Love of one's own

Nationalism expresses longing for civic friendship, not "hatred"

Watching the World Cup this month, with all of its national passions on display, I was reminded of a very good book on nationalism. In Imagined Communities (1983), the Marxist political anthropologist Benedict Anderson writes,

In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love.

He notes that the cultural products of nationalism — its art, poetry and music — have such love as their predominant theme. “On the other hand, how truly rare it is to find analogous nationalist products expressing fear and loathing.” [141-2]

National character grows among a people from shared experience. They speak the same language and pray to the same gods; their fathers fought in the same wars; their grandmothers tell stories that convey how one ought to feel about familiar things. They are likely to have a persistent stock of nursery rhymes and drinking songs; a repertoire of gestures, subtle facial inflections and emotional tones peculiar to them. Mutually recognizable to one another, they enjoy a form of social wealth that accumulates among inhabitants of some bounded territory that has been inhabited continuously for generations by the same people. Such an inheritance is far from universal; it is enjoyed by peoples who, often for reasons of geographical accident, have been spared conquest, colonization and dispersal long enough to form a nation, for example the “First Nations” of North America (as the indigenous tribes are called in Canada). The word “nation” shares its root with “native” and “natural”, and indeed a nation may claim an autochthonous origin for its ancestors — as though the earth itself, or rather their small part of it, were the original mother or father of their common lineage.

Consider that the appearance of the English flag gives consternation. The Union Jack is a flag of modern empire, and this we are comfortable with. The Red Cross is the ensign of St. George, patron saint of England, flown since the 13th century. It is the flag of a nation. It is permissible during the World Cup, but displays of it outside the cordon sanitaire of sport are taken as barely-disguised expressions of “hate”.

The conflation of communal fellow-feeling with racism (or “fascism”) denies people an elemental part of human experience. This is applied selectively. We cosmopolitans deny ourselves such experience, uniquely and asymmetrically, in a display of moral asceticism. This asceticism becomes our own point of pride, an inverted form of ethnocentrism.

The term “ethnomasochism” names this inverted thing. It has gained currency on the radical Right as a shorthand for the peculiar self-effacement that is required of the native-born populations in Western countries. One needn’t sign on to the entire interpretive lens of the hard Right to recognize that this term refers to something real in the collective psyche of the West, and to wonder about its inner workings.

There is a positive political moralism, of which ethnomasochism might be seen as the negative corollary. The French political philosopher Pierre Manent identifies “humanitarianism” as the post-Christian opinion of the cosmopolitan consensus that imperceptibly shapes our thoughts and feelings, both in public and private. It goes like this:

Peace and unity belong to the natural condition of mankind; its fragmentation into separate political bodies solicitous of their independence is the toxic fountainhead of everything that is wrong in human circumstances. Thus the right thing to do, the worthy enterprise, is to bring about the pacification and unification of humanity through the erasing or weakening of borders, the acceleration of the circulation of goods, services, information, and human beings, the fostering of an ever stronger and wider fellow-feeling among countries and peoples. Accordingly, looking at human things from the perspective of one’s own community — its common good and the peculiar content and quality of its education and way of life — is intrinsically wrong because it amounts to turning one’s back on the rest of mankind. Looking at human things … without the least preference (and even with a tad of healthy dislike) for what is ours — is intrinsically right and “progressive.” [Italics added]

Such an ethic of collective self-suspicion promises impartiality, but in fact delivers us into a peculiar moral disability. It scrambles those affirmative points of reference by which an encultured human being takes his bearings. He finds “less and less to love and admire, even to understand, in the human associations” to which he belongs.

Normally, it is from such a foundation of belonging that one develops the ability to engage other societies, both critically and appreciatively — indeed, the ability simply to see them. If you have ever read the anthropological writings of Christian missionaries to foreign lands, you may have noticed how finely observed they sometimes are, as compared to NGO-talk about the same places. Perhaps that is  because the former approach other peoples from within a concrete tradition of moral experience and judgment of their own. That is, “prejudice” may have some positive epistemic role to play in the encounter with others. One observes them, not as an entomologist does a beetle, but as a human being who, like the ones he is curious about, is himself situated in some ethically thick form of life, from within which these others show up as strange.

Manent points out that the humanitarian adopts, not an informed, but rather a principled preference for “what is foreign, far-off, in general ‘other’ — that is, what is beyond the range of our practical knowledge and real experience….” We come to inhabit a “make-believe moral world in which ideology reigns supreme, since there is no real and sincere experience behind this declamatory respect.” Such declamations of respect refer not to their ostensible object, but to the declaimer himself.

Indeed, the Other must remain abstract and emblematic if he is to serve the role assigned him in this drama that is internal to Western humanitarianism. To observe him concretely, ethnographically, may yield data that overlaps with some negative stereotype. That would put at risk the humanitarian’s determination to think and feel “without the least preference for what is ours.”

Cosmopolitanism is at least as old as the Roman empire, and an idealized kinship of human beings (as the children of a single God) as old as monotheism. But nonetheless, for the most part mankind has been articulated into distinct nations, each with its own genius. A surviving intuition of this is captured in a familiar joke that goes like this:

Heaven is where the chefs are French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian, the police British and it is all organized by the Swiss. Hell is where the chefs are British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, the police German and it is all organized by the Italians.

We were reminded of the positive affective bonds of nation with the recent passing of the Queen, and the outpouring of emotion it inspired. This seemed to be something other than mere celebrity worship, nor was the crowd just emotively celebrating itself as wailing spectator to a media tragedy (as when Princess Diana died). At least, it was not only that. As Paul Kingsnorth put it, the funeral display at Westminster was a “rolling, dense mat of symbolism, replete with historical meaning, anchored in a particular nation and time period.” What it symbolized was something we no longer believe in: sacral kingship, a relationship in which the monarch stands before God as steward of the common good of her people. We may no longer believe this but, Kingsnorth suggests, we have an abiding intuition of the necessity of something like it, this nestled order of being – a conveyor belt of love, let us say, that flowed downward from the Creator and upward from the people through the responsible person of the monarch -- if political authority is not to consist simply in raw coercive power backed by ideological ferocity.

In the classical schema, tyranny means rule for private gain, rather than rule for the common good. Without common ground, it is not clear what the concept of a “common good” could refer to. The common good is something more than an aggregate of private goods, or a term of approbation to be bestowed upon a particular distribution of them. Aristotle, and the Stoic thinkers as well, refer to civic friendship, and this offers a clue about how to think about the common good. The adage “friends have all things in common” may refer to a community of material property (as in “the commons”), but more fundamentally it refers to the experience of inhabiting a common lifeworld, and the mutual affective identification this makes possible. It is the basis of social trust.

As Benedict Anderson points out, political love is typically expressed in the vocabulary of kinship (motherland, fatherland) and that of the earth as home. “Both idioms denote something to which one is naturally tied. … [In] everything natural there is always something unchosen,… all those things one cannot help. And in these natural ties one senses what one might call ‘the beauty of the gemeinschaft’. To put it another way, precisely because such ties are not chosen, they have about them a halo of disinterestedness.” [143]

The immigrant (but not the refugee) is someone who has departed his own community through a free act of volition, and for that reason may be taken to represent the modern ideal of the choosing self, unencumbered by the accidents of birth. He is like the idealized liberal subject who enters into social contract. He may be presumed to have made a rational choice, that is, one that is precisely not disinterested.

This may help to explain the peculiar lack of fellow-feeling in places that have undergone rapid demographic change through immigration. For example, the Bay Area of today feels very different from that of my childhood. It has never been homogeneous, but in the 1970s and 80s it roughly “looked like America.” Today, the South Bay where I live looks more like the urban scenes in the movie Total Recall (but sunny), peopled as it is by H1B visa transients (the tech brahmins) at the high end and nomadic guest workers of uncertain legal status at the low end, with mostly Asian commercial clans operating the small businesses (and for some reason the post office). Social scientists tell us that the Bay Area scores the lowest in social trust of any metropolitan area studied, despite being high-income.[Footnote 1]¹

They have their ways of measuring that, using various proxies for what we might call civic friendship. What I can relay firsthand is an anecdote. Driving in Scotts Valley, I mistakenly turned into a residential development (its entrance was next to the driveway for the strip mall I had meant to enter). There was a woman, a resident I supposed, walking nearby as I executed a U-turn. I ventured a witticism, leaning out my window to say “you must see a lot of this.” She laughed, as I hoped she would, and confirmed that my mistake was a common one. I felt cheered, but also curious as to why this felt like a small victory. I realized that I had overcome a subtle inhibition, and that the appearance of the woman played a role in this. At the risk of triggering the humanitarians:  she didn’t look foreign, and this gave me just enough faith that she would take my comment as intended, recognizing my chagrin at transgressing her neighborhood and my implied criticism of the arrangement of driveways. I imagined a community in which such u-turns might be a running joke, and made a gesture of imaginative identification with them. I offered this gesture to a stranger in the form of a single cryptic sentence, at the risk of total non-comprehension. But she got it. I felt at home, as I had growing up.

This was something I hadn’t realized I was missing. In most of my interactions with strangers where I live (the heart of Silicon Valley), both parties noticeably restrict their verbal repertoire and I suppose this is due to the fact that we are quite literally foreigners to one another, to use a term that has a regressive tone and is no longer used. Communication is stripped down to a stilted exchange of bare information, and that not always easily. One enunciates as though addressing the voice recognition function of a bureaucratic phone menu, avoiding idiomatic expressions and the kind of regional or cohort-inflected verbal ticks that emerge among a settled people, the idiom of civic friendship. With the lack of common ground, one does not feel invited to risk humor, irony, goofiness, or a pointed reticence, the meaning of which ought to be clear. Flirting doesn’t work. There is less prospect of pleasure in being out and about. As Robert Putnam put it in his study of the effects of diversity on social trust, people tend to “hunker down” and keep to themselves. I have exaggerated the experience somewhat in this description, but the effect is real. [Footnote 2]²

If one takes notice of the communicative impoverishment I have described, is such noticing properly called hatred or xenophobia? I don’t think it is.

In my experience you can still connect with people, but it takes more effort. Others feel the same inhibition that you do. It is tempting to put on broad manners, like a Vaudeville stage actor, in an effort to be 100% unambiguous in some conversational gambit. But doing so makes you feel like an ass. Nobody is at home in the full sense, so you don’t get the kind of social ease that only happens in a real place, the kind that people feel they own. The South Bay feels somewhere half way between a real place and a Taco Bell along the interstate.

I wonder if this sense of transience contributes to the precipitous decline in fertility. Without owned space to pass on, the logic of reproduction is less clear. It is harder to imagine the continuation that gives a father hope, so beautifully depicted by Charles Péguy in his poetic meditation on natality and place, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope. To permit oneself pleasure in this poem is, I suppose, to indulge in nostalgia for a pastoral world no American has known firsthand for a century or more. But let us note as well that such nostalgia points to a permanent human need, however elusive its fulfillment may be.

In his book After Liberalism, Matthew Rose writes that “Our loyalties to a nation, culture, or people… are essential aspects of every human life, and to ask people to apologize for what they are right to value, and to be ashamed for what they are right to need, is to tempt political catastrophe.”

But back to the Queen. She symbolized common ground in the ancestral. That is not an idea that has much purchase in the British Isles today. But the final passing of it (for it did have a feel of finality) perhaps brought the void to awareness, and the British may reasonably be anxious whether any robust sense of the common good is recoverable under conditions of the polyglot anti-nation.

The passing of the Queen became primarily an occasion for a recitation of the crimes of British imperialism, both real and imagined. This catechism, and those that follow the same template in other Western countries, ironically serves to provide a kind of cohesion — not of the nation, but of a post-national ruling class that regards itself as the civilized minority and defines itself against a backward majority. The backwardness of the demos lies precisely in its susceptibility to “love of one’s own,” as against the humanitarian’s principled preference for what is Other.

The rise of populist movements has been fueled by a spreading recognition that this diversitarian turn, both in its moralistic expressions (humanitarianism as described by Manent) and in its material facts (mass immigration above all), is inextricably linked to an oligarchical development. Diversity is Our Strength, yes, but whose exactly? The political economy corresponding to humanitarian moralism and mass immigration is neoliberalism, an explicitly anti-national agenda for the globalization of labor markets, whether by the relocation of jobs to foreign shores or the opening of borders to foreign workers. Humanitarianism has been called “the sentimental justification of inhuman scale.”

Ethnomasochism is no psychological mystery, then. It serves a function among Western peoples as they adjust themselves -- or get adjusted -- to a post-national framework of government and economy. In such a framework, the proprietary pride of the citizen can only interfere. There are to be no citizens, only an undifferentiated mass of “human resources.”

1. See Robert D. Putnam,  E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century, The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture.

For an updated geography of social capital, see https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2018/4/the-geography-of-social-capital-in-america

Within “social capital,” the index “community health” includes participation in nonprofits and religious congregations as well as the share of residents who  “volunteered, who attended a public meeting, who report having worked with neighbors to fix/improve something, who served on a committee or as an officer, who attended a meeting where politics was discussed, and who took part in a demonstration in the past year.”

2. As Putnam summarizes his findings, “Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation. In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ – that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

They report

-- Lower political efficacy – that is, confidence in their own influence. Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action (e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage).

• Less likelihood of working on a community project.

• Lower likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering.

• Fewer close friends and confidants.

• Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life.

• More time spent watching television and more agreement that ‘television is my most important form of entertainment’.