Tag Archives: Aristotle

Nationalism Restored

01 Saturday Sep 2018

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Hazony, Yoram. The Virtue of Nationalism. New York: Basic Books, 2018. 304 pp.

Ever since the cultural turn in academia in the early 1970s, it has become de rigueur to disparage nationalism as a volatile and dangerous sentiment susceptible to extreme violence and prejudice. Nationalism was cast as an imagined community with the implication that it was a simulacrum whose substance came wholly from fabricated myths, rituals, and symbols. In this echo chamber, Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism comes as a rare and welcome breath of fresh air that revives the idea and places it in context with other alternatives that have been offered over the ages.

Hazony looks to the Bible, specifically Devarim, to find his definition of nationalism. The scriptures actively promote the feeling of brotherhood among all members of the Jewish nation and Mosaic law would serve as their constitution; the king of the Jewish state, its priests, and prophets would all be drawn from among the brotherhood and each would have a role in preserving the traditions, customs, and laws of the community. Geographically, the boundaries of Israel are set by Moses as he expressly forbids the expansion of the nation-state into the neighbouring lands of Esau, Moav, Lot, and Ammon.

The ambitions of nationalism are clearly limited and not inherently expansionist or committed to world domination as critics are prone to hyperventilate. Hazony does not deny that there has been great violence in the past in the name of nationalism but that is also true of any other theory of mass organisation, ethics, and governance. This is an interesting proposition put forth by the author, that nationalism is not merely a feeling of cultural connectedness between people who do not know each other but properly seen, it also includes a system of ethics.

According to Hazony, the roots of nationalism are to be found in the structure of the family – individuals are biologically related in a family and share a sense of rights and duties, blood and belonging, vis-a-vis one another; the prosperity of one member is the success of them all. As families band together into clans, clans into tribes, and tribes into nations to provide better security and accomplish greater tasks, the loyalty commanded by the heads is transferred upwards towards common characteristics the members share, such as language, faith, or ethnicity.

Using the family as a model of organisation for the state is certainly not peculiar to the Bible – similar notions are found as far apart as China and Greece. Confucius clings to the metaphor a little too closely with the result that the ideal Chinese state tends towards authoritarianism; Aristotle sees the polis – state – as the full flowering of the family life but does not carry the analogy too far as he recognises that there is a difference in the nature of power within states and families, not just quantitatively but qualitatively as well.

The Virtue of Nationalism juxtaposes a localised nationalism with universalist ideologies such as imperialism, Christianity, Marxism, and Liberalism. Nations are inherently anti-imperial and therefore more stable, the argument runs, because its members are connected to each other through bonds not mediated by institutions of state. Nations are particular to geography, language, faith, ethnicity, or some other criterion that defines the community whereas the universalist aspirations of Christianity, Islam, Marxism, and Liberalism fall to the temptation of conquest and subjugation of the entire world to the one “true” doctrine of choice.

Hazony’s depiction of nationalism as limited may be true in the Jewish tradition but it has had a very different history in Europe and Asia, at least. Halakha distinguishes between milkhemet mitzva – war of obligation – and milkhemet hareshut – optional war. In the first category fall, for example, the wars of Joshua against the seven nations while David’s campaigns of expansion come under the latter classification. In fact, G-d prohibits David from building the Temple because he was “a man of battles and [had] shed blood.”

It is also problematic to portray imperialism as a universalist principle. Although imperialists have no bounds to their geographic ambitions, it is usually also true that the imperial quest is usually carried out in the name of a nation; the various nations that fall to a growing empire are neither treated nor seen as equals. We see this again and again from the Roman Empire to the pink-tainted map of British expansion. Rome expanded its citizen base only in the latter years to stave off a fiscal crisis brought on by decades of decadent emperors but ties by birth or marriage to the Italian peninsula and preferably Rome were favourable traits to possess well into the second century. Similarly, London scoffed at Mohandas Gandhi’s idea that Britain welcome all inhabitants of its dominions as equal citizens of their empire. Hazony accepts this at one point, but not before an unnecessary discourse on the universalist instincts of imperialism.

The difficulty of sustaining nations on abstractions such as liberalism stems from the inability to justify loyalty to the principle. The likelihood of changing our minds as we experience life and are exposed to more information means that any belonging to an ideal remains unstable at best. Hazony takes help from psychology to make the case that humans are social animals who have a need to belong to networks and believe in something greater than than the mere material of life. Here, he brings up a word not often seen in nationalism studies these days – loyalty – which is the crux of the debate. It is not easy, if at all possible, to have loyalty to an idea in the same manner one feels ties to a sibling or parent.

Hazony reworks several historical events to lend support to his hypothesis, in many cases problematically. For example, rather than see the Thirty Years’ War from the traditional perspective of a conflagration between Protestants and Catholics, Hazony casts it as being primarily motivated by universalist impulses against local inclinations. While most historians would agree that the religious element ceased to animate the conflict as the years passed, the war remained an old-fashioned struggle for geopolitical dominance between France and the Habsburgs.

Perhaps the most jarring incongruity in The Virtue of Nationalism is how the second Christian schism is repackaged as a contest between universalism and particularism. At a certain level, it is undeniable that Catholic allegiance to their Pope made way for dual loyalties. However, it is hardly the case that Protestantism was a particularist creed any more than Christianity a sub-sect of Judaism. While the theological reorganisation gave monarchs their independence from Rome, the faith itself still believed it possessed a universal message. The recent Evangelical movement has strongly underscored this conviction.

The largest empire in the modern era was put together by Britain and it was Prussian militarism that sank Europe into the first of its cataclysmic convulsions of the 20th century. The United States began its expansionist project with Manifest Destiny and then eyed territories beyond; none of these countries were Catholic. What is disappointing is that these ill-considered examples are unnecessary and distract from Hazony’s already persuasive defence of nationalism.

These weak digressions may conceal the real import of The Virtue of Nationalism, which is an assault on the cult of the solitary individual. Hazony traces the roots of this ideology to at least one of its origins, John Locke. Hazony finds the English philosopher’s initial assumption that all people are rational and his utilitarian methodology in assessing rationality flawed. Contrary to Locke, Hazony argues that the fundamental unit of existence is not the individual or even the family but the community. Our ethics arise from our communal interactions as does our sense of self; in turn, these inform all our other beliefs and relations, such as liberty or nationalism.

This is at the root of the conservative world view, that the community and family are prior to the individual. Ever since the early Liberals recast society as a collective of individuals, the idea has taken hold and grown to a point where it is not even questioned any more. The few who reject this modern normal have usually done so on theological grounds and have been easy to ignore in an increasingly profane world. By reviving a classical framework, The Virtue of Nationalism fires a broadside at not just the critics of nationalism but the entire Liberal project. Not only are the dangers of a universalist mindset compared against nationalism and found to be as dangerous if not worse, but individual liberty is argued to be mere license if not exercised within the bounds of community and morality. Thus, this is as much a work of political philosophy as it is about nationalism.

It is to the author’s credit that he does not pay much heed to the silly distinction between patriotism and nationalism – Vidura counters this best in the Udyoga Parva in India’s treasured epic, the Mahabharata, when he says, “[t]hose prone to get drunk get drunk on knowledge, wealth, and good birth; but the same are triumphs of the strict.”

The Virtue of Nationalism is a short book and not written in a solemn academic tone despite boasting an impressive bibliography. Hazony would do well to realise, however, that his understanding of nationalism is peculiar to Judaism and not characteristic of all politico-cultural movements. The inadvertent contradistinction, however, should be most interesting to scholars of nationalism. Readers should beware that the chatty affectation of the book belies a profound sociopolitical weltanshauung and a powerful critique of Liberalism in all its guises. There may be some historical quibbles but they do not, oddly, take away from the overall argument and to narrowly focus on those would be to miss the forest for the trees. In an era of Liberal activist academia, Hazony’s efforts to take us back to first principles and rethink our implicit assumptions is a welcome intellectual challenge.

De Ambulandum

01 Friday Apr 2016

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Salve, amici! Every visit to the doctor these days seems to come with an exhortation to walk more. In the midst of a global obesity epidemic, the virtues of simple, low-intensity workouts like walking have seen a remarkable comeback, especially for the older among us and those with joint trouble. Walking comes to us almost as naturally as breathing, so naturally, in fact, that we think of it only in its absence – illness – or as a quiet act of solitary rebellion against the mechanisation of society. Whether by sheer numbers or necessity, the present association of walking with health has become so strong that we forget what an important part such a simple activity held in our cultural and intellectual development.

flaneurBefore health concerns came to dominate our physical activity scenario in the post-fast food age, walking was seen as a joyous pastime that promised liberation from the humdrum. The mid- 19th century saw the birth of the flâneur in Paris, the urban stroller who explored boulevards and arcades, parks and cafés. Bourgeois intellectuals sauntered through the city, in imitation of the greats like Honoré de Balzac, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Charles Baudelaire, Franz Hessel, observing yet not participating in the ebb and flow of urban life. Walter Benjamin writes that it was fashionable to take turtles for walks in the 1840s; the chelonians would set the pace for the flâneurs.

The act of walking was at once of observing and being observed. It was an economic statement – that one could afford the idle luxury of a jaunt – as well as a cultural one, taking a bird’s eye view of city life, micro-history, and fashion; the city was a book to be read by walking. In the transience of walking was found a solitude of the crowded street, a detachment amidst the throngs, as Søren Kierkegaard sought in Copenhagen, and Immanuel Kant in Königsberg before him.

The urban walker, however, has been a bit of an endangered species in modern times. Whether due to the Stürm und Drang intellectuals, the Romantics, or some other intellectual movement, the spirit of the age as been to wander in the wilderness. Civilisation was to be found in pristine nature rather than the trinkets of man. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was among the first who turned an intellectual gaze upon the humdrum activity of walking, according it the status of a conscious activity and ascribing significance to walking for its own sake. Until then, walking had certainly been held in high regard but rarely in isolation. Rousseau came at the beginning of an intellectually turbulent, uncertain time, and after him, the next century and a half turned his less-travelled path into a well-worn road – GWF Hegel, Edmund Husserl, William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Frank O’Hara, and others added theories or anecdotes to the reflection upon walking.

Nature was the venue for these philosophes, away from the din and smog of the rapidly modernising cities of Europe and America. Clean air, unpredictable breaks in the horizon, solitude, and the slow rhythmic pace were thought to rejuvenate mind and soul as the increasing popularity of Alpine resorts declared. There is surely something to the persistent claim that the bodily rhythms of walking somehow correspond to mental processes; think, for example, of how Jews shukel while learning the Torah or during tefillah. Perambulatory mechanics serve a similar purpose, though on a significantly more expansive scale and in pursuit of secular perspicacity.

Walking was seen as a deeply meditative practice perhaps marginally inferior to reading; to walk was to wander in the mind as much as on land, as to read was to journey in the mind and on the page. For some, like Woolf, walking activated melancholy and gloom while others, like Thoreau, found their muse in their rhythmic steps. To walk was to unchain the mind from the strictures of convention to let it revel in the barely plausible. As the activity of philosophers and poets, walking was seen as an eminently intellectual pursuit rather than physical exercise. Walking was clearly associated with health as it is today, but it was more of a psychological, perhaps even spiritual, tonic rather than a physical one.

Before the philosophers came the pilgrims. In the Middle Ages, walking was the subject of poets, and pilgrimage was one of the fundamental forms walking could take. The view was neither physical exercise nor intellectual stimulation, but a quest for self-transformation as much of the literature of the era, from Geoffrey Chaucer to John Bunyan, from Dante Alighieri to Thomas Malory, and from Miguel de Cervantes to John Milton, reveals. Whether it is Virgil and Beatrice guiding Dante, Christian, or Persiles, the journey – walk – itself is central to the narrative and the protagonists are passively passing through.

The sanctity of a pilgrimage had diminished considerably by the 15th century as pilgrims had become notorious for their chicanery and hence objects of mockery and suspicion. This is at the root of the subtle ridicule  Chaucer, Cervantes and others expose their bawdy and playful protagonists to. However, in the early Middle Ages, pilgrimages were difficult and fraught with danger, truly an act of penance.

Yet it was only in the Greco-Roman world that walking was not just a show, an intellective lubricant, or exercise but a marker of civilisation and even divinity. Of course, walking was all those other things too but it was much more. In his Geographica, the Greek geographer narrates an anecdote about an early interaction between the Romans and the Vettonians, a local Iberian tribe. Upon seeing a couple of Roman generals out for a stroll between the tents, the Vettonians were puzzled and tried to lead them into comfortable seating quarters since they thought that one should remain seated if not engaged in some utilitarian task. This is amusing to Strabo because the “barbarians'” response betrays their lack of culture. So strong is this view that it lasted even until the Age of Empire when the imperial portrayal of Orientals as indolent implied their inferiority on the civilisational scale.

To Romans, walking was a profoundly social activity; to be seen strolling with someone marked him as a good friend. The assumption of a constant audience made even the smallest of acts markers of identity and character. Though Cicero accepts the contemplative aspects of walking in De Officiis, he makes it clear in his letters to Atticus (Epistulae ad Atticum) what the true importance of walking was – company and conversation as a symbol of friendship. In fact, it is rare to find flâneurs in Latin literature.

woman who walksHow one walks was also very important to Romans – one’s gait was a mirror to one’s mind and character. A remarkable sample of the value of one’s gait is seen in Book Six of Virgil’s Aeneid, when a young Aeneas asks his father about the character of several heroes as they walk through the city. Earlier in the Aeneid, when Aeneas and Achates have been shipwrecked and separated from their men, they chance upon a strange woman – the goddess Venus, incognito – who tells them the story of the land they have found and its queen. Virgil writes, “…et vera incessu patuit dea” (and the goddess was revealed by the way she walked). Iris is similarly revealed in Book Five of the Aeneid when she appears in disguise to urge the Trojan women to burn their ships.

The intense focus on gaits meant that considerable effort was spent in teaching the children of the elites how to walk properly. The delicious paradox is that the gait was considered a natural indicator of character and here were the elites, training to be natural! Men walked differently from women, slaves from free men. Within the polis,  elite Romans inevitably walked in groups; just two noblemen with their bodyguards was enough to comprise a small group, and the companion and the guards indicated wealth, status, and ties.

Unlike the Romantics, the Greco-Roman world was also quite hostile to walking in nature. A telling exchange can be found in Plato’s Phaedrus, when the eponymous protagonist tries to urge Socrates out of the city walls. The Greek philosopher replies, “You’ll have to forgive me, my friend. I’m an intellectual, you see, and country places with their trees tend to have nothing to teach me, whereas people in town do.” Of course, the Peripatetic philosophers are the more commonly known example of this attitude; Aristotle believed that to leave the polis would be the act of either a god, unmoved by wild nature, or a beast. Seneca, however, reveals an ambiguity in the Roman mind towards nature in his De Tranquillitate Animi: they are at once interested in it and yet have a negative opinion of it.

So next time you go for a walk, remember – you are not only going to get some exercise but also to contemplate, meditate, display yourself, and participate in an act of civilisation. Go ahead, reveal the divinity in you!

Until next time, stammi bene.

This article first appeared in the April 2016 print edition of Swarajya as part of the column, Sprezzatura.

Sprezzatura and Eudaimonia

01 Tuesday Mar 2016

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Salve, amici! Before we start, what thanum an dhul does the name of this column mean? Well, the Oxford English Dictionary describes sprezzatura as “studied carelessness, especially as a characteristic quality or style of art or literature” but it has also been explained as nonchalance, elegant self restraint, or grace. Simply put, sprezzatura is the art of doing something difficult – usually artistic – in a manner that perfectly conceals the effort required to master the skill. Coined by Baldassare Castiglione in his 1528 publication Il Cortegiano, the word is not Latin or Greek in origin but Italian though the idea was clearly inspired by classical values, particularly Cicero’s neglentia diligens and Ovid’s observation, Ars est celare artem (The purpose of art is to conceal itself).

Il Cortegiano was an important work during the Renaissance and has informed the Western conception of what it means to be a gentleman ever since. Structured as a series of conversations between courtiers of the Duke of Urbino over four days, Castiglione touches on the nature of nobility, humour, and love. The author was himself the Count of Casatico, a small principality near Mantua, and played advisor to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Popes Leo X and Clement VII. Though there is little that is truly original – East or West – by way of etiquette in Il Cortegiano, the book nevertheless captures the humanist spirit in the princely courts of Renaissance Italy; until then, the authors of the peninsula’s famed city-republics – Leonardo Bruni, most prominently – had only espoused a civic humanism.

Sprezzatura cannot be taught; rather, it must be observed and imitated. However, the clay for this creation comes from knowledge – of literature, music, art, philosophy, food, fashion and many of the things found in the third chapter of the Kamasutra. In the 21st century, that list may perhaps be extended to include travel, the assumption being that such a person would be urbane. But what is it all for? Being well-informed is undeniably a desirable trait but what is the fuss about, really?

One theory is that the Renaissance being a period of Classical discovery, was re-emphasising the old Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia. Translating approximately to “the good life,” Aristotle’s concept of what it meant to lead a flourishing life was that it had to be not just philosophised and articulated but reasoned and practiced. As one can imagine, several things fell in the ambit of leading a good life – ethical conduct, wisdom, friendship, wealth, pleasing appearance, health, and so on. Activity, for Aristotle, included much of what Castiglione suggests as the beginning of sprezzatura – practicing a musical instrument, composing poetry, athletic ability, intellectual pursuits on the humanities and the sciences, and so on. The emphasis on activity rather than idle belief is key, as is the idea that virtue alone is not enough but several other factors are required. The corollary is that these habits should be pursued not for happiness but that it is a byproduct of pursuing these activities. Eudaimonia, then, was not a dry and abstract theory of morality but one of engagement with the world. Sprezzatura, then, was not merely an affectation; it was a way to practice eudaimonia with grace, for an overt display of excellence might evoke jealously and be a social faux pas.

So…back to this column then. The focus of this feature will be to discuss all the things mentioned above. You may have noticed several news blogs lately that have taken to reporting only on positive events to balance the flood of negativity in the regular press. This will be a variation on that theme – in the midst of largely socioeconomic and political commentary, Sprezzatura will try and bring you tidbits of joy albeit with far less grace than I would like! What this column lacks in grace shall be compensated for, I hope, in its approachable style – by no means is this meant to be an academic discussion about a minute point in a musical performance or a philosophical technicality but a chatty pointer to matters of interest that readers may be piqued enough to pursue later on their own. At times, there may be a hint of whimsy while at others, a topic may be quite serious: as Seneca reminds us through Lucilius, res severa verum gaudium (true joy is a serious thing)!

Until next time, stammi bene!

This article first appeared in the March 2015 print edition of Swarajya. It was the pilot article in a new column, Sprezzatura.