On one side, I have often felt that people are generally not very
good at identifying with, or feeling a sense of agency within,
very large human groupings. A village is about all we can take.
Much as I am a city boy, I really find urban densities, anonymity
(however useful for some purposes), alienatedness, and sheer
_scale_ frustrating at a very deep gut level. Urbanites seem most
successful at living our lives by creating smaller social
networks within the whole ecosocial system and 'black-boxing' out
the rest as mere instrumentalities.
It seems likely to me that the scale problem with respect to
human community size is not a cultural one. Our cultures have
been dominated by urban milieus for an awfully long time. It does
not seem to have helped much. I think the problem is phylogenetic
at root -- and readers of xmca will know there are very few
issues where I am inclined to biologize (or in this case to
ecologize).
There is another side, though. I am also inclined these days to
define the functional community for all scale purposes as not
just including humans, but also the built-artifactual and found-
used 'natural' ecology within which we are survivable and to
which we are adapted (more and less, and both phylogenetically
and culturally-biographically) -- and to do so not just
bracketing the latter as some sort of context or instrumentality,
but as argued before, as participating in the larger-than-
organismic circuits that make our? 'agency' itself possible.
So what phylogeny provides us with (as it does the frogs and
dogs) are pathways of development that expect to find certain
scales of ecosocial systems to co-develop with and through.
Phylogeny itself, or shall we say, the chreods of typical
developmental pathways, in effect 'black-box' out from each
relevant scale phenomena at scales more than two levels above and
below. I no more have a sense of agency and control with regard
to my cells than I do with regard to my nation. I manage
reasonably well down to about the tissue level, and up to some
sort of patch-scale of social ecology that might be what I can
wander through and interact with -- at my own scale -- over a
period of, say, days to months (a guess!). But I could never meet
all the people in New York, much less in the U.S., and interact
with them in a personal and contextualized way (i.e., get to know
them), nor similarly become familiar with all the social
institutions, or all the artifacts, even those on which I
indirectly depend from day to day in the city (or the region).
There is too much, even within a day's walk or ride.
So cities as ecosocial realities, or nations as either
geographical places or geopolitical cultural constructions (i.e.
pure imaginaries, like the "English language" or the "working
class" -- with _no_ actual or conceivably workable procedure to
ground them precisely in a material base, to convert intensional
category to extensional set), are not system-scales (any more
than my individual cells are) for which I have any phylogenetic
'grasp'. I have no trans-semiotic intuitions for them. I have no
'feel' for them. Whether or not they are a material part of me,
or me of them, whether or not our trajectories and histories and
evolutions are wholly mutually defining and interdependent. I do
not have affordances for them; they are not part of my species-
specific Umwelt.
And I cannot identify with their 'interests'. Which makes me
fairly certain that all nationalism is some parochial interest
rhetorically masquerading as a national interest. If nations have
interests, they are quite beyond our present ability to fathom
what they might be. They are like the interests of continents,
inhabited continents, seen from the viewpoint of no individual or
group, but from the level of the regional or continental
ecosocial system as a whole. No one has ever had the slightest
idea what such interests might be. I cannot even imagine a
convincing model for what the interests of New York City might
be.
But, as pointed out here, the ideologies of nationalism have been
rather successful at the gut level in modern times, at least
temporarily (usually in times of crisis, I think). They are not
directly discourses of interest, those get attached to them, ride
on them to parochial profit. They are discourses of strange
matters like blood and soil and race and a sort of quasi-clonal
familial bond, as if all Austrians were so much like all other
Austrians as to have valid, and if valid, priceless, intuitions
about one another. (I pick Austrians because I've just been
visiting there consulting on a project partly about Austrian
national identity.) As an American who has traveled, I do notice
that there are countries where there is a lot more homogeneity of
language, genetic traits, cultural assumptions, patterns of
upbringing, and a million little things, than I am used to. (I am
not ignoring the enormous residual heterogeneity in such
communities or its importance.)
There is, I think, a Desire to be able to scale-up our intuitions
about smaller forms of human ecosocial community to encompass
either the greater cooperative power and (we're told) security of
larger scales, or to offset the frustrating alienation and
disempowerment we feel about such scales, especially when we know
that we are in fact dependent on social-artifactual-natural
networks that extend out to these scales -- our very lives may
depend on scales where we have no sense of understanding,
perception, or agency. So we want very much to believe that there
can be a real ground for national identity, that there can be
racial and linguistic 'purity' on such scales, that we can trust
our neighbors because they are, at root, so totally like
ourselves and our families (to the extent we can trust them!).
Missing from these accounts, mostly, are the nonhumans. We do
have the phylogenetic grounding for intuitions and a sense of
agency in such small communities and ecosocial networks that
include not just other people, but _everything_ close to our
human scale that we interact with, depend on, collectively
influence. We can identify interests in some sense and identify
with interests, I believe, of local ecologies -- and not just of
local collections of humans-only. Granted, we cannot scale these
up to nation-like or continental scales either. But at least
there is a potentially valuable de-centering, from
anthropocentric misconceptions of interests (there can be no
human-only interests), and one that is not alienating, but
usually profoundly comforting.
So my money is not on Hitler, but on John Muir, to prevail in the
competition among memes. And not on internationalism, but on some
sort of network-topology localism (global networks, each small
enough to get to love, like xmca) that may or may not someday
utilize our semiotic second-sense to help identify and protect
our global-scale interests.
JAY.
PS. There are some loopholes in the scales/levels limits to
identification and intuition, as I have also argued recently
here. They are tied to our semiotic-material capacities, and
provide the 'someday' hope of the last sentence. But what can in
principle be done, and what we now know how to do, are, in this
case, very far apart. And let me also say that even New York City
is probably more an imaginary semiotic construct than an
extensional material ecosocial system -- it has no definite
boundaries, and it is really the scales of the humans-and-
nonhumans networks that feed through it which provide the better
units of analysis.
--------------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU