Interview: Part IV

See Part V of this interview for the explanation, or for an explanation, anyway.

4. How do you feel about nationalism and its interaction with culture? Is real-world political power useful, inevitable, corrupting, redemptive, any combination of these, for a "people"? Under what circumstances? And what constitutes a "people"?

Well, let’s draw a distinction here between patriotism, which is pride in and love of one’s country (or people) and nationalism, which (in my view) is a desire for one’s country to be the dominant one, connected with a sense that one’s country (and one’s countrymen) are in some sense better than those foreigners. Patriotism is, or can be, redemptive and useful, as well as corrupting, as it interacts with culture. Nationalism can be useful, but I don’t know that it can be redemptive.

The thing about nationalism and its interaction with culture is that, well, it’s a complicated interaction. If that nationalism leads to a sort of insularity, a rejection of other to the point of an artist/cultural-macher not being willing to experience “degenerate” art, well I’m agin that. As much as I like certain (for instance) Japanese calligraphic scrolls or Chinese landscapes or scholar’s rocks that come from that end of the spectrum, I think that the culture that the works came from was rotten in a wide variety of ways, and that much of the art that represents those cultures is rotten as well.

Now, given that (in my view) most good art is sparked off in the friction between cultures, I see that a certain degree of patriotism (or perhaps even chauvinism) helps by making the cultures harder, less slippery. Flintier. Delta blues, for example, or bringing the signifying monkey into otherwise moderately bland pop music. Or the way certain Jewish clarinet players brought klezmer sounds into Dixieland jazz. This is the pot in which bits don’t altogether melt, or at least don’t melt into indistinguishability.

Well, and to the second part of the question. Real-world political power is certainly useful for a “people” (and, bye-the-bye, I’m taking the question as referring to political power outside the people itself, that is, not the strength of politics in the community’s self-government, but the extent of its influence over other “peoples”), and as a direct result of its usefulness is corrupting. There would be hardly an opportunity for corruption without the usefulness, and where there is opportunity, there is corruption, at least to some extent. That does not make the people itself rotten, nor yet its culture, although the assumption of such corruption, and particularly the assumption of political power and its attendant corruption is likely to rot a culture. That is, power, when wielded, corrupts, but power, when taken for granted, rots.

On the other hand, can such power be redemptive? Surely, all power can be, if it is used to redeem. Let’s take, for example, US postwar imperialism. How did we use our newfound power, and how not? Ask Secretary Marshall. To the extent that we have portrayed ourselves to ourselves as willing to accept the mantle of responsibility, we have culturally presented our better selves. I think our culture was saturated with the idea of that, the idea of responsibility, of patronage. That had problems, too, of course, and I don’t want to ignore them altogether, but I think it’s fair to say that the American “people” (if there is such a thing, which we’ll talk about later) were to some extent redeemed by the Marshall Plan, and could be to some extent redeemed by, say, a massive plan to combat the more deleterious effects of global warning. It is only real-world political power that can be a means to such redemption. And, of course, it’s political power that gives a “people” an opportunity that it fails to take or botches, and the consequences thereafter, see France and Nothern Africa, etc, etc.

Well, and all that stuff is based on the idea that there is such a thing as culture, and as a “people” who have a culture, and those things are so unbelievably loosely defined that frankly all of it seems like garbage to me. Perhaps I should have started at the bottom of that question and worked my way back up. But I don’t quite see how to do it. Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that there is such a thing as a “people”, and a sufficient condition for a people to be a “people” is for the individuals within that group to think of themselves that way (or at least for a large number of such people to do so), and build our landfill upon that sand. Yes? Or no?