I just read 'Carnifex' by Tom Kratman which is a book I would not reccomend to everyone or even most people. Its very dark, and sometimes quite decadent. Its somewhat like 'The White Plague' in which a biochemist decides to slaughter the Irish for an IRA bombing of his family. In this case, Salafist Moslems on an earthlike planet arranged an act of mass terrorism, and the 'hero' decides to totally break the power of the terrorists and anyone who might aid them (sympathetic villagers, NGO aid workers, press reporters and anchors) and so on with extremely ruthless tactics (certain people volunteer to be 'taken hostage' so to force their governments to pay millions to the terrorists. This stops after one of these volunteers is taken by a hit squad supported by our hero, and the volunteer is ran feet first through a paper shredder despite the monies being paid.)
He ends his two novel series (A Dessert Called Peace is the first) with an authorial editorial in which he raises a number of lines of arguement against cosmopolitanism, or against the idea of a Family of Man, and the notion that nation-state borders are arbitrary lines to limit loyalty, and that the only reasonable and non-arbitrary line is all humanity.
MJ recently used this arguement on John.
I would love to see Kratman and MJ argue this out in a debate.
1. All seemingly arbitrary arrangements are the result of deliberate choices made by our ancestors. "I like these people, and this plot of ground".
2. The default (two) settings of human loyalty are 'my family' and 'me'. While nation seems to be able to overcome this to a large degree, cosmopolitanism does not. Thus in attempting to improve matters, you make them worse.
3. There are non-arbitrary loyalties such as the Mafia and being a company man at Microsoft. Breaking the nation, seems to strengthen these other loyalties which is not beneficial. Thus cosmo is revealed as just as arbitrary as any other loyalty.
4. Cosmo acts as a weakener of nations, but only the West and a few subsidiary groups like corrupt dictators agree on it. Thus the West is weakened, and its enemies are comparatively strengthened. Since most of its enemies are morally inferior to the West, this seems bad.
5. Frequently, cosmo is just a fig leaf for 'my family', and indeed most of the world is run on the basis of 'my family'.
I think cosmo has some advantages (and in ways I'm pretty cosmo. As I said before, I don't much of a visceral loyalty to America. I have a pragmatic loyalty based on the objective facts.), but its kinda like the Communists with the 'withering away of the state'. If we ever get there, that will be great, but it will take centuries to get there, and in the meantime, we've got real issues that need to be dealt with now.
I favor a rebirth of patriotism in the West, and a revived British Empire in the third world.
Edit: I'm not sure I'm doing justice to Kratman's editorial and its numerous lines of logic.
Interesting. I'm afraid I had to look up your use of the word cosmopolitan, which is indeed accurate but not the way I've heard it used in the past. It's usually closer in sense to urbane, sophisticated, or worldly, a citizen of the world in the sense of being current on all aspects of the "best" society. Yet that sense of being a "citizen of the entire world" as opposed to being a local citizen is the origin of the word. The antonyms parochial and provincial, interestingly, apply either way.
Prior to the unification of the United States, nationalism was familial loyalty. Swedes were not loyal to Sweden merely because it was their country and their birthplace and their government, but because they were on some level all related to each other, descended from the same intermarried pre-historic subgroup of humanity. In many countries in which tribal society evolved into national society, the King held his position because he was the first born son of the first born son of...the eldest of the original tribe. That gives him the authority that comes from being head of the family.
The first weakness of this argument is that we can push this familial connection back further. If I read it aright, Abraham is the rightful firstborn descendant of Noah, who is the rightful firstborn descendant of Seth. That means the tribe of Judah has the right of rulership by primogeniture, and if we can figure out to whom that right falls from there, we can figure out the rightful head of the human family--but it doesn't look like we can, because the chain gets lost somewhere along the way. In any case, if we should be loyal to nation because it is family, then the family loyalty should extend to the rest of humanity as well.
The second weakness is that the formation of the United States and other New World countries breaks this--but the United States in particular, as we have a history of encouraging immigration from all parts of the world. Intermarriage is still to some degree limited, so we are not all obviously and directly related to each other. That we are more closely related to the "families" of other nations is a point that became critical even in the twentieth century, when Germans and even more so Japanese Americans were considered suspect, of having family loyalties to their countries of origin that superseded any loyalties they might have to this nation.
Also, the idea that Americans are patriots to America is an extremely recent development. Our original union was created by a document called The Articles of Confederation, because we were literally thirteen independent countries entering into a treaty which was not much more than a trade agreement and mutual defense pact. The central government had no power to tax and little power of enforcement. It was only because these limitations were harming the union and individual states would make their own rules as benefited their own interests that Madison and his team were able to give us the Constitution of the United States of America, the document that constituted us as a single nation with a single government--and yet note that we call the units within that nation "states", the word which was then and to a lesser degree still now is used to identify discrete countries--Germany, France, Norway, Poland, and Spain are all "States". This conception of "The United States of America", that we were first thirteen and gradually an increasing number of separate countries unified by a central treaty organization (much like the European Economic Union) was so strong still in the mid-nineteenth century that Robert E. Lee was considering an appointment by President Abraham Lincoln to be commander of the Union Army up to the moment he heard that his own "country", Virginia, and seceded. The southern Confederate States of America were built very much on that concept, that they were independent countries united under one central government to coordinate their individual actions, but they were never obligated to do what the central government said. (Even Jefferson Davis declared the system completely unworkable, and wanted no part of such a Confederacy, but was in essence drafted to be its head--and that, again, because he believed in the sovereignty of his own State as an independent country.)
The Civil War put an end to any legal claim a member State in the Union might have to independent recognition as its own autonomous country; it has taken a much longer time for the attitude to be removed. I have met no one in the Northeastern corridor who thinks of his own home state as anything other than a geographical and political sub-unit of the larger country, and I think that even those "Rebels" who want the Confederate States of America once again to secede from the Union have a much different sense of the relationship between those States than their forefathers did, seeing that Confederacy as much like the Union, but without the involvement of "Washington" and "the North".
That means that already the "provincialism" and "parochialism" of loyalty to your home "country" has evaporated, but that this has been disguised by the appearance of replacement, that is, that instead of being loyal citizens of the Nation-State of New Jersey or the Nation-State of Tennessee, we are now loyal citizens of that entity we call the Nation under the name The United Nations, that is, States of America.
The unity model works so well that it has been followed on a small scale by the United States of Brazil and The United Arab States, and perhaps, too, by Great Britain (Her Majesty's Kingdom of England, Scotland, and Wales), uniting disparate peoples into unified countries and swapping their parochial nationalism for a larger one. It is now being followed by the European Union, which is moving in much the same direction the United States once did, unifying economically, removing trade restrictions, giving more power to a central authority system while retaining local systems on the "State" level. The concept is that cooperation of larger groups creates more benefits within those groups and better protection against anyone outside them.
Yet all such unions have individual costs. I read an article last week that suggested that four of the European Union countries were likely to crash economically because they no longer had the power as individual countries to "print money". The United States can always "pay" its debts because it can always print more paper, and while this devalues the currency at home and contributes significantly to inflation, it at least forestalls bankruptcy. Greece is now dependent on the Euros that enter the country through trade to pay its debts to other countries, because it cannot print money to cover the shortfall. That was a cost of unification. Other costs include loss of autonomous control and of prestige status: the unification of India required that Muslims, Hindus, and Christians all make concessions to each other to coexist in one (still very tense) community. You cannot assume that just because you are Christian, or just because you are Muslim, or just because you are white or male or Protestant or Catholic or descended from Amaterasu Omikami or Chief White Eagle that you will have automatic precedence. Nor can you enforce laws which seem to you absolutely vital to the preservation of society (such as, everyone must be a member of this faith, or anyone who is not a member of this group cannot be a full citizen) which others do not agree are correct (such as the vast majority of humans who are not part of that group).
In the play The King and I, the children are shown a map on which Burma and Siam are the only two countries, and they fill the entire map. The local instructor points to the King of Burma, depicted nearly naked on the map, and explains that he looks like this because his country is poor and he has no clothes, while the King of Siam is wealthy and powerful. Then the new teacher imported from England takes over the class, puts up a map of the world, and shows the class the tiny spot on it that is their country. They are incredulous, horrified, very upset; it could not be that their great nation is so small in relation to the rest of the world.
In becoming part of the greater, you lose the power of majority. In Siam, the Siamese control everything, because they are the overwhelming majority. In the world, they are less than a drop in an overflowing bucket, and their entire combined voices would barely be heard. Even great countries like The United States, China, and whatever Russia is now called cannot claim enough voices to control the world, cannot be a powerful enough voting block always to force through our own policies. "Majority-ism" forces us to compromise, to accept that sometimes what we want is not what the majority wants.
We are committed to "majority-ism". I am not certain it is a good thing. I remember Calvin writing something to the effect of, "When has the world been so happily constituted that the better course pleased the greater number?" I've seen several surveys that show that Democratic politicians who support policies taking money from the wealthy to give to the poor are supported almost entirely by the regions in which the number of indigent non-working welfare-supported families is rapidly becoming the majority, and thus it appears that the fact that those who don't work will soon outnumber those who work means that eventually the working will be taxed out of existence and there will be no one to pay for anything. The same thing could easily happen on a global scale. But if the answer is to abandon "majority-ism" then we had better find a more equitable system quickly. Oligarchies and monarchies have little chance of gaining power without a major war, and if there is such a war, well, Albert Einstein said that if there is a fourth world war, it will be fought with rocks and sticks.
Nationalism is arbitrary in the modern world. The path to international unity is a dangerous one, but the very principles of these United States press us in that direction, and the problems faced by the world as a whole will only be addressed when they can be addressed by a united world.
--M. J. Young
It's Kratman. He talks of Cosmopolitan Progressives (one of the two great evil forces in his book, with the other being Salafist Moslems.)
Yes, the Swedes would be traced back to Japheth. Interestingly, when a more advanced group came upon the Saxons, the Saxons had a line of kings going back to Noah like the Anglos??, but they had one of their early kings names wrong, and this despite the Saxons not having Biblical knowledge.
However, while I admit the validity of the Bible as history, I'm not sure Kratman would. He may be a Christian, but I'm not sure how much respect he has for the Bible as accurate history. I could be wrong here tho'.
He argues that the default setting is 'my family' which is different than the Swedes with 'their nation-family'. My family is much more constricted.
In the book itself he talks about making units that have social clubs together and keeping the size about 200 people because too much more and it would be hard for the military man to know more than that, and to care about their good opinion of him. So when the officers of a particular set of units hangout together, the whole sum of the officers is around 200.
I think that clarifies his arguement a bit. I haven't yet gone on to deal with your second arguement.
The problem with saying that "my family" is the default is that "my family" is different even among those within "my family".
For example, I think of the girls who are or expect to be my daughters-in-law as daughters; but I don't know that they all think of each other as sisters, or that they all think of me as father (some I know do, but I don't know about others). Also, they all have families, but I barely know the siblings of the closest of them. A century or so back, it was not at all atypical for married children to live with their parents, and thus for children to grow up in homes with their uncles and aunts; today that's almost completely unknown--I have seen my granddaughter probably three times this year, but I don't know that I saw her three times last year, and my wife has managed to miss several of those meetings. Part of how the Mafia worked was that large Italian families were so close-knit that you could have a hundred people at a family reunion--in fact, I have been to reunions on my mother's Italian side where there were a hundred "close" relatives (not more distant than descended from my great grandfather, who had five sons), and no one invited the bunch from Buffalo because it would be too many. Now, though, I can't remember when I last saw any of my first cousins (although I've had some correspondence with two or maybe three of them), and I'm not certain my children would remember my surviving aunts and uncles. In fact, I know that only my eldest ever met my father's sister and her husband (in Mississippi), and since his brother was not yet born he probably was too young to remember it now. The twentieth century completely redefined the nuclear family. Family units are on average much smaller (Walton-sized families are so exceptional that they get their own television shows) and are generally less connected than they once were. My wife noted some time back that we were probably at that time geographically closest to my parents, and we were over a hundred miles away from them.
So while I can accept that there is a sense of a natural "family" unit, I think that it's absurd to think it's quite so "natural" that everyone knows what it is. Families are by nature interlaced with each other--I don't even know if my sister-in-law has a another brother-in-law, or even, come to think of it, whether she has a sibling. I've heard her maiden name, but I don't remember it.
--M. J. Young