How is this relevant? He didn't 'appeal' to Protestantism to prove anything. There may be a philosophical point here to quibble with, but little else.
Yes, there's a philosophical point here, but he's the one making it! And it's also a historical point. He
does appeal to Protestantism, not to "prove" anything, but to
explain a certain historical trend he perceives in European history:
Indeed, modern Europe in general introduced an extraordinary idea with the rise of revolutionary Protestantism and its mutation into the European Enlightenment, an idea paralleling the concept of romantic love — the notion of ideology.
He's making a historical claim here: that the rise of Protestantism led to the Enlightenment, and that both were characterised by the novel notion of ideology. He goes on to say that ideology is a non-natural concept, one that you have to learn rather than acquire in a natural sort of way:
Ideology is an acquired value. No child can be a Jeffersonian or a Stalinist. That can only be chosen after the age of reason, along with romantically acquired spouses.
The problem is that this is all great, sweeping statements that are hard to substantiate. Speaking as someone who
is, in my own limited way, a historian of the Enlightenment and particularly of its religious aspects, I think there is truth to the claim that the Enlightenment grew out of the Reformation. Some of the key ideas in the Reformation were the seeds of some of the key ideas of the Enlightenment. So what he says has some initial plausibility. But I think the truth is much more complex than this, and I don't think it's true that "ideology" was an invention of the Reformation. There were just as many rival ideologies in scholastic thought. If it's true that no child can be a Jeffersonian, it's equally true that no child can be a Thomist, or a Scotist, or a Benedictine, or a Franciscan.
He does, actually:
His point is that someone will always going to view the world from your original, primal perspective. Ergo, people are divided by their conception of the world and never become wholly estranged from their roots.
So, for instance, someone brought up as a Sunni Muslim in Egypt is almost certainly never going to become a "natural" British progressive. He might move to Britain, speak perfect English, agree totally with secular, Western values, and fit in, but his thoughts and actions are always going to be what another Arab Muslim would feel in the same shoes. It's not the exact same thing as national feeling, but the two are generally conterminous.
This is perfectly true, but it's only part of the point he's making, as I read it. Nationality is, for him, not simply the cultural matrix of one's upbringing that determines one's views; it's also a genuine identity. He keeps talking about "one's own" in the sense that one identifies with one's nation, or one's co-nationals, in a way that goes beyond merely recognising social influences on one's own views.
Also, later in the essay he points out that in some cases, people's attitudes are determined by factors that override national tendencies:
...the single most important distinction, of course, is the difference between rich and poor. That distinction, more than anything else, determines how someone lives his life. The difference in the life of a poor peasant without land and a wealthy man is qualitatively different in all respects except the fundamental facts of birth and death. They live differently and earn their livings differently. They can be grouped by the manner in which they live and earn their livings into classes of men.
That's surely quite right. So the point here is that there are many different factors that determine, or influence, a person's outlook. Nationality is just one of these. Friedman here identifies wealth as another and goes on to argue that it's even more important, as a determiner of identity and outlook, than nationality. And clearly there are others too, such as profession, interests, and so on. Take me: I'm British, so that undoubtedly gives me all kinds of biases, prejudices, beliefs, attitudes, and so on. But so too does being European. I'm an academic, so that too determines many more biases and attitudes. It means I probably have more in common with middle-class academics from other countries than I do with plenty of people from my own. One of my main collaborators is an Italian academic with whom I have plenty in common, because we're both European historians of philosophy. I surely have more in common with her than I do with, say, a City banker or a Glaswegian market stall vendor or a West Country farmer, irrespective of nationality. And then on top of that I'm a gaming geek, so that also gives me a great deal in common with people like that across the world. And this is before we even mention politics and religion, which are both hugely important in determining self-identity.
Nationality is certainly a significant determining factor in people's personality and outlook, but why pick up on it as if it's
the only significant one and make out that nationality is somehow constitutive of identity while the other factors aren't? This is why I say that Friedman's essay is inconsistent. He acknowledges that other factors, notably wealth, are sometimes more significant than nationality; but he assumes that nationality is the "correct" one, and that those who identify with other groups are somehow wrong, that they are basing their identity on cost analysis or other non-natural factors while those (the great earthy majority) who base their identity on nationality are right, because it's natural to do that. But a moment's thought is enough to show that this is obviously false. If an evangelical Christian regards herself as a Christian first and foremost, and identifies other evangelical Christians, irrespective of nationality, as "her own", she is not making this identification on the basis of some non-natural wealth calculation. It's entirely natural for her to do so. If a tabletop roleplaying enthusiast makes this activity central to his identity and spends his time discussing it online with people around the world, it's natural for him to think of himself as a roleplayer first and foremost and to think of those other people as "his own".
America the nation, the ideal, the brotherhood of Americans. Same thing goes for France, although obviously the two are going to be qualitatively distinct in some manner.
But this doesn't explain anything. Saying it's "the nation" doesn't tell me anything, because the question is precisely what "the nation" actually is. "The ideal" tells me that it doesn't exist, because an ideal pretty much by definition is how you want things to be, not how they actually are. As for "the brotherhood of Americans", that's at best a metaphor and at worst outright meaningless. So I'm still unconvinced that there's any meaningful distinction between "the United States" and "America"; and even if there is one, Friedman has certainly not succeeded in explaining what it is.
Why not? It seems fairly obvious that someone might identify as British while not liking the British government.
Of course they could, but Friedman isn't contrasting one's attitude to one's country with one's attitude to the
government. See what he says about America. First he distinguishes between the love and obligation he thinks we have to our families and places of birth, simply in virtue of being born there, and the love and obligation we might later pick up towards other things. He then claims (doesn't argue, just claims) that the ideals of the United States, as written by its founding fathers, come under the second heading rather than the first:
The idea that romantic love should pre-empt the love of oneʼs own introduces a radical new dynamic to history, in which the individual and choice supersede community and obligation. It elevates things acquired through choice as superior to the things one is born with.
This notion is embedded in the American Declaration of Independence, which elevates life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness over obligation.
And then later:
Consider the tension between the idea that the United States was created for the purpose of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and the decision of a soldier to go to war and even willingly give his life. How can one reconcile the constant presence of self-sacrifice for the community — and the communityʼs demand for self-sacrifice — with the empirical claim that men pursue the acquisition of goods that will give them happiness? War is a commonplace event in modernity and soldiers go to war continually. How can a regime dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness demand that its citizens voluntarily put themselves between home and warʼs desolation?
Obviously this happens. Nationalism is very much a critical driver today, which means that the love of oneʼs own remains a critical driver. Dying for a regime dedicated to the pursuit of happiness makes no sense. Dying for the love of oneʼs own makes a great deal of sense.
So here he contrasts the nation, for which it is natural for a soldier to wish to die, with the country, for which it is not natural for a soldier to wish to die. The country is not simply the government. It's the
country, with its ideals and purposes and system of government and all the rest. It's what is defined in the founding documents of the United States. It's not just whoever is currently sitting in power in Washington.
Now if all of these things are in the "country" box, it's hard to see what's left to put into the "nation" box. But let's suppose that there are still some concepts left to which we can attach the word "nation". Perhaps the "nation" is just the American people, who would still exist as a more or less distinct bunch of people even if the eighteenth-century rebellion had failed and they were still governed from London. Well, that still leaves the question why it's "natural" to love the nation and be willing to die for it, and not "natural" to love the country and be willing to die for that. Or, indeed, to love any other group or body with which one associates oneself, and be willing to die for it.
Consider religion again. Friedman goes on and on about how, traditionally, people identified straightforwardly with their nation (or, at a smaller level, with their tribe or family), and it's only since the Reformation that we have acquired the notion that there are also artificial groupings to which we may owe love and allegiance as a result of choice rather than birth:
The modern Enlightenment celebrated acquired love and denigrated the love of oneʼs own. Indeed, modernity is the enemy of birth in general. Modern revolutionary regimes overthrew the anciens regimes precisely because the anciens regimes distributed rights based on birth. For modern regimes, birth is an accident that gives no one authority. Authority derives from individual achievement. It is based on demonstrated virtue, not virtue assumed at birth.
The struggle between the love of oneʼs own and acquired love has been the hallmark of the past 500 years. It has been a struggle between traditional societies in which obligations derive from birth and are imposed by a natural, simple and unreflective love of oneʼs own and revolutionary societies in which obligations derive from choice and from a complex, self-aware love of things that are acquired — lovers or regimes.
And not a word about religion! And yet surely religion is the example
par excellence of people
acquiring an identity through choice, which they then regard as transcending any identity based on birth, and for which they would be willing to die. Just think of the martyr narratives of early Christianity. Those were people who had chosen new identities, which they regarded as completely overriding their birth identities (early Christians did not even celebrate their birthdays, for this reason), and they were not only willing but actively eager to die for this identity. And Friedman thinks that no-one did this before Luther and the Enlightenment? It's absolute rubbish.
I'm not in a position to give details, I'd need to know a heck of a lot of sociology and intellectual history to give a minimally adequate description of American nationalism. Yes, I grew up in America. But in general, it's not wise to ask people about their own nationalism because that just invites bias. For instance, I recall a girl in my 9th class saying that America doesn't really have a culture, that we're just an open country. This is ethnocentrism at its most extreme; the idea that people from your country are the "normal," vanilla people, and it's everyone else who just acts oddly.
I don't expect you to be able to give details: I'm not asking you to defend Friedman's assertions. My point is merely that that's all they are - assertions. The essay is quite cleverly written to seem convincing, but there aren't many real arguments in there, only persuasive assertions. Friedman makes this attractive-sounding distinction between the natural love of "one's own" and non-natural wealth calculation, but he doesn't give any argument for why we should take "our own" to be our nation as opposed to any other group with which we identify. Perhaps such an argument exists, but
he doesn't give one in this essay. And your original question in the OP was what we thought of these essays as pieces of writing, not whether we agree with the claims made in them. The fact that he makes these assertions without any argument or evidence is a weakness of his writing, irrespective of whether the assertions are in fact correct. Although clearly I don't think they are correct either.
I expect he's biased because he's not used to dealing with the common socialist on the street. He's referring to anti-nationalist ideas among intellectuals. Friedman studied Marxism and
wrote a book on the Frankfurt school, so I doubt he just doesn't know what he's talking about.
No doubt, but that doesn't change the fact that the essay is downright inconsistent, as I said at greater length above.
He doesn't. In fact he specifically goes out of his way to differentiate the two:
No, he doesn't. That quotation is doing
exactly the reverse of what you claim. In that quotation, he is saying that Marxists (note: not socialists) and liberals
seem to be at odds, but under the surface they are in fundamental agreement. That's not going out of his way to differentiate them, it's claiming that the apparent distinction between them is less than it appears to be.
So doesn't this completely prove his point? That internationalism, seen through lofty socialist lenses, rarely has any relation to the actual desires of the working class?
No, that's not what I said at all. I didn't say that
the working classes have a nationalistic outlook, I said that
some socialists do. So Friedman is, I think, wrong to brand all socialists as non-nationalists. Whether these nationalistic socialists are themselves working class or not, I don't know.
Racism and sexism were natural at some point or the other. Neolithic humans didn't have the conceptual framework to understand race egalitarianism, even in principle. If you placed one in Africa, they'd just see bizarre tool-using apes where we would see Africans.
I find these comments very disturbing. It's odd that you talk about "neolithic humans" and the hypothetical experiment of "placing one in Africa" as if Africa didn't have its own neolithic humans. By "neolithic humans" you presumably mean neolithic humans from places other than Africa. But your choice of language itself, and your assumption of a particular global viewpoint, themselves dehumanise Africans.
But more importantly for the argument, how on earth can you know what you claim here? How on earth do you know what, say, a neolithic Asian or European would have made of a neolithic African? What evidence do you have for the exceptionally strong statement that they would have regarded them as apes?
And if women occupied a critical place in society as homemakers, with a sharper biological division of labor among the sexes, then why would sexism be an unnatural viewpoint?
It depends on what you mean by "sexism". If you mean "thinking that men and women have naturally distinct roles in family and tribal life", then of course that would have been natural and no doubt neolithic people did think that, and probably paleolithic ones too. If, however, you mean "thinking that women are less important than men" or "thinking that women should be paid less for doing the same work as men" then I think the case is much less certain for attributing such attitudes to prehistoric people. Again, what's the evidence?
It's only empirical changes brought about by the modern world that has made it clearer what women and races are.
One could just as easily turn this view around and say that it's only the changes brought about by the Age of Discovery, which gave Europeans, for the first time, the ability to dominate and enslave people of different races en masse, the conceptual framework and the psychological imperative to dehumanise them. And it's only the changes brought about by the industrial revolution, which for the first time allowed men and women to perform the same jobs on the factory floor, which made it possible for men to be treated preferentially over women despite there being no rational basis for it at all.
You see, it's easy to attribute great changes in society to poorly defined epochs in this way. But it's just cute speculation without concrete examples and evidence. Friedman's point about the Reformation and the Enlightenment and the supposedly great changes they made to humanity are exactly the same.
Regarding nationalism, you're right that there has to be a case to be made for it. But I don't think it can be easily dismissed as unnatural. Are familial or tribal connections also unnatural? To your viewpoint, they obviously are. There isn't any metaphysical relationship between you and your parents, just instinct trying to make sure genes get passed on.
No, this isn't my view at all. Of course there's no "metaphysical" connection, but that doesn't mean such relationships aren't natural. Obviously it's natural to feel a special connection to your parents and your family, and the people around you. What I think is unnatural is the extension of these natural connections to a far larger group that one has very little to do with. I have a natural connection to my parents and family, and to my friends, and to others with whom I deal. How on earth do I have a natural connection to over 60 million people who I've never met and with many of whom I have nothing in common? Why do I have a natural connection to them and not to many other people whom I
do know and may feel very close to? The people on this very forum mean more to me than most of my co-nationals do; even you, Mouthwash, with whom I suspect I share no viewpoints or attitudes at all, are closer to me than most of them, since we have at least communicated and share interests in this forum. Why's it "natural" for me to identify with millions of people I've never met and never will, over you? That's the question that Friedman doesn't even recognise in this essay, let alone attempt to answer.
It isn't necessarily just your own country. But it figures large in it.
It's the only element that Friedman talks about. Consider:
This leads us to nationalism — or, more broadly, love and obligation to the community to which you were born, be it a small band of nomads or a vast nation-state. The impulse to love oneʼs own is almost overpowering. Almost, but not quite, since in modernity, self-love and the love of acquired things is celebrated while love of oneʼs own is held in suspicion. The latter is an accident. The former is an expression of self and therefore more authentic.
"Nationalism" and "the impulse to love one's own" are used interchangeably here. There's no argument at all for identifying them. There's no argument at all for the claim that one's co-nationals are "one's own" and no recognition at all that anyone else might be considered "one's own".
I have to say, going over this essay again to write this response is making me less and less well disposed towards it. I was fairly critical before but now it seems like turgid nonsense.
As I've argued above, yes. Although we should be glad that nationalism is not anything so crippling as a biological drive to sustain a colony or whatever. The point of the essay is that nationalism is an inevitable consequence of the human condition, and isn't something to be despised or feared.
I don't think he's saying that it shouldn't be feared - note that he identifies nationalism as a key factor behind war, and as closely bound up with fear of the "other", which is surely right - he's just saying that it's inevitable and we need to be able to understand and deal with it.
Wouldn't people with comparable amounts of wealth behave similarly? So, Noam Chomsky and a steel worker in Detroit might both readily identify as socialist, but humans aren't simple or consistent enough to simply have ideology correlate to experience. Noam Chomsky might want an international union of workers, yet the steel worker, as you've pointed out, would be more likely to focus on the livelihoods of himself and those around him.
That's not what I said about the steel worker. He might be a nationalist or he might not. Wealth doesn't determine people's attitudes any more than anything else does. There are plenty of working-class left-wingers and plenty of working-class right-wingers, and the same for every other class and ideology you care to name. This notion that the workers are more right-wing and the middle and upper classes are more left-wing (or whatever language is appropriate for Americans) is an old right-wing myth (which, as it happens, is another idea that can be traced back to the Enlightenment, and it's no truer now than it was then).
People don't always hold political views out of self-interest. A classic example is the often-cited support of many in the British textile industry for the US during the later stages American Civil War. They supported the US because of its more moral stance on slavery, despite the fact that economically speaking they should have supported the Confederacy, on whom they were dependent for cotton. (I know, too, that British attitudes were more complex than this, but it's just a simple example.)
And of course wealthy people don't all behave in the same way. Some hoard it and never give any away, and some become philanthropists and give away vast amounts. Just consider Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, two people with pretty much identical backgrounds from a cultural point of view, who used their vast wealth in very different ways.
The two are not mutually exclusive, and it's obvious from the first couple of pages that he is trying to explain things with layman concepts. Feels like political theory to me.
It really isn't, because what he's explaining isn't politics. It's more like social economics or something like that.
It seems to rely pretty heavily on history.
The main theme is geopolitics, but every extrapolation he makes is analogized to historical events. It's not history in and of itself, but it's a framework upon which history could be written. Just suppose that the focus was more on the events themselves, and you get what I'm saying.
No, you're quite confused. Just making broad and general references to historical epochs doesn't make a piece of writing "history". The essays themselves have a far greater emphasis on geography. Just look at the one on Israel again. It starts by identifying its genre as "geopolitics" and stating that the basic premise is that everything is determined by geography. Then it gives some very brief and basic historical claims, drawn uncritically from the Old Testament, which it uses solely as the framework on which to make a long geographical assessment. (e.g. Friedman says nothing about what King David actually did, other than note how extensive his kingdom was, and then discuss the geography of this area.)
This may or may not be a legitimate method of geopolitical analysis. But it's not history! It doesn't even
try or
claim to be history. Everything he says about history is meant to illustrate his primary points, which are about geography and economics. Consider what he says in the piece on China:
The heartland is China’s agricultural region. However -- and this is the single most important fact about China -- it has about one-third the arable land per person as the rest of the world. This pressure has defined modern Chinese history -- both in terms of living with it and trying to move beyond it.
A ring of non-Han regions surround this heartland -- Tibet, Xinjiang province (home of the Muslim Uighurs), Inner Mongolia and what is commonly referred to as Manchuria... These are also the regions where the historical threat to China originated. Han China is a region full of rivers and rain. It is therefore a land of farmers and merchants. The surrounding areas are the land of nomads and horsemen. In the 13th century, the Mongols under Ghenghis Khan invaded and occupied parts of Han China until the 15th century, when the Han reasserted their authority.
Following this period, Chinese strategy remained constant: the slow and systematic assertion of control over these outer regions in order to protect the Han from incursions by nomadic cavalry. This imperative drove Chinese foreign policy. In spite of the imbalance of population, or perhaps because of it, China saw itself as extremely vulnerable to military forces moving from the north and west. Defending a massed population of farmers against these forces was difficult. The easiest solution, the one the Chinese chose, was to reverse the order and impose themselves on their potential conquerors.
His main interest is clear: explaining human behaviour geographically. He describes Chinese geography (at much greater length than I've given here). He describes the inhabitants of the various places, and their occupations, in terms based on the geography of those places. And he describes their actions as determined by their locations and occupations. History is introduced only in the very broadest, most general terms, as illustrations of the determining power of geography. When you get phrases such as "China saw itself", you know you're dealing with generalities of the very highest order; there are no names here, no individuals or even groups or parties named as formulating these policies, just "China" itself as a vague, superhuman actor.
What he says here may be perfectly true. I don't know. It may also be a good way of grounding political and economic analysis. I don't know. But it's not history.
