich assholes. And that this was the last generation of heroes. After the long war, nothing was ever quite the same. The message is clear to not give up on our values. Those who do face divine punishment in Zeus' name, or maybe punishment in the name of the Moon.
Apologies for how many asides there are. This topic seemed to really branch out in my head.
Eventually, every country wants to set up schools so it can have an educated population that can run the country and produce more income. (The Khmer Rouge is the exception that proves the rule, I should think.) They also help to manage the state, which is most obvious in the ancient Chinese and Korean system of exams to take a public office, which has been replicated, at least in principle, worldwide. Exams no longer include quite so much philosophy, but still expect you have jumped through certain social hoops.
In the West, the social function of education is more obvious, because of its religious roots. If you have a holy book, then you need people to be able to read the holy book. Literate people tend to be educated on other matters, are able to do bookkeeping, and therefore end up running the state's bureaucracy. Clerical jobs used to be occupied by clerics.
So that gets to the second function of education: cultural integration into society. You learn the values that are important to people, be they religious or secular. Acculturation through molding young minds to be a part of the society in which they live. For better or worse, it's always a bit coercive, now that education has spread beyond the upper classes. The grades are merits, useful for entering society; but the stick to this carrot includes mandatory attendance and various punishments, possibly including corporal.
So when we talk about education, what we're really talking about is the values of the culture that they want to pass on to their children. From our canon, we know essentially nothing about the educational systems of the Moon Kingdom of the Silver Millennium, nor are we wiser about life in the Crystal Tokyo. We do, however, know a lot about the values of the people who are important in the kingdom, so we can start there.
So let's talk about the prima facie virtues first: love and justice, passion, beauty, courage, and exams. Damn it Ami, really? "Love and Exams"? Okay, fine. Shiken 試験 could also mean "test" as in "experiment", but really we're back on the imperial examinations story. We could just pretend she said "wisdom" or "knowledge" or "sophia" instead. However, you do get some other meaning from tests: scientific method, merit, and impartiality. Still, love is not impartial.
We have some additional virtues from the introduction speeches of the Outers: embracing, flight, ruin and birth, and revolution. I don't think we really see those in the characters quite the same way, however. In Pluto, I think we see patience in spades. In Saturn, there is some hope that never dies. Uranus follows her dreams, no matter the cost. And in Neptune, I see some prudence, though she sometimes stretches that into compromising too far.
These virtues are, for the most part, completely uncontroversial. Love, on the other hand, love is going to be an interesting thing to try to teach at school. It's the very foundation of the ethical system, but it's the hardest thing to nail down. And the question of who is to be loved looms large.
Because of the release of The Odyssey in the past month, everyone has been talking about ξενία, or xenia in our alphabet. Xenia is the moral obligation between guest and host, the idea that outsiders must be treated with hospitality, but so too must the visitor treat the people he meets with respect.
Wikipedia, Xenia (Greek) Wrote:Xenia consists of two basic rules:
The respect from hosts to guests. Hosts must be hospitable to guests and provide them with a bath, food, drink, gifts, and safe escort to their next destination. It is considered rude to ask guests questions, or even to ask who they are, before they have finished the meal provided to them.
The respect from guests to hosts. Guests must be courteous to their hosts and not be a threat or burden. Guests are expected to provide stories and news from the outside world. Most importantly, guests are expected to reciprocate if their hosts ever call upon them in their homes.
From all accounts -- except the most recent translator of the Odyssey, Emily Wilson, who just doesn't seem to get the movie -- The Odyssey is a film about xenia. The theme is present in Homer's adaptation, but in Christopher Nolan's adaptation, it's the central pillar. Essentially, the Trojan Horse presented by the Greeks is a breach of hospitality, so much so that it has ripple effects through culture. Everyone starts to think that it's okay to abuse hospitality to get what they want, guests become suitors/power-seekers in Ithaca, and guests among Odysseus's crew kill their hosts to make it home alive (it doesn't work). And it ripples beyond this, to the extent that the social fabric itself falls apart.
An event I mentioned some posts above, the Late Bronze Age Collapse, is mentioned at the end of the movie in an attempt to fully drop the anvil, because audiences of our benighted age apparently need it. The Greeks become the Sea Peoples, whose raids nearly collapse all Western civilization. We were the baddies all along, it seems.
It's a refreshing contrast to the nationalist myth in the previous post, right? It's not the outside force that caused our people to lose their former glory, it's our own failure to live up to our own virtues. That doesn't seem to be true for the Moon Kingdom, which really was destroyed by outside force – and at the very least, Serenity I herself doesn't remind me of one of those asshole kings in the Iliad. But it's almost certainly what happens to Endymion's kingdom, where the corruption is viscerally present through the Youma.
The virtue of xenia, of hospitum, of hospitality, is probably old enough to date back to the time of the Moon Kingdom, based on the dates I gave in the previous post. And it's certainly, documentedly old enough if you choose the later date (documented in The Odyssey, of course).
Here, an advantage of being an English speaker: we've been talking about relations between guest and host, but in PIE they're the same word, *gʰóstis. In fact, ghost and geist are the same as guest and host as well, they're all about a foreign presence. The stated logic for xenia is that the stranger may well be a god in disguise. The Holy Ghost is that presence, right?
Christ extends xenia further in his teaching, via Matthew 25: "For I was hungry and you gave Me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave Me something to drink, I was a stranger and you took Me in ... Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." Offering hospitality in pagan thought is "in case a god comes in disguise, therefore protected by Zeus Xenios"; in Christian thought, it's literally "the divine is present in all strangers!"
(Three aside thoughts: (1) It's really hard to overstate the influence that Jesus had on modern ethics. (2) This is an example of how C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien found meaning in pre-Christian pagan ethics. (3) If that's the teaching, how did we end up where we are in the West? *sigh*)
I've gone on about this one concept quite a bit because this is the core ethical conflict in Sailor Moon. The Outers instinctively distrust strangers, the Inners instinctively welcome them.
The theme of the Stars season is xenia. In the Stars season, the Outers distrust the Kinmokuseijin to such an extent that they're suborned by the real baddies. (The manga is quite different, and will be addressed below.) On one hand, you have the strangers who come in friendship, but are pursued by other strangers who would do them harm (and harm the whole galaxy, it turns out). Some choose to help the agressors to keep their safety, others protect the emissaries from those who would happily kill everyone. The moral is clear, if the lesson is hard learned.
For all of the time I spent defending Maruka and Hichiru's ... uh, Haruka and Michiru's point of view in the S season, that sometimes sacrifices must be made, what they do in the Stars season is unforgivable. Absolutely unforgivable. They chose to break xenia, to work against their monarch and her guests on a divine mission, in order to seek temporary safety -- which was always an illusion, anyway. Allegiance to Galaxia always meant death. Prudence gave way to compromising, and finally turned to perfidy.
I'm honestly not sure that this was intentional on the part of the writers, because they don't really explore the concepts very well. Stars is very questionable as an anime season. Stuff happens, Mamoru disappears for literally months while Usagi is pining for him, with no one to notice he's kidnapped – then the plot finally ends, and we get our "Congratulations Usagi" moment at the end. But breaking hospitality is the temptation they wrote their characters into.
The manga versions of Haruka and Michiru don't have this problem; they only act as antagonists because they are dead, and their bodies/star seeds reanimated to battle against their friends to inflict extra despair damage. They each die in an ambushes set for them as they try to activate ancient defenses for the solar system, and die as heroes. Maybe the plan of splitting up was bad, but they're still heroes. They don't like the Sailor Starlights at first (probably from jealousy), and suspect them of working with the enemy (not entirely unreasonable). But on their own choice they never break hospitality, and they have learned the lessons from the S storyline about who is in charge.
But it's still about xenia. Phobos, Deimos, Luna, and Artemis all came from other worlds and helped their new host planet, where Tin Nyanko and Lead Crow come under false pretenses to win a victory. Galaxia is all to willing to exploit friendship to gain power. Her quests for power only gains her ever more thirst for power. The second half of the Stars manga is about the nature of evil and how corruption can only never be appeased or controlled, only rejected, over and over again.
There's also a lot of overt Christian imagery in the manga: a Christian graveyard, crucifixion of three, Galaxia's castle being an over-the-top gothic cathedral (most similar to Cologne Cathedral, but just more, plus added rose window), and of course the messiah in serafuku. But also souls as physical objects which are subject to rebirth, which suggests a bit of dharmic influence – which, since this is from Japan, probably means Buddhism. The Sailor Crystals come from the connection between tama meaning jewel and tamashii meaning soul, revealing the Shinto roots too. Rei has Shinto magic even while attending Catholic school.
Just a brief aside: this is a manga for schoolgirls, and they're killing off most of the main characters and putting 'em on crosses. And Galaxia's body count has to be in the trillions if you think about it for more than a minute. No wonder they didn't adapt it to screen back then. They decided to make their adaptation about xenia instead, which is somehow familiar.
These religiously-tinged events are going to affect all of the sailors, not just Rei. As time goes on, the people will think of her more and more as the Goddess-Queen of Moonkind. So too will the ethical lessons learned at great cost be prominently held in the lunar society. The founding myth is important, and (rolling it all back to the top), will be taught in schools.
And the founding myth is simply dripping in religious, sacred meaning. The messiah and her 12 apostles (8 planet sailors, Mamoru, Chibiusa, Artemis, Luna) (which I suppose makes Naru the Mary Magdeline of this metaphor?), who is the daughter of a goddess. The one scene at the end of S, where Usagi holds the infant Hotaru has layer after layer of symbolism. In one way, she's the Madonna with child, but her shell-shocked face invokes the grief of the cross. But also, she is Pharoah's daughter, saving the infant Moses from doom, but also embodies Moses himself, saving his people from Pharoah(90)'s wrath. And again, she is a Bodhisattva who returns again and teach love and justice, passing through the Galaxy Cauldron with wisdom into rebirth. Oh, and they all have names of pagan gods.
The founding myth is one of light versus darkness, and shows the heroes in their true form. The period where they all lived on Earth, in exile from the heavens (i.e. during the manga) becomes like the Hijrah to later generations of Crystal Millennium people -- a time when right and wrong were pure, and all of the chosen people lived in the same community, not spread out across time and space. Beryl and Galaxia made pacts with the devil at terrible cost, but were defeated by friendship, love, and the ultimate sacrifice. If Sailor Moon is a true story, then there's really no secular way to tell it. It's religious from beginning to end. And as I said in the nationalism chapter, this founding myth what a nation is built around.
Nations are built in homes, in media, and in the schools – anywhere people tell stories about themselves. At first I thought Ami-chan would build the school system out, and she likely would do all the initial planning. But it's too important to leave it just to exams girl. Makoto wants people to learn useful things for life, like cooking and economics. Minako wants school life to be fun, to have sports and clubs and festivals and performances. And Rei, well, Rei knows that children need to learn virtues, ethics, and stories. This makes sense, because you want to build balanced children, and to some degree each of the Inners represent one aspect of the ichirei shikon, which in Shinto thought you want to have in balance.
We find ourselves at a really interesting point, where the state doesn't really want to impose an official religion, but it is an official religion. Those stained glass windows of Usagi I mentioned a few posts back? Well, here they are. The sailor guardians don't seem like the kind of people who need temples for worship, but there will still be civic spaces that need art and expression, and a good deal of the civic art will celebrate their sacred leaders. If there comes a time when the princesses pass away but the Moon Kingdom endures, proper temples will surely be built. Look at the Lincoln Memorial or Lenin's tomb to see how secular societies build temples to their founders, and it will surely be more intense in an explicitly religious society.
But not a monolithic, enforced religion. Sailor Moon has a postmodern, syncretic plot that accepts elements of several religions, and even Rei interacts with multiple religions. It's hard to see this set of people restricting bona fide religion (though Ami may want to double-blind test those Scientology e-meters first). But once we start teaching kids about the eternal battle between light and darkness as history, we're in the zone of state religion.
As an author, you have a lot of freedom here. Maybe the state faith all works great. Some citizens will take it more seriously than others. But the word that comes to mind for me is "schism". Like every religious corpus, people will identify with the parts they like. Some will praise Usagi's kindness to outsiders, while others exalt her adamant defense of the homeworld. The immigration debate today, but with added religious overtones. Well, I guess the overtones were already there, since you can take xenia, or Christ at his word above – or otherwise, you can take a more Calvinist interpretation that only the Elect are really worthy of this treatment.
But Usagi herself is still alive, as are her apostles. It's harder to get into debates about WWUD? when she is around to tell you what she would do. Of course, with my experience on the internet, people will still debate "what she really means" and it will all be a little maddening. Such is the nature of temporal power, such is life.
A distant Moon Kingdom that outlives the heroic generation, past the Crystal Millennium, will eventually have to deal with these problems. Miniskirt Pirates a.k.a. Mouretsu Pirates is effectively a Sailor Moon fic set in this era (or are we really supposed to believe that the blondes of the Serenity royal family wearing odango are completely unrelated?), and it wrestles with the problem of royal legitimacy and purpose after the death of the founders. Yes, you can set a fanfic in this era too! The neat thing about Sailor Moon is the the setting's scope is functionally unlimited, so long as your heroes believe in love and justice.
The IR implications of the Moon Kingdom being a religious society are pretty boring, no matter what assumptions your story makes about the status of Earth nations or alien empires. A country which has a state religion but free practice otherwise is functionally Sweden or the UK. The UK has enemies, but it's not because of Anglicanism, it's the long history of colonialism. Any state that doesn't like another because of the religion is probably going to come into to conflict for one reason or another anyway – values, resources, not liking the cut of their jib. On Earth, religious conflicts are usually about other things, stolen land or cycles of retribution, none of which apply here. Unless the story includes China (e.g.) building a moon base on the haunted ruins of the Silver Millennium, there's really no cause for conflict.
Back on education: we now have a state value system, which verges on a state religion, which we want to be taught in schools. There's an important reason for this: Acculturation is best accomplished when young, as basically every state and religion has realized. Some people never change their minds, so the first crack is an unmissable opportunity.
So how do they do that? Public or private education? The Japanese model of independent schools. My first inclination is that they'd be government run, but it turns out we have a tiny bit of canon to lean on!
If you accept the canon of people's lifespans getting extended by ten times, that will likely lower the birth rate a whole lot. Women might delay having kids until their 80s or 90s to ensure they are secure enough to have kids. And schools will be even rarer than in Japan today. (Free fanfic idea: All of the secondary students in Crystal Japan attend one normal-sized boarding school, and get sorted into houses based on which sailor senshi they like the best.) Outside of immigration and population boom periods, the market for education will be pretty small, with not a lot of room for competition.
Which means the set of schools will be pretty small, well-funded, and closely observed by the state, no matter who is the ostensible operator of the school. If the primary threat to the security of your state is women making pacts with the devil, you're going to watch this all very closely, right? No really, that is the primary threat. This is the prime time to instill values, to stop bullies before they start in the name of love and justice. The princesses want people to build a sense of camaraderie that they shared, and let them discover themselves and make lifelong friends.
For primary education in this regime, well, have you seen Non Non Biyori? In that show, the little agricultural town no longer produces many children, so all five of the school's kids across all six grades attend classes together – most of which is self-study, because their teacher is kind of lazy, too. Mixing ages tends to have good effects on education. It's also more like the environment our tribal ancestors were educated under, where the whole community educates the next generation. Ami likes exams, so there will be some standards, but I suspect most of that will be pushed on the older kids. What you really want to teach kids at this age is basic survival facts, and ways of thinking. Mathematical reasoning, reading, social skills, and culture – enough to build upon in adolescence.
This is probably the age when they get tested on their knowledge of the anime of Sailor Moon, and do worksheets on the themes of each episode. In our setting, the anime already exists because the characters crossed universes. In a more canon setting, you'd expect that it would get made in the early Crystal Millennium. Rei and Usagi will ensure that, and it's great for teaching morals to kids. (The guy who will have made the Sailor Says segments will be exiled to Nemesis.)
For higher education, with long lifetimes one would expect most people to get it eventually. For some, right away, but some people might get to it 120 years later, when they're looking for a change in their life. Unlike on Earth, university incomes really cannot be driven by enrollment, because there's not enough people. It really has to be the state funding it, and the primary function will be producing research, not graduates. Truly a paradise for the professors.
But because people can enroll multiple times, and we'd expect a portion to do so over the course of centuries, total enrollment in secondary schools may be something like double that of high schools. Certainly, you'd expect doctors to go back to medical school every two or three decades simply to keep up with advances. (And pray they actually use the new techniques.)
The best academies are on Mercury, of course, and Earth as well. There's a great agricultural school on Ganymede. You know, that kind of setting-building, which should be easy for anyone.
With long lifetimes, there's another big problem here. You know the adage, "science advances one funeral at a time"? Or in the words of Max Planck, who is smarter than me and felt the problem more deeply:
Quote:A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it ...
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.
This will be a deep, core problem that faces the Moon Kingdom, because 10x longer life spans make this mechanism work 10x slower. It's a problem with human nature. Can people really think themselves correct for fifty years, then come around to a new opinion in the face of evidence? Our lives right now suggest otherwise, with boomers educated in the era of "maybe global cooling is a thing?" still cannot accept the overwhelming evidence that we have had a decade of global record or near-record high temperatures. People killed by global warming in Europe this year are going to their graves thinking that global warming isn't real. Imagine someone with attitudes that are 950 years out of date! Okay, you don't have to imagine, Pete Hesgeth has a "Deus Vult" tattoo.
This problem is not limited in education, but it will be felt most deeply there. I don't know how lifetime tenure of professors survives in a society like this, but at the same time, how does a compassionate society turn people out of jobs that have become their identity? Especially for males, jobs are identity.
What is the purpose of education? Is it to produce new ideas? As Friedrich Nietzsche would have it, to produce those men who write new values and new law-tables? Or is it to produce the same society over again? Like almost all of our pre-industrial ancestors, who saw less change in their lifetimes than we see in half a year, they simply wanted to reproduce the tribe. Is education for the Dreamtime, the eternal past interacting with the present? Was our modern period the Age of Heroes the time in history when everything could change, mostly inaccessible to those born a half-millennium into the reign of Neo Queen Serenity? Or does society continue its rapid expansion of learning, leading to new forms of enlightenment?
I don't really know, and I'm not writing into this period of future history. I'm writing at the early part, where education will depend largely on initial conditions. In our setting, much of the education will take place on Earth like it does today. And on the Moon, Moonbase Alpha will bootstrap its own schools first, when the first Alphans have children. It may go through a period of people being shipped back to Earth for anything advanced, or be very expensive on the Moon. And finally university research outposts give way to actual schools and universities. As an American, this is not hard to imagine, it's only 170 years back for large swathes of our country.
Of course, people should be able to see some of the upcoming challenges, just as I predict them here. (Obviously, unpredictable things should happen too.) You might expect some of the princesses to avoid long-term planning, but not Ami, Setsuna, nor Artemis. There will be plans to avoid the problems in advance, some of which even work!
So just by changing human lifespan, we create the conditions to stratify and ossify society further. (Honestly, I hadn't even thought of these problems until I finished writing about grade schools, and asked myself what happens at the universities. Essay writing is fun sometimes.) I can actually start to see where the Black Moon Clan's criticisms come from now. Long life spans really do change the balance of power, keep corrupt people in, and make it nigh impossible for the younger generations to surpass the old. But remember the Black Moon truthers are all kind of dumb and Demande is basically an incel – the normal kind of dude who sees life, believes he should have a shortcut, and blames his problems on other people. The Moon Kingdom might have its problems, but the Black Moon Clan doesn't have the solution.
But maybe Usagi does have the solution. To bring that earlier aside into the main text, another messiah, Jesus had major effects on ethical thought, to the extent that we no longer recognize the source and humanists claim it as their own. For instance, take slavery, where Jesus didn't say much about it directly, but left ample hints in the parables. The lessons were clear from the beginning, but people just didn't have the mindset to hear it. (Jesus lampshaded this.) Yet even by the 300s people were talking about how slavery was unjustifiable if all humans are God's children. It set in motion a very long chain of events which led to the end of officially sanctioned slavery in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Maybe Usagi, too, may manage to put something in motion that makes the problem less, or even moot. The gift of life might be the easy part for her, when was is needed for her kingdom is nothing less is a revolution in their hearts. History shows that messiahs can do so, and have done this already. The moral arc of history doesn't just bend towards justice on its own. Someone bent it.
And we, too, bend history with the ethics we choose to uphold and pass on, and those we excuse ourselves from. Going back to ancient Greece, it's hard to say how much of the Trojan War actually happened as shown in the Iliad. (Odysseus is an unreliable narrator, so much of the Odyssey of course didn't happen.) We know Troy was sieged several times from archaeology. We know it fell around the same time. We know the Bronze Age Collapse happened, and suspect that the "Sea Peoples" in Egyptian records are actually Greek raiders. We know that in this time, the Greeks lost their writing system entirely, and eventually made a new one based on the Phoenician one.
Part of the explanation from Homer, which comes to him from oral tradition, is that the Trojan Horse broke xenia in a spectacular fashion. Moreover, most of the kings were self-centered rich assholes. And that this was the last generation of heroes. After the long war, nothing was ever quite the same. The message is clear to not give up on our values. Those who do face divine punishment in Zeus' name, or maybe punishment in the name of the Moon.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto