Gallery

‹ Back

 

I myself am 17 years old, and most of the people I talk to about these sorts of things are roughly within the same age range.  And even then at a young age, many of us have graduated to the same sense of mind and attitude toward the world common with our parents and educators.  Likewise, most people at this age are already completely used to nationalism, whether they realize it or not.  

But the issue of my writing is a matter of nationalism.  When I say nationalism, though, I mean it in a very broad sense.  Because nationalism itself is broad, for this reason, most people may indeed be nationalists without the consciousness that they actually are.  For the purpose of this writing, nationalism is the tendency to make large numbers of people out to be one homogenous entity.  Though in my writing, I will not exclusively examine nationalism on the basis of a nation, because I think political entities can bear out the same qualities of nations.  In some sense, one can be nationalist without necessarily being a part of a nation- it is now a commonplace, after all, that Soviet Marxism or Trotskyism were nationalist in their own way.  So I am using the term nationalism for lack of a better.  

    The issue of homogenization is bad enough, but I think out of all the mental vices to do with nationalism, the dominant one is a lack of volition. And the causes for this must vary, but here is a list that I’ve taken in observation. 

First, there’s the matter of sheer arrogance, as most common sense would have the idea of nationalism almost entirely limited to the more outrageous and notable governments, like Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy.  But this definition not only kicks nationalism under the historical rug but also makes nationalism out to be something outside individual possibility.  

Naturally theres also the linguistic issue, nationalist chatter is somewhat obvious in institutions like the Church or in the rhetoric of more old-fashioned politics, where terms like “fatherland” or references to a nation’s territories as “hers” bear out the image of an individual-almost human entity.  And for the most part, I never found these sorts of moments to be all that effective in swallowing up any loyalties.  But I think a fair deal of nationalist talk, is causal and in very general terms, so long as people believe they can gauge the feelings of whole nations.  In more ways than one, the inadvertent, almost organic unfolding of groupthink still do have a priority, even if not a conscious one.  Nationalism must have a desire to see something happen, largely the object is to get hold of some sort of material that promises dominance, or to outright assert dominance.  Though it cannot excite collective pity, this will be explained at a later point.

    Of the ‘speeches’ and political talk I wind up hearing, some reverted to the usual talking points of Zionism, and others were simply outright applause for Israel. Frankly, nothing was surprising about this, even in schools, one can spot the general drift in larger society that leaves non-partisan talk thwarted by various obstructions in both directions.  Everything in our age tries to assure the average person that he is in the right. His outlook and confidence are summed up in his comments throughout the day, if he’s on the left-“the Palestinians don't deserve this”, and if he's on the conservative side- “the Israelis have the right”.  Most people are talked about in this sort of way by one group or another, and the only real difference eventually comes down to one's political predilections.

In any case, this is the habit of mind that pervades nationalism: making the group into an individual for our rhetorical convenience.  I believe this is the more considerable problem with nationalism, and more so than the passionate patriotism felt about a nation or political entities; because it tends to quietly spread bad feelings between whole groups. Of course, I think a person can be bad, and he can do bad things. But at any rate, I think it’s entirely pointless to say a group can be, on the whole, “bad” unless every member of that group lives out a completely replicable life.

    So nationalism gets around this by just changing the many into a singular body.  Of course, I am not trying to say that the practice of nationalism is altogether limited to rhetoric, but rhetoric is an unfailing cause for our conscious and subconscious worldviews.  

When up against the obvious forms of nationalism like jingoism many are familiar with, I think many people believe jingoism is worse, but I do not think so.  After all, most people, especially among my high school generation, can confidently say that they do not believe some people are innately superior to others. But in the inadvertent definition, they are hopelessly nationalist.  Of course, they will say that they are strongly against the notable moments of nationalism.  It’s easy, after all, to distance oneself from the Axis powers, But the issue is, that the sort of things that are working against nationalism are found in the recognition of nationalism. So when we actually get around to doing nationalist things, we tend not to notice.

    On the one side, nationalism homogenizes people and makes them all out to be one person, easy to collectively punish and justify those punishments.  However, I think it works on both ends. The defenders of nationalism are de-individualized in their groups, such that they abandon any personal motives-i.e inner restraint, empathy, and accountability. It is with this last place that I am concerned.

Somewhere or later, in his 1895 study of the mob, the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon observed that the individual tends to forget about his individuality when in a group.  Because he, for the most part, conforms with his comrades on most accounts and fails to disassociate himself from them.  Such that he is made confidently an extension of the group’s ambitions and has no real motive of his own other than that which benefits the group.  To that degree, he has no personal accountability. There are other more instinctual causes for the matter, people may conclude that it is safer to outright do what others do, and that would be the issue of group effect, which I feel Solomon Asch came up with a far better analysis to explain. Presumably, everybody else in the same boat should feel the same, such that the group itself doesn't have any accountability for ITS actions.   I think Le Bon’s findings were for the most part disagreeable with the French intelligentsia at the time, who happened to prefer the humanist comfort in Kant's religion of reason and the rational human. But I think after a while, even if a war had to happen, Le Bon’s theory was turned popular with the examination of Nazi war criminals shortly after Nuremberg. To this extent, later frequent examinations sometimes exaggerated their usefulness and the thought of mob hysteria graduated to a degree of commonsense.  Now, I believe, “de-individualization” has the faint suggestion of massacres, genocide, and all sorts of mob violence but not the subtlety of daily life.  

    At any rate, though, the reasoning of Le Bon was good enough, such that Philip Zimbardo only added a supplemental case for the group effect.  The Stanford prison experiment, though, has already been mentioned plenty of times in these kinds of essays, but it shouldn't be passed off only because of that renown.  There, in the experiments, nothing but a label and instructed association with a group was more than enough to completely smooth down any accountability among the prison guards.  Their roles were taken so seriously, that they had done their jobs with a sort of maniacal enjoyment, but they were not mixed up with politics nor any valid cause of group hatred other than their being a part of a group.

Nowadays, these kinds of studies seem out of the current intellectual atmosphere: those who do bother with the issue of research at all would like to either write off these studies as solely unethical and ignore any practical worth, or exaggerate them altogether and then develop a wholly cynical attitude towards human nature.  But people shouldn't so quickly take these studies as a singular revelation, what is really at issue is the psychological tendency to be nationalist.  But no reputable educational system, across multiple schools in lower education, has made it their business to see history and politics in psycho-social terms.  Even though it's tempting to ignore the mass of ill will in the world, I’d like to see a more courageous attitude towards what is, I think, another one of the causes of nationalism.

    I am always amazed when people assume this nationalist kind of talk can have some good come out of it.  Even if they don't have concrete examples of nationalist consequences, they can, by reason and principle, determine that the homogenizing of a group is at the very least an issue for concern.  Here I am not trying to attack moments of inadvertent or ‘good-hearted’ nationalism, encouraging “cultural pride” and differentiating qualities of a group are a few instances that come to mind.  Of course, I don't think one should discourage feelings of pride and enjoyment in one's culture, but the positively-spirited phrases that homogenize people are, more or less, cause for nationalism.  Even when I was younger, it was impressed upon me that I should be happy to be “one of the Muslim boys”.  Even when I was only by relation, a Muslim, just as I was by relation Jewish or Christian.  Our schools are fond of this “celebration”, but I think it only has the effect of distancing me from any individual sense of self I may have had to begin with.

Students my age should make it their business to understand these causes, especially when they are at such an impressionable point in their lives. Even now, many students, who may not have any immediate connections with Israel, have the same nationalist views as those who do. For the most part, they’ve made themselves a sort of private and intelligible world where whole groups of people are always in absolute agreement, and with them, everything is a matter of sport with one national team up in arms against another.  

Seeing how nationalism comes with a tremendous sense of deindividualization, it’s almost pointless to argue with a nationalist.  For he has already adopted the group itself as his personal motive.  Such that any disagreement feels like a pointless assault against imaginary facts He might as well be doing this sort of thing everywhere, but more recently he has been doing so in Israel.  Realistically, he is the sort of person to write off mild-mannered criticisms of his government as anti-Semitic.  This kind of thing happens everywhere, though, and it's best summed up as collective delusion.  Every state that is in the ‘bad’ can be expected to act this way sooner or later. What is also at play is, the fact that people would like to hold up the political orthodoxy for which they have associated.  It has made the conversation nearly impossible, and I think any intellectual conversation should never be in a way where sheer offense can end the debate there and then.

    I don't want the final impression of my writing to be wholly grim or cynical, I only believe that people are considerably impressionable. I do not think that I, nor anyone my age, is free from this senselessness.  But I think some good can come out of realizing this.  I encourage those in high school to not altogether wipe away these feelings, but to take them with a more introspective awareness. I would certainly not urge anybody to stay out of politics or things that could arouse feelings of nationalism.  I’d go as far as to say that all students should engage in world politics much more frequently than they already do, because it is, like most things, approachable if known.  All people express some natural impulse in wanting to see one side on top of another in what Freud calls the ID, and all people should likewise discipline that impulse.