Phylogony, culture, nationalism
Douglas Williams (dwilliam who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Thu, 10 Jul 1997 11:38:03 -0700 (PDT)
As it happens, this whole discussion is taking up themes which I eventually
mostly cut from my dissertation because they were, like a black hole,
drawing everything into them and providing no light whatsoever. I pulled
out from it before I hit the event horizon, and so managed to finish my
dissertation. One thing that I'm certain of, however, is that (as Jay
points out eloquently) nationalism is not an objective reality, but rather
an artifact which defines the inconceivable abstraction of large societies
into a collection of memes--what I called, borrowing from Latour's borrowing
from Hobbes, a leviathan. Where I disagree with Jay is that nationalism is
only a mask for local, parochial interests. In a sense, this is true: I
suspect that the demagogic Croat and Slavic leaders of the ex-Yugoslavia,
one of whom was a social psychologist, preached their own destructive
nationalisms more to gain access to and augment their power and personal
privileges than they did out of a true belief in the abstractions of
800-year-old land titles, or personal grievences from WW II. But the people
who followed them, and killed in the name of Greater Serbia, there's the
problem. Some of them may have been longing to loot their neighbors, but
not all. People need social identities through which they mediate their
actions. They need social identities that are able to contextualize and
interpret the inconceivable scales of communities in which we actually live.
Religion (at least, in a version separate from nationalism) is mostly gone,
which leaves nationalism as the most readily accessible model. Nationalism,
as Jay points out, extends analogically the family-clan model to culturally
homogenous groups. George Lakoff's most recent book discusses versions of
this in action in United States politics. The purpose of such artifacts is
to create a semiotic construct through which common interests of dispersed
groups can coordinate; Latour discusses this in his analysis of the conflict
between Renault and EDF's narratives of transportation. Two hundred years
ago, nationalism was a good heuristic method for coordinating cultural and
economic activity. Transportation and communication were hard to coordinate
on a scale larger than the nation-state. But increasingly, we live in a
trans-national, trans-cultural world. To persist in organizing societies
only up to the scale of nation-states is to yield transnational control to
economic corporations, who will eventually control the public nation-states;
this is what is beginning to happen in the United States. Corporations
don't like war, which is nice, and they tend to disapprove of prejudice as
detrimental to commercial markets and to work-force needs; things could be
worse. But surely, we could do better. Nationalism is not inherently a bad
tool, but it cannot be the only tool through which our trans-national
communities interact.
I think in passing that I am also replying to Ania's concerns about Russia
buying politicians in Georgia, Poland, or elsewhere in order to achieve
their ends. Russia may do that--though I suspect the Ukraine is the state
they would be most interested in, because of its historical and agricultural
significance--but in the end, such economically questionable, ideologically
driven activities cannot last. And if the old Soviet Union couldn't hold
together, any attempt to reimpose a new one, even indirectly, is doomed.
Belief, and collective activity is what holds a nation (or a corporation)
together. I doubt Russia has that belief in itself. And as a point of
history: The United States constitution has a clause that exempts anyone
living in the United States at the time that it was adopted from the
birthplace rule. The rule is there, Ania, as you point out in your comment,
explicitly to prevent attempts by other countries (France and England being
the suspects at that time) to bring in their own candidates for office, or
to have persons with a strong biases toward another country to hold the
executive office. France and England both did attempt to control or
influence the young U.S.A. But times and the problem have changed. As it
happens, right now we're having hearings to determine whether or not China
tried to influence the American presidential election by giving money to
their preferred candidate. But all the money China's alleged to have given
is a pittance in comparison to the money corporations who want laws passed
in their interest have given to both political parties.