The fragility of imagined communities

There are few concepts which instill in me as deep-seated an ambivalence as nationalism. Having lived in a number of different countries has pushed me in the direction of the cosmopolitan universalist who believes that human beings are not so fundamentally different. I often find myself frustrated with people who are willing to characterize foreigners in broad strokes and paint them as a monolith.

Yet, it would be dishonest of me to say that it did not influence my thinking in powerful ways, because it undeniably does. When someone criticizes a country I have lived in, my mind immediately starts searching for reasons they are wrong rather actually pondering the content of their statement. I can construct arguments as to why I believe the societies that I've belonged to bring out human potential better than some others, but that doesn't really explain the origins of my visceral response.

Why is it that nationalism exerts so much influence on us despite the fact that it originates from something as arbitrary and fluid as the nation? I thought I'd spend a little time trying to evolve my views on this topic this summer, so I picked up Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities to kick things off.

The origins of nationalism

The books starts off by explaining that while we tend to think of the nation as a concept that has existed for millennia, they are actually fairly modern. People have always had affinity towards the people they had direct contact with, but the idea that you have a special relationship to a fellow countryman whom you have never met is actually quite new.

Nations are imagined political communities—but that is not to say that they are fabrications. Anderson writes,

It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.

Several factors led to the birth of the nation, chief among these being the rise of print capitalism, which enabled people to spread ideas through a standard written language. Around the same time, people were losing faith in the idea that certain languages gave privileged access to the truth and were beginning to abandon a view of societies centered around dynastic families with special status. The nation rose to fill this void.

If nations are imagined, why are they so powerful?

Why, then, is nationalism is so powerful that people are willing to sacrifice their lives for it? A grave for a fallen liberal or a fallen Marxist seems absurd, whereas the grave of a fallen French soldier is perfectly normal. My general impression here is that while this is an extremely interesting and important question, the book provides only partial answers.

In explaining why the people of colonies developed national identities distinct from their imperial rulers, sometimes transcending race and status, the book gives a lot of credit to the local publishers which gave both the European conquerers and the original inhabitants common ideas. Anderson acknowledges that economic incentives and institutions also played a part, but even all of this put together seems like an incomplete picture.

Nations as a guarantor of safety

The piece that seems missing from Anderson's work is the fact that the idea of a nation maps onto our innate tribalism, and that is what gives it the emotional power that it has. Ultimately, humans are biological systems programmed for survival, and we need heuristics to determine whether or not someone else is safe to be around or not.

I think this makes sense for anyone who has traveled to another country. When you land back in your home country, there is a sense of relief and safety that hits you, even when you know that crime rates in the country you visited are low and you've ended you trip trouble-free. It seems to me as though print capitalism guides these emotions in certain directions, but do not act as origins of nationalism's power.

When nations fall apart

Now another question I want to pose is the following: if nations can be formed through the ways Anderson has described, can they also fall apart in similar ways? I talked about the collapse of nations as institutions in my last post, but here I'd like to examine the collapse of nations as imagined communities.

Taking, for example, the print capitalism factor, it is well documented at this point that the United States can be split into separate communities based on media consumption. At this point the kinds of media people consume may still be similar enough that the United States is not in serious risk of fragmenting into separate nations, but could it progress to the point where the imagined community of the United States no longer makes sense?

Side note: I know it's weird to talk about the American media landscape as not being fragmented right now, but it still is largely similar when you compare it to other countries. Non-politically charged news is covered in basically the same way. Plus, we seem to still be watching the same movies and TV shows.

Many Trump supporters and Brexit voters talk about their country seeming increasingly unfamiliar to them. Arlie Russell Hochschild has recently written about how many Trump supporters feel as though they are strangers in their own land. Anderson's formulation of the nation suggests that it is largely formed top-down. Perhaps we are close enough to the edge that those at he top need to restrain themselves and try to keep the imagined communities we have alive.