Things Written Randomly in Doubt Page 10
Much more should be asked of our children, and if it were, they would overcome the challenge easily, because children are sponges – they are learning machines. Their abilities may vary in different activities but they all have the ability to excel. Not all of them can reach the greatest heights and if we were to improve the education system, the bar would of course be raised, but all of them will be able to appreciate some of the arts and produce good material. They will not be alienated from their culture either as producers or “consumers”. Nobody ever became a poet without reading or listening to poetry, and nobody ever became a musician without listening to music.
Free will is thus a limited margin of freedom that is granted more to those who have had a chance to develop their abilities in childhood. This is not strictly a moral question, although some of the arts do also develop a sensitivity to others. On the other hand, there is little evidence that the educated are more moral than the uneducated. At the most, we could say that education frees children to be more themselves in adulthood, in both good and bad. In other words, it imparts free will.
The remaining margin of free will exists predominately in the mind. Individuals can succumb to outside pressures to the degree resulting from a balance between what they are comfortable with and what they feel obliged to do in order to survive. This is an important consideration in an authoritarian state or, I think, in a consumer society with its own methods of coercion, and could be influenced by free will, although also by mood and nature. But in the privacy of their own minds these individuals are able, if assisted by education, to develop ideas more freely. You may say that this is a very restricted form of freedom, and that it will have little influence on society or the future. You would be right about the first assertion, but wrong about the second. Where there are many people with a good education (and especially if they are disgruntled as well), then society is capable of changing in an intelligent and planned manner (which must be fairly gradual and conscious of the existence of unknown and unpredictable problems). For some time, we have been told that there is no other way of doing things. This fits with the mindset of necessity. If a people argue, debate and take decisions to change their society, they can do so. Things will never go exactly according to plan, but there is that possibility. There is a midway between arrogant, large-scale activism and subservient passivity. We can engage with the world, but we have to do so with an understanding of the limitations on our own role. To use Buber’s terminology, with an I-thou approach. We have free will, if we will ourselves to be free.
And did my father have free will Well, if any of us have it, then he most certainly did. I possibly inherited a belief in my own free will from him, and this may be a delusion and a further constraint imposed upon me, but I used my putative free will in a manner he thoroughly disapproved of. We were hardly very original in that father-son relationship. All of us are a mixture of predictable instincts and erratic free will. Most of us – all of us except a few dogmatic philosophers and theologians – believe that we are if not masters, at least incompetent coachmen of our own destiny, and most of us exaggerate a little in thinking that.
My father was a mildly devout man who attended church fairly regularly, but wasn’t concerned if he didn’t. He did not go to socialise with clergy or congregation, returning promptly to his glass of gin and vermouth – or two. He was, in any case, a man of few words. He was not good at judging people, but was loyal in his attachments. Such people usually don’t have much control over their lives, as these traits put them at a distinct disadvantage. Nevertheless he started life with the advantage of class at a time when the middle class was as assertive as it is once again today. It is difficult to know whether he overcame those disadvantages because of his class or because of his will. Without them he might have “done better”, which meant he could have reached a higher rank and enjoyed more recognition, and almost certainly he thought that he should have and mistakenly thought he would have been happier for it. Part of him would have denigrated such things as rank and recognition, but such things have a terrible way of worming themselves into our brains and restricting our free will.
In Bangladesh there was a very young Englishman in the habit of meditating beside a tank, which was the local English word for small artificial lakes generally used for washing clothes. My father passed him every day on his way to work, and one day stopped and went over to invite the youth to lunch. It turned out that this hippy had walked and hitched from England, and lived some kind of ascetic life-style.13 My father was not only being generous; he was also curious and, I believe, admired his guest because he admired all people who made their lives and did not simply accept the one that was given them by birth and society. It didn’t really matter what they did. This is why I feel certain that he believed in free will even though we never discussed the subject (or much else other than an anecdotal presentation of his own life), and naturally he believed that he, in particular, had free will, but that does not prove that he did.
While he was exceptionally good at his own work, my father was not very good at knowing what was going on in the human world around him, but then few of us are. The unknowability of other human beings is the greatest barrier to meaningful relationships between us. We are capable of being tricked again and again by one kind of outgoing personality, and yet are diffident of someone pathologically incapable of deceit. The only way we can overcome these instinctive errors is by willing our reason to take charge of our behaviour. I’m not sure that my father was capable of this in his private life. But then a man who played his cards so close to his chest, as did so many men of that generation, was not an easy man to know. I don’t think he knew other people, he may not have known himself – and this does restrict our free will. But I think – and I can say no more than that – that he did will himself in other ways to do things and create. Which is not of any importance to you, the reader, except in this: there are, very probably, different ways of exerting our free will, and I’m sure that we agree that it does exist when we’re talking about our own lives. Perhaps even Hobbes made that exception; I’m sure that Luther did.
Nations and Nationalism
Ernest Gellner defined nationalism as “primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent”.1 Gellner also believed that nations are something pretty new, although he is not very clear about when they appeared. At the end of his book, he says rather vaguely that he never claimed that men did not always live in groups (but, it is implied, those groups were not always nations). As most things in the modern industrialised world are not quite like anything that came before and are in some way a product of this modern world, and if the nation has to be the specific modern nation, then we have one of those circular arguments of which some academics are so fond. Gellner is proved right by his own definitions. If we are to go beyond such self-fulfilling arguments we need to ask what a nation is, irrespective of whether or not it is an entirely modern phenomenon. It appears to be an identifiable human grouping that is greater than mere kinship. It is large enough to mean that an individual could not possibly know every member (which does not mean that it is that large; tens of thousands could constitute a nation and this was roughly the size of the city-states, which in many ways were the closest thing to the modern nation in the ancient and late-medieval worlds). Moreover, there is unfortunately no specific criterion that defines this category, making” nation” an extremely elusive concept, and yet people always believe that they know what it is. Historical study appears to demonstrate that these features belong to both the modern and the ancient nation. Certainly the alacrity with which nationalism was adopted implies that the affected populations were not entirely foreign to the discourse of nationality.
On the modernity of nationalism, I believe Gellner is on much firmer ground, and besides the words themselves seem to tell us that: “nationalism” is a relatively new word, while “nation” is very ancient.2 Nevertheless, because I am a li
ttle more circumspect and human history is full of surprises, I would prefer to say that nationalism on any significant scale is something that occurred in the late-eighteenth century and only firmly established itself as a powerful social and political force in the nineteenth.
Interestingly, it was culture and nation that were congruent in many parts of early medieval Europe, as well as nomadic, semi-nomadic and warrior nations in pretty much all eras. In Charlemagne’s Europe, people were tried according to their own nation’s laws and not the laws of any particular territory. To some extent this concept of nation appears to have been applied in the Ottoman Empire, where nations or millets were kept apart, not geographically but by carefully encoded cultural and social norms. The story of the Franks is an instructive one because it demonstrates the continuity and dramatic change in a nation over time. Nation is above all defined in historical terms, but it has little or no permanency (in that sense, it is similar to language).3 The Franks arrived at the eastern borders of the Roman Empire as an independent nation speaking a group of similar dialects. At that moment, their political unit (albeit a fairly loose one), their culture and their nation were congruent, but they had no fixed territory. Some of them then became a mercenary people, engaged by the Romans to defend the eastern border they had come up against (possibly against other Franks). Those Franks had therefore taken another political master, but still considered themselves to be Franks. The funeral inscription of a legionary who died in the third century in Pannonia (present-day Hungary and a few surrounding areas) bears this inscription: “Francus ego cives, miles romanus in armis”, which we could translate as “I belong to the Frankish people, but under arms I am a Roman soldier”. This typically layered identity shows however the predominance of national identity even though he was far from his Frankish homeland (and may not have been born there, given the difficulty of travel and brevity of lifespans).4 With the fall of the Roman Empire, the Franks found themselves masters of several independent Frankish states (Neustria and Austrasia were the principal ones, but Frankish laws of succession meant that they tended continuously to split and reunite) and were also divided into subgroups (principally the Salian and Ripuarian Franks), each with their own laws. They now had a fixed territory, political units and nation that were congruent, but they no longer spoke the same language, as the western Franks had adopted Romance or Neo-Latin from the conquered peoples of what is now northern France.5 This does not appear to have affected the unity of the Frankish nation. More interestingly still, when they conquered the territories of southern France, they did not assimilate them into the Frankish nation, but ruled them as a subject people. They were referred to as Romans, as was, not unsurprisingly, the population of Rome, but other Italians were referred to by the name of another German warrior nation, the Lombards. Indeed the Lombard identity survived long after Lombardy’s defeat by Charlemagne, and I suspect it was Italian humanism’s search for its glorious Latin roots that finally eradicated the name (nationalism may be new but national mythology is certainly not). In Boccaccio’s Decameron, two Florentine merchants living in Gascony are referred to as “those Lombard dogs” (“quei lombardi cani”), which takes us to the fourteenth century. Lombard Street does not refer to the modern Italian region, but to Italy or at least northern and central Italy. The Romance-speaking Franks of Neustria seem to have been a little confused about the origins of their language. A ninth-century manuscript states: “It seems that at that time the Franks learnt the Roman language that we still use today from the Romans that were living there. Now no one knows what their mother tongue was”.6 The majority of a population can adopt the language of a small number of invaders (as occurred with English in Ireland or nearly occurred with Norman French in England), but it is unthinkable that a conquering majority could adopt the language of a conquered minority. Yet this is exactly what the Neustrian Franks believed. Chroniclers took it for granted that Clovis had either annihilated the Roman population of Neustria or driven them out. Any other version would have challenged their Frankish identity and reduced them to the same level as the “Romans” of Aquitaine and Septimania (now the Languedoc) to the south. The power of mythology in national identity is already clear and appears to be a constant. But mythology was based on the sound principles of power and subjugation, both of which are the key elements in the creation of strong identities.
The usefulness of Gellner’s definition can perhaps best be demonstrated by quoting one of his ex-students writing much more recently. Professor Anthony Smith defines nationalism as “an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of autonomy, unity, and identity on behalf of a population deemed by some of its members to constitute an actual or potential ‘nation’.’”7 Smith, who is not dismissive of the “perennialist” argument (i.e. the idea that nationalism has always existed), is being cautious and circumspect, but to such a degree that nationalism becomes too vague a concept to be meaningful. Gellner identifies this crucial link between nation and political unit, which in the modern world is the state. What Gellner completely ignores throughout his book, is the role of mass political involvement and the rise of democracy in the creation of this new phenomenon. A people’s sense of nation, which had always existed, became relevant because of their gradual transformation from subjects into citizens. By becoming one of the pieces on the political chessboard, that sense of nation became nationalism.8
Gellner claims to be a dispassionate observer of nationalism, while in reality he is something of an apologist for greatnation nationalism, and for him small-nation nationalism is ugly, counter-historical and rather kitsch. Social scientists want nationalism to produce identifiable patterns of behaviour shared by all its forms. The fact that they have not yet managed to identify them satisfactorily perhaps demonstrates that nationalism is too varied to be seen as a single entity (Gellner does not seem to realise the beauty of his own definition, which ties nationalism down but allows for the variety of its forms). Unlike so many nineteenth-century “isms”, nationalism is not even inherently left-wing or right-wing. Gellner starts a fashion for being dismissive of nationalism, which by his time was identified with secessionism and therefore concerned small-nation nationalism, while the important struggles of great-nation nationalism occurred in the nineteenth century: Germany, Italy, Poland and Hungary. Often it was assumed that small nations would be subsumed into these great nations, and therefore obliterated, which did not actually take place in Europe, but did in the post-colonial world on a grand scale, the Kurds being a notable example. Gellner writes sarcastically of “sweetly reasonable” nationalism, as though such a thing could only exist as an irrelevant intellectual construct. He seems to forget that both Gandhi and Hitler were nationalists and defined themselves as such, and yet what a difference between these two men and the effect they had on humanity: the difference between the prince of light and the prince of darkness.
Before expanding on these points, however, we must first consider the nation in agrarian societies, which Gellner disposes of in a typically schematic manner. He argues that there was an age of innocence when nation did not exist. I am unwilling to engage in discussions on the state of nature, which always say more about the arguments their proponents want to make about the present than any reality that may have existed in the past. What we do know is that modern historians of so-called “tribal societies” reject the word “tribe” and prefer the word “nation”. Like western nations, these nations are not specifically ethnic or linguistic identities, and their boundaries are often extremely complex.9 In fact, they can differ from “modern nations” precisely because of this greater complexity. Amongst the Nzema of Ghana and the Ivory Coast, nation is both matrilinear and patrilinear, so the nation with which you engage in agricultural activities is not necessarily the nation with which you go to war.10 This perhaps reveals one aspect of the modern nation: it ideally wants everyone to belong to one nation and one nation alone.11 It rejects “layered identity”. If we look at Scotland towards
the end of the first millennium, we find that Scotus in the Latin sources could mean an Irishman (Gael in his original homeland), an ethnic Gael living in the territories either of Scotland or England as we now know them, an Ethnic Gael living in Scotland (which was then beginning to form), someone who came from the Gaelic heartland around the modern county of Argyll (historically Dal Riada), or someone living in Scotland of whatever ethnic background (Gael, Briton, “Pict” or Norseman, to name the principal categories). Of course the last definition was the one that eventually won out, but it did not firmly establish itself until after the Wars of Independence.12 The second millennium can be seen as a process of identifying nation with territory (and ultimately the state), which considerably accelerated in the later centuries and spread out from Europe across the world.
Gellner provides a diagram that shows the upper layers of society as stratified horizontally and the lower layers of “insulated communities of agricultural producers” as divided vertically between each locality. This seems an incredible claim. The Ottoman Empire was made up of several nations and these nations lived alongside each other and had no clear geographical territory (as with our tenth-century Gaels). The empire encouraged these distinctions (as empires do) and demanded that everyone should wear their own national dress.13 Sometimes nation was primarily defined by religion and sometimes by language (as in the case of the Albanians and Greeks). People were aware of their identities, which extended beyond their own valleys, and knew that some of their neighbours belonged to other nations.
Gellner appears to believe that the city-state was something was very different from the nation. In reality, the city-state was a nation that gave rise to a kind of protonationalism, particularly in its more republican and democratic forms. In late medieval and early modern Florence, citizens identified with their patria (Florence) and nazione (Italy – roughly modern Italy without the Kingdom of Naples). But the patria was perhaps the closest to the modern nation; it was the political unit, and Florentines or rather the higher ranks of Florentine society were mainly concerned with how it was run. The rest of Italy was the political forum in which their states jostled with the others, forming alliance and defending interests. It was a world more threatened from within, until foreign invasions started in the last decade of the fifteenth century.