Nations and Narratives

a narrative about nations

La Liberté guidant le peuple by Eugène_Delacroix, 1830

I finished writing this in an extended fury early this afternoon, then I let it simmer while I went to work before placing my finishing touches. This morning, a Boeing 787 crashed explosively over Ahmedabad, and I watched it explode while Hispanic immigrants made my breakfast BLT. At work, a colleague told me anti-ICE agents were lighting police vehicles on fire in Brooklyn. He sent me the video of cars on fire. On my way home, I thought about my lesson plans for next week and about the finishing touches on this piece before taking out my phone and reading a Free Press article about the possibility of an imminent strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

When I finally got home, I assembled a fan then plopped down to see texts from one of my students and well, you guessed it, another fiery explosion. In Iran.

I decided to finish this and schedule-publish it earlier than I intended because I feel like it’s already gathering dust as the narrative I reference turns another page.

Just to be clear, I’m not trying to take sides, and I currently have Palestinian and Persian students, and am aware they have national narratives, too, each with their own experiences and views on their nations and personal narratives integrated with them and their experiences, which I don’t delve into in this essay. I am trying to write about the concept of “nation-narrative” as a facet of identity and how it functions in a general way.

National narratives are deep, and we can all have complex relationships with them—Americans, too, as many people I know do—on all corners of the Cartesian plane of political identity.

I finished writing this in a cafe in Astoria, a very Persian/Balkan/Greek/Turkish corner of town, which was simply the best place with good drinks and comfortable writing space closest to where I’m currently staying. I make these final edits while streaming Al-Jazeera, logging in my subconscious how to follow up about the nation-narrative significance of the geopolitical escalation.

---

A nation is a nascent group of people, not of kin but of the same kind. Nation comes from “nascent” and from the Latin nationem, natio (meaning: birth, origin, kind, tribe, race of people; fundamentally, that which has been born) and nascentem, nascens (meaning: beginning to exist, grow; come into being), and nasci, natus (meaning: to be born; having been born) which all are related to the proto-Indo-European root /genə/—to give birth, beget—all these sound patterns pertaining to a group of people who are nascent from a common history and born of a common origin with common ancestry. I think Peter Thiel’s anxiety when he talks about the importance of maintaining a nation’s founding mythos, once unifying now unraveling, a “Straussian moment” beginning to untether in the late sixties, touches a vulnerable nerve.

Because it’s true.

The postwar order of nations is a particular thing, a trajectory of stability born out of a time period of shifting powers: colonial projects withdrawing, modern industries thriving, restless nations prodding, ideologies multiplying, industrial leaders capitalizing, masses rallying.

A state is a stable thing. It’s static, in stasis. It stands on its own.¹ A cynical view of a state is a state that parasites off local communities, ordering and organizing them towards its own telos. This is how James C. Scott’s state sees and organizes.

The American project limited the entity of the state by keeping its powers in check. This was and has been an intricate project of system formation. The U.S. State is a system, a system that’s run fairly well despite its flaws, stains and lapses.

People can also parasite off a state if that state is stable and organized, a hospitable host. That host can turn hostile, too, and reject its parasites if its homeostasis is threatened by their stress or homeostatic cost.

Maria Konikova recently wrote an essay here about time. For me, time started moving quickly after college, when I really stepped into my own and started learning about the world and things that actively interested me. The experiences started compounding and coming at me rapid fire after I moved to South Korea to teach English. The time period was formational, and only possible for me because I had achieved a college degree, held an American passport, and had been charged with enough desire and drive to do something as ambitious, adventurous, risky and interesting as leaping out of Pennsylvania and landing on another continent. It felt like being in a pressure cooker, and when finally a crack appeared, I had to eject.

In this sense, I owe a lot of my education and self-exploration to the postwar paradigm. More than I owe to college. Maybe people often find this confusing about me. But it’s true. And the people I met while teaching weren’t just Koreans or Americans, but a mix of all kinds of people from around the world: Afrikaners, Korean-Canadians, Floridians, Australians, Scots, Québécois, etc.

One thing I found to be immutably true in this scenario is how nation and narrative weave strongly together in identity formation. This might seem obvious, but it’s very viscerally true when you're out of your home culture and one node in a mix of many other nodes of people from different places around the world—different languages are spoken, and different alliances of ease are formed: mutual jokes and cultural insights signaled, actions and behaviors mimicked and validated. Everything from saying “bless you” to having an opinion about Tom Cruise can not only give your cultural assumptions away like Michael Fassbender’s impression of a German officer in Inglourious Basterds but act as an offering of friendship and shared cultural values, even if you use different words to say “bless you” (gesundheit is still my favorite) or hold different value assessments of Tom Cruise (implicitly you still agree on the axioms of the argument).

“País” is the Spanish and Portuguese word for country. It’s similar in Italian and French. While this isn’t linguistically universal, it is a masculine noun and evokes a masculine feeling: fatherland. One could equally refer to country as motherland. Both the masculine and the feminine must meet, unify and balance to maintain a healthy nation-state, however its people imagine it.

Many philosophers, historians, anthropologists, social theorists, and worldly writers have poured a lot of time and energy into trying to define what a nation and what a state is. I don’t have any of the answers but want to narrate how my experiences of this have affected me and my views.

Narratives and nations are deeply woven together in people’s identities. This weave affects international diasporic communities, too. It fades and lessens as generations succeed and are born in the new country, in say, America, but as long as there’s still a connection, maybe extended family living in the land of origin, maybe just a single visit made to meet that family that one time, there’s an investment to the narrative of that place that’s transported into the American-born person’s identity. It fades faster around the fourth or fifth generation, when the bilingual bicultural grandparents are no longer around.

This is perhaps something many people fail to be able to sense and connect with among the Jewish community and among international Israelis, whose national narrative was disrupted and shaken significantly on October 7th, and as the escalating conflict goes on.

Of course it exists for Palestinian people, too. The cultural depth and integration of both Jews and Palestinians, a diasporic and exiled Judean culture and history and a peripherally colonized Ottoman culture and history, runs deep and is interconnected with how their surrounding national-narrative neighbors inherit and integrate them. There’s certainly a lot to interrogate about the term Judeo-Christian but it’s hard to say it hasn’t been a significant force in American history over the past century, and Western history for longer than that. There’s equally a lot to interrogate about the term Islamic World—but it suffices to say that the long tail of the narrative is more antagonistic than not, despite the overlaps and shared cultural inheritances from Arabic numerals to Al-Farabi.

Yet October 7th interrupted a national narrative of a growing nation that transcended its own borders and meant a lot of different things to different people at a global scale over a secular world. The nation growing according to a particular postwar paradigm had its own flaw, stains and lapses. Yet it had a story that informed many people living in that postwar paradigm.

That narrative didn’t exist for many people, also. These people simply were less vested in the stories of nations, including but not limited to their own nation. Thus, they didn’t and still don’t have any vested interest in the October 7th attacks.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz showing Greta Thunberg a video of the attack isn’t going to work like a history teacher showing his class videos of the Holocaust—it’s more like a Sunday school teacher trying to show a young punk rock atheist Veggie Tales. A captive audience only listens to the degree that they want to be there and want to listen. Showing a video of, yes, even a terrorist attack, is moralizing without tact, sensitivity, or an effort to connect. The escalated lack of nuance among the people who protest the war also lacks tact, sensitivity, or an effort to connect.

The national narrative of the Jewish diasporic (or Israeli) person who maintains connection to Israel is a parallel line to countless other people’s national-narrative sense of identity, most of them all self-involved in domestic affairs with minimal reasons to intersect—at least in any real way that’s obvious to them. (The illusion of intersectionality is in believing in culturally imposed and thus narratively disconnected intersections superimposed over historically more real ones).

This, the capacity of the attacks to be so dark and awful and personal—personal maybe isn’t the right word, but violating, is partly why the October 7th attacks were the most successful terrorist attacks since and probably surpassing September 11th—the other part being the global context absorbing and counter-reacting to the emotional and political reaction (under Netanyahu’s leadership) of Israel’s national-narrative. Because of the nature of the situation of Isreal and Palestine, and of the nature of the attacks, they cut deep. The Netanyahu coalition’s reaction to them certainly hasn’t helped how people feel about Israel and its people. An award goes Bibi and his coalition as being supremely opportunistic (I’m being polite).

National-narratives weave into all of our identities, and they are culturally real. I don’t mean they are facets of objective reality, but that they undergird every person’s intersubjective reality, and that intersubjective reality is really quite primary—a priori—and difficult to psychically escape.

I know this is a bold claim to make and maybe ought to revisit some of the twentieth century writers who wrote about the nation, nationhood, its psychology, its imagined entity: Benedict Anderson, Slavoj Žižek, George Orwell, Ernest Renan, many others, all from unique first principles and axiomatic approaches ranging from the sociological to the technological, from psychoanalytical to spiritual.

But for now, this is my anecdotal story about my “education.” What I write is based on the life I’ve experienced, based on the people I’ve met and known.

National-narrative identity is real and taken not just seriously but internalized to an unconscious, inarticulable and deeply held core for many people. Many Americans seem unaware and are somewhat insensitive to this. As are many people from many nations. I imagine people from the more insulated places with less international interaction are a little less aware of the depths and dynamics of how these national-narrative identities work, or play out. What I mean is that it seems that Europeans, Brits, Turks, Arabs, Israelis, North Africans, South Africans, Brazilians, Indians, Russians, all seem more aware of this national-narrative thing to a degree that they are and have been less insulated, and to a deeper degree than, say, South Koreans, or Americans, protected by their two oceans.

Though I can hardly speak for all nations. For people of every nation, this national-narrative internalized identity exists radically differently, and of course there’s a range of its essence among many nations. In America, for example, the national-narrative identity of being a Texan is very different from that of being a Bostonian (or of being Black in Boston or Black in Texas); likewise, a Confederate Southern from a Northern Yankee; a Montanan from a Floridian. Yet, people can move and adapt from state to state pretty easily because of this and other layers of shared culture and language, and to a degree, memory.

It’s harder to move and adapt to another country. For obvious reasons, I hope at least: language, culture, socializing habits, social circle formation, among other reasons.

Getting “in synch” with another national-narrative way of seeing the world takes a lot of time. It’s hard for me to imagine what it’s like to be British. Or Irish, or Canadian, or even Texan or Californian. I simply grew up and learned a particular culture at a particular time and place.

One way to bridge the empathy-isolation gap is to read. Reading essays on Substack is one good way to come to see things from other points of views. One thing reading Substack essays has helped me understand is the generational gap in perspectives and nation-narratives. Time passing, like occupying space, creates its own borders and national narratives.

Another way, I hope, is by meeting and talking to people.

It’s hard to understand another person’s trauma. And another nation-narrative’s disruptive trauma. But it’s possible if you are interested in understanding it, ask people about it, ask them the right questions, and try to connect.

I don’t always see this happening with people. I see it sometimes, but not as often as I think would be optimal. I’m not saying everybody should be nation-narrative-maxxing in their interactions all the time. I’m saying that getting a little more awareness of this and understanding these national narratives as kernels of identity would be better than simply imagining and projecting one framework, like say, colonizer-colonized, on to everything.

It’s hard to imagine the effect of October 7th on Israelis and on the Jewish diaspora without trying. And even then, it’s still hard. I can’t say I understand the full extent of any national narrative, and obviously this nation-narrative varies for every single person, born to their own particular time and place. But to the extent that land and place and nation are integrated into anyone’s national narrative, October 7th hurt and felt like something violent and well, for lack of a better word, traumatic.

Dramatic to the narrative.

How do you treat people with this kind of hurt and indignity? Do you listen? Or, say shut up and move on? That’s a big question with a variety of answers. I’m not trying to make a soft-hard/nurturing-disciplined caretaking distinction here, or tell people how they should react, but I want to make the case that macro-cultural emotional imprints and action-reaction mirrors the personal.

With geopolitical reactions in the hands of an opportunistic coalition and military—in the hands of power-seizing leaders—the personal gets distorted and extended into the ethnonational, and this is where the dance gets tricky—the dance of understanding and connecting with other people from other places that seem impossible to understand.

This is what happened a few days ago with the Israeli Defense Minister and Greta Thunberg. They’re not only on different sides of a conflict, but on different personal narrative-national timelines. Not only do they speak different languages, but they are seeing the world in different ways, steeped in different narratives.

I don’t think I’m saying anything new. In fact, I may be simplifying something that’s been iterated many times in many ways, especially since, say, the French Revolution and the following centuries of formations of modern nation-states, from Greece to Germany, South Korea to South Sudan.

So how come I’m saying it so “simplifiedly” and personally and reductively, and writing about it here and now?

Partly, I have a writing habit, for better or worse.

Also, it seems like whatever a nation is, and whatever a state is, and whatever a nation-state is, their definitions now need to be re-iterated, updated, and polished for people to see clearly again.

The coalitions of the left seem inoculated against this view of national-narrative depth and diversity (while claiming the opposite) while many of the right seem ready to look homewards but fixated by the limits of past dreams. The left tends to get steeped in a more superficial façade or veil of ignorance of anti-this, anti-that; the right tends to get wedged too tightly into past longings and deep-seated arguments rooted in hard-lined differences of nation-vs-other, of life-affirming stereotypes.

I don’t think I’m going to crack a whole new theory on nationality and national identity, but I’ve encountered the world in specific ways of. . . well, seeking life, community, and career as a semi-ludditic recession-era philosophy degree holder, forming a specific passport-enabled postwar post-collegiate American identity.

I admired this essay here, about oikophilia and oikophobia,

Aodhan MacMhaolain

writing about a love for his country and racial roots. I also gained something from traveling, perhaps somewhat naïvely but still authentically to who I am and what I enjoyed about being in other countries. Traveling enables exploring other cultures, getting to know other people, and potentially reorienting the traveler towards the values and strengths and promises of their own homeland. I felt a renewed oikophilia, too, but also an appreciation for the variety of national-narrative-grounded points of view among people from many places, from people coming from and traveling to all parts of the world—but also recognized that theirs were not my own. I met a range and diversity of good people (and some bad/questionable characters) and recognized I had an identity rooted in homeland—a narrative I’d inherited by default from my birthright and nationality.

If there is a real meaning to “woke” grounded in reality to the experiences of other people from other cultures and other places, then it doesn’t rest within the acronymic deifications of races, ethnicities, lineages, and peoples based on static identities, but in the dynamic and changing identities we encounter when we actually meet and connect with those people.

This can’t be managerialized or reduced to bureaucratic or static or statist legibility administered and enforced by whoever is in power. Real diversity rests in its capacity that can’t be coded or controlled. I diverge from the human biodiversity crowd, as I understand them, in that I believe the narratives of nation, nationality, and nascent peoples are more powerful than their genetic inheritances, or if not more powerful than they should be treated as such. There’s a lot of grey area here, and connections and overlap with things like epigenetic switches and phenotypical behavioral mimetics. I’m more confident that national narratives can incorporate subcultural diversities of a population for extended periods of time. Yet, there’s limits to how much and to what degree, and a lot we don’t know about social and culture and class factors of mixed, diverse populations.

I could be wrong. Perhaps this is something that attracts my interest towards places like Türkiye, which as a nation-state is not doing so well right now but still has managed and can continue to be (though many people will strongly contest) a nation-state with regional influence and room to grow. Of course, Türkiye’s economic decline could be a case of secularism failing and immigration oversaturating its nation.

Brazil, similarly, but from a radically different historical trajectory, has managed a degree of population diversity and growth as a nation-state. Same for the United States. Yet all still face the macro-problem of maintaining their national narratives.

Still, national narrative can supersede the predestination of group-genetic or racial determinism.

Yet: balances are difficult to maintain over time. Even Israel, who entered the leadership of Netanyahu for a second term as he assembled a heterodox coalition of militant IDF leaders and pacifistic orthodox thinkers, faces further fragmentation among its people, secular to orthodox, diasporic to nativist, defying the current mil— okay, war—I agree with Andrew Sullivan that calling it genocide is insincere and disingenuous² (he does not use those words but says, “ugly and hideously insensitive”), though even calling it war seems a little off at this point in time—and time, that’s the interesting thing passing now as Israel escalates and hostages remain hidden in tunnels and famine, or at least hunger, is a war tactic as ambush and rape was the inciting terror for Hamas—who, as far as anyone can tell, seem like they’re losing pretty bad yet still, how does anyone know what exists of Hamas? Israel has lost, too—lost its way and in the vortex of power unlikely to have a clear path forward if it loses all its allies. Time: soon two years will have passed since October 7th, 2023 (when Biden was the President) and now with the American election and well, everything from 2024 to now, it sure feels like Israel and Netanyahu have indeed lost the plot, that it’s not likely many more hostages will be seen, and that either less and less inhibited tactics of warfare will snowball, or spread like wildfire—as time, American time, seems to be taking over and moving at a faster rate towards its own cataclysmic version of chaos since Trump’s 100 days, which we’re now well beyond.

Sometimes I wonder what an alternate history might look like if Protestant Church of England allied with the Ottoman Turks against the Catholic Church of Rome. Maybe this is likely in one out of a thousand timelines, or one out of fifty, but it still is possible and if I had the research skill and literary ambition and time, maybe I’d try and see what kind of Man in the High Castle inspired world could be possible. Would nation-states still form? Would the Jewish diaspora find their home somewhere else? Would another Holocaust-parallel event happen, would the Judean people find other ways of joining the alliance against another common enemy, the Catholic Church? Would Dutch Protestants spread into Spain? France? This would be a massive imaginary project, a sixteenth century historical fiction involving three high-agency women: Safiye Sultan, Queen Elizabeth I and Italian-Ottoman Jewish kari, or envoy, Esperanza Malchi. Anyway, an alternate history of nation formation could have existed. Winds can change.

The Sortie of Messologhi by Theodore Vryzakis, 1853

This could provide for a radically accurate historical fiction, a hypothetical experiment on how national-narrative identities could play out if some winds blew in other directions. National narratives would take shape and they’d be integral to plot and character arcs. In this story, the nuances of such massive events as the Protestant Reformation, the Fall of Constantinople and Ottoman Imperial Harems would shape things. Intra-European schisms, the rise of localized Christian communities, and a radical new technology from Germany (the printing press) all factoring in the early seeds of nation-states.

But I digress. There’s a lot of bad, disingenuous storytelling today. Is it a fear of what the truth might reveal?

Traveling and meeting people outside of one’s home turf forces the traveler out of their comfort zone—if they do it right and give up on the securities of such things as Airbnb, social media, using their smartphones, taking digital pictures, and accessing the internet.

I think that’s still doable, right?

With venturing outside oneself comes an appreciation for home, homeland, fatherland and motherland, its gifts and opportunities, and everything it gave to make you—you.

From there, we can talk. Discourses can reward because they return the gifts of time, love, and understanding—investments of time, life and experience.

Unlike LLMs, which reduce time invested to zero, and produce output as close to instant gratification and easy user experience—optimally designed to make the user feel like their interaction is effortless—as they can get.

As usual, I intended to write a few paragraphs and ended up near “near email length limit” again. Thanks for reading.

May you have a nationally and narratively informed weekend! Viva la vida.

ARW

I write autobiographically about time here and here. I also write about lighter topics like science fiction and Hayao Miyazaki.

1. I like Acemoglu and Robinson’s definition of a state as a balance and struggle between authority and societal norms with a narrow corridor for perpetual success.

2. Both euphemisms for cynical.