I am restless, and have been for quite some time. My hopes for our country, raised by the seductive optimism of the campaign and election of President Obama, have largely faded. The political culture of Washington, D.C. remains, to my dismay, the status quo. The discourse of professional politicians, pundits across the mediasphere and citizens participating in our digital democracy has become even more polarized and intransigent. There is, for me, an inescapable feeling that something is wrong, a sense that something has been broken, and I am struggling to identify what that "something" is...
This is not at all the diary I had planned on writing this week. No, not at all... Sparked by the flurry of I/P diaries and the feckless invocations of racism and antisemitism, I had intended to post a diary examining the nineteenth-century academic definition of the "Semites" and the manner in which this heuristic construct, having entered the European public consciousness as a scientific fact, was warped into political antisemitism. While rummaging through my collection of books and binders of articles by and about Ernest Renan, the nineteenth-century French savant whose writings profoundly shaped both the academic and public perception of the Semitic "race," I came across my copy of a lecture delivered by Renan at the Sorbonne on 11 March 1882 entitled "What is a Nation?" ("Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?"). Much to my chagrin—for I regard Renan’s scholarship with deep ambivalence—reading this short lecture again helped me to frame and express the sense of restlessness and unease I feel here and now, in the political landscape of America in the twenty-first century.
As the title suggests, "What is a Nation?" is Renan’s exploration of the defining features of the "nation." Renan’s method in this lecture is negative; that is, he worked through ideas posited by other political theorists concerning nations and nationalism, pointing out what he perceived to be critical flaws in each, before proposing his own unique and rather provocative definition of a nation. In Renan’s estimation, claims to nationhood on the basis of 1) ruling dynasties, 2) race, 3) common language, 4) shared religion, 5) material interests, 6) geography and 7) common defense are all inadequate to explain the solidarity felt by members of a nation.
No, it is no more soil than it is race which makes a nation. While the soil furnishes the substratum, the field of struggle and industry, humanity furnishes the soul. Humanity is everything in the formation of this sacred thing which is called a people. Nothing material suffices for it. A nation is thus a spiritual principle, the outcome of the profound complexities of history; it is a spiritual family, not a group determined by the shape of the land.
Mankind is a slave neither of race, nor of language, nor of religion, nor of the course of rivers or mountains. A large aggregate of people, healthy in mind and warm of heart, creates the kind of moral conscience which we can call a nation. So long as this moral consciousness gives proof of its strength through the sacrifices which demand the abdication of the individual to the advantage of the community, it is legitimate and has the right to exist.
Renan proceeds to identify two aspects of the spiritual principle that binds a nation in solidarity. There is a perception that a common ethos was forged in the past—a past comprised of shared memories, history and mythology—and there is consent in the present to perpetuate that ethos undivided into the future. What is fascinating in Renan's discussion of a nation's "shared past" is this: in addition to the national power emanating from communal memories of persons and events, of national heroes and "Remember the Alamo" moments, is the national power emanating from a willful and necessary amnesia with respect to other historical persons and events which, if remembered, would serve to fracture national solidarity.
Benedict Anderson, in his magisterial Imagined Communites: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; rev. ed. 1991), both criticizes and develops Renan's observations concerning the fundamental importance of the past: real and imagined, recalled and forgotten. For Anderson, a nation is an imagined political community:
imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. [...] a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. (1991, pp.6-7)
Alright, for any of you who have managed to read this far and may perhaps still be interested, allow me to explain why Renan's lecture and Anderson's development of some of Renan's points are presently resonating so strongly in my psyche and have helped to frame the sense of disquiet I feel.
I am unconvinced that we Americans remain "one nation." Lurking behind seemingly benign policy differences among Progressives/Liberals/Democrats and Conservatives/Republicans is a deeper and perhaps irremediable schism concerning American national memories, history and mythology, with each side wishing to remember, and likewise to forget, different aspects of this imagined past.
I do not recognize the nation—past, present or future—that emerges from the bilous rantings of pundits and reactionary entertainers on the right, nor do I suppose that they recognize my nation, my America. I feel little solidarity with many on the right whose vision of America's past and future is anathema to my views. I do not consent to their vision of this "one nation." This is so much more than a partisan fight over the inclusion and exclusion of materials from textbooks, it is a struggle for the moral conscience of America.
"One nation," but imagined by whom?