I glanced through the one on Political Theory. There seem to be some odd and confused ideas in there.
"Glanced" being the key word; you've missed the point totally.
Plotinus said:
A common mistake, but a serious one. Conscience doesn't dictate choice - it limits it. When you follow reason you are not making a choice, you are doing what reason forces you to do. Friedman appeals to Protestantism, but he forgets what Luther supposedly said to Charles: "Here I stand, I can do no other." Luther felt he had no choice precisely because his conscience and his reason forced him to take a stand one way rather than the other.
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.
Plotinus said:
The distinction he goes on to draw between being "American" and a "citizen of the US" makes no sense to me. I don't understand what "being American" means if it doesn't mean "being a citizen of the US", and he doesn't explain. All he does is describe various differences he thinks there are between them, but while he explains what he thinks being a citizen of the US is, he doesn't say a word about what he thinks being an American actually is.
He does, actually:
Andre Malraux wrote once that men leave their country in very national ways. An American expatriate is still an American and very different from a Mongolian expatriate. Wherever one chooses to go, whatever identity one chooses to claim, in the end, you cannot escape from who you are. You can acquire as many loves as you might, yet in the end, whether you love oneʼs own or not, you are what you were born. Your room for maneuver is much less than you might have thought. A man may have given up his home, but his home has not given him up. You can reject your obligations — you can cease to love — but your own remains your own.
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.
Plotinus said:
But what is America if it's not the United States? I assume he's not distinguishing between the country and the continent. What is France if it's not the French Republic? They're exactly the same thing, aren't they? Could a person love France and hate the French Republic, or vice versa?
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.
Plotinus said:
He seems to think that there's an intrinsic difference between love of one's country and love of one's state, such that the former is natural and the latter unnatural. Not a single argument is given for this, merely a series of assertions. He seems more interested in asserting that love of one's state is unnatural and takes it for granted that the reader will agree that love of one's country is natural, because it is "love of one's own".
Why not? It seems fairly obvious that someone might identify as British while not liking the British government.
Plotinus said:
Even if we accept that it's natural to love "one's own" (and he doesn't even begin to explain what that means), he doesn't explain why it's natural to identify one's country as "one's own". Why should an American "naturally" take America to be "her own"?
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.
Plotinus said:
First, this is outright inconsistent: he claims that the impulse to love one's own is "almost overpowering", but then goes on to say that socialists and liberals reject is, as if socialists and liberals represent a tiny, strange minority.
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.
Plotinus said:
For one thing, it's absurd to lump socialists and liberals together here, as if they're the same thing.
He doesn't. In fact he
specifically goes out of his way to differentiate the two:
It is interesting to note that economic liberals and Marxists, on the surface mortal enemies, both shared a single common view that the nation, understood as a unitary community that made all other things possible, was at best a convenience and at worst a prison. Both expected the nation and other communities to whither away, one through the transnationalism of capital, the other through the transnationalism of the working class.
Moving on...
Plotinus said:
On nationalism in particular I think that socialists have a tendency to be much more nationalistic than liberals do, because many socialists are concerned for the working classes in their own country specifically, and will support e.g. higher tariffs that help workers in their own country at the cost of foreign ones. Liberals are less likely to do that.
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?
Plotinus said:
And I would say that liberals (to the extent that one can speak of all of them as if they had identical views) reject nationalism precisely because it is unnatural: because it is about an attitude to a non-natural, non-existent entity that takes the place of actual people. I don't think that nationalism is "natural" any more than racism or sexism are natural; like them, it's ultimately a form of bigotry.
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. 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's only empirical changes brought about by the modern world that has made it clearer what women and races are.
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. But what about ants? An individual ant doesn't owe anything in particular to the queen. But eusociality is real, and it can't simply be referred to as "that psychological bias that some animals have." You see what I'm getting at?
Plotinus said:
But why should, say, the Iranian's "one's own" be Iran? Why shouldn't it be the Middle East in general? Or Muslims in general, if she's a Muslim? Or men in general, if he's a man? Or human beings in general, if he's a human being? Or, narrowing it, Tehranians in general, if she's from Tehran? Or people with black hair in general? Or left-handed people in general? Or whatever? Friedman just assumes that the natural group to identify as "one's own" is one's country, and he ignores all other possibilities.
It isn't
necessarily just your own country. But it figures large in it.
Plotinus said:
And he doesn't address the disturbing implications that this raises. What if "one's own" is one's own race, or one's own sexual preference, or one's own gender? Does this love of "one's own" seem quite so cozy and natural and fuzzy and warm and romantic then?
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.
Plotinus said:
Friedman tries to defend it by arguing that wealthy people have the security to be willing to see their country take risks while poor people don't; and that may be true, but it errs by identifying wealth with class (it's perfectly possible to be an upper-middle-class intellectual and have very little money, and perfectly possible to be working class and wealthy - this is something Americans still seem to have difficulty understanding) and by identifying political views with class. All the working-class people I know are more left-wing than I am.
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.
Plotinus said:
This essay isn't history, and it rather puzzles me that you should hold it up as an example of how history should be written.
Well, not that in particular. I just thought it went with the rest of them.
Plotinus said:
It's not political theory either - it's more like a defence of a particular political outlook.
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.
Plotinus said:
In fact none of the pieces you've linked to seem to be history - they are instead political analyses of the current state of affairs in these countries, backed up with geographical explanations for their circumstances, Jared Diamond-style.
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.
I read the post above by Plotinus, and from the passages he includes by the author himself, i quickly lost any interest in reading anything by that author.
Good to know that a few bad quotes and criticism is enough to to turn you off. But will you be able to resist his essay
on Greece?
No doubt you'll be offended by it, and rant about "geographical determinism." That's how I've seen most Greeks respond to it.
Worth noting, briefly, that the idea people somehow were dumb, misguided, or locked in a non-self-interest state from the beginning of humanity to just prior to some end of the medieval era or a couple of centuries after it, is utterly ludicrous.
If you don't read the essay, you can't expect that your criticism will be taken seriously. This isn't even close to what he says.
That's quite a claim. Are you able to elaborate?
Sure. I admittedly haven't read much history, but apparently those who
have think Peter Green is an excellent writer. I decided to take their advice, and recently read his biography of Alexander the Great. The first half is adequate, although it mainly focuses on the rise of Macedon under Phillip. The second half is worse. For instance, I hardly get any detail on how Alexander's empire operated while he was still in Anatolia or the Levant or Egypt. Literally nothing about governance, or the attitude of the people living there. Nor does it get better with Iran. Essentially all he has to say about it is that the Zoroastrian priests opposed him and saw him as an enemy of the natural order. I know nothing about the outside world as well. How did Persia react to his early victories? How was he viewed in different places? But no, Green just follows Alexander around in his exploits, as if in a void. There are points where he does elaborate a bit, but it's too little, too late. It's hard for me to remember details that way, and harder for me to care. In other words, I want history I can actually gain something from, not just a tedious rundown of What Alexander Did.
If you glance at Friedman's essays, you can immediately see how perfectly understandable they are. Sure, they're for complete laymen, but the style in which he writes allows everything to be properly contextualized. The main points and little details are both incredibly clear, and he doesn't have to treat the reader like a five-year-old. I've also read his book on America's recent wars in the Middle East, so I know it can be translated into something more thorough, like an actual scholarly narrative.
George Friedman is the dude who thinks that people of Mexican descent in the United States are a fifth column who can't or won't integrate and will eventually want enosis* with Mexico because reasons.
* Henceforth to be referred to as "guacamolosis".
Why are you always attacking people? Stop it, for Christ's sake. You are one the greatest driving forces in the mob rule of the forums. You go where the majority goes and chastise others whenever you think people will praise you for it.
You are a trouble-seeker. You show up wherever you can call someone you don't like a racist. Just because two other people aren't buying the OP doesn't mean you have to join in with mockery.