Along with gems such as:
"The fact that the Soviet Union shares with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland the rare distinction of refusing nationality in its naming suggests it is as much a legatee of the prenational dynastic states of the ninteenth century as the precursor of a twenty-first century internationalist order"
"Marxist and liberalist theory have become etiolated in a late Ptolemaic effort to 'save the phenomena'; and that a reorientation of perspective in, as it were, a Copernican spirit, is urgently required."
and other inane passages (no, I don't know what they mean either)
This guy Anderson argues that Nationalism is ridiculous; the nation does not exist. Communities are imagined; they're not real, insofar as you can never know everyone in your community.
I'm lazy so I'm going to quote a man called Gellner: "Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-conciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist".
Although Anderson critiques this himself by stating: "Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretenses that he assimilates 'invention' to 'fabrication' and 'falsity', rather than to 'imagining' and 'creation'. In this way he implies that 'true' communities exist ehich can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger than villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined".
Did you read that? There's no such thing as a community?
Moreover, "l'essence d'une nation est que tout les individuls aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient oublie bien des choses." Effectively - the perceived essence of the nation is that all have some shit in common.
Effectively - there is no nation. It's all imagined; you're never gonna meet the vast, vast, vast majority of people - only in the most primordal villages of 50 or so people, can a 'community' exist. It is all perceived - it's not real. Nationalism is a joke.
Anderson points to something lots of countries have in common; the tomb of the unknown soldier. He says that unlike other isms (Anarchism, Liberalism...), Nationalism is different. It's much more potent, so far so that people are willing to die for it. Can you imagine a tomb for the unknown Anarchist? It's laudable tbh.
He goes on to state the origins of Nationalism (and I suppose jingoistic tendencies?) as the dawning of Nationalism arose with the Enlightenment, something commonly known to have destroyed Christendom in Western Europe. With the rise of the Enlightenment (rationalist secularism), religion fell; you know this, it's an old tale. We all got smarter and less religious, moving it on a bit I guess you could quote Nietszche; Gott ist tot ('God is dead'). Effectively; God/religion/life as we know it is over. No more religion. Boom.
Kk, so religion helps us answer shitty problems; why am I blind? Why is my friend paralysed, etc... it pacifies us, calms us, helps us, that's why it lasted so long. However, the enlightenment took away the comfort of God, but not the miseries of life.
SO WHAT DO WE DO?
We invent nationalism. Bare with me (or with Anderson, this is not my argument). With the loss of religion, we (we being W. Europeans) needed "a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning...few things are better suited to this end than an idea of nation... If nations are widely conceded to be 'new' and 'historical', the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide into a limitless future".
Geddit? We need the nation to feel like a part of something; with no God then there's no point to life. With a nation, there is. You're working for the bigger picture; you are a part of your country. You are the past, present and future. I guess it's almost atavistic?
To summise; Nationalism is a by-product of the enlightenment, a lack of religion meant we needed something else to be a part of, so we turned insular, to our nation.
Oh and also, the denigration of Latin, for the vernacular languages (so English, German, French [zut allors!]...) helped compound the issue of being insular, rather than a part of a community.
OKAY MY TURN.
Obvs I can't argue with the roots of Nationalism; I'm not really in a position to do so. I'm an undergrad student, this guy is a bloody professor. I can't contest facts, but I can opinions.
He says that no communities exist, because we will never meet everyone, they simply live 'in communion' in our minds.
That's ridiculous imo. We will never meet everyone, or even the majority of people in our community, but we all have many things in common. We all inhabit the same stretch of land, we all speak the same language, okay that's arbitrary, I'll expand.
We are all governed by the same government, we are all subject to the laws of Parliament. This can not be said of everyone; I share nothing in common with a Chinese fisherman, but I have much in common with a farmer in Norfolk. We have the same government, laws... we all fight in wars against the same enemy, we all live on the same island (British isles BABAY!), we're bound toogether by our country. We may not be exactly the same - but Anderson seems to make everyone atomic. As though we're all completely apart from each other. This is not the case, esp. not in a Socialist country like here. We rely on each other; I pay taxes to educate your kid, you pay taxes so I can have an operation on the NHS, fact is we're all interconnected. You will never meet me, but we're all bound on this island. Ties bind.
It may not be tangible - you can not touch 'community', there is no rope around us, we are not bound physically. If I saw you on the street I wouldn't say hello, but we have so much in common. We are a community; we rely on each other, we're bound.
On a purely economic basis, what would we do without a primary industry? What would we do without a seconary industry? What would we do without a tertiary and quartertiary industry? We all need each other; if no one paid taxes then there'd be no health service, if there was no tertiary industy this country would be broke. Without you I am nothing; I could not survive in the way that I do. Without people working like me, you couldn't survive. Everything has an origin, even the richest people have money which trickles from somewhere, somewhere with most probably a humble beginning.
We most definitely are a community - it doesn't matter that I'll never see you, we all read the same newspapers anyway. And even if we don't, we're all bound by a common fate to this country. Our country.
It just seems bizarre to me to state that the community does not, can not, never has and never will exist. I live 'in communion' in your head, but I still live, I still live in your country, use your taxes, fund your education etc etc.
Let's ask Adam Smith! He wrote The Wealth of Nations, where he argued that wealth was not money in itself, but wealth was derived from the added value in manufactured items produced by both invested capital and labour. See? We need each other.
It's just bizarre.
Anyway, Anderson's argument seems really hollow - we're not a community because we never meet each other. Okay.. is that it? There is no reason that his supposition that community does not exist should be worth more than my supposition that we're part of a large community. I think there's a tendency for undergrads to not dare and question - like we see a hugely complex book written by someone with clearly a lot more experience than us, and we take it at face value. This guy's a professor - I'm not even 20. My political knowledge is a 2:2 from a first yr undergrad course, I'm not exactly well learned. But the fact is, I just think he's wrong, and there's no reason why my opinion is any less valid. This subject is not scientific; it's not based on facts and dates and figures, it can not be quantified. It's intangible and subjective, so meh.
Anyway, his constant reiterance that nationalism merely superceded religion (and the rise of vernacular languages/denigration of Latin use) also seems simplistic. Admittedly I know little, but as far as I recall nationalism is nationalism insofar as it's shared by the whole nation - it is a shared notion. The majority of the population have always supported the nation, I remember reading once (many years ago!) about the mass suport for the Crimean war 1853-56 (charge of the light brigade anyone? >_<), admittedly this is a bit after the enlightenment, but I think nationalism has always existed. Maybe not to the extent is does now, but it's always been there. And when it wasn't, it wasn't religion which replaced it, but more poverty - people don't think about a war when it's a constant battle to feed and clothe their children. It was not religion then, which stopped any nationalism previously, but poverty. Perhaps it could instead be argued that rather than the loss of religion, it was the industrial rev (for Britain), or general increases in social welfare, which increased nationalism - if you don't have to spend all your energy on the very basics, you can expand - right? If you can expand, you can think about your nation.
I'm totally making this up as I go along btw. But anyway, Anderson also seems to exaggerate the loss of religion experienced in the enlightenment, which seems highly naiive. Many countries in Europe have been in the grip of religion, way after the enlightenment. The Orthodox church in Russia has always flourished, even during the USSR when it was nearly quashed, it always had adherants. In France, Portugal, Spain, Germany... religion has always been massive, as well as Britain. Anderson speaks as though religion simply disappeared and the whole of Europe was enlightened - no. The literati and educated were perhaps 'enlightened', but I doubt the rest were. It's only been since the 50s that church attendance has really started falling.
I think there was a place for both religion and nationalism - Anderson speaks as though they're mutuall exclusive; not at all the case.
WHAT CHU THINK?
And no, I don't know why I'm in on a Saturday night, writing about nationalism. I really, really, really, really, REALLY wanted to go out tonight, but alas, I was bailed. ¬_¬
MY FRIENDS ARE LAME.
This is probably the much confusing post with long words you have ever blogged. Yikes
ReplyDeleteMany of the points you make about language and government are actually made in Imagined Communities. Indeed, ithink you marginally misunderstand him--his argument against Gellner is the fact that they are invented does not mean they are non-existent, or fictitous. Anderson's primary point is the constructed nature of nationality.
ReplyDeleteThere are, of course, problems with Anderson's arguments. I think, however, his broader points about print capitalism, shared identity, reading newspapers at the same time (a point you raise as your own but which is actually a substantial part of his argument) are cogent.
(I'm jjarvis, btw, I trundled over here from TSR.)