1. From Yuval Noah Harari. Without referring to Hazony, Harari writes,
All attempts to divide the world into clear-cut nations have so far resulted in war and genocide. When the heirs of Garibaldi, Mazzini and Mickiewicz managed to overthrow the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire, it proved impossible to find a clear line dividing Italians from Slovenes or Poles from Ukrainians.
This had set the stage for the second world war. The key problem with the network of fortresses is that each national fortress wants a bit more land, security and prosperity for itself at the expense of the neighbors, and without the help of universal values and global organisations, rival fortresses cannot agree on any common rules. Walled fortresses are seldom friendly.
Good point. But then he writes this:
Creating a mass global identity need not prove to be an impossible mission. After all, feeling loyal to humankind and to planet Earth is not inherently more difficult than feeling loyal to a nation comprising millions of strangers I have never met and numerous provinces I have never visited. Contrary to common wisdom, there is nothing natural about nationalism.
Harari recognizes that in order to scale up our tribal instincts we seem to require a common enemy. But he thinks that such an enemy could be something impersonal, such as climate change. Uniting all of humanity against impersonal enemies strikes me as a hope with little basis in experience.
2. From Alberto Mingardi, who writes,
One can agree with Hazony that it is naive to assume that “political life is governed largely or exclusively on the basis of the calculations of consenting individuals.” But to assume that governments are just bigger families is the oldest trick of the apologists for interventionism. “Paternalism” never goes with limited government.
I certainly agree.
Nationalism and patriotism are not virtues but very destructive and dangerous vices, akin to racialism and religious intolerance.
Nationalism and patriotism have given rise to countless wars.
Most religions preach intolerance of other religions as a virtue, and this has also caused many wars.
Another common enemy could be diseases like colds and flu. People seem quite happy to pass these around for the sake of convenience. Why give up going to the cinema if you have “a little sniffle”. A bit of globalism against these diseases wouldn’t go amiss and could prevent a lot of misery and even save lives.
Anyone who thinks that climate change is perceived to be, and will be fought as if it were, an “impersonal enemy” is already ignoring the current politicization of climate science. Perhaps aliens…from outer space, I mean.
Agree. Even if there was broad consensus on the matter of climate change, my suspicion is there’d simply be a sort of purity spiral where the people who wasted electricity by leaving their phones plugged in after they were fully charged would gradually become our international outgroup, with roughly the same status as the Huguenots in 18th century France. I’m joking, but only mostly.
The human instinct for “enemy” cannot be de-personalized, it is a coalitional instinct ( https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27168 ) that has human agency at its very heart. Or at least human-like, personified agency (e.g., Satan). There is no “two minutes hate” against natural seismic events like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc. One is not going to be able to mobilize passions to motivate universal human coordination against such things, precisely because there is no politically-useful blame game against other, rival humans.
An asteroid strike could wipe all humanity out, and things like that have happened with enough frequency in Earth’s history that it’s worth thinking about. But most people have zero interest in whatever actions governments are taking to prevent or prepare to respond to such events, or thinking they can win more social status for themselves by advocating that more attention and resources be allocated to that risk. No human to blame, no enemy, no interest.
Indeed, climate change alarmism is a great example of a field that many people find motivating precisely because it is contentious and controversial, correlated with current political coalitions, and involves fighting human rivals and the full mobilization of society’s public influence-industry resources and the often unethical use of other social technologies that suppress opposing messages.
One of these days, we will understand that scale matters and that we need organizations at each level from the family up to the global scale; but that they are very different organizations, not only up the scale, but in diversity at the small scales. People projecting the problems of their own family onto another family… unhappy families are each unhappy in a unique way, yes?
People’s ability to vote with their feet is the final check on abusive government. Global governance removes that check and clears the way for inescapable abuse.
It is not that easy to vote with your feet from one legislature to another. Most have severe barriers to immigration, some to emigration.
It is possible to use your currency to vote in a way – do not buy something that is in your opinion overpriced or highly taxed, such as petrol or diesel. Instead get an electric car. If electricity is highly taxed, then charge it with solar or wind, if practicable.
If professional services are in your opinion over priced, then minimise your use of them.
Everyone has their own sense of value. Use your currency to support people or companies that offer value.
People find ways to cross borders. Some 13% of Venezuela’s population has done so. The United States is home to more Norwegians than Norway, more Cubans than Cuba, and more Irishmen than Ireland.
“Voting with your money” is a great way to keep rapacious buisinessmen in check, but does little against rapacious governments that can tax by inflation and can hurl armies against their citizens.
As to “tax by inflation” refusing to buy goods and services that are inflated, ie a “buyers’ strike” helps.
Why can’t I be left alone?
The people who insist that if you don’t forsake your nation for all of humanity then you must be at war with all of humanity are just projecting their own extremism
I don’t want to be a brother to all personkind
I have my family and I have my people which I care about
but as far as everyone else goes I’m indifferent but friendly
I wish them no harm but I wont go too much out of my way to help them
So the world will be better if we only sacrifice our selfish interests for the greater global good. Where haven’t I heard that before?
Just hand over your house keys and the whole neighborhood will pitch in and make sure the use of every room is optimized and all bad things and dangers lurking in your basement are eliminated.
It is not very difficult to conjure up utopian futures. The question is always how to achieve them. Yawn.
Harari does provide a useful opportunity to dissect the falsehoods that gird the supranationalist agenda. In fact, each and every sentence in his little essay is demonstrably false.
Let’s start:
(1) For several generations, the world has been governed by what today we call “the global liberal order.”
No, the world has not been governed by the global liberal order. Burma? North Korea? Cuba? Palestine? Kurdistan? Mexican drug cartels? Darfur? Boko Haram?… … All governed by a global liberal order? Not for a minute.
And “we” call it that? Or is what he is calling the “global liberal order” somehow distinguishable from all the other jargon labels like “liberal international economic order,” ”Pax Americana,” etc, etc. generally used to set up the proposition that challenges to elite influence by the little people are the biggest problem in the world today.
(2) Behind these lofty words is the idea that all humans share some core experiences, values and interests, and that no human group is inherently superior to all others.
Where does that come from? And how would it distinguish supranationalists from traditional nationalists or populists giving the latter a fair shake? But in any event it is plainly false as supranationalists hold themselves out as superior to populists and nationalists who are invariably deemed to be racist, hateful, stupid and generally inferior in every way. Harari does go on to admit that some nationalists share liberal values but then simply assumes that the devil we know is somehow worse than some unrealized post-liberal order.
(3) Cooperation is therefore more sensible than conflict.
So if you are not a supranationalist, you are in favor of conflict. And all cooperation is inherently supranationalist. Got it. But tell it to a Muslim in Chinese detention camp. Submitting to the empire’s oppression is better than conflict? I don’t think so. And when did people start taking Orwell’s Animal Farm as a how-to-guide?
(4) All humans should work together to protect their common values and advance their common interests.
In actuality, human work is a limited resource. Work devoted to commonalities is work that could have gone towards higher value uses. And the work we see so far devoted to commonalities by any objective measure has in fact been a deadweight loss.
(5) And the best way to foster such cooperation is to ease the movement of ideas, goods, money and people across the globe.
Death to tall poppies. Regress to the mean. Look at how well eased movement of people across the globe worked in Crimea and Tibet.
But this has gotten too long already so on to just a few more low points.
(6) All attempts to divide the world into clear-cut nations have so far resulted in war and genocide.
False. Brazil achieved its independence from Portugal entirely peacefully. So too have dozens of former colonies such as Botswana, Iceland, Australia, Canada, etc. Even more recently on 1 January 1993, Czechoslovakia peacefully split into the independent Czech Republic and Slovakia. No war, no genocide.
(7) Walled fortresses are seldom friendly.
False. Good fences make good neighbors. Throughout history walled forts have been a preferred safe location for merchants to trade.
(8) And we cannot have a global trade network without some global order that sets the rules of the game.
This canard still floats around even though it has been demolished on countless occasions. Humans have traded without each around the globe without regulation for millennia. The archaeological evidence for long distance prehistoric trade is overwhelming.
Finally, Harari demands “please name the year in which humankind was in better shape than in the early 21st century.” I guess it all depends upon what you define “better shape” as. But the Pax Romanica and the Pax Mongolica were both periods of profound peace, much more peaceful than the early 21st century, in which global trade flourished. But of course they required all that nasty subjugation. Harari would have us believe that global rule by elites chanting down with climate change, down with nuclear war, down with robots would not involve inordinate amounts of subjugation be we can see what is happening in the EU where every detail of one’s life is regulated by unaccountable elites.
No, a “Pax enim Dei elit dominare” is not credible. But reading Harari does mightily validate and strengthen the rational skepticism we must embrace if we are to avoid being swindled by the slick-talking huckster elite.
I say “In pace in Sceptic” now and forever.
FWIW Richard Fernandez does an excellent job of exploding globalist kumbayism in the context of the Chinese chip scandal over at PJ Media today:
“Global interdependence, whether reflected in manufacturing partnershipss or international political corruption imposed risks which are only now being fully realized. China can spy on the West and it’s hard to do anything about it. The difficulty of escaping from the logistics trap was forcefully described by the South China Morning Post. “Tethered by the supply chain: US tech community resists Donald Trump’s China tariffs, fearing collateral damage.” Companies and countries are now tethered to their enemies.”
“Cultivate your garden” from Voltaire. To make yourself happy AND to avoid causing too much unhappiness to others.
US Democrats, today, are trying mightily to move us towards a post-liberal order, one where PC-bullies can change the culture and ruin other people’s lives based on their sex, their race, or their opinions on sexual orientation.
Harari says: “Cooperation is therefore more sensible than conflict.”
We’ve just had a few months of the US Senate confirmation circus which shows virtually no cooperation from Democrats.
He says that the world has never been better — this is true, and great, and under-appreciated. But he fails to note that it has made so much progress because the USA, exceptional America, was both the post-WW II superpower AND was NOT trying to get “a bit more land, security and prosperity for itself at the expense of the neighbors,” the reason given for the failure of pre-War Europe to have friendly nation fortresses.
American freedom, prosperity, dynamism, and often idealistic behavior is the primary reason the world is so good. Socialists & US Democrats support failed policies, like the many who supported Venezuela’s Chavez policies, with the unsurprising failure to follow — that centralized socialism is the failed idea which has been tried again and again, and has failed, and failed, and failed. Virtually every proponent of “socialism” includes some global, solidarity sounding ideals, with enough centralized power to solve some huge problem. But the gov’t then uses the power in a corrupt manner, often helped by and helping tribal cronies.
The real problem is tribalism, the form of tribalism based on hating the other tribe, as so many hate-filled Dems are beginning to hate Republicans. This can be similar to a tribal nationalism that hates the other nations, but love of your nation doesn’t have to include the tribal hatred. He claims:
“We can still push forward with a truly global agenda, going beyond mere trade agreements, and stressing the loyalty all humans should owe to our species and our planet.”
“All attempts to divide the world into clear-cut nations have so far resulted in war and genocide. ”
This quote is seriously wrong.
The Hutu-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda was not because of nationalism and the nation-state. The Cambodian Killing Fields genocide of 25% of the people was done by uneducated Cambodians killing the educated and many others, not the nation state.
He wants the loyalty of all humans? Well, history shows those with power who want the loyalty are able to get it … by killing or hurting the disloyal ones. With genocide or other less deadly camps.
Americans used to be able to disagree in peace about policy. Now the Dems have decided any policy disagreement means the Reps are evil — and evil folk can be resisted by any means, fair or foul.
Free speech, and freedom to disagree, is the key liberal value that has been so successful under America’s hegemony. Hate speech laws and other ways to censure free speech are a more clear and present danger than nuclear war, climate change (formerly global warming), or tech disruption (AI or otherwise).
“Liberals” support free movement of poor, non-liberal people from economically and culturally less successful areas into richer, more liberal areas — but they seem oblivious to the reality that mass immigration without assimilation changes the rich liberal area. Into something less rich AND less liberal, where liberal means freedom, private property, privacy, & lots of lifestyle choice.
I would say that national unity is required first in order to successfully combat an impersonal enemy like climate change. And even then not all nations have the capacity to do so even after attaining unity.
National unity – necessary but not sufficient to combat major impersonal problems humanity faces in the next few hundred years. That’s why it matters which nations succeed and dominate the world.
I’d settle for civility.
Hillary thinks the only language that Republicans seem to understand is strength. Waters wants them to know they’re not welcome in department stores or pumping gas. Booker wants his supporters to walk in to Congress and get up in the faces of these evil Republicans. But Obama had the right idea in his Rutgers speech: “Use your logic and reason and words.”
The national idea is never content with ancillary status once it gets into politics.
This idea from Mingardi is almost silly — the whole US isolationists are both nationalists and fully content to be non-dominant over others.
Think of Heidegger’s disagreement with Hitler, and Heidegger’s disillusionment. Between those two anti-Semites, Heidegger was the nationalist, Hitler the imperialist. Isn’t that obvious?
American imperialists in particular were Hitler’s explicit example: “Here in the east a similar process will repeat itself for the second time as in the conquest of America.”
Mingardi: “If only because of size, such an empire needs a certain tolerance of different ethnicities, religions, and cultures.” What the Roman Empire needs, the Russian Empire appears not to need. So it’s not a necessity.
The British Empire was tolerant to begin with, but less so after 1813. The policy of the East India Company was that Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs would all be allowed “the undisturbed enjoyment of their respective opinions and usages.”
But British missionaries made the British Empire untenable. That’s the real meaning of “imperial overstretch.” The missionaries and moralists and climate change evangelists create their own opposition. They inspire, unintentionally, the armies and revolutionaries, the revolting peasants, who rise up to overthrow them.
A rational imperialist, or an imperialist who isn’t deranged with self-righteousness, would be tolerant and willing to compromise with the natives. But the European Union, or the Conquistadors, or the IPCC?
I am finishing up Hazony’s book and hope to have a review posted soon. I’ve found the discussion (not just here but among the public intellectuals) so far to be almost hopelessly confused and off the mark, though honorable mention to John139 for concisely and accurately articulating the typical progressive view of the matter, wrong though it is. I’ll save most of my attempt to clarify and correct for my review, but I’ll make this point here:
The “resulted in war and genocide” line is really bonkers. Even the most rudimentary understanding of our past allows one to recognize that all of human history is filled with near-constant amounts of war, genocide, insurrections, revolutions, civil wars, violent conflicts, major population replacements and displacements, etc. Indeed, much of our social and cultural evolution – and probably biological evolution too – came about in response to this ugly reality. Multi-ethnic empires went to war with each other all the time, and had little trouble with genocidal persecution when expedient. It would be tendentious in the extreme to characterize incredibly bloody and terrifying events like the French and Russian revolutions as ‘national’, ‘racial’, or ‘tribal’ conflicts.
Blaming war and genocide on ‘nationalism’ is like blaming prostitution on the emergence of the internet. Yeah, on the one hand, people ended up using the internet to buy and sell a lot of illegal sexual services, and until the government started to really crack down on it, it made such contracting easier. On the other hand, they don’t call it “the oldest profession” for nothing.
Definitely biological evolution too.
Think of “the perfect organism” in Alien, chasing Sigourney Weaver all over the ship. Or the Martian life-form in the Ryan Reynolds movie Life. Or the red weed in The War of the Worlds.
H.G. Wells had this figured out more than a hundred years ago. If his red weed had a world-view, it would be Hitler’s. The Martian organisms aren’t nationalistic. An organism wants to live and consume and spread and destroy.
In fact, even earlier than Wells, Keats had a vision of the horror of nature and its “eternal fierce destruction.” And Keats got there before Darwin did.
“But he thinks that such an enemy could be something impersonal, such as climate change. Uniting all of humanity against impersonal enemies strikes me as a hope with little basis in experience.”
I don’t think the impersonal nature of the “enemy” is the problem. After all, people do unite to help victims of natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes. The problem is that uniting against “climate change” is code for uniting against people that don’t favor huge taxes and government regulation done in the name of climate change. It’s an Orwellian slam of one’s political opponents phrased as a call for unity. It’s like saying, “Let’s unite to head off the looming disaster of the runaway welfare state.” Why would mere question begging fool welfare state proponents to “unite” against themselves?
Think of it this way, “climate change” is just a code word that Bobos use to identify each other because part of Bobo identity is to deny that Bobos are a tribe. Since Bobos are not identifiable from observable characteristics like race, they need to identify each other by doing things like not using plastic straws or bringing their own bags to the grocery store. So, Harari is actually calling for Bobos to unite against anti-Bobos across national boundaries.
We already see this happening as even self-proclaimed “nationalists” in America seemed to take an inordinate interest in the last French election and Marine Le Pen, for example. We don’t actually have true “nationalists” in the developed world. Bobos in the US feel affinity to Bobos in Europe *and* anti-Bobos in the US feel affinity to anti-Bobos in Europe. Some anti-Bobos like to call themselves “nationalists” because many Bobos like to call themselves “globalists”.
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Think of it this way, “climate change” is just a code word that Bobos use to identify each other because part of Bobo identity is to deny that Bobos are a tribe.
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Interesting comment. I have always been interested in subjects rather than celebrities, which is why I prefer subject based groups such as Yahoo Groups as opposed to personality based groups such as Facebook or Friends Reunited and to a lesser extent Twitter.
That presupposes that massive taxation and regulation is the answer to climate change.
Installing renewable energy equipment costs money, but then it gives a financial reward – insulation from inflation of energy prices. Buying an electric car gives improved driving experience as well as not relying on primary combustion. The problem with those two is that many people live in flats where they are inappropriate. It is possible to get devices that charge batteries with off peak electricity, and the customer uses the stored power during the day. This is beneficial to the environment if millions of people do this, as the energy is cheaper off peak for a reason. Public charging point for electric cars could use renewable generated power.
Genocide in the 20th Century was committed by those who showed no respect for national borders.
I can’t wait for Handle’s review!
In the meantime, here is a very thoughtful review from someone who challenges Hazony not from a political philosophy standpoint, but from a Biblical one:
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/saving-american-nationalism-nationalists/
We have to take Meir seriously given his deep Biblical knowledge — the guy teaches at Yeshiva University!