Nationalism and Modernity

[Xunzian]

Recently Prof. Crane over at Useless Tree has been thinking a lot about nationalism. Specifically, how it relates to China and how Chinese philosophy relates to nationalism. I thought some of his posts would be a good jumping off point for discussion so I’ll provide them:

Why Modernity Challenges Confucianism

The new semester has started. I am now busy with class preparation (I read everything that I assign for classes right before class so that it’ s fresh…and that steals the time I have to read other things). And I have taken on some administrative duties (Chair of the International Studies program here). All of which means less time for blogging. But let me try to fuse class preparation and posting…

For my class, “Nationalism in East Asia,” I have the students first read Ernst Gellner’s little book, Nations and Nationalism. It’s a punchy read. He makes a strong case (“strong” in the sense that he argues it vigorously) that nationalism is a product of modernization, especially industrialization and that the “nation” (by which we can presume he also means national identity) is a product of nationalism; as he famously states: “It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.” (54). Thus, he goes on at some length distinguishing agrarian society from industrial society, and in that distinction I can see something that explains why Confucianism might have a hard time gaining intellectual traction under conditions of modernity. Take this paragraph (pp. 23-24):

If cognitive growth presupposes that no element is indissolubly linked a priori to any other, and that everything is open to rethinking, then economic and productive growth requires exactly the same of human activities and hence of human roles. Roles become optional and instrumental. The old stability of the social role is simply incompatible with growth and innovation. Innovation means doing new things, the boundaries of which cannot be the same as those of the activities they replace. No doubt most societies can cope with an occasional re-drawing of job specifications and guild boundaries, just as a football team can experimentally switch from one formation to another, and yet maintain continuity. But what happens when such changes themselves are constant and continuous, and when the persistence of occupational change itself becomes the one permanent feature of a social order?
The point about “cognitive growth” links back to his analysis of the effects of industrial modernization on intellectual life: the rise of analysis - breaking down received knowledge into smaller parts and seeing how and why they might fit together, and whether they might be reconfigured more effectively. It’s a new kind of rationality, a new epistemological skepticism.

And something similar happens in the social world as well, and the social and intellectual feed off of each other. It’s reminiscent of the great line from Marx:

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

I wouldn’t say Gellner is a Marxist, his analysis of nationalism runs counter to much of Marxist thought, but he certainly has a materialist bent to him…

In any event, when I re-read that passage of Gellner’s above, it immediately made me think of the modern fate of Confucianism. These two lines stand out:

Roles become optional and instrumental. The old stability of the social role is simply incompatible with growth and innovation.

Social roles are the constituents of Duty (yi) and for a Confucian, even a modern Confucian, they cannot be optional and instrumental. They are essential and necessary. Indeed, a modernized Confucianism, if it is to preserve the basic elements of the ancient philosophy, would have to reject the idea that the “old stability” of social roles is somehow so incompatible with modern industrial and post-industrial life that they, the roles, can some be disregarded. That’s why Ames is trying to develop a Confucian role ethics.

I imagine that if Gellner were to attend one of Ames’s seminars, he would simply laugh at the impossibility of a role ethics in a modern industrial context. Who’s right?..

More on Confucianism and Modernity

My last post elicited a couple of excellent responses and, instead of simply burying the exchange in the comments section, I will bring them up here for a new post.

First up is Justsomeguy, who points out:

"Well, for starters, I’m not sure that it makes sense to apply the European nationalist narrative to all nationalist narratives. Indeed, in Europe it was generally the case that a sovereign ruled over a multi-ethnic, multi-national empire through capricious situations such as marriage alliances.

I’m not sure that such an analysis can be applied to China, which unified early on and more-or-less remained unified. Back to an earlier post about critical Han studies, the Han race is about as homogeneous as the Caucasian race. That is to say, not at all. I mean, you’ve got multiple mutually unintelligible dialects and a great variety of physical traits yet they are all supposed to be the same thing?"

It is always helpful to raise this kind of question: can theories of nationalism that are generated largely upon a Western (or, at least, non-Asian) empirical basis be used to explain Chinese (or other Asian) experiences? While we must always be alert to the ways in which cultural or political bias might distort our view, I think that, in fact, we can do this. Indeed, it is done all the time, by both Westerners and Chinese. Let’s not forget that the Chinese Communist Party, and Mao Zedong himself, certainly believe that historical-materialism, which was generated based largely upon a European empirical basis (and which produced, in Marx himself, some glaringly Orientalist assertions) could indeed be useful in explaining, and shaping, Chinese experience. Much could also be the same for the contemporary purveyors of capitalist enterprises in China.

So, the problem is not inevitable or inherent but specific; that is to say, if we are constantly open to empirical challenge and accept a wide range of evidence, from a variety of cultural and political sources, then, yes, we can avoid the worst abuses of Euro-centrism.

In the case of Gellner’s theory and China, there are elements of it that are applicable. Indeed, he even recognizes this in a parenthetical comment: “Only seldom (as in the case of the Chinese bureaucracy) is it co-extensive with a state (and in that case, it did display a certain kind of nationalism.)” (16)

The “it” referred to there is the stratum of power holders, that social force which has access to state power. And he recognizes that in China, historically, the agricultural elite was well-formed and, to an extent, self-conscious of itself as possessor and reproducer of a “high culture.”

But Gellner only goes so far as a “certain kind of nationalism.” Of course, for him, nationalism has a very particular definition: “…a political principle, which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent.” (1)

In imperial China (let’s just say from the Tang on for now) the examination system created a relatively culturally homogeneous elite class - most studied the same books, read the same poetry, could refer to the same literary and historical narratives - and that class was extensively distributed across the territory effectively ruled by the centralized bureaucratic apparatus. There was a kind of congruence between the cultural and the political unit. And the high culture and the bureaucracy were very resilient and persistent historically.

But Gellner’s analysis might then lead us to say that while the identity of the Chinese cultural elite is a “certain kind of nationalism,” it is not a modern nationalism. And the primary reason for that is that it did not reach far enough down into society at large to be analogous to a modern nationalism. As justsomeguy says later in his comment, there is a great deal of cultural and linguistic diversity in imperial China. The idea of a unified “Han” ethnic identity just does not exist, not, at least, in the manner in which it is mobilized today. Indeed, it is precisely because of the persistence of many, many local cultural differentiations, below the elite level, that we might say that pre-modern Chinese identity, however homogeneous and extensive it is at the top, is not yet “national” in a modern sense.

And this brings up to another comment, by Vik:

“This seems suspiciously close to the old Eurocentric/Orientalist stereotype that the past was fixed and static (without creativity) and “modernity” somehow dynamic. I hope someone would open that up to scrutiny right off the bat. Are we really all that different now? Looking at the long arc of history?”

Again, another excellent question. And I agree that we should avoid the old, and inaccurate, notion that the pre-modern world was static. It was not. It contained its own dynamism and change. Just think about the economic transformations of the Song. But to say that imperial China was not stagnant is not say that it was as dynamic as is contemporary China. As happened virtually everywhere in the world, industrialization and capitalism brings an increasing pace of technological, economic, social, culture and political change. Everything speeds up. Thus the changes that have been happening in China since, say, the 19th century but especially in the twentieth century and onward, have brought more thoroughgoing and more rapid transformation than was generally the case in earlier imperial times.

And I think on this score Gellner is right. Once capitalism begins to spread around the globe (and I understand capitalism as a particularly powerful form of industrialization) old, and generally smaller and more restrictive, social formations are dissolved into larger and larger scale cultural units. It is in that cultural space that national identities are asserted. What distinguishes modern, national identities from pre-modern, elite cultural identities is scale. A much larger portion of the population (virtually everyone within the boundaries of the state) is drawn into literacy and participation in a common culture. And that common culture is the medium for the horizontal solidarities of Chinese national identity.

Let me finish here with one more idea from justsomeguy:

“As for roles becoming optional and instrumental, well, to bring things back to your post we can ask what Marxists think of that. They have a word for it: alienation. Pre/anti-modern communitarian paths (a la Sandel) seek to avoid that alienation and are successful at it within the class of people whose alienation is being considered (real bad track record on women’s rights, those communitarian societies). Confucianism can fit quite comfortably into that reaction to modernism. That needn’t demand that Confucianism be reactionary, though. The role of a good remonstrator is stressed in the Mencius, after all. So, Confucianism can serve that function within the context of modernity for those to whom Confucianism means something.”

I agree. To my mind the most productive (is that the right term here?) role for modern Confucians is politico-cultural critic. It may be more. It may inspire personal moments of reconnection with the “old” social roles that are the source of Humanity. And those are good and valuable moments. But I don’t think it can be transformative versus global capitalism. Small victories will have to be savored when they are possible…

So, do we agree with Gellner’s hypothesis? That the order is: modernization → nationalism → nation? And do you agree that such an ordering can be applied to China and other East Asian countries? Japan, certainly. The Meiji Restoration nicely follows Gellner’s path. However, I’m not sure that the same analysis could be applied to China, Korea, or Vietnam. I suppose that Sonderweg-theory could be applied to the first three. The quasi-nationalism of the elites in those countries paved the way for a half-modernized country with nationalistic elements but fundamentally divided. That could explain some of the tensions that all those countries are experiencing. Granted, colonialism also throws some vinegar into the mix since you’ve got nationalists who define themselves as being opposed to the colonizers but it is also the colonizers that make modernity a possibility.

Learning Nationalism

In my class on East Asian nationalism were are reading the introduction and afterword of Liah Greenfeld’s book, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. It is quite different from the Gellner book I mentioned in posts below. She is much more subjective in her analysis, as opposed to Gellner’s vaunted objectivity.

This passage from Greenfeld jumped out at me:
The cardinal fact of human existence is that humans lack built-in “models for” behavior in groups. Social integration and cooperation are necessary for the preservation of the human species (as well as for its individual members), but there is no innate knowledge of how this should be accomplished. The lack of innate knowledge results in the need for models and blueprints, for an image of order, or created symbolic order, among human beings. (18)

For her, national identity becomes one of those “created symbolic orders,” and a particularly powerful one under conditions of modernity. (Quite to the contrary of Gellner, she argues that nationalism produces modernization, not the other way around).

That passage, and that sensibility, brought Mencius immediately to mind:

“Hou Chi taught the ways of agriculture to the people, taught them how to plant the five grains. And when the five grains ripened, the people were well fed. But once people have plenty of food and warm clothes, they lead idle lives. This is their Way. Then, unless they’re taught, they’re hardly different from the birds and animals. The sage-emperor worried about this. He made Hsieh minister of education so the people would be taught about the bonds of human community: affection between father and son, Duty between sovereign and subject, responsibility between husband and wife, proper station between young and old, sincerity between friend and friend.” (5.4)

后稷教民稼穡。樹藝五穀，五穀熟而民人育。人之有道也，飽食、煖衣、逸居而無教，則近於禽獸。聖人有憂之，使契為司徒，教以人倫：父子有親，君臣有義，夫婦有別，長幼有序，朋友有信.

Mencius, of course, famously asserts that all human beings have an innately good human nature. But that innate goodness must be cultivated and developed. We must be taught, and constantly continue to teach ourselves, how to be good. We require the “created symbolic order” of Ritual and Duty to establish and live through the “bonds of human community.”

I suspect Mencius would reject the limitation of this project to nationalism, which is too parochial in its vision. Rather, he would see this as a more universal, transnational endeavor…

Are these created symbolic orders entirely artificial or do they represent a fundamental means of human interaction? If they do in fact need to be re-learned with every generation then why do these same orders repeat themselves throughout human history? Whence moral grammar?

Also, how would we apply the order of nationalism → modernization? Again, you’ve got China with its arch-conservative sonderweg. That would seem to mess it up no matter the order applied. But in the case of Korea and Vietnam, I think this order could be said to make more sense. To overcome the colonial experience and experience mastery on their own terms, the nationalism of both lead to moderization. The same system could be applied to other countries like Malaysia and Singapore as well. But then you’ve got Japan. I suppose it could be argued that the nationalism that lead to the Meiji Emperors assuming ultimate power could be argued as preceding Japanese modernization. I’d need to look at some dates before I made a firm conclusion there.

Zhuangzi on Nationalism

This is going to be a bit round about, but bear with me…

Today in my East Asia Nationalism class we were discussing Benedict Anderson’s classic text, Imagined Communities. At one point, in considering the origins and rise of nationalism, Anderson notes that the decline of religious intellectual authority contributed to the creation of a historical moment, a clearing of intellectual and symbolic and linguistic space, that enabled the subsequent rise of nationalism. He resists an oversimplified notion that the decline of religion caused nationalism, but he certainly suggests that it facilitated the articulation of national identity. He further suggests that nationalism fulfills some of the functions that religion can, and still does, fulfill. There may be a deeply held human need for assurance that life has meaning beyond individual experience, that death is not meaningless and lonely. Here is Anderson on religion:

If the manner of man’s dying usually seems arbitrary, his mortality is inescapable. Human lives are full of such combinations of necessity and chance. We are all aware of the contingency and ineluctability of our particular genetic heritage, our gender, our life-era, our physical capabilities, our mother-tongue, and so forth. The great merit of traditional religious world-views (which naturally must be distinguished from their role in the legitimation of specific systems of domination and exploitation) has been their concern with man-in-the-cosmos, man as species being, and the contingency of life. The extraordinary survival over thousands of years of Buddhism, Christianity or Islam in dozens of different social formations attests to their imaginative response to the overwhelming burden of human suffering - disease, mutilation, grief, age, and death…At the same time, in different ways, religious thought also responds to obscure intimations of immortality, generally by transforming fatality into continuity (karma, original sin, etc.). In this way, it concerns itself with the links between the dead and the yet unborn, the mystery of re-generation. Who experiences their child’s conception and birth without dimly apprehending a combined connectedness, fortuity, and fatality in a language of “continuity”? (10-11)

And here is what nationalism can do:

The century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought with it its own moral darkness. With the ebbing of religious belief, the suffering which belief in part composed did not disappear. Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of continuity more necessary. What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning. As we shall see, few things were (are) better suited to this end than an idea of nation. (11)

Nationalism transforms “fatality into continuity” by attaching the individual to the trans-historical national community. It gives meaning to life by promising that the presence and work of each individual contributes to something larger than any one person. Each adds to a vast collective that stretches back into the mists of history and forward into the infinite future. Nationalism promises that you will not die alone.

And that is where Zhuangzi comes in. He rejects the fear of death and meaninglessness that under-girds the human need for either (or both) religion and/or nationalism.

Of course in Zhuangzi’s day there was no such thing as nationalism or national identity. Collective identity of the scale and style of “the nation” is (as Anderson and Gellner argue) a modern phenomenon. But we can extrapolate from his views on death to get at what his likely response to nationalism would be. Take these two passages:

In all beneath heaven there’s nothing bigger than the tip of an autumn hair, and T’ai mountain is tiny. No one lives longer than a child who dies young, and the seven-hundred-year-old P’eng Tsu died an infant. (26)

Birth and death, living and dead, failure and success, poverty and wealth, honor and dishonor, slander and praise, hunger and thirst, hot and cold - such are the transformations of this world, the movement of its inevitable nature. They keep vanishing into one another before our very eyes, day in and day out, but we’ll never calibrate what drives them. So how can they steal our serenity, how can they plunder the spirit’s treasure house? If you let them move together, at ease and serene, you’ll never lose your joy. And if you do this without pause, day in and day out, you’ll invest all things with spring…(75)

He is telling us to simply accept mortality and fate. Accept the inevitability of death. If we embrace the “transformations of this world” without fear then we will find joy. And what would happen if people actually did what Zhuangzi says? There would be less cause for national identity and nationalism. We would not need the cling to the notion of the nation to find continuity and meaning in our lives because we would understand that continuity and meaning can only come by giving up on fictitious distractions like the nation. Meaning, for Zhuangzi, is not to be found in a transcendent or trans-historical conception. It is right there in front of us, immanent in the immediate moment, here with us now.

Indeed, I think Zhuangzi would scoff at nationalism and point to just how much death and destruction have been wrought in the name of securing us from our fears of a lonely death. Zhuangzi is, positively, an anti-nationalist.

But what about religion? Would Zhuangzi be against religion? That’s a harder question because, historically, his thought has been used by those who have made Daoism into a religion. I think there are certain philosophical problems with doing that but I cannot deny that Zhuangzi’s ideas have been drawn into religious practice. Maybe, however, that is just not necessary. Zhuangzi would seem not to need religion either. Just let our fears and hopes “move together, serene and at ease” and we’ll never lose our joy…

Is nationalism a parareligion that serves to provide a cocktail of immortality? I can agree that both nationalism and religion can both serve to manufacture the created symbolic order mentioned above. Or at least they are involved in the execution of that created symbolic order. But if that were true, what would that do to the date of modernization? You’ve got clear religious alliances dating way back! Look at Europe in the Middle Ages. It wasn’t called “Europe” it was called “Christendom” and there was a pan-Christian religious nationalism that is similar in tenor to the current pan-Islamic nationalism espoused by organizations like Hamas and Al Qaeda.

Tricky, tricky.

[Xunzian]

One topic that I think relates well to this discussion is nationalism, modernity, and racism. The nation-state is regarded as a rather critical component of modernity but in many cases the “self determination of nations” that lead to the development of the nation state was driven by creed, race, ethnicity, language, and a variety of other concerns that are presently regarded as less-than-noble. Historically speaking that is, but is this situation necessary? At their base, are all nations driven by this sort of crass identity politics and if so what can be done about it, if anything?

[rasava]

Xunzian:

This attempts to address your second post in this thread. The issue goes all the way back to earliest humans where the pack at one watering hole were considered to be “more worthy” or “more human” than another pack at another watering hole. And fundamentally I don’t see the issue being of political nations so much as the conflict of individual societies. Historically what we’ve in fact seen is a trend of “inclusion” causing societies to grow from watering hole packs to something nearly including all of humanity. It is that trend that offsets what at least from a political dimension is called nationalism, a social subset can be identified as racism, but what ultimately can be described in general as the perception of social membership and, as a corollary, who are the right holders. The Mayans felt they could subjugate other peoples and brutally cut out their hearts because at a fundamental level the society determines who is a rights-holder and people outside the society are not considered to have the same rights or are not as “human”. As the web of “likening” oneself to others outside of a given society grows, whether its from empathy or some other motive, more people are considered part of the society. “Evil” can come from acts done by “outsiders” against the society, but it can also arise from perceived excessiveness in promoting exclusion (i.e. the Nazis).

Therefore as societies develop, there is an interplay between the perceived “evil” of the acts of outsiders and the perceived “evil” in identifying too many outsiders in the first place. Nationalism tends toward a political flavor of the former. But even if there were a one-world state, there would still be outsiders; they would be criminals who reject the rules of membership.

Having said all this, I don’t see the development of a society as “driven by creed, race, ethnicity, language, and a variety of other concerns.” Under the perspective above, society actually starts and is drivent from a primitive and narrowly defined form of “inclusion”, but it is inclusion nonetheless. It may start from the motive of self-preservation but evolves into a sense of one’s individual value within a social context. It is certain failures to include that the less-than-noble comes into play. The growth of a society is the continued folowering of inclusion, stripping away gradually at the exclusions.

[Xunzian]

I can agree with what you are saying, anthropologically; however, I was thinking more about the “nation” as in a the modern nation-state as opposed to pre- or half-modern configurations.

[Xunzian]

Look at the Europeans who invented modernity. The old states were comprised of a variety of different cultures, languages, races, creeds, the whole deal. The only thing holding them together was the old game. The republican challenge to the old autocracies was based on a rather narrow cultural identity. We can point to Austro-Hungary falling apart, but there is also the Netherlands/Belgium split substantially earlier. When the French created the modern French state (not a republican adventure, but it had many of the same principles) they kicked out the Heugonauts and the like to create a solid Catholic French identity. Likewise, England started to become recognizable to moderns looking back around the time they lost their holdings in France. The fiction of the state relies on many of these elements. Those are the markers for when a state becomes a nation as opposed to the mere domain of a prince.