Modern Tribalism

Nationalism and the nation state seem eternal. In our sophisticated era of extraordinary production and distribution with a global economy and democracy becoming well sown into societies we seem to have things pretty good. But who are we? Beyond our names we often immediately grasp for our citizenship, our nationality. The most intense discussions are also often over us and them (“why don’t they go back to their own country?”), and the nation, nation-state or more cloudy term ‘country’ gets thrown around; these terms define and group us. Yet we need remember “ironically, what we call the modern nation-state is also a pre-modern, for it often seems to presume that a national population is a given, fixed, and pre-existing community, language group, or race, and that a citizenry emerges in the twentieth century that could be homogenous and harmonious” (Beilharz 2002: 216). Assumptions are made that not only is the idea of the nation (I will just use this term, my purpose needs no finer distinctions) relatively clear-cut , agreed and understood, but that there isn’t any tension, it is sorted, and standardly assumed to be sustainable and even ideal. Yet, here is a fact about the seemingly innocent nation: “Robert Pape recorded 188 suicide bomb attacks between 1980 and 2001. Fully 82 percent of these attacks were associated with the campaigns to achieve a Palestinian state, a Kurdish state, a Tamil state, or a Chechen state, or to seperate Kashmir from India … most of the other attacks were associated with nationalist attempts to end a foreign occupation of an existing nation-state” (Roeder 2007:5). Also many bloody wars have been due to state expansion or inter-state tension “Nils Petter Gleditsch recorded 184 wars within the jurisdictions of sovereign states between 1946 and 2001, including 21 within their external dependencies and 163 within their metropolises” (Roeder 2007:5). Also terrorism may be a global phenomenon now but it’s history seems to spring from national roots.

So whether states are morally pristine seems to be clear with the answer in the negative: they come with baggage and can lead to evil. Yet like a good liberal/social democrat I believe they are the best rough model for organizing society (with capitalism and democracy extant). But what must be asked is what is this phenomenon of the nation like, what are its features, what defines as it is rather than what it should be? Well, the nation is new, for starters, it came from somewhere and thus isn’t a clearly defined, sorted unit:

“the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen ushered in an age of nationalism that led to the conscious creation of nation-states. In the 185 years that followed the final defeat of the French in 1815, most existing states sought to redefine themselves by the new logic of nation-statehood, namely, that their statehood was an expression of the sovereign will of a people. More dramatically, a total of 191 new or reconstituted states joined or rejoined the international system, most with the claim that this represented the sovereign prerogative of a people to be self-governing”.

(Roeder 2007:5-6)

Nations are coincidence, where power happened to lie in a seemingly unified area at an arbitrary point in history where enough persons mustered the effort to declare statehood, that they comprise a nation. Often unified areas (that is, a piece of land with a population that can work together) try and pick up the pieces after towering powers fall or spheres of influence wane “decolonization represents the single most common source of new nation-states- 62 percent of the total number created since 1815, … 188 states” (Roeder 2007:6). Another fact is only a handful of national anthems really predate the 20th century, even though they are assumed to echo many many generations back something like half of the national anthems were created in the middle of the 20th century.

I often hear the response and attitude I expect from tribal nomads “why don’t they go back to their own country?” which usually assumes no moral responsibility and assumes that the state is the foundation and be all end all of human affairs. Yet I have at least one major qualm with this situation. Firstly, as seen above, empires and powers often relent on land and let a nation develop (Britain leaving and letting the nations India, South Africa, Iraq and Palestine be, and France letting Vietnam, Syria and lebanon be, for example). This is problematic as like with humans being born they don’t start with equal circumstances and opportunities. Former colonizers and occupiers leave neophyte  nations in subpar to say the least (and with 62% picking up the pieces after former powers leave you can understand why there aren’t so many affluent nations, e.g. Germany, Canada, France etc). To suddenly abandon a group of people after sustained tutelage then expect with simplistic libertarian like expectations that they can fend completely for themselves is delusional and immoral. The problem is the lack of memory, the lack of knowledge of history. Americans don’t know how they effected Mexico, Britain is ignorant of its many abandoned children, I suspect Japan knows little of its former territories Taiwan and Korea and France has sustained ignorance towards Algeria.

Why don’t we try remembering our humanity before our nationality?

Bibliography

Beilharz, P. (2002), Social Self, Global Culture. ‘Nation: Experiences and Explanations’. Oxford University Press.

Roeder, P. G. (2007), Where Nation-States Come From. Princeton University Press.

The Problem of Inspiration

Just watching a documentary about Maya Deren and was suddenly jolted by expressions of hers. Deren was amongst people of Haiti, living for a sustained period of time (in the manner of classic anthropology,  with her humanity able to transcend the observer/observed dyad) and she observed:

“I do find that the manner in which it [voodoo] operates in practice, ritually, the interior miracle [Kierkegaard subjectivity is truth], if you will, is very valid. You see, the Haitians never ask whether you believe in Vodoun. They say, do you do it, do you serve?” “[Question: Do you think people are pretty skeptical, looking askance at this talk about Voodoo now?] Well, I don’t think they would be if they just related a little bit to things they have from time to time felt. For example, those moments when, when they forgot themselves and when everything was clear by a certain logic that was larger than themselves. Those moments… imagine those multiplied a thousand times so that one’s self is really transcended and everything is clear in another way I think one would begin to know what I mean. I think artistic inspiration is in that direction. I think love is in that direction. The logics of love are different than the logics of non-love”.

Perfect. Every points hits hits hits. What I needed was an arsenal of philosophers and writers from Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Derrida, Blanchot to reach the same conclusions she did from just being in life and with phenomenological awareness knowing ones experiences [thoughts, emotions, physical sensations and more] through incredible levels of attuning to life, mastery of the moment. But not simply the moment, the present [as all the tragically comprehensively well read know], but having sufficient experience in past moments and sufficient experience open to specific future moments. For instance, Deren completely and intelligently annihilated the Western disposition for justified belief and that religion should be objectively correct, so she was open to the Haitian and broader, what I believe is more primordial and right, disposition towards religion which is that subjectivity is truth. Deren perfectly understood that you had to live the ebbs and flows of life, you had to daily experience and practice (i.e. do!) so you could feel, that is, find valuable, significant, important. So therefore a system, discourse (language, if you will, not just of words but also, or primarily, of action) is required. Something larger than the individual lived daily and sustained over time. So here is the problem for inspiration: you must already in part be disposed, ready for what you receive, for what spark gives inspiration. To analogize, you must speak English before you can hear a very new, to the hearer, sentence of English or expression of English (e.g. a rap). This expression may radically alter ones daily activities, routines and life but one had to be in some sense open to the possibility to have it actualise.

So problem for the Enlightenment, modernity person (like myself much of the time) that expects a solid idea unto itself will be consciously learned and acquired out of pretty much nothing. Also that a single idea can reveal a new area of knowledge and will be a foothold for further reflection, study, knowledge, progress in knowledge etc unto itself. We often have background variables which aren’t entirely conscious to us which colour and affect our relation to something. To quote George Steiner on language, but the same holds for anything we experience: “[words] rise to the surface of speech from great depths of national or regional sensibility, barnacled with undeclared remembrance.” This was one of the great points of Freud, that the millions of moments people live imprint millions of nuances onto peoples’ lives, which makes their individual experiences of phenomena unique. This doesn’t mean communication or knowledge is impossible at all, a knee-jerk reaction from the Enlightenment era people who believed too much was assured and certain and practically linear like progress was possible in all domains. It does mean that people are complicated, especially the workings of the individual mind and experience and you can’t naively believe people will respond to one stimulus similarly. This bedevils psychology; you can’t even believe that trend data on simple, stimulus and response experimentation is valid, yet alone useful. It is like physicists mistaking the atom for the fundamental, base building block of reality.

I was very happy when I heard Maya Deren say what she said. I felt a kindred spirit, like our lives share a wavelength. I believe this to be the highest communion, a sense of being parallel, which at its peak grants a sense of oneness. There is a problem with each individual having such rich, detailed and distinct lives: they are separate, different from each over. Any society which perpetuates the belief (because people can believe just about anything if the belief is circulated enough) that individuals are atomised and seperate will have as an underbelly a sense of isolation, emotional vertigo whereby like a lone skyscraper we feel like our true selves, the important part of ourselves, is not recognised by others and stands alone, as an ocean of cheap talk, advertising and throwaway speech furthers the sense of isolation as one of the strongest things to bring people together (language) is not trying at all to recognise who we are. I believe in Western society this malaise of modernity, to use Charles Taylor’s notion, is a constant, unrelenting thorn. To experience (I favour this holistic term) that another person is like us and recognises us, two distinct things which intertwine, is the best psychological medicine to the experience of isolation. To overcome being too individual one must become more social, more often parallel to others. Close. Like two instruments in a symphony, which by nature sound different, but by grace (yes, I’m grasping for religious terminology) can play one song, chime oneness, together.

I think it is a hallmark of the current period of history, Facebook. Social networking at large is an attempt by an individualistic society to acknowledge something larger than the individual, yet it does so in a fatally flawed individualistic manner. It attempts perfect identity, to perfectly identify and grasp the social world, yet as discussed and known to Wittgenstein and Heidegger you can’t enunciate the social world because there is too much background. Even as people try to prune and maintain their Facebook page which they believe they do from individual volition they are in fact playing to expectations from others because people get a sense of what is important from other people. Why did someone put music tastes on their Facebook? Say basketball was an interest? Graffiti, skateboarding etc. This doesn’t mean that subjectively they don’t enjoy or find something important. It just means that they saw other people enjoying it or they saw it was another person doing something. People forget how human everything we come into contact with is! All the books on my shelf are a human being, all the words in those books are the fingerprints of a human being, a subjectivity. I believe that when I like a novel or some writing in a novel I am to a degree liking it because it has the aura of humanity about it. Likewise one learns to enjoy physical exhaustion early due to a social upbringing, thereon it is easy to realise that sport is fun. It is both enjoyable for the individual in the first person, yet like people learn language from others then speak their individual mind so too do people learn to enjoy and find things important, then they nuance their significances in what is both individual expression (liking something as an end in itself) and seeking social recognition (liking something for the sake of one’s social environment).

Society

“Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is how Thomas Hobbes described life in the absence of society. His conclusion, 350 years ago, that society is necessary to maintain civilized relations between people reverberated in March, when Tea Partiers attacked a disabled man during a health care reform protest. With anti-social forces tearing at our connective fabric, it is essential to understand the value of society and to defend it.

Society is a network of institutions and relationships, from churches to public schools. It encompasses physical infrastructure, financial mechanisms, and social norms and behavior, as well as the legal system that supplies essential security and stability. Members of a well-functioning society are bound together by respect, trust, and need.

(link 1)

In the absence of society, the state of nature, the environment and ecosystem which humankind lives in is unforgiving (and largely because  human beings act without mercy or forgiving towards one another). Society is the ideal that base dispositions can be overcome. Think about the notion, something larger (social structure) is needed to facilitate decency as individuals in general, left to themselves, will act with cruelty and longevity will be lost for all, along with a respectable standard of living. This is a jaded viewpoint, it the liberal viewpoint (and I am a broadly defined liberal), yet it has been a guiding principle especially since the French revolution and has generally been vindicated.

The estimation of humanity unto itself is low. Yet as William Vollman displayed with his cataloging of violence, and as historians have laid bare since records were created humanity’s capacity for evil is vast and always able. In times like these for Western societies like Australia, the Unites States and the United Kingdom it is largely forgotten, or repressed. With darkness returning, with nationalism, hatred, self-focus stirring we will see what the average individual is made of. I fear what such opportunity will reveal, the 20th century, “the century of barbarism”, may well be challenged for infamy. The question: why?

Human psychology is the reason. We need a few dozen more Freuds before we have a comprehensive picture of psychology, a paradigm. As has been observed by the likes of Freud and Erich Fromm (I can’t with certainty cite more, my memory of psychology is fading) people have a hard time living with fear and uncertainty, which life perpetually is as it is stuck in the middle of time, which detaches people from their past and thrusts them into a fundamentally unknowable & uncertain future. There is an impossible drive to do away with all fear, with all uncertainty. The West, and the world, has a tradition of hero worship. The idea of self-sufficiency, of humanity beholding power which can have the final say, so to speak, which can get beyond the ebb and flow of the world, of reality (like the incredible power of our mind, to so readily think of whatever we wish). It may seem trite but the entrepreneur is a new hero, the so called “self made man”. Just seeing the existence of such determining power, a man who can influence a whole industry with his business in this case, uplifts many an individual as it exemplifies that it is possible to be more than a pawn in the cosmic chess game. Why do normal, not wealthy people feel actively annoyed over governments trying to curb the stupendous wealth making of the few? Even Warren Buffet has revealed mythology of the pure, completely self-sufficient individual (on record, I am not against entrepreneurs, just the popular notion that they owe nobody nothing at all. Many make their gains deservedly in my view): “I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I’ve earned” (link 1).

There is also the labeling of the other which the average person does. The futile categorizing of a certain group of humans as evil, as ungenerous, as indecent is an attempt to get certainty. By having a fixed point, an Enemy, one can know oneself as Good. Nietzsche has torn this to shreds of course, but for nearly all human history societies have defined themselves against groups of others (Israel is a great example, as “recently an intelligence official actually called the absence of Palestinian terror a “propaganda problem”) (link 2). Even in this age where many societies have large middle classes with high standards of education and living we see absolute silliness of Europeans (e.g., Belgians, French, Swiss, Britons) hating and contrasting themselves with Muslims. From having a hatred, a contrast (e.g. “these Muslims are not like us, they do not wish us well, are not decent, not democratic, evil”) there is such little distance to travel to violence and cruelty. This is coming from not warmongering, impoverished, uneducated American masses but the allegedly superior European examples. Why bother with education and democracy if it yields such bad returns in judgement and politics? Because it is sadly the best, so with desperation explanations must be made…

What is interesting is society in the age of globalisation. Society is a rickety project, yet already we are building newer and greater things, the “community of nations”, that is a world with peace, trade, international organisations and an overarching reality of interconnectedness between nations. We have barely established a workable model for one society to organise people, to have them live long lives without suffering and with opportunity. Now things are being shaken up as what surrounds the liberal democracy, roughly described above as society, the relation between nations are being transformed via globalisation, that hard to describe, mythical beast.

These are incredibly complex systems, globalisation, the liberal democracy and human psychology. How globalisation effects the liberal democracy which in turn effects human psychology which in turn effects people’s relations unto each other is incredibly complicated. Yet, it is vital that we understand what facilitates an amiable, sympathetic orientation towards others. More mulling required.

Immigration and Other Others

2009

TOTAL SETTLER MIGRATION 160 000

REFUGEES 15 000 BOAT PEOPLE 2 000

Around one perfect of Australia’s overall migration and nearly 100 perfect of Australia’s media attention (link 1). The red herring’s if mosque minarets or burqas are gobbled up and considered the essential issue (as if boat people were all of Australia’s migrants and as if Islam consisted entirely of mosque architecture and the public dress of women). The other is mainly unknown. If the other was known they wouldn’t be a talking point. Ignorance is not a virtue, only a practicality as we can’t know and learn everything at once. Furthermore, in spite bridging gaps of ignorance between peoples there is also corporate media which is engendered to keep talking points alive so they can make profits (hence perpetuating ignorance and focusing on the irrelevant details and casting them as the central details).

Immigration is fundamentally a test for the citizenry, the people; not the politicians. Politicians largely mirror what lies in the hearts of everyone. Don’t like boat arrivals? Then we’ll toss them in detention behind barbed wire while they go on hunger strikes for attention. This is furthermore a fundamental test of the globalising world and it shall reveal the mettle of the ordinary person and the prospects for dealing with climate change, terrorism, cultural and linguistic pluralism and so on.

Overcoming ignorance does not mean gaining cultural fluency, simply getting beyond primitive stereotypes and giving the benefit of the doubt to immigrants and not assuming what was gossiped to be gospel (ideas like all Muslims hate the West (whatever that is), all female Muslims wear burqas and are subjugated). The fact is it is by and large people of the host country, white Australians, whispering and pooling amongst themselves their limited knowledge and using it to judge very different and detailed groups of people who arrive here. I only have a shaky understanding of Australian history, and furthermore there is reason why Australians axed the national anthem down to one verse instead of four: we don’t know ourselves very well. It is misguided to think that ethnic and cultural stereotypes are worthwhile cues to human action over understandings of human behaviour and psychology in general.

History teaches us that it can be done as well. In the 1950s and 1960s many Greeks and Italians immigrated to Australia. Now a million Australians claim Italian ancestry and only half use their native language around the home, which indicates integration (not a necessary or required indicator of integration, I have no moral belief that people should give up their ancestors languages, yet it is indicative that people are satisfied with using the host nation’s language English that there are no barriers between people). To contrast around 670,000 people claim Chinese ancestry in Australia and nearly all speak Mandarin or Cantonese around the home (link 1).

The 2005 Cronulla riots and the 2009 attacks on Indian students are an important point in the discussion of immigration, they are examples of failure and hopefully events of which we can learn from an avoid in the future. There is an undercurrent of racism in Australia, as there is in every country, yet it is dangerous and should not be accepted. As Waleed Aly illustrates “An Australian National University study published in June found that Australian job applicants with a non-Anglo name were significantly less likely to be selected for interview than their Anglo counterparts. Indeed, the further one’s heritage strays from Europe, the worse it seems to get. Chinese names fared worst, then Middle Eastern ones. This is the kind of stubborn, subterranean racism with which we still struggle” (link 2). Furthermore, and not something thought about enough in discussions of immigrations and racism, but the consensuses and views of other countries are that “Australia seems only to warrant attention to the extent that it can be presented through the prism of racism. BBC World television barely covered the Australian federal election in 2007, until it emerged that Liberal Party volunteers were distributing fake racist leaflets in the seat of Lindsay” (link 2). The take home message, for a final cribbing of Aly “there is more than a whiff of hypocrisy in the international stereotyping of Australia, yet even so, it would be wilful blindness to dismiss the charge of racism as malicious fantasy.” Coexistence, simply getting by amongst different groups of people (I am not using the more nebulous term multiculturalism) is possible yet requires sincere, regular efforts.

Finding terminology for descriptive purposes (that is, scientific, merely identifying purposes) and prescriptive purposes (that is, how things should be) regarding immigration and different people living together is hard. How to maintain a sense of identity?  How to hold onto the valuable things of community? How to not violate and wrong the other? How can the other hold their dear ancestral community in live somewhere new? The instant we start our conversation about the other our words fail, as we simply don’t have the knowledge to speak of them. What does the word Muslim actually mean? Hindu? Indian? Asian? Chinese? Middle-Eastern? Language can deceive as much as it can illuminate, as when these words are used in public discourse people have radically different understandings of them. Some understandings benign, some dangerous. Only with sincere, sustained effort may we overcome difficulties and problems.

Ethnic, religious or simply specific group communities (that is, areas where a group lives together) are an interesting phenomenon. Are they practical, in the sense that a first wave of immigrants from a specific country will always bunch together in areas before venturing out in individual families to live where they please? Are they signs of resistance, active attempts to bulwark a dialogue, a give and take with the host country? Does hostility from the host country herd ethnicities into certain areas? Does poverty or transport issues mean immigrants end up in certain locations? Are they a means and transitory, or a end and enduring? And finally are they good or bad? First I think looking at them historically illuminates what causes their formation, in this example with Chinese immigrants:

The most notorious of these incidents, and the one which has generated more folklore than any other, was the so-called Lambing Flat Riot, actually a drawn-out series of incidents on the Burrangong Goldfield in New South Wales between November 1860 and September 1861. Several place names are sometimes used interchangeably when describing these events. Burrangong was the name of the gazetted goldfield, and its principal settlement later became the modern town of Young. Lambing Flat, the name which has attached itself most persistently to the events, was a sheep paddock where one of the more violent incidents took place.

Another important aspect of the story is the political events that were going on in Sydney, for the Burrangong affair was played out against the background of a contentious debate in the New South Wales Parliament over legislation to restrict Chinese immigration. Chinese numbers on the New South Wales goldfields had been relatively small, but were rising in the wake of restrictions imposed in Victoria. Restrictive legislation had also been proposed in New South Wales as early as 1858 in the wake of Victorian and Southern Australian laws, but the Premier,Charles Cowper found his own party divided on the issue and the Bill failed. Then in 1860 the Chinese and British governments signed the Convention of Peking, a diplomatic agreement that subjects of the Chinese and British Empires would have reciprocal rights under their respective countries’ laws. As the Australian colonies enacted British laws, it raised the question of whether New South Wales could legally exclude citizens of the Chinese Empire. A new Chinese Immigration Regulation Bill was being drafted for debate in Parliament while the first gold miners were arriving at Burrangong.

The events at Burrangong were well-recorded at the time, and have been analysed by a number of historians in recent decades. The popular impression of the riots as a savage assault on the Chinese by European miners is a mere thumbnail sketch, greatly understating the complexity of what happened there. The Burrangong affair was arguably the most serious civil disorder that has ever happened in Australia, involving more people and lasting much longer than the Eureka Rebellion at Ballarat six years earlier. Eureka has a higher historical profile only because of the unnecessarily brutal military attack that turned the rebels into martyrs.

Trouble began late in 1860 with the formation of a Miners Protective League, followed by roll-ups (mass meetings) of European diggers evicting Chinese miners from sections of the field. These events involved the quasi-legal posting of notices to quit, and were carried out ceremonially, with a brass band leading the marchers. There was little violence at first. Most of the Chinese moved to new diggings nearby, and some returned soon afterward. This pattern of behaviour was to be repeated on several occasions over the next eight months; there seemed to be an understanding from early in the Burrangong events that the Chinese would be tolerated if they remained in certain areas of the goldfield.

In ten months of unrest at Burrangong, the most infamous riot occurred on the night of 30 June 1861 when a mob of perhaps 3,000 drove the Chinese off the Lambing Flat, and then moved on to the Back Creek diggings, destroying tents and looting possessions. About 1,000 Chinese abandoned the field and set up camp near Roberts’ homestead at Currowang sheep station, 20 km away. There were two triggers for the violence: in Sydney the Legislative Council rejected the anti-Chinese bill, and a false rumour swept the goldfield that a new group of 1,500 Chinese were on the road to Burrangong. The police arrived in the days that followed, identified the leaders of the riot, and three were arrested two weeks later. The mob’s reaction was an armed attack on the police camp by about a thousand miners on the night of 14 July, which the police broke up with gunfire and mounted sabre charges, leaving one rioter dead and many wounded.

The police briefly abandoned the field, but then a detachment of 280 soldiers, sailors and police reinforcements arrived from Sydney and stayed for a year. The Chinese were reinstated on the segregated diggings, the ringleaders of the riots were tried and two were gaoled. At the end of the affair, Burrangong was quiet and the Chinese were still there.

Two months later the Chinese Immigration Regulation Act passed the New South Wales Parliament; essentially similar to the Victorian Act of 1855, but going further in also prohibiting the naturalisation of Chinese citizens. It was allowed by the Secretary of State for the Colonies on the grounds that the recent civil emergency in New South Wales had justified a breach of the Convention of Peking. The effect on Chinese immigration to New South Wales was dramatic: in 1860, 6,985 Chinese had arrived in New South Wales; in 1861 the figure shrank to 2,574, in 1862 to 1,030 and in 1863 only 63 arrived.

(link 3)

I believe the roots of enclaves, of group communities are concern, which were justifiable in Australia’s colonial history especially, of the host people not being decent or civil. Also being able to get information, even find work and somewhere to sleep were also significant driving forces for the first migrant communities. Furthermore I believe their nature is transitory and they, by and large, are not resistance. Regarding morality they are fine. To cap off my understanding: “in short, migrants cluster strongly in the early years of their migration, since without English or help from their group they cannot get jobs or function in our society. Over time more arrive through chain migration of family and friends and ethnic concentration increase. Some prosper and move out of the ethnic village to middle class areas, some stay since they make money from their compatriots, some fail to thrive and remain on welfare there over time, just like the rest of us” (link 1).

Immigrants require some sincerity and effort from the host population to be understood, so the walls between people can come down. With laziness racism will brew and explode in events, building unnecessary further tension between peoples. Communal living upon entering a new country must not be considered smugness or disrespect, but must be given the benefit in situations where doubted and let be. It has taken centuries for different groups of people to live alongside one another, and one look at the United States shows that time itself will not help people coexist. We live at a moment where immigrants may integrate faster, and it is a positive that people can travel to a new land and fit in quicker and more comfortably. Yet in these times the host population can become lazy, so now perhaps more than before we must show our hospitality, our sincerity, our humanity.