March 18, 2004

  • I'm trying to come up with a framework for 'flipping' nationalism. Lefties and progressives and all those kinds of folks bemoan nationalism as a restrictive force that keeps people's minds from seeing the possibilities. And they're generally correct in their assessment, but their attitude is all wrong.

    Nationalism is like any other -ism. You can take it and make it your own. You can personalize it, you can modify it, you can subvert it. It's just some ideas that sort of self-organize into a group. They all reinforce each other. So if you can take one or two of them and give them a little tweak, the others will reinforce that tweak.

    So I'm thinking about nationalism, and how it's a sort of myth. Just a few nights ago I read Gilgamesh for the first time, because I was thinking about Hammurabi's code, one of the oldest written sets of laws, which came from Mesopotamia. A land we now know as Iraq. Iraq just set down its first constitution since being invaded and occupied by the US, so I was thinking about what kind of story you could tell about the relationship between these two documents.

    That led me to Gilgamesh, because some of the deities mentioned in Hammurabi's code are in Gilgamesh, the oldest written story in existence. The epic of Gilgamesh was set down by Shin-eqi-unninni, the world's first published fiction writer, a third of the way back to the last ice age. For real.

    So my original intention was to compare the oldest stories of national identity (Gilgamesh was a king, after all, and Hammurabi didn't write a code because he was a peasant) to the current story of national identity in the US, but now I'm a little side-tracked. Maybe next time.

Comments (6)

  • Have you read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson?

    You might find it interesting.

  • I had forgotten about the Mesopotamian stuff in 'Snow Crash.' Could chiseled spam be cuneiform?

  • You're digging into interesting stuff. I guess I'd want to look at, maybe, European ideas of Nationalism too, to get some thoughts. Inn the late 19th Century there was surely a push there to dispose of the idea, replaced by the Socialist concept that workers everywhere shared the same essential facts and needs. After a disastrous run of nationalist fervor 1914-1945, Europe seems to have steadily (if slowly) drifted away from what Americans think of as "nationalism" toward something that might be better down the line. I guess I'd prefer "societism" be the root. What, as a society, do we want to create. Flags are cute, but don't really do anything for us. I'm far more interested in humanity's goals.

  • There's this notion from another Neal Stephenson book called 'The Diamond Age' where nations are replaced by 'philes,' which are more like 'blogrings than societies. Still, though, even in that world the philes war and struggle against one another.

    I think everyone wants to belong to a tribe, and the shallower the local experience of tribalism, the greater the attraction of an abstract nationalism. And in the globally-oriented world, a similar dynamic is at play, except it works in another direction: The shallower the experience of globalism, the greater the attraction of nationalism, because at least as a nation you have a physical boundary to argue over. For 'shallow,' read 'getting fucked over by the IMF' or 'threatened by the US as being part of the axis of evil,' or whatever.

    So in the US we get our cake and we eat it, too. We control the game of globalization, but we've got enough power to afford the luxury of being nationalistic. We're relatively safe in assuming that what's good for the US is good for the world. We just don't get it when smaller nations say we're screwing them over. So that's the second half of my equation above... We benefit from globalization, so the parts that benefit (American-based multinational corporations, for instance) have little attachment to nationalism (which is why they're multinationals).

    I was going to say that in general Americans have either shallow or chronically-deep tribal identities. That in general terms, our tribes are identified either by mass media and marketing, or by reactionary politics. But I'm not so sure it's true. Maybe I should actually sleep some tonight.

  • But I'll finish the thought first...

    In this sense, globalist Bush is using nationalism and tribalism (religious right, 'Angry White Men') as tools. ('Well, duh, Homer!') The problem set is this: How do we create an honest nationalism, one which overwhelms the echoing emptiness of the fake one being peddled by the globalists? And more importantly: How do we create an honest, sustainable tribalism that can be reconciled with the new nationalism?

    Because tribalism in the US is what's going to save the world from the US.

  • Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod.

    (I wish I had time for comments beyond sexual innuendo. I think I love you)

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