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The Biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy stirred up a political firestorm when, in attempting to defend the importing of foreign workers through the H-1B visa programme, he criticised America’s native culture as one of “mediocrity” and “normalcy”. Calling for “more math tutoring” and “fewer sleepovers” for America’s youth in order to render them employable, he declared on X that “‘Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent”. Jumping into the ensuing debate, Elon Musk offered an alternative analogy, portraying America as a global sports franchise that ought to contract the best players no matter their origin. “Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct” for Americans to hold, he wrote.
Unsurprisingly, neither proposed mental construct landed very well with President Trump’s populist-nationalist base, and Ramaswamy was soon duly shuffled off to a term of exile in Ohio. In the one view, “America” is merely a glorified economic zone, just one part of a “competitive global market” in which labour and capital flow freely. In the other, America is a professional franchise whose sole objective is to maximiae winnings. In both cases, America is viewed as analogous to a corporation. In such a corporation, management’s only responsibility is to profits; it has no inherent responsibility to employees or their wellbeing, something of interest only insofar as it translates into productivity.
The corporate machine views employees merely as interchangeable human resources, to whom it owes no loyalty. Indeed, if it is to effectively devote itself to profit maximisation the company can afford no permanent relational bonds with any of those who work for it, as it must be able to fire or replace them based on cold utilitarian calculus. There are thus few experiences employees find as irritating as that common workplace psyop in which management proclaims the corporate office to be a “family”. Employees know implicitly that it is natural affections and iron-clad mutual loyalties, or at least strong relational bonds, that are precisely what distinguish a family. Their corporate employer, in contrast, won’t hesitate to dump them by the wayside the moment they fall into the wrong column of a spreadsheet. For their part, employees are liable to return the sentiment and retain no lasting loyalty to the company – though perhaps plenty of resentment.
What angered many about the two CEOs’ comments was that — like so many among today’s elite class — they displayed no sense of loyalty or obligation to Americans as a nation. A nation is not a corporation. A nation is a particular people, with a distinct culture, permanently bound together by shared relationship with place, past, and each other. A house becomes a home through the relationship with the family that lives in it, a connection forged out of time and memory, between the concrete particularity of place and the lives of a specific group of people present, past, and yet unborn. We can say this house is home because it is our home. In much the same way, a country becomes our homeland because it is ours — and the we of that “ours” is the nation, which transcends geography, government, and GDP.
Unlike a corporation, a nation really is much like a family. And, like a family, it is characterised by strong relational bonds that are covenantal, not contractual. A nation establishes moral obligations of solidarity and subsidiarity that cannot be simply abandoned. Much as we naturally would, and should, put our own children’s lives and wellbeing ahead of others’, a nation is obligated to distinguish its own from others and to put the wellbeing of its own first. If it fails to do so, then it can no longer remain a nation any more than a family could remain a family were it to try to extend the fold of its care equally to all humanity. Only once our immediate duties to those closest to us are fulfilled can concern for the good of others be rightly extended further outward. And though we may choose to adopt a child into our family, we cannot as readily toss them. We cannot, say, swap out our child for a different one who is more likely to get better grades in math class or willing to perform chores for a lesser allowance. A nation-state is no more justly able to replace its own people or neglect its unique obligations to them simply because doing so seems more profitable or convenient.
Yet a family is hardly built on obligation alone. A healthy family is founded, ordered, governed, and sustained by love. It is love that binds its members together, forges their sense of responsibility, guides their conduct, and directs their proper care for one another. And it is love that directs us to rightly set our concern for these particular people above others, in the proper ordo amoris, or order of loves.
Love is not, cannot be, universal. It is born in particulars and defined by distinction. Should we say we love our neighbour, yet we do not love him for himself — with, or despite, all his unique eccentricities — but only insofar as we claim to love all people in the abstract, then we do not really love him. We cannot love our wife because she is a woman; we can only really love a particular woman. Thus, we believers find we must have faith that even the infinite God loves each of us in particular, numbering the very hairs on our heads; for his love to extend no further than to the mass of humanity as a species, as to a mass of sparrows, would be cold comfort indeed.
We love those people and those good things which are distinct and special to us, and those that are particularly our own all the more, but this hardly implies that we must then automatically hate all others. We do not hate other families’ children just because we love our own. Still, this twisted logic is today widely ascribed to one important expression of love: love for our own nation. Yet this is indeed what it means to be a nationalist: to love one’s own nation, in much the same way (if not quite as deeply) as one loves one’s own family.
As C.S. Lewis observed, patriotic love for one’s nation grows organically from that which is most local, familiar, and meaningful to us — from our love for our family, our land, and our community. From “this love for the place there goes a love for the way of life” of our nation, in all its many common particularities, all tied up together. In the case of Lewis’s England, “for beer and tea and open fires, trains with compartments in them and an unarmed police force and all the rest of it”.
None of this implies that we then desire to impose this particular way of life on the rest of the world. But it does mean that none should be surprised that men might lay down their lives to defend their own nation as their own, and for no other reason. They do so for the same reason they would lay down their lives to defend their children, or their friends: because they love them. Common loves are the source of common loyalties, and of common life. As Lewis reminds us (paraphrasing G.K. Chesterton), “a man’s reasons for not wanting his country to be ruled by foreigners are very like his reasons for not wanting his house to be burned down; because he could not even begin to enumerate all the things that would be lost”.
Yet, at least among our ruling classes, this natural reciprocal love between nation and citizen, which sustains our countries and our societies, seems to have long since frayed. This is no great shock, given that in our age the very idea of nationhood is itself decried, or outright denied, the nation-state stripped of the nation, the world reduced to a network of special economic zones. A man cannot love a special economic zone. Nor can its administrators possess any special feeling for its temporary inhabitants.
This grim status quo is no accident, however. It is the result of a deliberate, 80-year conspiracy against love, conducted out of fear. As I’ve argued elsewhere, after the Second World War, with trauma and totalitarianism haunting the world, the American and European leadership class resolved that these evils should never again threaten society. And they concluded that the emotional power of nationalism had been the central cause of the 20th century’s catastrophes, leading them to make anti-nationalism the cornerstone of the liberal establishment consensus that came to dominate culture and politics after the war.
The philosopher Karl Popper, in his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, denounced the idea of national community writ large, labeling it disastrous “anti-humanitarian propaganda”, and smearing anyone who cherished his particular homeland and history as a “racialist”. Theodor Adorno, who set the direction of American psychology and education policy for decades, classified natural loyalties to family and nation as the hallmarks of the “authoritarian personality” that drove the common man inexorably toward fascism.
But the aversions of the post-war elite grew deeper than a philosophical anti-nationalism. As R.R. Reno writes in The Return of the Strong Gods (2019), the visceral imperative became to fully banish all the “strong gods” that fueled conflict, meaning all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies”. Strong bonds and strong loves of any kind — of family, nation, truth, God — came to be seen as dangerous, as sources of dogma, oppression, hatred, and violence. The peaceful and prosperous “open society” that the post-war establishment set out to instantiate would, as Reno puts it, “require the reign of weak loves and weak truths”, with all dangerous sentiment subordinate to the rule of cool rationality and tepid impartiality.
In this belief, post-war leaders embraced the legacy of Thomas Hobbes, who had viewed the wars which upended his own century as a product of the state of nature — the “war of all against all” — that constantly threatened to emerge from the pride and spiritedness (thumos) of mankind’s base natural personality. He saw the solution to this risk as man’s submission, out of fear, to the absolute power of a political leviathan — but also to an anthropological project, a programme of metaphysical reeducation to turn man’s eye away from any summum bonum and downward toward only the fearful summum malum of struggle and death. As Matthew Crawford has succinctly explained, Hobbes believed that “any appeal to a higher good threatens to return us to the horrors of civil strife and must be debunked”, all our spirited passions and “vainglorious self-assertion” drained away so that we can consent to rule by Leviathan, “King of the Proud”.
With Hitler having firmly established himself as the summum malum of the post-war order, the liberal establishment embarked on their own version of Hobbes’s political-anthropological project. Seeking to dissolve the traditional “closed society” they feared was a breeding ground for authoritarianism, this “open society consensus” drew on theorists such as Adorno and Popper to advance a programme of social reforms intended to open minds, disenchant ideals, and weaken bonds. New approaches to education, psychology, and management sought to relativise truths, elevate “critical thinking” over character development, cast doubt on authorities, vilify collective loyalties, break down boundaries and borders, and free individuals from the “repression” of moral and relational bonds. Soon only economic prosperity and a vague universal humanitarianism became the only higher goods that it was morally acceptable to aim for as a society.
As government joined forces with post-war psychoanalysis, this program of subtle social control soon solidified into the modern therapeutic state — a regime that, as Christopher Lasch noted, successfully “substituted a medical for a political idiom and relegated a broad range of controversial issues to the clinic — to ‘scientific’ study as opposed to philosophical and political debate”. This removal of the political from politics lay at the heart of the post-war project’s aims. Its central desire was to reduce politics to mere administration, to bureaucratic processes, legal judgements, expert committees, and technocratic regulation — anything but fraught contention over such weighty matters as how we ought to live, organise society, or define who “we” are.
Public contention over genuinely political questions was now judged to be too dangerous to permit, even — indeed especially — in a democracy, where the ever-present spectre of the mob and the latent emotional power of the masses haunted post-war leaders. They dreamed of governance via scientific management, of reducing the political sphere to the dispassionate processes of a machine — to “a social technology… whose results can be tested by social engineering”, as Popper put it. The operation of such a machine could be limited to a cadre of carefully educated “institutional technologists”, in Popper’s words, or rather to Hegel’s imagined “universal class” of impartial civil servants, able to objectively derive the best decisions for everyone through the principles of universal Reason alone.
The result was the construction of the managerial regimes that dominate the Western world today. These are characterised by vast, soulless administrative states of unaccountable bureaucracies, a litigious ethos of risk-avoidance and “harm-reduction”, and a technocratic elite class schooled in social engineering and dissimulation. In such states the top priority is the careful management of public opinion through propaganda and censorship, not only in order to constrain democratic outcomes but so as to smooth over or avoid any serious discussion of contentious yet fundamentally political issues, such as migration policy.
Meanwhile, the common people of such regimes are practically encouraged to live as distracted consumers rather than citizens, the invisible hand of the free market and the inducements of commercial and hedonistic pursuits serving not only profits but a political function of pacification. It is preferable that the masses simply not care very much — about anything, but especially about the fate of their nation and the common good. That sort of collective consciousness, transcending self-interest and seeking higher order, was after all identified as a foreboding mark of the closed society.
Here, then, can we see the long historical roots of the open, neoliberal state pointed to as an ideal by Ramaswamy and Musk. Innocently or not, these libertarian-leaning businessmen’s conception of the polity is almost indistinguishable from the “post-national state” that devoutly Left-wing leaders such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau have set out to devolve their countries into. The “globalism” so often decried by populists is neither Left nor Right but the logical product of the rationalist universalism embraced by the 20th century’s post-war consensus. It is the inevitable result of treating people, and peoples, as interchangeable units in a mechanical system — that is, of regarding them without any distinguishing sense of love.
But, as is increasingly obvious in our turbulent 21st century, our loveless machine-states are deeply unstable. It turns out that attempting to remove all bonds of affection from politics introduces some fundamental problems of political order. Most important, it has delivered us a leadership class essentially incapable of responsible leadership.
The noble classes of the pre-modern world’s closed societies were still capable of displaying a real sense of noblesse oblige: of having a sacred obligation to and responsibility for the people they ruled, because they were theirs. Though modern cynics may dismiss this sentiment as a myth, it was often genuine. It is a striking fact, for instance, that the last real generation of Europe’s aristocratic elite was disproportionately savaged in the trenches of the First World War, the flower of its youth voluntarily marching off to die leading from the front in defence of their nations at a significantly higher rate than ordinary soldiers. Eton, the nursery of the British aristocracy, lost more than a thousand of its students during the war — a 20% casualty rate compared to the army’s national average of 12%.
Today, our elites no longer betray any similar sense of special obligation to their people. But then we can hardly expect them to, given that all the strong bonds of loyalty that once tied them to their countrymen, transcending divides of wealth, education, and class, have been severed. They conceive of themselves as meritocrats, of no special birth and therefore no special responsibility. More importantly, they have been taught from birth that they ought not even conceive of their nation as particularly their own or to love it any more than any other portion of humanity; their self-conceived domain is one without borders, the global empire of the open society.
Whom does government serve? This is perhaps the most pressing question of politics. In theory the leadership class that rules us is supposed to represent and govern on behalf of the common people and their best interests. This is meant to be precisely what distinguishes our regimes from tyranny, “tyranny” in the classical lexicon meaning rule for private gain rather than for the common good. But no one can truly represent or act rightly for the wellbeing of another if they bear no particular concern for them. It is love, and only love, that can really guarantee that anyone acts in the best interest of another when they could do otherwise. Love is the only force capable of genuinely liberating us from selfishness.
It is a modern conceit that those with power are kept restrained, uncorrupted, and ordered to justice and the common good primarily by lifeless structural guardrails, by the abstract checks and balances of constitutions and laws. The ancients would have maintained that it is far more important that a king be virtuous, and that he love his people. And is this not plausible? Fundamentally, a father doesn’t treat his children well, refraining from abusing or neglecting them and raising them rightly, just because he obediently follows the law or some correct set of rules and standard operating procedures. He does so because he loves his family, and from that love flows automatically a spontaneous ordering of all his intentions toward their good. He would do so even in the absence of externally imposed rules. Love is an invisible hand all its own.
It is this invisible hand, not that of the market, that is so glaringly absent from the heart of our nations. If ours seems a cold and callous age in general, our ruling class, characterised by its indifference and our societies by division, dissolution, and despair, surely this lack is the real cause. As Reno writes, “the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led. Fearful of strong loves and committed to ever-greater openness, the postwar consensus cannot formulate, much less address, these problems”. With today’s elite “unable to identify our shared loves —unable even to formulate the ‘we’ that is the political subject in public life — we cannot identify the common good, the res in the res publica”.
The enlightened man, the conservative Russel Kirk once noted, “does not believe that the end or aim of life is competition; or success…” Nor does he hold any foolish political “intention of converting this human society of ours into an efficient machine for efficient machine-operators, dominated by master mechanics.” What he recognizes instead is that “the object of life is Love.” And, so, he knows, what’s more, “that the just and ordered society is that in which Love governs us, so far as Love ever can reign in this world of sorrows; and he knows that the anarchical or the tyrannical society is that in which Love lies corrupt”.
If the countries of the West are still capable of renewal, that renewal will come only when our leadership classes recover an uncorrupted love for the particular people — the nation — over which they govern and commit to placing their wellbeing first. We are fortunate then that, in the hearts of some of them at least, this recovery seems at last to have begun.
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Subscribe“If the countries of the West are still capable of renewal, that renewal will come only when our leadership classes recover an uncorrupted love for the particular people — the nation — over which they govern and commit to placing their wellbeing first. We are fortunate then that, in the hearts of some of them at least, this recovery seems at last to have begun.”
In which leaders’ hearts has this “recovery of uncorrupted love begun at last?” I must be missing something because they all seem to me to have uncorrupted love only for themselves.
There are some now creeping onto the world stage. JD Vance for sure, Meloni, Victor Orban, Geert Wilders to name a few. I would agree though that, in general, it’s not the hearts of the ruling class that have changed, but the hearts of the ruled.
I agree with your choices, but I wonder how long that sentiment will last as they continue to discover all the doors that open before them when they are in power for long enough.
N.S. Lyons is a very fine writer indeed. My only slight reservation about this article is his emphasis on love, particularly the love of leaders for those they lead.
I’m not convinced most leaders ever truly loved their national population, but I do believe they strongly identified with their nation, citizens, history and customs. And, in my opinion, it’s the lack of strong national identity that has undermined Western countries.
As the author notes, national identity has been systematically destroyed by the post-war, technocratic consensus. But the tribal instinct, at local or national level, is exactly that, an instinct. It can be suppressed for long periods of time, but can reassert itself quickly and powerfully.
Ironically, the end point of placing bureaucracies of “experts” in charge of nations, and even, in the case of Europe, almost a whole continent, is that the bureaucrats themselves become a tribe, strongly bound by class, training and ideology. They now act for their own benefit while professing to act for ours, and in so doing, filled with a sense of self-righteousness, embody those animal spirits that so frightened the creators of the post-WWII consensus.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
– CS Lewis
Totally agree with you about NS Lyons btw.
Nuts … that’s the quote I was looking for just above. Thanks.
This is precisely why Brexit was fought so intently; by the Establishment side in seeking to overrule the result of the referendum in order to maintain the technocracy they’d established, and by Brexiteers who instinctively grasped that the technocracy was failing them.
As someone else said in a different context: it was a close-run thing. The outcome is still being played out, and will be for decades; and, as Brexiteers also grasp, it’s far from being simply a matter of economic efficiency. This then, is the living example of the author’s thesis.
What Mr Lyons misses in his attempts to smear Musk and Ramaswamy as technocrats or “Efficient machine operators” is what he says he abhors. He’s dehumanizing them and perpetuating propaganda. He completely misses the sacrifices and risks they have made to speak out against the actual machines, which is the Establishment and the Bureaucracy that is Washington DC. The very things he says are tearing at our fabric.
He speaks of love and solidarity yet shows none of it to those risking everything while he risks nothing. Seems somewhat disingenuous to me.
What do you honestly believe billionaires like Elon Musk are ‘risking’ by aiding the Trump administration. Do you really think they’re risking their wealth or fortunes. Of course not. Like most sensible rich people, their wealth is beyond the reach of any politician except in the most extreme revolutionary conditions. We don’t have such conditions, but things were proceeding in that general direction, and Trump is a sign that all is not well with America. Shrewd observers might conclude that now is the time to demonstrate one’s allegiance to the populist movement publicly by backing the populist leader and avoid the people’s wrath at a later time in a possibly worse situation. The man who tries to hold back the flood unsuccessfully is likely to be forgiven. The man who sits in his mansion ignoring the problem, not so much. By aiding Trump, the visible leader of a victorious populist movement, Elon is not risking more. He’s reducing his risk and seeking advantage over other the many other technocrats and global oligarchs who tried to destroy Trump since 2016. Remember how many of the billionaires visited Trump after his victory but not before. Well, they’ve now moved up in his esteem vs. the many who still oppose him. Elon, Vivek, and the rest of the tech bros are engaged in self-preservation, pure and simple. They’re seeking to do what rich people do, which is maximize their returns and/or minimize their losses. The billionaires may yet lose quite a bit in the fall of globalism and I suspect Elon knew that before making the calculated decision to support Trump’s populist/nationalist movement and gain whatever favorable treatment he could.
For the love of god, please read this and apply it to your endless drivel…
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343449753_The_Importance_of_Paragraph_Writing_An_Introduction
Ah there you are. I feared I’d put you off with my last response. Good to have my personal troll back. You honor me with your repetition. Keep the message simple, repeat it endlessly, excellent communication advice.
Exactly. I was very surprised by the last paragraph “We are fortunate that, in the hearts of some at least, this recovery seems at last to have begun”. Really?! Name names. please. I read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk and he is exposed as a ruthless slave driver who works his employees into the ground and then discards them. He doesn’t show love for anyone. His four-year-old mini-me is his security blanket, born to serve his father’s emotional needs, poor kid. God forbid he should ever want a life of his own. The power that Musk has been given over people’s lives is truly terrifying to witness.
Very kind of you to come to the rescue of Elon and Vivek, but somehow I don’t think either of them will end up on the street if things don’t go as planned in their government roles.
If Musk fails in cutting the government we all end up in the street.
The Dem’s policies showed they did not care about their countries citizens. From mass emigration, draconian environmental policies that will do nothing to save the environment, to the corruption of NGOs that wasted money and supported censorship, to the racial reckoning which destroyed inner city communities but did provide good jobs for black elites (who mainly seem not to be ADOS) the Biden years were an unsustainable disaster.
I think he is discussing ideas. As are they. And in such an arena pointing out the limitations and assumptions is de rigueur. So I wouldn’t describe it as attacking. It’s merely indicating limitations to their whole scale application. Clearly they have limited application because musk and ramaswany have had great success applying similar models.
And yes I admire them for outing the bureaucracy establishment as inhuman.
Just look where it found itself going.
I’ll admit I came rather late to understanding the nature of the EEC (as was); EU Law was a module I studied in 2000. I remember reading section 2 of the European Communities Act 1972 and being astonished. I’d strongly recommend it to anyone. I think it makes the case for Brexit on its own.
Was it Lewis or Orwell who explained that the leftist bureaucrat has nothing whatsoever to restrain her because she acts with the approval of her own conscience — she honestly believes that she regulates every aspect of your life for your own good.
Love is universal and you can’t call yourself a believer unless you really try to love your neighbor. To make love particular is easy – everyone loves someone. Even murderers love their mum. What’s really hard is to love your neighbor and your enemy, to turn your cheek and receive a second blow, to embrace a stranger as you do your brother. This is the message of the Gospel. I personally think that we could do with a lot more of it these days.
Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:
39 But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
40 And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.
41 And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.
42 Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.
43 Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.
44 But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
There’s a certain point below which one doesn’t want to dip in a discussion, where folk just post tracts of the Bible.
And it’s even dippier, if he’s just replying to himself.
… and not only that, the tract doesn’t even cover N S Lyon’s key point about the limitations of love. Jesus said – and I’m paraphrasing Him – that there are only two commandments; love God and love your neighbour. That’s neighbour; not the whole world. Jesus also explained how we should love our neighbour; as ourselves. As an atheist (albeit a Protestant, Non-Conformist, Dissenting atheist), that strikes me as a profound and reasonable approach to take. Check out Matthew 22:37-40 and then take a moment to thank William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale for being able to read it in English.
Thanks for the chuckle!
You cite one of the most challenging and radical teachings of all time. Personally, I do think it belongs BTL of an article by someone who calls himself a believer. How much of a believer, and in what way?
Let’s also remember that, in addition to the radical outreach that spread across the world, Jesus gave particular messages and blessings, and washed the feet of his disciples.
Ye is currently making a ton of money selling sneakers.
That “love of others” is a fiction, and it’s in pretending we should aspire to that fiction that brings us to the embrace of mass migration. Are they not our Brothers? No, they damned well aren’t!. They mean us harm, or seek to exploit us – if not all, then in many cases.
“Turning the other cheek” will simply destroy us. But neither should we hate them – just require them to respect our physical and cultural boundaries, and if they won’t, force them to.
“The rule that you are to love your neighbour becomes in law, you must not injure your neighbour: and the lawyer’s question, Who is my neighbour? receives a restricted reply. You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour. Who, then, in law, is my neighbour? The answer seems to be—persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected when I am directing my mind to the acts or omissions which are called in question.”
… and you should love your neighbour as yourself. I’m my own harshest critic, and regularly fail to meet my own high standards; but those are to the standards to which I hold my neighbour, too.
The biblical definition of love is that it is action that does not wrong a neighbour. Love is a not a feeling or a philosophical position. If your neighbour or a passer-by throws an empty bottle into your garden, that is not expressing love.
Like all the sayings attributed to Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospels, turning the other cheek is directed very specifically to the circumstances of the audience. It is essentially not fighting for self as self. It does not mean pretending that the enemy in war are not to be resisted.
Forgiveness is another area that even Christians can get confused over if they do not pay close attention to what they have been told. There are severe conditions imposed on a wrongdoer before the person they have wronged is obliged to forgive them, as set out in Matthew’s Gospel.
It’s OK to forgive someone who has apologized for wronging you and takes responsibility for their actions. Otherwise it’s not OK.
The people will worship something, be it an idealized (if mythological) person, or the State inevitably full of corrupt people no better, and often far worse, than you yourself.
Anybody who thinks “normalcy” is a real word needs a beating in my book!
As for the essay, this line really stuck out for me
“They conceive of themselves as meritocrats, of no special birth and therefore no special responsibility”
This is why I hate the pretence of meritocracy, as it’s usually simply a front for selfishness. By ignoring any leg ups you may have received it’s much easier to think of the poor as lazy and undeserving, which is how I imagine the bulk of the “tech bros” and technocrats view their fellow citizens
I have to admit, I had no idea normalcy isn’t actually a word *ducks head*
I wouldn’t bother ducking, I’m no use at dishing out beatings.
The last scrap I had I was knocked out by the bouncer, then came to in the police station getting my noggin stitched up.
Great article. The ambition of creating a better life for one’s descendants is being supplanted by the endless cycle of the “hard times make strong men…” meme. No generation is to be spared the struggle, the tournament stamping on a human face forever. If a community fails, its members can be replaced by others more committed to struggle.
It’s the basis of the regiment.
Immortals.
An excellent piece, well-reasoned and persuasive on an intellectual level, but even more so on an emotional one. This just feels right to me and I would prefer a world where the potential excesses of nationalism eventuate in all their bloody primary colours to one where a grey corporatism and risk-avoiding bureaucracy reduce us all to abstract and interchangeable “global human economic units”.
I absolutely love this article, it neatly collates the main issues at the root cause of the slow death of western society. I would add that, as well as love, duty played a massive part in nationalist societies and seems to have disappeared more completely even than love has. Those boys from Eton marched out to die for king and country for love yes, but also because they felt a strong social and moral duty to protect what was theirs. That sense of duty has been systematically ripped away from our society, so that we brainwash our children to have a sense of entitlement and to view duty with suspicion and derision.
The tide thankfully seems to be turning, but as the left talked of a long march through the institutions, the right must now plan the same. Our education system, from preschool to third level, is still very much a post nationalist, global citizen indoctrination camp, and this must be addressed if we are to establish a nationalist bond of love and duty once more.
There are just a few people risking everything in attempting to shine light on the indoctrination you mention. Mr Lyons shows no love to two of them in this article. Namely Musk and Ramaswamy. In fact he disparages them.
Both Musk and Ramaswamy have said things that evince a rather mercenary attitude toward Americans. Ramaswamy wants us to make our children miserable and Musk seems to think we should all just get out of his way; we’re just flies in the ointment. They don’t even try to hide their sense of superiority. Is that love?
Neither one could get elected for anything around here. With good reason, if you ask me.
I feel like major conflict played a big role in that sense of duty, though. And the propaganda that came with that major conflict. I can’t be sure, but I imagine if there were a full scale conflict that somehow required a massive ground force, or perhaps an invasion of our own country, you would be surprised at how quickly people would come forward for the survival of our country.
In truth, things are easy for us, and have been for some time. Our lives are on cruise control, and a lot of folks from previous generations sacrificed their lives to make it possible. I guess I feel like the sense of duty for the average American is still there, even if it doesn’t seem like it.
Why the change of title?
I noticed that too. SEO, maybe?
While I agree with much of what the author says, traditionally our nations were more like upper class families with servants than like modern nuclear families.
That is, they were class based. Some of the family members were solely there to serve others, and their children were expected to do the same. Only at time of war did we become sentimental enough to admit everyone to full family membership.
Let’s not fantasise that in the past everyone was a full family member. Our societies in the past were at least as divided as they are now, with a very distinct upstairs, and equally distinct downstairs who could be hired and fired as those upstairs saw fit.
> Let’s not fantasise that in the past everyone was a full family member
And yet … I think of an episode of Downton Abby: The butler is ‘exposed’ by a blackmailer as having once been an … entertainer! … shocking! … of course he immediately resigns, being an honorable servant. But His Lordship will have none of it. He pulls a Bank of England note of considerable value out of his wallet, hands it to the blackmailer and tells him to make himself very scarce very quickly least His Lordship have him sent to Australia, convicted of Blackmail. His Lordship then advises him to disappear without a trace forever and tells his servant that this episode never happened. There’s no ‘sentiment’ there, but their is ‘family’. There’s no warmth between master and servant, but their is honor and duty.
And it is fiction!
True, but celebrated by many people over the years as being accurate.
Indeed. As an illustration of the familial nature of big estates, the great majority of aristocrats in earlier centuries pensioned off their aged servants without the slightest legal obligation to do so.
Just when I think you people can’t be any dumber you come out with this lunacy.
Are you really reduced to quoting Downton Abbey? Really?
Mr Lyons omits many salient points in this article.
It was too long already.
This made a lot more sense than what we have now.
“Only at time of war did we become sentimental enough to admit everyone to full family membership.” Stress brings out the truth.
If we recognize that, at some basic level, “family” was (and is) ethnicity-based, it becomes much clearer. So it’s natural that not everyone be a “full” (nuclear?) family member. The family includes the entire tribe. Ideally, the entire “nation.”
Beyond that, it’s all experimental. I’d have to say, it’s not going well.
Just an observation, not a theory!
This is very relatable to a Vietnamese man like me and this is how I can take this issue:
There is a uniquely Vietnamese (but of Sino origin) that could sum up the situation – “đồng bào”. The term originates from the folktale of ancient king of Lạc Long Quân and Âu Cơ got pregnant and gave birth to a sac, which had 100 eggs, which means 100 children. This was the root of a mythology that all Vietnamese has a single common ancestor, and therefore, any Vietnamese is siblings to each other in some forms or another. There are some claims that the term “đồng bào” has root from that same folktale, because “đồng” means the same or similarity, and “bào” is as in “bào thai”, which means a fetus of a body. In recent years “đồng bào” is often used as an affectionate way to refers to all citizens of Vietnam (rather than just using “nhân dân”/”the people”, regardless of ethnicity (Vietnam’s main ethnic is called “Kinh” or “Vietnamese”, but there are some 15% of Vietnamese population are from at least 53 other ethnicities). In English articles, the term is often translated as either “fellow countryman” or “compatriot”
Now you will wonder where is the relationship between this mythology and the article itself: because there is a common assumption that since all Vietnamese citizens are “brothers/sisters/siblings” to each other, people should helps each other when someone is in trouble, sick or went into crisis. This is the reason why many state organizations and agencies, as well as private companies have their own charities arm and there are many charity events being publicized every year – long before so called “Corporate Social Responsibility” became a thing. The Vietnamese culture are dependent on these bonds, love and emotion, so often that sometimes they would willing to break the box to help people.
However, it seems like that in the Western (neo)liberalism mindset, this does not exist. I felt like that many actions that the “Democrats” or “liberals” in the Western world are trying to do is a straight reverse of what is mean to be “đồng bào”. This was very evident during time running up to the US election and after the election, when they treated these who voted for Trump or so-called “far-right” candidates as if they are dumb, ignorant, racist, fascist, rotten by “fake news”, and not fit for a civilized, modern society. They assumed that all people of the nation thinks like these liberal elites and taking the “progressive” policies for granted. When things do not go into their plan, they find the proxy partners to harm against their “đồng bào” in order to keep their own interest as much as possible.
Even if Trump or someone far-right can be a criminal, a con man, a malicious businessman, depending on anyone’s mind, what they can do is that they can “exploit” the compatriotism feeling that is rampant within sectors of the society that is economically stressful as the result of the war. If Putin wins or not, it’s not as important for these people as when will economy be back to normal.
I know many people in this Unherd community may not like communism or socialism, but please note that the “Communist Party of Vietnam” was originally not designed to be “communist” but rather “nationalist”. The “nationalism” at that time is the feel of compatriotism that we are united to fight against the grip of foreign elite on a mainly agrarian country and being unattached to any major powers as much as possible. Even the propaganda of CPV recently also have more “nationalisitc” feeling that you can see from the “far-right” parties in the Western world than “communist” feeling
On the other hand, the so-called “Republic of South Vietnam” and their supporters are just a bunch of Vietnamese-speaking neocons and neolibs who wants to impose a fake form of “nationalism”, which, however, was dependent on Western neoconservatism and neoliberalism, which only serves their own interest and not even for other Americans. This is the main reason why Trump is so friendly to the Vietnamese “communist” government in the first term and did not care about so-called “human right activists”. The second term can be more thrilling. The Vietnamese “republicans” are so angered that after many decades of living in the US to help spreading “democracy”, they are becoming abandoned under Trump, that they even scolded White Americans for “stupidity”, echoing Democrats’ messages.
So, in other words, they have bastardize the “nationalism” and “patriotism” to make the whole world an open slave for their own interests, and as such, they don’t do anything that work for “nghĩa đồng bào” (compatriotism) for the nations. It’s more like “vì đồng, bào dân tộc” (for the money, eroding the people) rather than “vì đồng bào dân tộc” (for the people, for the fellow countryman). This is the very reason why Trump and their followers just keep rising, period.
It seems obvious that after world war II, the West has been consciously trying to move away from nationalism. Or even away from ‘modernist’ projects in general that relied on such ‘grand narratives’. This is the most fundamental characteristic of post-modernity after all.
Still, there is a big difference between the initial postwar period and the ‘neoliberal’ period after the late 70s. The initial period was actually characterized by solidarity, welfare states and an unprecedented level of equality. In the 80s and the 90s you get the “there is no society” doctrine, where open society and post-national doctrines essentially morphed with neoliberal economical thinking.
Especially from the 90s the prevailing idea was that politicians and everyone else could only be self-interested and thus no one could be trusted. Given the chance, everyone would simply cheat and betray everyone else. And so under the influence of Game Theory it was decided that everything had to be run like a (pseudo)market, the work of mathematician John Nash played a big role. Using competitive markets, self-interested actors would express the will of the public better than democracy ever could.
There is an interesting documentary series about this from Adam Curtis called “The Trap”. He concludes there is a big problem with this market fundamentalism because later research showed that people are really not that self-interested, egocentric and disloyal. In fact, the research showed only two of the investigated groups actually behaved the way Game Theory assumed: economists and psychopaths.
First of all, very well written. But I do not agree with the author’s utopian fantasy. The only establishment that tends to attract patriots is the military; some may even argue social workers. Politics attracts the narcissists and sometimes ideologically driven narcissists. The crisis of national identity is the result of many factors. Technology is perhaps the biggest one. The evolution of demographics is another one. People in big cities around the world are more alike than their compatriots.
Always interesting when headlines change.
It was
It’s now
Both accurate, I think, but who wanted the change?
I’m going to hasard a guess. The editors put it up with the first version and N.S. Lyons told them it was BS weaponizing of his article and if they didn’t change it he wouldn’t write for them again.
So they ended up compromising on a half-weaponized title.
My impression is that this isn’t true of all employers, in all countries and time periods. It’s an attitude that corporate America has pioneered, and it has gone hand-in-hand with the shift from family-owned companies to publicly-traded companies.
America is basically just a collection of private individuals vying for personal supremacy and it manifests most assuredly in their cherished private sector and business life. And it really is life… life is business!
Bravo. This is the best essay I’ve read this year.
And by a margin.
The Summum bonum is God. God is love and where true love is, God himself is there.
I think Mr Lyons is wrong on Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Not to mention Donald Trump himself. They risked all, even assassination, to step forward and speak out against what Mr Lyons describes here as the faceless bureaucracy ruling over us that has no love for us. They risked the full force of the Establishment machine, which is the actual machine controlling us, which came out against them, as they attempted and are attempting to dismantle the corruption behind the bureaucracy that’s clearly failing us. They risked all to shine light on our institutions so we can bring back that trust and solidarity that Mr Lyons appears to value so highly, as we all should. They are risking all against those who are as I write burning down the fruits of Musk’s and even Trump’s labor and attacking any who want to reward that labor.
What has Mr Lyons risked to aid and abet the efforts to return to the “Just and ordered society” he craves?
Mr Lyons risks nothing. Though he thinks he’s helping by smearing others as “Efficient machine operators” thus dehumanizing them. That’s not love. That’s more hate and propaganda.
OMG!
One critique: I’d like to read more about the paradox that whereas we are in fact ruled by globalist plutocrats like Musk who view everyone as disposable economic units, the government pretends — and may even believe it’s own lies — that it is there to protect us from every ‘harm’ and to wipe away ever tear and to guarantee that Equity insures that everyone finishes first — except for whitey of course, he is to be replaced least he continue to Oppress.
What historical drama did you get this particular garbage from?
Nice bit of racism at the end though – you guys just can’t resist showing us exactly what you are!
If I interpret your comment correctly, I think it refers to the phenomenon of humanitarian imperialism; that is, the belief in an inalterable set of intrinsic human rights which should be imposed upon every culture so that no culture can be distinguished from another. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights had all the best intentions, but its net effect is to claim dominion over the world. In retrospect, it is fundamentally a statement of Western liberal philosophical attitudes. There is a lot to like about those, and plenty to contest as well. Because it is anchored in an individualist view of society; that is, the idea that society comes about as a voluntary arrangement of individuals, when in fact we are social animals at the root, and individuality is secondary.
Accordingly, in the current phase of (late) globalist capitalism, which is highly individualistic, the UN Declaration provides cover for the capitalist atomization of society, right down to the level of single individuals, whose selfish rights are supposedly inviolable. Don’t like your spouse — get a divorce. Don’t like your parents and sibling — disown them. Don’t like your kids — well, that is the next step coming.
Further, because most of the Western world has been brought up under the strong influence of individualism (especially in America), most citizens have no means to protest against that because they simply have no concept of any other way of organizing society. They have been indoctrinated into individualism.
And that, in my view, is a tragedy in every sense of the word.
Great analysis, thanks. But. The object of love much matters, too.
The Hebrew bible can be seen as arguing this out: the priests said nation, the prophets said God.
Moreover, the God beyond a transcendent horizon – which is to say one beyond human possession, judge of all, and as the source of all, the one object worthy of unconditional love.
So both loveful nationalists and loveless technocrats miss the key point. Be in the world but not of it, as Jesus taught – and as republics under God, and constitutional sacred monarchies similarly, can hold us to.
At one time, say 1900, the USA was a team.
Now it’s just a stadium.
Elected officials don’t care about you, either, and unlike the techies, govt can arrest me, imprison me, and kill me with little threat of repercussions.
Our leadership classes work in their self interest and that of their donors. Let’s not pretend they worry about us.
I would prefer that this nation collapse under its own inadequacies and mediocrity than for it to be propped up by foreign talent with no love or attachment to this country and its culture (yes…we have one).
Peoples are not interchangeable.
“ A nation-state is no more justly able to replace its own people or neglect its unique obligations to them simply because doing so seems more profitable or convenient.”
You say that like it’s fact, but nation states do try to replace its people. Look at the extreme mass immigration under Biden administration. And they didn’t care nor do feel any compunction. All because it is more profitable to hire illegal aliens, who indeed are alien in beliefs, culture, and experience to natural born Americans.
Neglecting obligations is what nation states actually do. Deficits. Who cares, let’s blow out the budget before the other guy takes office, he’ll get the blame. Because the people are so stupefied or their replacements don’t care to question mass media.
Please, I’m not against what you have written. But to portray the nation as acting one way when it clearly has acted another is uncritical.
The technocratic and managerial approach to organising society was guyed by C S Lewis in his novel That Hideous Strength.
The way in which the two sceptics are treated who feature in the story, one in each camp, is particularly noteworthy.
Love is a practice, or lack thereof, not a mere concept. However directed or oriented, no “ism” can sustain it, let alone in some “uncorrupted” form. Not patriotism, nationalism, universalism, communitarianism, or even altruism. Unless what is thought in the head and felt in the heart meets the hand, in acts of love.
Conflating the hand of love with the concept of nationhood—let alone the arms of war—is a rhetorical trick, which Lyons advances with considerable flair, but no weight. Why is the militancy of intense nationalism needed to sustain what is good, and loving, about patriotism, or concern for one’s neighborhood?
The author even makes his key example what poet and WWI casualty Wilfred Owen called “the old lie”: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. While better than dying for no cause or country at all, it ain’t that sweet, let alone uncorrupted. The version of Christian practice that makes militant nationhood into a great good or even its highest good is corrupt to the core. What the hell kind of love is that?
Does the author celebrate Biden for having a son who died for reasons related to his military service, in a terrible war? Or castigate Trump and Bush Jr and Clinton equally for their evasions of service?
Ah the good old days of aristocracy and factory work circa 1910, when everyone was suffused with an uncorrupted love of family and nation, and no one felt left out! I can almost picture it now—if I squint away the number and condition of the poor, the disenfranchisement of women, and the “glorious” 20th-century horrors which Lyons would like to put into sensible perspective.
I agree there’s been an overcorrection into fake “world citizenship” that is in fact untethered and selfish. But don’t pretend there was an uncorrupted golden age that was not also, in many ways, worse than what we have now, even in this hostile and troubled zeitgeist. Or tell me exactly when your ideal version of noblesse oblige held such sway: 1914, 1861, 1588, 1066? How we love to selectively “remember” the Good Old Days.
A living practice of love for family, neighborhood, country, and planet is not reducible to any “ism” and cannot live in the abstract, however firmly believed. It needs to become flesh in our lives, from our heads to our hands. Guided by a pure or at least less corrupted hearts. We were created for more than division or material self-concern.
Well said.
“In such a corporation, management’s only responsibility is to profits; it has no inherent responsibility to employees or their wellbeing, something of interest only insofar as it translates into productivity. The corporate machine views employees merely as interchangeable human resources, to whom it owes no loyalty. Indeed, if it is to effectively devote itself to profit maximization the company can afford no permanent relational bonds with any of those who work for it, as it must be able to fire or replace them based on cold utilitarian calculus.”
I can think of no clearer evidence of total managerial ignorance than this comment by this writer. He obviously has a total lack of understanding of how successful management works through team building. Successful managers, and especially those as highly successful as Musk and Ramaswamy, are by definition team builders who have selected, mentored, motivated and managed a cadre of people who perform in unison as needed for the enterprise’s success. No potential employee in their right mind would choose to work for an employer with the characteristics he describes in this article. No employee is motivated by being defined – and treated — as simply just another interchangeable part of a process and successful enterprises do not arise from that philosophy. In fact they fail miserably.
This is the best article I have read on Unherd and one of the best things I’ve read in a long time. This is globalism reduced to lowest terms. I have previously linked globalism in Europe and intellectually to the trauma of the World Wars and the fear of another. The Cold War, then, was a contest between two programs of anti-nationalism, both emphasizing aspects other than nation, country, race, or religion. It seems fair at this point to say that both have failed. Liberalism defeated communism, and then itself.
Nationalism is the order of the day, because it seems clear that whatever happens, it won’t be the world of free trade and free movement that the ‘citizens of the World’ were hoping for. For all their money and all their power the globalists cannot win, because money cannot buy everything. Love, loyalty, and the sense of common cause that unites families and nations cannot be bought, sold, and traded as a commodity on Wall Street. It can be denied or explained away by academics citing evolution or biology and dismissed as irrational and irrelevant, but locking something in a vault, burying it, and pretending it doesn’t exist does not mean it is truly gone. Humans can destroy most physical things through, but there is no art or science that man possesses that will unmake tribalism or undo the natural bonds of family, kin, and chosen friends. One is compelled to ask who would want to do such a thing and why. The historic trauma of the world wars and the fear of nuclear annihilation is the answer, but more basically, the answer is fear.
I find fear is often the enemy of loves both great and small. We desire connection but we fear betrayal. We love our families and friends but fear the grief that comes with their passing. We love our neighborhoods, our cities, our nations, but we fear war or their changing into something we no longer recognize. There is, of course, a way to escape such fear. If one never trusts, one can never be betrayed. If one never loves, one cannot grieve for the loss of that love. If one does not have any particular care for one’s nation, there is no reason to fight for it, and no reason to care how it changes. All of these things can be justified in terms of pure utilitarian reason. Given how many lives are lost in war and conflict, a purely objective system that weights lives equally would suggest a philosophy that, like globalism, rejects the notion of nations, cultures, or nationalities if that rejection prevents the massive loss of life in warfare. It terms of pure reason, globalism has considerable merit. Yet, few people would advocate avoiding connection with other humans out of fear of betrayal, and fewer still would advocate being without love for any person. People do not refrain from loving others out of the fear of loss. Loving a tribe, culture, or country in this manner is no different from anything else. Yes, there is the risk of war and conflict with other cultures, yet for humans, it is how we define and understand ourselves, by our families, clans, communities, and nations.
I make these observations even as I myself feel tribal loyalty far less than most. I cannot say it is entirely absent, but I can say I had almost none as a child, and what I have now is likely partially informed by my observations of others and personal experience. From those observations, people who have no sense of tribal loyalty seem somehow less than they should be, less in a way I can understand better than most. They seem less natural and more artificial. I have noticed they are almost never happy, content, or at peace, with themselves or with the world. There are a bit more like me, but what comes naturally to me seems to be a conscious effort on their part, much like faking normal requires considerable effort for me. I would not wish my particular disability upon any other any more than a blind man would to blind others. I would not advocate people trying to live without a sense of tribal loyalty, without a sense of nationalism, than I would have them gouge out their eyes. At some point, people have to come to terms with what they are, individually as a person and as a human being in general. I don’t believe denying any part of our basic nature will end well.
Questions of degree and kind matter, a lot. To be a patriot or have pride in family, tribe, or nation can have plenty of upside. Yet, in my observation, tribalism or nationalism of the untempered or ideological kind has distorting influences that are not natural in any good or essential way. And what of intense ethnic loyalties within a multi-ethnic nation, as most of any size are and long have been, notably the USA?
Humans are naturally violent and selfish too. We can’t eliminate that inborn tendency in the human race, or even totally erase it in ourselves, for most of us who fall well short of sainthood or enlightenment. There’s no need to let it reign supreme or run free though.
The way you directly equate tribal loyalty with nationalism seems false to me. The stronger tribal loyalties usually attach to nuclear family, extended family, ethnicity, and race. Fealty to nation or flag rises up during times of disaster and warfare. Militant nationalism is inherently warlike, as should be tempered along with other forms of excessive tribal attachment—like rabid cultural or political partisanship.
You are correct. Questions of degree and kind do matter, and I speak too often in absolutes. Moderation is the key in all things. I see a system of distinct nations with mostly homogenous cultures, well defined borders, and a non-violent, non militaristic, sense of patriotism to be the optimal balance between the need for economic productivity and social harmony and an accommodation for the reality that humans are tribal creatures. I don’t want Nazi Germany. I also don’t want universalist communism/socialism because it destroys human freedom by trying to force human nature into a hole where it won’t fit. A liberal, greed based version of the same thing is not much of an improvement.. As you say, there’s a sweet spot to strike, and I think that’s what this author is aiming at.
You’re also correct that the USA is a poor example of the ideal balance in question, owing to its unusual history. As a result, the US must exercise a greater level of tolerance and flexibility in its government, and accept a lower trust society. Given enough time, a distinct, organic culture will develop. One sees elements of that in rural America but it’s not anything like most of the world’s rich, ancient cultures.
All the more reason why we shouldn’t export our particular dysfunction to the rest of the world by insisting our way is the best. American multiculturalism and the fact that powerful empires always export culture have, I believe, done real damage to the world in general and Europe in particular. Europeans who feel contempt toward the US for their imposing American ideology have a decent gripe, IMHO. The nonsense about CRT, the 1619 project, DEI, were all cooked up by American academics championing the multicultural US as a prototype for a united world. It should not be held up as such. There are good things about America as there are with most cultures, and there are bad things as well. The rest of the world trying to imitate a nation with such a unique history was bound to be awkward and lead to problems. With Trump it’s all kind of blowing up in our faces. I wouldn’t handle it the way he is. I think there’s a better way, but there’s not a way that’s good. It just is what it is. As much as I usually disagree with Fazi, I give him credit for recognizing that Europe’s interests were rapidly diverging from those of the US and sooner or later that was going to make the alliance harder to sustain.
You’re a better person than me AJ. I’ve no doubt the world would be better off if everyone were like you. I’m more or less a bystander, as near as any person can get to being a disinterested, impartial observer, and what I see is that most people are fairly decent. They don’t want to actively harm one another, and will refrain from taking most actions that harm others. Most will even make efforts to help others in certain situations and circumstances. Some will go to great lengths. Some will do only a little, but most have limits. Some are only willing to go out of their way to help others to a certain extent, even on a mental/emotional level and some are not willing to do much at all and would rather mind their own business. Think about how many people resent paying taxes because they don’t feel they should have to give up ‘their’ money. I’ve never particularly agreed with or understood that line of thinking, but it exists, and I’ve no idea how one could ever eliminate it without just culling some portion of the population, and most wouldn’t consider that a viable solution. There’s always going to be people like that, people who don’t want to sacrifice much, if anything, for collective outcomes. Traditional culture helps keep these types in line and productive by establishing a base line for acceptable conduct in a community, town, and ultimately a nation. They develop norms and standards of behavior, then enforce those norms through fairly simple psychological means acceptance vs. rejection, reward vs. punishment. Those norms become the minimum acceptable to exist in that society. Even the most selfish can gain nothing by breaking the standard. Conformity is enforced. Deviancy is punished. As something of a non-conformist, I learned this lesson well at a very young age.
If there are no norms, however, no standard, no social rules, what constrains the behavior of the more selfish members of society? The answer is brute force, such as the law and the prison system. The US has the world’s largest prison population, and nobody else is remotely close. I don’t believe that’s a coincidence. Extend that to the entire world, and you get something even worse, something dystopian. That’s simply what I see.
You see more in people than I do and think them far more capable of far greater change. I admire your convictions and I wish you luck in making people better. I don’t think it’s going to work, but I admire you for your convictions. You are the best advocate for social liberalism on this site by far and I hope that one day the Democratic party will sound more like yourself than the cult of race obsessed social justice warriors setting out to right the wrongs of centuries past and unite the world as one big happy planet. Your optimism is reasonable. Theirs is delusional, and that level of delusional thinking cannot be allowed the reins of power. They are no better than Trump. I actually had some faith in Biden to limit the influence of the far left, but I doubt Harris is effective at anything outside a courtroom, and she’s just as much a tool of the corporate world, who I consider the real source of most of the world’s problems. Between the loons and the corporate overlords, it’s a tall task to retake the left from its current predicament. I have hope that someone like Sanders will eventually be able to run against a right wing populist that isn’t an angry, vulgar, insulting, bully and we’ll have a real chance to debate the direction of the nation in a reasonable way that’s positive on both sides. With Trump and the current incarnation of the Democrats, we’re a long way from that.
Truth, love and power. The Christian foundations of Western Civilization. Circa 2000 years.
Profit, efficiency and growth. The neoliberal foundations of Western Civilization. Circa 50 years.
Diversity, equity and inclusion. The woke foundations of Western Civilization. Circa 5 years.
History doesn’t lie!
It depends on who writes it.
I’m rewatching “A Few Good Men”, a movie about two different conceptions of honor and duty, and I can’t help pitying how the Western civilization is doomed because both conceptions of honor and duty have unravelled because of laziness and selfishness.
A very fine article. One factor, not mentioned by the author, that is at work undermining citizens’ sense of national pride, or at least, belonging, is the very rapid changes being made to the way our physical environment looks. In a furious effort to provide (ware)housing for rapidly expanding (through immigration) urban populations, our cities become virtually unrecognizable every few years. It’s difficult to foster or maintain a sense of loyalty to a place whose appearance is being continually altered, where landmarks are torn down and where our use of “the commons” is severely regulated or curtailed altogether.
Well written but what went wrong has been obvious since the GFC when QE showed the partialities. I don’t agree that some hearts are thawing. The elite battle emerging appears to be Davos vs Wall St. I don’t believe the idea of citizenship and all it means occurs to them, unless it serves their ends. Still it’s been somewhat amusing watching Our Leader in military duds spearheading rearmament in a country that refuses to fight. I can find no one in my network who would die for 21C Britain. Any thawing hearts would need to be furnaces of patriotism to shift the current.mood. perhaps we’ll get some false flags to help us along. With apologies for my cynicism.
Simone Weil on roots: “No human being should be deprived of his metaxu, that is to say of those relative and mixed blessings (home, country, traditions, culture, etc.) which warm and nourish the soul and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.
The true earthly blessings are metaxu. We can respect those of others only in so far as we regard those we ourselves possess as metaxu. This implies that we are already making our way towards the point where it is possible to do without them. For example, if we are to respect foreign countries, we must make of our own country, not an idol, but a stepping-stone towards God.“
Excellent thought provoking essay. It has made me reflect on another essay currently on Unherd by Mary Harrington about the Commonwealth. It has a negative view, considering the institution is old fashioned, outdated and only loved by Boomers.
I am an Australian, living in the UK. So I do smart at negative articles about the Commonwealth and have been wondering why it bothers me so. Another person commented here that the love of country was embodied in the vote for Brexit. Then it hit me. I voted for Brexit. One of my many reasons for doing so was the overshadowing of UK responsibilities to the Commonwealth by the EU. Why did I feel this way? Because of love for the idea of the Commonwealth, because of an allegiance to the crown and our shared history and a sense of belonging – however distant, to this green and pleasant land.
This love still exists in some Commonwealth countries and it is certainly a good reason for the UK to keep investing in the institution. For Britain’s sake almost more than the Commonwealth itself.
And so did you get back your green and pleasant land?
This won’t sit well with most of you, but here goes. I write from the state of Connecticut. Two days ago, a 32-year-old man set fire to a house in which he was being held captive for twenty years in order to escape his fiendish stepmother who tortured and abused him since she pulled him from the public school he attended until the age of 12. The man, 5 feet 9 inches tall, weighs 67 pounds.
Over the past two decades, where was your compassionate government for this man? The school district that he attended, did it care enough to send out a truancy officer? The Department of Child Protective (LOL)Services, did it do follow up with care after its initial visits? Did the boy’s friends or family ever ask, “I wonder how he’s doing,” let alone knock on his door? The house in which he was imprisoned was boarded up and overgrown with weeds. In short, blighted. No cops? No firemen? No blight enforcement officers?
The point is, governments are legal entities. Same with corporations. Same with our Constitution. They cannot love, and we’re foolish to think they can. Worse, we’re inhumane. It’s the individuals within these entities with the capacity for love and compassion. Stand up and fight for the person summarily fired. Our Constitution, in proscribing governmental powers, assumed a level of humanity amongst the citizens of our country, that clearly modern America lacks. Alas, caring is hard work. It forces us to, God forbid, care for the welfare of our neighbor. It’s so much easier to lay that burden on the government or corporation. There once was a day when members of a family, church, or community looked after their own. Now we expect the government or a company to do our jobs. Unfortunately, the more we foist human responsibilities on these legal constructs, the more inhumane we become.
There is irony heaped higher than physically possible among the UNHERD elite who having savaged DEI to the point you cannot even see the shreds, to buy into an argument that essentially is about spiritual humanism, finding emotional value in caring for others.
The current administration steers itself swiftly to administer to those with wealth by those with wealth with an all encompassing agenda propagating more wealth for those with wealth. To ask it to resonate with any human virtue asks for gaslighting.
Maybe all you shredders might want to reconsider what DEI was originally trying build in the world. What a hypocritical bunch of elitist bastards many of you are.
The construct that is called a “nation” is a function of post-industrial capitalism and therefore a very recent phenomenon. Love, on the other hand, is not so recent. The idea of a metonymical love that can explain away the various contradictions of the capitalist order by its power of representation in some supposedly immanent notion of nationhood is certainly rather literary and poetic and also makes for evocative prose. But it is hampered by the fact that, while its ability to stir feeling is immense, its ability to actually explain the various iniquities of modern society are small. Speak of “love of the nation” to people whose so-called nation has long abandoned them and be ready for a gob of spit in your eye. The idea of a nation is not some refuge from the perils of contemporary capitalism but, on the contrary, is a myth that has been foisted for the service of transnational capital itself. Let’s start talking more dialectically and have greater imaginations than some maudlin story about “love” and “nation.” The victims of the idea of the nation are numerous and they are waiting for the minimum wage to become a living wage and for the risk of bankruptcy over healthcare costs to fall by the wayside of history—along with other outdated concepts like the “nation.” Don’t worry about love: it will always be there. I have it in my heart. For I love my fellow man so much I would never allow myself to fall prey to easy philosophies that sound fanciful but only reproduce the material divisions in our society that have brought us nothing but more war and more decay for so very long.