Supporting the community

"Mankind." That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom... Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution... but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night!" We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!

It is my understanding that Independence Day, the 1996 summer blockbuster, was nearly universally reviled in Europe and, well, everywhere in the world that is not the United States, with many critics pointing to the speech above as the epitome of unironic American egocentrism. After all, what is a clearer statement of American arrogance and ignorance than the supreme success of a movie predicated on an asinine analogue between the American Revolution and an alien invasion?

This is not the point of this post.

American egocentrism is nothing new and to say something new about it would be difficult and, more importantly, not particularly meaningful. To attack it on the American Independence Day would also be a poor move: a nation's citizens should have the right to celebrate their nation on the anniversary of its founding if no other day, should they not? Perhaps, then, we should attack nationalism, or the positively connoted synonym patriotism, which Samuel Johnson famously declared "the last refuge of the scoundrel". After all, Americans have only recently emerged from eight years of opponents to government actions being summarily dismissed as "unpatriotic".

This, too, is not the point of this post.

Or at least, not exactly. The genesis of this post lies with a bumper sticker I saw some weeks ago: I have meant to write this since then, but the Fourth has finally given me the motivation to actually do so. The sticker's text was something along the lines of, "The PATRIOT Act is Unpatriotic". Pithy, of course, and a standard line since the infamous legislation that legalized so much dangerously unsupervised surveillance. But I argue that the line is an intrinsic contradiction; that it fails before it begins by accepting a vocabulary whose baseline assumptions already make the winner the side of centralized authority, secrecy, control, power.

It is no news that what passes for "liberal" in the United States--or rather, what is allowed to pass for liberal in the mainstream political and media spheres of the United States--would barely pass for center-right in any other modern political discourse. But even among those ostracized, "radical" members of the American Left, there are many who still suffer from a great and terrible fear of being labeled "unpatriotic". They find the PATRIOT Act offensive not just because of its contents but because of the audacity of the name, the vile contradiction between signifier and signified that they perceive from it. They rise to anger when mouthpieces denounce them or others as "unpatriotic" because they are the "real" patriots: because they support what the United States was truly founded on, the values they espouse, which are contrary to the centralized authority proffered by the "other side".

It is not simply that they fight a battle, not realizing that they have lost the war, it is that they fight a war on terrorism with terror. It is that they fight a war to end war. It is that they are arguing from a position whose central tenets, if examined closely and truthfully, can only result in the conclusion that war is peace and freedom is slavery. And thus, of course, ignorance is strength.

Their failure, their first and damning mistake, is that they accept the premise of the "nation". That the idea of the United States is a noble one, that it is a real and living entity that must be defended from those who would prey upon it, that a legitimate purpose of government and politics is the vitality and morality of the nation.

This is bullshit.

The idea of the "nation" may, in fact, be the most dangerous bullshit ever thought up by the minds of men--or perhaps not. But certainly the nation, the successor to the empire (though of course empires persisted long past the rise of nations and persist today, America's being the most notable), is one of the greatest tools of oppression ever devised.

A nation is an artificial community. People naturally group themselves by connections of family, locations, resources, anything that can connect people together. Human beings are a social species; their strength is in networks. Alone (although we are never truly alone, of course), we are weak; it is by working together, by giving and taking from each other, that human beings have accomplished what they have.

Networks, however, can be difficult to build. Beyond the blood ties of family, human connections can be notoriously tenuous--barring childish "friendship bracelets" and the like (though they of course are similar symptoms of the same desire for signification), there are no permanent marks of friendship. Friendship is a connection based on trust, but trust, of course, is something that is difficult for many people to give. And so we create visible signs and symbols of our connections, to make sure they are based not simply on trust (as if a physical embodiment gives a connection more strength--though of course often it does, in that a person who defies a signified connection becomes known as a betrayer): we have contracts, and laws, and titles, and business cards, and in the process the network solidifies and becomes an institution.

The essence of a network is its fluidity: it is flexible, mobile, easily redefined--in fact, it exists in a sort of quantum uncertainty at all times, so that it has no definition at any particular moment except when one is asked for. It is the strength of networks: they cannot be tied down, or destroyed by one link in a chain being destroyed, for there are no necessary parts. Everything is replaceable. But this is also the danger of networks, for humans: we are replaceable, and so the only thing we can rely on to keep us from being replaced is the goodness of the other parts of the network.

An institution is a network without fluidity, a network frozen in a moment of time, so that all the connections that existed then become a permanent structure, never to be in danger of being replaced, and never to be added to. It is a structure: a tribe and a chieftain, a fief and a lord, a kingdom and a king. The titles of nobility, the levels of the church, every hierarchy, every artificial social construction designed to give rigidity to social networks, the epitome of which, of course, is the nation: a social institution so vast it can contain 300 million people (or over a billion), manifest as a bureaucracy with such vast reams of legislation and levels of governance that no individual could ever conceive of the entirety at once, so that instead it is reduced to one or two words, a bite-size vocal meme to be repeated in lieu of any real understanding of the vast complexity of the social sphere the institution superficially encompasses, a golden idol to bow before in lieu of any real conception of the nature of God (which is, of course, simply another idol. But that, too, is not what this post is about.)

Besides churches or other organized religion, there is no other institution that has acquired as much legitimacy as the nation--and in the postsecular world of today, even religion's supremacy is arguable. In the years after the beginning of the Iraq War, the "Support the Troops" ribbons became a tired punchline of ignorant consumerism; but the criticism, of course, was always simply that those who purchased such ribbons had not actually done anything to "support the troops". It was and remains and unquestioned assumption that everyone should, in fact, support the troops.

I do not mean to suggest that American soldiers deserve to die--but I do believe that no one deserves to die. And thus it is without qualms that I can say, I do not support the troops. I do not say, I merely criticize the administration that sent them there, or even the new administration that keeps them there. I criticize the cultural worship of the nation that leads people to accept that it is a noble thing to kill or even to die for an artificial construct with as much real impact on the average person's life as, well, any major Western power. It is easier to see the lack of influence of the nation when considering another: there are many nations in which the American government has more influence than the local national government, most obviously, but the people living in those nations do not pledge their lives to the cause of the United States.

The nation's success, I think, lies in its coopting of the notion of "citizenship". You may be members of a club, employees of a company, or followers of a church, but you are a citizen of a nation, and that word enjoys many special connotations that the others do not. While again there are similarities with religion, for most people, citizenship implies far more duty, loyalty, and responsibility than membership in any church. This is because citizenship is at its core a word for the type of give-and-take interaction that is the nature of every real, nonartificial community.

Citizenship is not a bad word--it is, in fact, I think a very good word, and a very important word, deserving of respect. Citizenship means being an asset to your community and not a burden--the problem is in the definition of "community", which has of course expanded far beyond any rational borders (though such borders would of course be nebulous, as any true network is) to include the entirety of modern states.

In such a context the values of citizenship becomes impossible to follow because there is no way to ascertain what benefits the "community" of the nation and what does not--beyond, of course, what the national government says. Which is the entire point of the nation, its great danger and its great promise to those desiring power: when a person can no longer contextualize their community, when the network of people they know and rely on becomes too vast for them to even begin to understand, they turn to institutions and structures to provide simple labels for them to use instead, and simple values for them to use instead of true evaluations of benefit.

And thus young men willingly fly hundreds of thousands of miles around the world to kill and be killed by people they know nothing about and believe that they are being good citizens.