GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

I suppose I assumed that it goes without saying, but in discussing groups it should be remembered that every group has a more or less mythicized founding event, involving a “nomos,” in Carl Schmitt’s terms: an originary division of a property cleared away for the “settlement” of the group. This “property” can be, and has been for most of history, land, but can take on other organizational and institutional forms (activist groups “own” a particular constituency and will battle other groups for it). There will always be land, though, so such groups must be considered the most fundamental—other groups exist at the sufferance of the group that “owns” (through some mutual defense covenant) the land. Attempts to reaffirm the group’s identity are always restorations of the imagined nomos, including a defense of territorial boundaries and form of internal allotment—and such attempts presuppose some disorder in the nomos, which will most likely be attributed to some betrayal on the part of some portion of the community (which presumably has misused its allotment, or manipulated the rules of allotment). Members of groups must imagine themselves in their groups in these terms, whatever violence to reality must be done—but we need not assume that the imagined allotment always does violence to reality, anymore than we assume that such violence is done by the originary hypothesis itself.

An exchange I have been having with someone very familiar with GA regarding issues of antisemitism, victimary thinking, etc., raised the question of how we account for group belonging in terms of the originary hypothesis. Are Jews a group, or just a phantasm in the anti-Semites imagination? If they are a group, how so—do they act together in some meaningful way, participate in shared institutions or practices, have common characteristics or interests? The same, of course, applies to any group—what makes a nation a nation, an ethnicity and ethnicity—religions at least have shared belief systems and rituals (not that there aren’t plenty of difficulties here as well)?

The answer is, I think, simple, while requiring subtle gradations in actual analyses. Groups are bound together by honor systems, more or less tightly. If you are Irish, and you take pride in the accomplishments of your “fellow” Irish, are ashamed by their misdeeds, feel compelled to defend them against accusations, are concerned with how their actions reflect on you, then you are a member of the genus “Irish.” Of course, these compulsions can be felt more or less strongly, depending on how dependent you are on the group for protection (or how much you fear its reprisal for perceived betrayal). To put it in more fundamental terms, you are a member of a group to the extent that you participate in the redemption of its hostages—both literal hostages, in the sense of coming to the aid of threatened members, and figuratively, in the sense of trying to lower the threshold of what will count as an “attack” in the first place—and are a potential hostage yourself.

What this means is that “groupness” is intrinsically barbaric—there is nothing “modern” or “enlightened” in the defining element of group belonging. Which is why the most modern and enlightened among us tend to despise or deny the reality of groups. The whole point of a “culture of dignity” (to refer to the analysis by Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning I have been using in recent posts) is to make it possible to treat individuals outside of groups, i.e., as other than hostages. A culture of dignity creates the optical illusion that individuals can exist outside of groups because it develops (political and economic) mechanisms for isolating individual actions against a background from which group entanglements have been erased, but this is only possible because we are all now part of a new type of group in which we find honor in protecting all individuals from being taken hostage, and by a wider (if vaguer) range of dangers. Modern nations are cultures of dignity overlaid on honor cultures, in some mixture—if a space for dignity is not carved out, we have a tribe, not a nation, and a tribe certain to degenerate in its encounters with nations due to its addiction to violence; if dignity is interpreted and practiced in such a way as to treat honor as inimical to the dignity of the individual (if it, for example, takes seriously claims that displaying the national flag at public events “offends” some marginalized group), then it won’t be long before that culture fails to protect anyone’s dignity either. (And it also follows that anyone who tries to be a member of the national group without displaying loyalty to more local groups—the South, Italian-Americans, Midwesterners, Bostonians, etc.—is likely to be considered less completely a member of the national group as well. National loyalties are tested less often, so without the proving grounds of more local loyalties, one’s trustworthiness will always be in question.)

Political parties and activist groups, which is to say groups founded within modern nations, fit this model perfectly—they preserve the dignity of the individual at the very least in allowing any individual to leave the group (which is a reflection of the national dignity culture), but, otherwise, insofar as one acts or allows oneself to be identified as a member of that group, one is a potential hostage and committed to the redemption of hostages. We could obviously analyze all the other groups in which people participate—they would all exhibit the same unsavory defensiveness on the part of group members, whose first response to any accusation against the group will be denial and counter-accusation, to be succeeded either by a more or less traumatic break with group, continued denial, or a reconciliation with these newly discovered vulnerabilities with the protection one finds the group still offers—whether that protection be from physical attacks or, as is much more common in modern groups, from some form of moral contagion caused by the compromises of civilization. (The point of being in one group, then, is largely to assert you are not like that other group.)

So, what of individuals? Are they, rather than groups, the real illusion? Has anyone ever seen one of these individuals of whose existence we have heard rumors? What we recognize as individuals are initiates in some discipline—to commit yourself to some moral or intellectual discipline is to have in reserve the capacity to resist the importunities of groups for reasons other than shame or fear. Even so, the individual exists on the margins of groups, not outside of them: an American who can examine, and criticize, as if he weren’t an American but a “historian” or “cultural theorist,” the various events, doctrines and figures making up American history and culture, is still a potential hostage and recipient of protection from fellow Americans, even if he eschews participation in the common American culture. Unless his disciplinary vocation involves a resentment towards that culture that not only makes the critical distancing easier but exceeds the boundaries of the discipline—in that case, the critic has simply joined, more or less explicitly, some other, perhaps internationalist, group. Disciplines can become groups—one can feel compelled to defend the honor of the profession after a well known historian has been caught plagiarizing—but only to the extent that it becomes less of a discipline (rather than the defending the profession, the true historian should root out all forms of “groupiness” that might lead members of the profession to place loyalty over the rigors of inquiry). Naturally, I don’t mean to imply that disciplines must be institutionalized—there are all kinds of disciplines, which is to say ways of establishing one’s dignity. Indeed, almost everyone has at least some discipline in this sense. Another source of individuality might be those liminal conditions so common in modernity—being a foreigner, being associated with foreigners, being a minority whose membership in the larger group is not certain (perhaps you wouldn’t be redeemed from captivity), associating with such minorities, etc. To the extent that such conditions constitute more than confusion and uncertainty, though, it is because those thereby situated make a discipline out of their anomaly, perhaps a discipline in the study of the group in relation to which one stands somewhat askew. Seeking to integrate that discipline as a kind of gift into the knowledge of that larger community ultimately confirms one as a member; using that discipline to discredit (bring shame upon) that group indicates an attempt to find some other, most likely political, group to join.

Nationalism is where rivalries internal to a social order meet rivalries between social orders—where the internal rivalries are converted to and transcended by (originally through some more or less explicit, more or less imposed, pact between tribes or smaller kingdoms) the external rivalries, and the external rivalries shape and limit the internal ones. All opposition to nationalism tries to prevent the crystallization of that meeting point: to squelch internal rivalries so that some elite in control of the state can manage external rivalries on its own terms; or, to make external rivalries impossible or invisible so internal rivalries can be squashed in the name of keeping the peace.

This understanding of nationalism would, I think, explain a lot. First of all, I think it would account for the rivalries between the ancient Greek city-states which, on these terms, could be called “nationalistic”—the Greek city-states promoted internal rivalries to an extent that many of us today would find insane, which might account for the constant wars between them, and it may very well be that a workable balance between internal and external rivalries was never attained—leaving the nationalist communities easy prey for empires. It also explains why the emergently nationalist early modern Europe found it so difficult to remain united in response to the perpetual threat of the Ottoman Empire—the conversion of internal to external rivalries can’t scale up to the size of a civilization or an empire, even if provisional alliances are always possible. Third, it would explain the hostility of virtually all forms of political theory and philosophy to nationalism—Marxism, liberalism, communitarianism, even fascism all find nationalism to be a troublesome perplexity, because the maintenance and free play of internal rivalries is alien to all attempts to eliminate mediations between individual and state or individual and society (or, in the case of communitarianism, a rather minor affair at any rate, to evade the competitions at the individual and international levels by defining communities in fundamentally cooperative terms); while the acceptance of international rivalries as both “natural” and a beneficial spur to internal strivings explodes all modern utopias. Does nationalism have its political theorist? Or has it always been a kind of blot on all political theories? The obstacle to theorizing nationalism past a certain point is that the meeting point where internal rivalries meet external is always shifting and itself a site of rivalry—unlike liberalism’s right of the individual, for example, or socialism’s transformation of the relations of production, we could never imagine subjecting that process to a “law,” or axiomatic definition.

The need for robust internal rivalries allows for an understanding of “rights” in nationalistic terms. Rivalries must be engaging and exciting; they must be “real” and consequential, both at play and at work—but they must not be allowed to spill into civil war or sheer exclusion of one part of the national community. That means strict rules, tacit and explicit, are required to limit the scope of competition to circumscribed fields—these rules translate into “rights” for individuals. We’re not talking about “natural” rights here, but simply rules protecting the autonomy of fields of play, and the freedom of movement from one field to another. (So, for example, “free speech” would not be so much about individual rights as about the need to have competition in the fields of journalism, science, etc.) External rivalries generate internal differentiations as fields that help one nation compete with others are promoted—science, economics and technology most obviously, but there is competition between nations in the literary, diplomatic, athletic and many other fields. In this way, transnational communities of scientists, athletes, merchants, writers and artists, etc., are generated, in (usually) harmless, productive tension with national loyalties. Nations engaged in such rivalries become more like each other, which, as we know from the laws of mimesis, can make their rivalries more deadly, but also makes possible the creation of a body of law and custom regulating interaction. None of this is possible with transnational institutions like the EU or UN, or transnational progressive organizations committed to chimeras like “international human rights”—or, needless to say, with empires, whether established on ecumenical or religious terms. Even the liberal, rights-based, state ultimately finds nationalism to be an irritant, or worse, and such states, insofar as they flourish, must set out to break up nationalist inclining institutions and weaken the majoritarian tendencies needed to convert internal rivalries into external ones. A certain kind of radical libertarianism, though, which seeks to abolish the state while accepting the stratifications of a free society and the autonomy of all institutions from any center, can easily be compatible with a kind of ragged, perhaps intermittent, nationalism.

A healthy nationalism has no tolerance for outright treason, of course, but it has plenty of room for idiosyncrasies, abstentions, dissidence and even plural loyalties, at the margins—after all, there’s no way of knowing for sure what cultural innovations will become a genuine possession of the nation and source of national honor, while having some citizens with relatives, friends and commitments in other countries can be converted into access to and intelligence regarding those countries (like American German and Japanese speakers during WWII). More embattled nationalisms, though, may need to withdraw some liberties, and keep citizens in the established channels of competition; without taking advantage of opportunities to open up a bit, however, it is unlikely that second and third tier nations will be able to elevate their standing. And this is why, as I have emphasized in my previous nationalistic posts, nationalism is ultimately more of a civilizing than a barbarizing force—and, when it comes to civilizing, two steps forward and one step backward is probably the best we can do.

One of the sponsors on Glenn Beck’s radio show (a show filled with fascinating, idiosyncratic sponsors) is in the “food insurance” business. You can imagine what that is, and you can also grasp the absurdity of it—if we get to a point where food is not readily available through supermarkets, delis, diners, etc., where will the people insuring us against such an eventuality be getting their food? It’s akin to an attempt to sell “social collapse” insurance, or “money insurance,” as if the insurance company will survive the social collapse that leaves us all reliant on it, or the dollars with which our money insurer indemnifies us will not have suffered the same fate as the now worthless dollars we have in the bank. Nothing could be more human than to grasp at such absurdities, where we hope for a restoration in the imagination that is really just a way of figuring what we fear to lose in a manageable way. From where else could we stock our imaginations other than from our memories (in whatever composite and revised form), and what prompts our imagination more urgently than the present’s repudiation of those memories?

I suspect that most, if not all, of the political hopes of the present are not all that different than attempts to sell or buy “food insurance.” There is some part of the social order that one likes, and there are other parts one doesn’t like. The parts one likes are authentic, or progressive, grounded in something natural or in some law of history; the parts one doesn’t like are parasitic grafts on the whole implanted by some special interest at odds with the general interest. It’s not always or even, necessarily, often, wrong to speak in these terms: we can certainly distinguish between the core and peripheral, the healthy and the sick, in our institutions. What is almost always wrong is to assume the evils, the parasitic, the sick, can be excised in such a way as to leave the original body intact and restored to its natural form. Ultimately, parasites prey on some weakness in the host. I think the originary hypothesis is in agreement with the foundational deconstructive argument that what we designate as marginal, unnatural, evil, and so on is constitutive—or, rather, the act of designation itself is constitutive—of the center, the natural and the good. Imagining a restoration of the social order is always an attempt to forget the event of founding.

What are we citizens of the Western world made of these days? We really don’t know, and we can’t know—part of the structure of a civilized order is to occlude such knowledge. Part of the morbid fascination with exceptional regimes, in particular authoritarian and totalitarian ones, or even everyday emergencies, is that we find out who people “really are” behind the “façade”—which really isn’t a façade until it proves inadequate to circumstances. Ultimately what we want is some kind of fit between our signs and the world, but signs never quite fit the world so a primary moral decision is whether to expose the misfit and appear as an attempt to approximate fittingness, or to participate in illusions of an a priori fit. It is those who attempt the latter who are most severely disabled when signs can no longer be stuck on the world. So, let’s say the government of the US spends and inflates itself out of its currency, and the Medicare, social security and other entitlement checks stop coming; nor can infusions of cash created ex nihilo prop up the downwardly spiraling economy. Some people, I am certain, would apply themselves to the task of creating alternate economies, new systems of security, new commensurations between discipline and reward, and communities to go along with them. But how many? Your answer to that question will also be an answer to the question opening this paragraph.

Friedrich Hayek’s assertion of the superiority of free, open, decentered market societies when it comes to producing knowledge of social needs is, I think, irrefutable. And representative democracies, far less effectively, but perhaps more effectively than autocracies, provide knowledge of the range and relative power of social resentments. But economies bring needs and capabilities into alignment, while information provided by vote totals bears no similar relationship to political capabilities. Someone will ultimately get around to selling what lots of people want to buy, but there’s no reason to assume that some president will come along and “make America great again” no matter how many people want that. There’s not even any reason to assume that far more modest accomplishments will result from displays of majority, or even super-majority, public desires. And while buying a product can lead to unpleasant surprises, for the most part you get what you pay for; in politics, nobody really has any idea of whether getting what they now want will satisfy them when they actually get it. The unintended consequences are simply too consequential and diffuse. The discrepancies become wider as the democratic system is swallowed up by a new form of administrative state, run along victimocratic and therapeutic lines. How many people today really expect the policies they have voted for to be implemented? The more savvy work through the courts and bureaucracy. The Roman Senate remained until the end, didn’t it? So will our Congress, and the state governments.

Even more important, neither the free market nor the democratic political system provides reliable knowledge of the second most important kind: the kind of knowledge that enables us to distinguish between friends and enemies. In fact, there’s good reason to believe that both systems, modernity as a whole in fact, makes such knowledge harder and harder to secure. In economics, an enemy is someone whose needs you haven’t properly framed yet; in democratic politics, the enemy is a constituency one hasn’t yet effectively reached out to. That the enemy simply doesn’t care about your flat screen TV or your jobs plan is  unintelligible. The only enemies you can really imagine vividly are those who insist on telling you such things about the enemy—they are war-mongers. Which means this penultimate knowledge may not be lost after all—it can be turned inward, towards the small differences inflaming your narcissistic feeling of being in the front line of the march of history. In this way you build a system of lies to protect your belief in food insurance. You will not, for example, publicize attacks committed by migrants from barbaric societies, much less stop the migration itself, because you don’t want to give “ammunition” to the opponents of migration. So, the one who denounces or tries to stop the rape of children becomes evil—they’re the real enemy.

Knowledge of friends and enemies can only be acquired through a social order in which loyalties are constantly formed and potential defenders of the community are given space for friendly competition testing courage, endurance, leadership, teamwork and fighting skill. Creating protected, virtual, spaces for such testing, and allowing for the free invention of such spaces so that we don’t have to periodically engage in mass slaughter to know what our young men are made of, is essential to civilization. If egalitarianism were deliberately created in order to destroy such spaces, it couldn’t do so any more effectively than it has been. And if you destroy this penultimate knowledge, you drive the ultimate knowledge, of how to bring signs into an approximate, shared relation with reality, into exile.

What I have been in recent posts calling “nationalism” is simply the most likely way of restoring these forms of “natural” knowledge. Only spontaneously formed loyalties, developed through shared experience and drawing upon a shared past, and then tested through confrontations with outsiders of one kind or another, can provide for these fundamental forms of social knowledge. Of course such knowledge is in a sense tribal, and nations are in a sense tribes, but they are civilized tribes, which allow for the formation of thinkers who can turn their loyalty to the tribe into disinterested anthropological and historical inquiries into the inevitable ironies and paradoxes that will beset that nation, and thereby form its “conscience.” But the constitution of the nation itself proceeds through a series of inclusions and exclusions (school vs. school, town vs country, region vs. region, ethnic group vs. ethnic group, religion vs. religion, the hostilities swirling around certain professions, like the law and finance, various articulations of majority-minority confrontations, etc.) that are ultimately but never completely transcended by the belief that the nation constitutes a form of civilization either co-equal with or at least marginally more civilized in at least some ways than one’s neighbors. (In this sense, every nation is a “proposition nation,” motivated by the belief that it has its own special “calling.”)

One of the more interesting things about the Trump phenomenon (which has been an amazing source of information on so many topics) is that Trump’s support of a heavily managed regime of international trade and for universal health care, in both cases flouting central points of conservative doctrine, doesn’t seem to be hurting him at all (yet). It seems that people object to managed international trade in the name of transnational goals, according to international law and through arcane negotiations—in that case, “free trade” is a powerful shibboleth. When it’s a question of managing trade nationalistically so as to no longer let the Asians and Mexicans get the better of us—that’s a different matter entirely, and protests in the name of free trade are muted. Even universal health insurance, an anathema to the right for many years now, seems acceptable if it is done in the name of American community and not vague progressive imperatives (although we do still need to see about this as, of course, about Trump’s candidacy as a whole). The hunger for straightforward, unapologetic nationalism is palpable, here and in Europe. Nationalism will never quite be what it wants, but, then, it doesn’t make claims about its meaningfulness within a historical process, so it doesn’t have to. (It’s also worth noting that while nationalism implies some degree of popular political participation and feedback, other than the fact that it tends to lean more “democratic” than “liberal,” it is compatible with a spectrum of regime forms from near autocratic plebiscitary to normal representative.) Certainly Jews and other minorities have good reason to be ambivalent about these developments, but it would be wrong and foolish to resist them—rather, potentially threatened minorities should go about the business of making as many friends and as few enemies in the nation as possible (as opposed to invoking “universal” principles so that you can represent your opponents as criminals). We may be on the receiving end of some unwelcome information as (if) nationalism displaces the victimary order and administrative state (its natural enemies), and it’s better to be prepared to make use of such information than to try and pre-empt those who would bring it.

A large part of the problem with victimary thinking is that it, like any tyranny, prevents the system from receiving the feedback it needs. The more things that can’t be said, the more things people are thinking but hardly anyone knows they are thinking—but they go on thinking it and when they act on it, everyone is surprised—and the response is usually to clamp down more forcefully on that mode of expression. At the same time, there are always things that shouldn’t be said, things that, if said, create alienation and thereby generate a new kind of silence and blocking of information channels. A good way of distinguishing among political systems might be in terms of which provide, or can be designed so as to provide, sufficient feedback from the margins. Liberal democracy no longer seems to do that, perhaps because it is neither very liberal nor very democratic.

This is in large part because liberal democracy has anathematized nationalism. There is certainly a spectrum of nations, from those forged artificially out of diverse ethnicities subjected to a single regime to more natural nations that really are more like a collection of interrelated tribes. In any case, a nation defines itself by its external others—allies, enemies, would-be subjugators—and its internal others (often defined in conjunction with the establishment of external others)—those of a minority ethnicity, religion, ties to other countries, etc. Nationalism cannot be defined other than by othering, which is why it so horrifies the victimocracy; indeed, nationalism is perhaps the original sin against which the victimary defines itself. If 20 million people in widely dispersed and overlapping communities come to view themselves as like each other and loyal to each other in a way they aren’t like and loyal to anyone else, it is inevitable that those likenesses and loyalties will be more densely concentrated amongst and across some communities and sub-communities than others. In other words, some will be more genuinely representative of the nation than others.

Nations, in their modern form, began as national markets and to a great extent remain that, despite the vast globalization of markets—at the very least, most of our daily exchanges are with our fellow countrymen. They also, even in autocracies, presuppose at least some form of equality among citizens. In other words, they embody universal principles in exclusionary ways, modeled, especially in their promise of eternity and redemption, on the Israelite national community portrayed in the Bible (an argument I owe to David Goldman, aka “Spengler”). The exclusionary structure penetrates the nation itself, as I have just suggested, while the universality of exchange and citizenship moderates that structure. Insofar as a nation considers itself more civilized than its neighbors, it must put its exclusionary, or discriminatory, practices before the interest in spreading the principles of the market and citizenship. If it doesn’t, outsiders claiming to belong in the national community will exploit those principles while sapping them of substance, which is the “quantum” of civilizational discipline constitutive of the nation. The more a civilized nation dwells among other civilized nations, the more markets can be freed of exclusionary practices, and the more the rigors of citizenship can be relaxed.

Nationalism is highly unpredictable and therefore risky and therefore particularly frightening in a world comprised of delicate balancing acts between widely disparate international forces and crisis prone economic systems. But for this very reason it is superior to any other political form in generating information and feedback regarding the relations between center and margins. Nationalism certainly disallows identification with another nation, and the boundaries between explicit and implicit identification can never be drawn once and for all, but the insistent repetition of phrases like “for the good of the nation” “my nation above all” channels discourse into the oscillation between the civilizing tendencies of exchange and citizenship and the more barbaric, because belligerent, distinction between self and other.

The real problem with nationalism today is that it is ugly, according to contemporary political esthetics. It includes by excluding, even if the exclusions need not be violent. The exclusions based on the principle that the other is not me is, in fact, more limited and less violent than exclusions based on the other’s being on the wrong side of some putatively universal principle, but it deprives us of that quintessentially modern promise of final reconciliation. Nationalism works according to stereotypes: the representative national character (expressed through propaganda but also through consumption patterns and mass entertainment) is a stereotype, and the various margins are stereotyped, sometimes viciously. This is unbearable for those raised in a “victimhood” culture—indeed, even those committed to a “dignity” culture tend to flinch when presented with overt stereotypes. The question, then, is whether stereotyped minorities can bring themselves to resist the temptation to parade their dishonor before the all embracing post-dignity government and demand reparations. (I think that big government is a post-nationalist phenomenon, because relations between a dominant majority and minorities capable of leveraging their own sources of power are self-regulating; it is the attempt to stifle such processes that requires the heavy hand of government.) The alternative is to turn the stereotypes, which, of course, always misfit or mis-take their object, into sources of information by flouting the expectations and double binds they establish. This, no doubt, puts an added burden on the minorities, but it is now possible to see that even greater burdens might result from insisting upon an untrammeled minoritarian culture. And there are pleasures in marginality—the pleasure of being able to lapse into a certain kind of spectatorship before some political battles; the pleasure of, through solidarity and the insights of what W.E.B. called “double consciousness” and Hannah Arendt called, in relation to Jewish marginality, the “conscious pariah,” cultivating fields of culture left fallow by members of the majority; among others. We can perhaps learn enough from history to resist some of the virulent—racialized, imperialist, ideological—forms of nationalism while there can, of course, be no guarantees. Indeed, accepting the primacy of nationalism as a principle of social organization involves surrendering the fantasies of institutional guarantees providing by the transnationalisms based on universal rights and international institutions.

First of all, though, let’s see how many people can learn how not to flinch at the ugliness.