Almost everything in life boils down to some kind of social convention which is essentially 'tradition'.
I don't know if you have kids, but as soon as they start to ask questions, it becomes clear.
Like why you can't just wear your thong to work? Or nothing at all? Pull at the thread and it comes apart pretty quick. Answers lie more often lie in identity and culture, then they do some kind hard logic.
Obviously Monarchies represent a distinct issue as there's the essential problem of class, but I'd also argue there's something much more than intangible there: so many of the most successful countries have monarchies. Popular ones to boot. Even countries which had powerful socialist leaders (and of course socialism/communism would be utterly opposed to monarchy in theory because that's literally the top of the class system they want to destroy). Sweden, for example is a very socialist country with a monarchy that's more popular than the UK monarchy in the UK.
Of course, you can dump all of that and just use Western time, and mark your birthday in 'days since Jesus was born' ... but I'm not sure how relevant that would be in bucking tradition :)
I also think there is value in the Japanese 'era' system in some ways.
While we see it through the lens of 'Monarchy', maybe we consider just seeing it as 'era' which uses the Monarchy a specific demarcation point.
After all, a new 'era' would have represented entirely new forms of governance, structure, international/feudal relationships. An opportunity to do things like debt forgiveness, heck even build some public works like big libraries or museums, such as happens for each US President.
In many ways, it makes (or perhaps did) make more sense to mark 'eras' in relation to the geopolitical context as it would have in hard dates.
In the grand scheme of history we use the Geological Time Scale [1] (i.e. eras, epochs) as it's quite a bit more convenient that just citing dates.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful reply. I understand your idea.
> It boils down to “tradition”
Yeah, I think you are 100% correct, but I don’t think everything can be justified for that reason. For some countries, say, Sodomy Law is still tradition. In the U.S., people still use weird unit system, refusing adopting Metric system. I know they are extreme examples.
Celebrating new era is wonderful, but I hope people reconsider the use of this peculiar year counting system. It is a good time, I guess. Everything boils down to “tradition”, like you said, but I don’t think we have to stick to the same tradition.
I don't know if you have kids, but as soon as they start to ask questions, it becomes clear.
Like why you can't just wear your thong to work? Or nothing at all? Pull at the thread and it comes apart pretty quick. Answers lie more often lie in identity and culture, then they do some kind hard logic.
Obviously Monarchies represent a distinct issue as there's the essential problem of class, but I'd also argue there's something much more than intangible there: so many of the most successful countries have monarchies. Popular ones to boot. Even countries which had powerful socialist leaders (and of course socialism/communism would be utterly opposed to monarchy in theory because that's literally the top of the class system they want to destroy). Sweden, for example is a very socialist country with a monarchy that's more popular than the UK monarchy in the UK.
Of course, you can dump all of that and just use Western time, and mark your birthday in 'days since Jesus was born' ... but I'm not sure how relevant that would be in bucking tradition :)
I also think there is value in the Japanese 'era' system in some ways.
While we see it through the lens of 'Monarchy', maybe we consider just seeing it as 'era' which uses the Monarchy a specific demarcation point.
After all, a new 'era' would have represented entirely new forms of governance, structure, international/feudal relationships. An opportunity to do things like debt forgiveness, heck even build some public works like big libraries or museums, such as happens for each US President.
In many ways, it makes (or perhaps did) make more sense to mark 'eras' in relation to the geopolitical context as it would have in hard dates.
In the grand scheme of history we use the Geological Time Scale [1] (i.e. eras, epochs) as it's quite a bit more convenient that just citing dates.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale