Why Is Nationalism Always So Unsettling? | 2017 Book Picks, Part 4

On "the big questions of our world," two new books: A Secular Age and Blood and Belonging. Plus a few older ones.

Strictly speaking, these are not offered with the rigor of a "best books of the year" list. We went through a lot this year, and these books, published in 2017, happened to help us think it through.

We are recommending books in four categories: humanities and social sciences (fiction excluded), business and technology, lifestyle and aesthetics, and fiction.

The candidates in the first three categories came from two sources: recommendations by more than 20 professional publishing houses, and recommendations from QDaily's editors, reporters, and contributing writers. For the fiction section, we gathered the views of writers, translators, scholars, book critics, book editors, and literary critics, and commissioned the pieces from them. The rest was written by QDaily's editors and contributing writers.

We read these books through as far as we could, and we "sincerely believe they really are good" — as last year, that is the least we owe readers before recommending anything.

This is the fourth installment of our humanities and social sciences book picks.

It covers two new books, A Secular Age and Blood and Belonging. The review of A Secular Age was written by Zhang Rongnan, an associate professor in the philosophy department at East China Normal University and the book's lead Chinese translator. She wrote A Hermeneutic Discourse on Modernity: Charles Taylor on Modernity, and has translated The Ethics of Identity, Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present (co-translator), and The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher (co-translator), among others.

A Secular Age

Zhang Rongnan, East China Normal University

In 2007 the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, known worldwide, published A Secular Age with Harvard University Press. In it he sets out at length the question of secularity that occupied him all his life, and folds in his earlier thinking as well. The sociologist Robert Bellah called A Secular Age "one of the most important books I have read in my lifetime."

So why does A Secular Age matter? For people in the West, in a secular age, believing in God has become steadily more of a problem, while secularity has become the default, needing no special justification. For us in the East, the decline of a traditional culture led by Confucianism, and the forceful arrival of Western modernity, have changed the conditions of our lives and our search for meaning just as completely. In a modern society of growing material abundance, many people who set out to ask what life means end up lost. Taylor tries to offer a way of thinking the question through. Standing in the Christian tradition, he treats the modern Western society that broke free of medieval theology as a secular society. In a secular society, religion becomes an optional choice, with no more claim on us than any other secular option.

As a philosopher with a devout religious faith, what puzzles Taylor is this: why has believing in God become so much less a matter of course in modern Western society than it was 500 years ago? He answers from a hermeneutic point of view. Secularization, he argues, is neither the natural outcome of modernity's development nor a neutral, universal historical process. It is the product of one framework of meaning replacing another: secular humanism has taken over the world of meaning that God once built. In this new world of meaning, our account of the universe may come from natural science and our view of society from social contract theory. Sitting in a cinema watching The Wizard of Oz, we find it hard to understand why Dorothy and her friends fear the Wicked Witch of the West; we may even laugh at that fear. Taylor calls this world of meaning an "immanent frame," because it is closed to transcendence. It is this phenomenological experience of living inside the immanent frame that leads him to call our era a secular age.

Because he understands secularity in a particular way, Taylor stresses a third sense of the word. Secularity 1 means religion's retreat from public life; secularity 2 means the decline of religious belief and practice; secularity 3 means a change in the conditions of belief — the context in which belief itself changes. Taylor says it is secularity in this third sense that he is examining. On that understanding, the shift is "from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace." Believing in God is no longer self-evident; people have other choices. More important, those choices are secular-humanist ones. By secular humanism Taylor means an atheist humanism, as against a theist humanism such as that of Erasmus or Kierkegaard. In the modern West, he says, we have to speak of secular humanisms in the plural. There are Enlightenment versions, Romantic versions, Kantian versions, utilitarian versions, and more. There are also many versions that overturn humanism altogether, such as anti-humanism and transhumanism. Taylor compares this swarm of competing worldviews to a "nova effect."

So what is it like to live inside the immanent frame? First, it is conflicted, or, as Taylor puts it, under "cross pressures." We may be secularists who now and then feel a "spiritual" pull. Or the reverse: we may be devout theists who go through doubts that pierce the soul. The swarm of competing worldviews means that reflective people feel pulled in several directions at once. Second, we easily feel uncertain, or "fragilized." Why? Because it is hard to talk with people who do not share our worldview, and that makes us doubt whether our own convictions are real. Taylor sees the immanent frame as having become the condition of existence for people in the modern West, and he has no naive wish to throw it off. But he is optimistic: because people feel a lack inside the immanent frame, they will return to positions of faith, or build new forms of spirituality (not necessarily religious ones — there are non-religious forms of spirituality too). Taylor believes that whatever our values, we all accept some definition of greatness and fullness in human life. And whichever version we take up, people are bound to pursue what they count as a full life.

Taylor's work drew a huge response in Western intellectual circles. His idea of a "secular age" has been called into question, since religious communities are still thriving in many parts of the world today. Other critics have argued that the tension in modern society does not run mainly between religious believers and non-believers, as Taylor says, but between monists and pluralists, or between those who champion closed societies and those who champion open ones. In a sense, though, all these criticisms misread him. Taylor does stress the divide between the immanent and the transcendent, but he stresses the difference between openness and closedness just as much. In his view, an open mind matters equally to the religious and the secular, because in a plural modern society it is openness to other positions that lets people live together in peace.

A Secular Age is also written mainly as intellectual history rather than sociology. Taylor does not set out to give an account of secularization as a global phenomenon; he admits outright that he cannot. What he sets out to do is offer a systematic philosophical reflection on the Christian civilization that shaped the modern Western world. It is worth noting that although Taylor states plainly in this book that he is a Catholic, he is neither a theological apologist nor someone who prettifies tradition. He respects the values modern society has won, and from a position beyond it he reflects on modernity's many shortcomings and problems. In the preface Taylor wrote for the Chinese edition, he extends an invitation: "I have offered a portrait of the Western path of development, which may help Chinese readers ask themselves in what ways this picture differs from China's own trajectory." The value of this book, then, is not only that it shows us a vast map of how the Western intellectual world changed, but that it hands us a mirror in which to examine our own intellectual tradition. So let us look in that mirror now.

Blood and Belonging

Why Is Nationalism Always So Unsettling

QDaily

Once the Balkans learned from Europeans a new way of thinking about the self — nationalism — the region became a powder keg.

Even at the turn of the 20th century, people there had little notion of a state and none of a nation. In 1912 a British diplomat meeting an Albanian nationalist organization for the first time was astonished: "All Muslims, whether Shia or Sunni, Turk, Arab, or Kurd, were registered on the census simply as Muslim." As for the Greek national uprising, which people remember mostly thanks to Byron, it carries a good deal of a poet's exaggeration. Norman Stone, a historian of Turkey, has said that "most of the legends of Greek nationalism are made up."

But once nationalism arrived, everything got complicated. That seems to bear out the claim that nationalism comes first and the nation second — at least there are signs of it in the Balkans, the world's most famous and most tangled crossroads of ethnicity, religion, history, and culture.

In Imagined Communities, his widely read book, Benedict Anderson defines the nation as "an imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign."

Nationalism has a technical explanation too. Anderson proposed the idea of "simultaneity": "An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his 240 million-odd fellow-Americans. He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity." That makes it possible for Americans to recognize themselves as one people. Anderson argued that once newspapers became a major source of information in daily life, they more or less fixed the technical basis of this "simultaneity" — "we know that particular morning and evening editions will overwhelmingly be consumed between this hour and that, only on this day, not that."

Whether that was the decisive cause is argued over. What comes next is clearer: in late-developing nations, the lower classes were mobilized by economic inequality, while students and intellectuals — above all bilingual intellectuals who had studied in the imperial metropole — became the most important drivers of nationalism.

In the most famous cases of national independence, Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah, the founding fathers of India and Pakistan, were all educated in Britain. Eight men who studied in France in the 1950s — five teachers, a university professor, a civil servant, and an economist — not only led Cambodia to independence but went on to carry out a genocide…

Genocide has no connection to nationalism, of course. That is only a coincidence. But nationalism became one of the 20th century's main facts, and in Michael Ignatieff's very compact summary its creed comes down to three points: 1) the people of the world are divided into nations; 2) these nations are entitled to self-determination; 3) full self-determination requires statehood.

Ignatieff is the author of Blood and Belonging. Written in the 1990s, the book studies six specimens of nationalism in six regions. Where Imagined Communities is a theoretical work on where nationalism comes from, Blood and Belonging lets you see, through these six stories, the details that make nationalism unsettling.

It, too, begins in the Balkans.

"If I am a Serb, will the local Croat police protect me? If my new boss is a Serb or a Muslim, will I keep my job at the soap factory?"

Ignatieff says the answer to these questions is no. "Because there is no longer a state to guarantee the old inter-ethnic bargains, everyone turns, in haste and confusion, to another source of protection: the warlord." The warlord does not only offer protection; he offers a solution. "He tells his people: if we cannot trust our neighbors, we must drive them out from among us."

"The warlord says: get rid of your neighbors and you will never have to fear them again. Live in your own town and you can live in peace. My boys and I will protect you."

That is the first reason nationalism is unsettling. Once the warlord is brought in, everything becomes uncontrollable. And there is a further detail: "The smaller the actual difference between two peoples, the larger it must loom in their imaginations. Freud called this the narcissism of minor differences" — the necessary consequence being that "enemies need each other to remind themselves of who they really are. A Croat is therefore someone who is not a Serb, and a Serb is someone who is not a Croat. Without hatred of the other, there would be no clearly defined national self to worship."

The loss of control does not stop there. It keeps building.

"Everything is the other side's fault. In the moral universe of pure nationalist delusion, every act is forced, a necessary tragedy. Towns must be destroyed in order to liberate them, hostages must be shot, massacres must be carried out. Why? Because the other side started it, because the other side is a beast that understands no language but violence and revenge, and so on."

"Everyone in a nationalist war speaks the language of fate, of compulsion, of the abdication of morality."

And because we are all in this together (Isaiah Berlin: "When I am among my own people, they understand me as I understand them; and this understanding creates within me the feeling that I am somebody in the world"), when a region is ruined by a warlord's militarism and economic plunder — as, generally speaking, it always is — "you might think these lines [people queuing outside banks, afraid the banks would fail, waiting to withdraw their money] would be full of grievances against Milošević… Yet once again, all the anger that should have been aimed at Milošević was aimed at the West instead — at Churchill and Thatcher, because they backed the Croats; at the Americans, because they helped the Bosnian Muslims, and so on."

The nationalists plainly made the mess themselves, and the only result is stronger nationalist feeling — a shared hatred of the enemy. Nothing else.

And it soon rises to the final demand. "Without statehood, people will sneer at you on the bus, people will mock you for what you are. Being a people is not enough. To have dignity, you must have a state." Even in a place as cool-headed and reasonable as Quebec, nationalist demands end up here.

In the end you find that nationalism has little to do with reason, or with how developed a place is. Quebecers who believe in globalization, who mean to be progressive, modern Quebecers, also want to be "French North Americans."

No one wants to call himself a nationalist. "The word means shutting yourself in," said one Quebec nationalist, who thinks Quebec's culture should be open to the world.

But: "We just want to be at home in our own house."

And at the very end they come back to that first question about the Serb and the Serb warlord.

Ignatieff recorded a conversation with a group of Quebecers.

One of them said: "Well, does anywhere else let a publicly funded school system run in a language other than the main national language?" "Fair enough," I replied. "I'm not saying Quebecers are intolerant. You're not. I'm asking why you feel so insecure. Why do you believe your language needs a state of its own to protect it?" "We're not insecure. We just want to be at home in our own house." "Yes, frankly, we're tired of being a minority in Canada. We want to be the majority in our own place." "Wow, that sounds bad. The tyranny of the majority?" I asked. "That's not the tyranny of the majority, that's just democracy," a student said. "Even if you're right, even granting that you need a state to protect your language, can you be sure it will work?" I asked.

The banner image shows PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) guerrillas, via flickr; the long-format cover image is of Michael Ignatieff, via ceu