Good piece. I've bothered to read Anderson's book (which is actually quite eccentric in many ways). As you've noted, for Anderson a national consciousness, that presupposes nationalism, is enabled by a cultural flattening of time/identity. When he first published Imagined Communities in 1983, there would've only been a handful of widely consumed broadcast channels. This would appear to be a vindication of his thesis about mass media no doubt. I dont think there had been radical change by the final edition (2006) either - facebook only started to take off in that year.
I've often wondered where his thesis sits now national communities have splintered into a gazillion different information ecosystems. It most certainly suggests there is something more fundamental about national identity than mass media.
Yes good point. National identity always surprises liberals and Marxists with its persistence, e.g. its revival during the collapse of the USSR, and it's clearly in evidence on say Twitter without any guiding force!
What's not often said: Anderson's book, as well as others mentioned, is just a bunch of opinions piled on historical facts (like the invention of the printing press and nationalist pamphlets). There's nothing irefutable in them in the ways a Physics equation is.
In what you call "upper normies" I still see echoes of the same assumptions: this attempt to destroy a sense of patriotism or national identity wherever possible. They ridicule & undermine the idea that Britain is in any way great, but almost never realise that theirs is in itself a bias - which will colour their judgement and make impartial analysis of history impossible. They can see the patriot's fondly-held bias, but not their own.
I tend to think that this, along with the attack on Christianity - come direct from the communist/Marxist approach to propaganda: attacking precisely those things that made the capitalist nations of the time strong. Hobsbawm etc were making the facts fit the theory, which is how dishonest politicians operate, but is the opposite of how a scientist should work.
The arguments often change when it comes to Ukraine. Then it suddenly becomes imperative to recognize the inherently distinct Ukrainian ethnicity, and stand up against the Russian mudding of waters.
I don't want to focus on whether Ukraine "deserves" to be it's own nation and where we draw the line, are Croats just Catholic Serbs who belonged to the Habsburg empire, whether Slovaks are just Czechs who belonged to Hungary instead of Bohemia etc. I don't care about this here. I just want to note that suddenly in the case of Ukraine, the upper normie is suspiciously nationalistic all of a sudden.
Excellent good sense. Regino of Prum (d.915) came up with a fourfold definition of nation, based on Classical conceptions, that became the standard definition in medieval Europe:
Diversae nationes popularum interse discrepant genere moribus lingua legibus.
(The peoples of various nations differ by origin, customs, languages and laws.)
Where genere (origin) is ancestry. This concept turns up, for instance, in the internal divisions of the Knights of St John.
An excellent piece. One of the amusing things to think about in all of this is your one example of Palestinian nationalism. That is the best example of a modern nationalist movement that was completely invented, and yet it is one that is treated as sacrosanct. There are vast swathes of texts from the early 20th century showing that the "Palestinians" saw themselves as Syrians, and that the whole "national movement" that we recognise was largely created by outside forces (the PLO being established under guidance from Nasser's Egypt and the PFLP being created by the Soviets). The Palestinian Arab Congress in the 1920s saw Palestine as an integral part of the Syrian nation to be ruled from Damascus.
Though regardless of if the idea of the modern 'nation state' existed before Westphalia, length of tradition is not a valid defence of Nationalism as a system. It's inherently divisive, competing nations can't solve the global problems we face, and as far back as the Greek city states it was being countered with Cosmopolitanism by that Cynics and Stoics. And there very much is a synthetic 'by the numbers' approach to the creation of Volksgeist for propaganda purposes -
Good piece. I've bothered to read Anderson's book (which is actually quite eccentric in many ways). As you've noted, for Anderson a national consciousness, that presupposes nationalism, is enabled by a cultural flattening of time/identity. When he first published Imagined Communities in 1983, there would've only been a handful of widely consumed broadcast channels. This would appear to be a vindication of his thesis about mass media no doubt. I dont think there had been radical change by the final edition (2006) either - facebook only started to take off in that year.
I've often wondered where his thesis sits now national communities have splintered into a gazillion different information ecosystems. It most certainly suggests there is something more fundamental about national identity than mass media.
Yes good point. National identity always surprises liberals and Marxists with its persistence, e.g. its revival during the collapse of the USSR, and it's clearly in evidence on say Twitter without any guiding force!
What's not often said: Anderson's book, as well as others mentioned, is just a bunch of opinions piled on historical facts (like the invention of the printing press and nationalist pamphlets). There's nothing irefutable in them in the ways a Physics equation is.
In what you call "upper normies" I still see echoes of the same assumptions: this attempt to destroy a sense of patriotism or national identity wherever possible. They ridicule & undermine the idea that Britain is in any way great, but almost never realise that theirs is in itself a bias - which will colour their judgement and make impartial analysis of history impossible. They can see the patriot's fondly-held bias, but not their own.
I tend to think that this, along with the attack on Christianity - come direct from the communist/Marxist approach to propaganda: attacking precisely those things that made the capitalist nations of the time strong. Hobsbawm etc were making the facts fit the theory, which is how dishonest politicians operate, but is the opposite of how a scientist should work.
The arguments often change when it comes to Ukraine. Then it suddenly becomes imperative to recognize the inherently distinct Ukrainian ethnicity, and stand up against the Russian mudding of waters.
I don't want to focus on whether Ukraine "deserves" to be it's own nation and where we draw the line, are Croats just Catholic Serbs who belonged to the Habsburg empire, whether Slovaks are just Czechs who belonged to Hungary instead of Bohemia etc. I don't care about this here. I just want to note that suddenly in the case of Ukraine, the upper normie is suspiciously nationalistic all of a sudden.
Excellent good sense. Regino of Prum (d.915) came up with a fourfold definition of nation, based on Classical conceptions, that became the standard definition in medieval Europe:
Diversae nationes popularum interse discrepant genere moribus lingua legibus.
(The peoples of various nations differ by origin, customs, languages and laws.)
Where genere (origin) is ancestry. This concept turns up, for instance, in the internal divisions of the Knights of St John.
He was more accurate than many over a millennium later
An excellent piece. One of the amusing things to think about in all of this is your one example of Palestinian nationalism. That is the best example of a modern nationalist movement that was completely invented, and yet it is one that is treated as sacrosanct. There are vast swathes of texts from the early 20th century showing that the "Palestinians" saw themselves as Syrians, and that the whole "national movement" that we recognise was largely created by outside forces (the PLO being established under guidance from Nasser's Egypt and the PFLP being created by the Soviets). The Palestinian Arab Congress in the 1920s saw Palestine as an integral part of the Syrian nation to be ruled from Damascus.
Though regardless of if the idea of the modern 'nation state' existed before Westphalia, length of tradition is not a valid defence of Nationalism as a system. It's inherently divisive, competing nations can't solve the global problems we face, and as far back as the Greek city states it was being countered with Cosmopolitanism by that Cynics and Stoics. And there very much is a synthetic 'by the numbers' approach to the creation of Volksgeist for propaganda purposes -
https://open.substack.com/pub/morewretchthansage/p/once-upon-a-time-in-a-nation-the?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1oiue6