This is the 8th post in my extended consideration of Mark Moffett's The Human Swarm (2019). In it I consider the current polarized political situation in the USA. The events in Washington, D.C., of 1/6 make Moffett's thoughts on group identity and coherence more urgent.
Having finished chapter 24, “The Rise of Ethnicities”, I am within two chapters and a conclusion (which I’ve already read) of finishing Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm and am feeling the need to step back and reflect a bit. My primary reason for reading the book is, of course, that I’m interested in the material. But I’m also interested in what’s happening in the world around me, in particular, in American politics, which has become highly polarized over the last decade or two. What might The Human Swarm have to say about that?
Consider the following pair of tweets:
There’s a lot of that going around and it seems to be getting worse.
Identity is one theme in the book, one I’ve not addressed directly in these notes. Moffett notes that in even the simplest small-scale social bands, identity is an issue; individuals have to balance their need for a unique identity within the group with the group’s need for overall cultural coherence among its members. In larger societies different groups work to maintain their identities in the context of the overall identity of the group. And when a group’s need to maintain its own identity begins to infringe on the requirements of society-wide coherence pressures may bring about a split within the group.
Moffett discusses that dynamic within various animal societies and in human society. The question I’ve been thinking about is this: Is that where America is now, at the brink of dissolution? I don’t know.
Here’s a quick and crude look at the American state. It’s short, but nonetheless I think it’s at the right scale to outline the process. We’re talking about a long-term society-wide historical process. At this scale all the complexities of events fall away or, perhaps a better formulation, are absorbed in the global dynamics of the process.
Let’s call the nation’s founding set of circumstances the Originating Dispensation (OD). The OD consists, on the one hand, of a set of documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution chief among them, but they’re surrounded by various supporting documents, for example, the Federalist Papers. On the other hand, the OD also consists of a multiplicity of facts on the ground, chief among which are the specific groups of people who participated in the process. While the founding documents may have aspired to universal principles, the facts on the ground privileged males of means among all others, males over females, and whites over everyone else.
The OD was mightily stressed by the Civil War, but managed to pull things together and lasted for another century, reaching its high point in the 1950s. By that time a bunch of amendments had been made to the constitution, among others: slavery was eliminated and discriminated outlawed, incomes were taxed, and women were granted the right to vote. Through it all white men, mostly Protestant, ran the country, more or less. They formed the dominant culture. Then things began to unravel in the 60s, the Civil Rights Movement, anti-war movement, feminism, hippies and so forth.
The OD is still unraveling and I don't see how it can be put back together. Humpty Dumpty has fallen. Everyone genuflects to the Constitution, but the will to make it hold seems terribly weak.
Now let’s add just a bit of detail, just a bit.
During the fifties the country was still coasting on the national unity that had formed during World War II, the most extensive war that world had seen, one fought across all the continents of the Old World. That solidarity was, in effect, the founding crucible of the Civil Rights Movement, as though the nation was at last strong enough and secure enough to grant, in fact, the rights which had been extended to African American in law almost a century ago.
Let’s look at the last paragraph of chapter 25, “Divided We Stand” (yes, I’ve glanced ahead, p. 343):
Societies contain ethnicities and races that stick together despite the members’ prejudices about each other. The usual view, voiced by William Sumner more than a century ago, is that friction with outsiders draws a society together. Clearly that’s not always true. The external forces that promote civil peace primarily galvanize the dominant people while often straining their ties to a society’s other ethnicities when those groups are regarded as part of the problem. This tension among the members can cause a kind of social autoimmune disease, turning a society against itself.
In passing civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s did the dominant group overreach? Of course its dominance was weakened as well by pursuing war in Vietnam and thereby alienating the young, the sons and daughters of the men and women who’d waged the Second World War. I note in passing, as Moffett did, that Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps at the beginning of The Second World War (p. 338). The heirs of the OD weren’t fully confidence of their dominance.
The turmoil of the 60s and 70s gave way to the so-called culture wars of the 80s and 90s. The force of the nation’s founding documents, symbols, and myths was no longer strong enough to define a superordinate identity with which all citizens could identify. And so forth and so on through a parade of events, the Clinton impeachment, the Supreme Court decision that allowed George Bush to become President, the attack of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror, fought to no end by an all volunteer military, Obama’s quixotic victory, and then the astonishing victory of Donald Trump, social media virtuoso and friend to Russian oligarchs. What would the 50s think of that? After all, the political atmosphere of the 50s was dominated by the Cold War against the predecessors of those oligarchs. But, in the world of identities and nations, is that really any stranger that the country’s ‘special relationship’ – to borrow a phrase from a different geopolitical context – with Japan?
I have no idea how that story will work out. The forces of cultural identity and economic interest are far more involved than those involved in the climate. At least we have half an idea about how to model the climate, we understand the underlying physical principles even if we can’t get enough data or computing power to run a really high quality simulation.
President Trump’s executive order targeting anti-Semitic and anti-Israel speech on campuses might be framed as a narrow legal matter, but it has touched on a defining issue of our time: Who belongs, and who decides?
The order is ambiguous as to whether it sees Jews as a distinct nationality or a minority race, but either interpretation aligns with Mr. Trump’s preoccupation with defining, and policing, the boundaries of identity.
And the order’s creation of special status for Jews, but not other religious minorities, follows Mr. Trump’s habit of welcoming some demographic groups into the rights and protections of American identity and excluding others. Tellingly, the singling out of Jews for special protection in the order left some feeling still more exposed.
Such preoccupations with identity have animated not just the Trump administration but much of the global populist backlash. Leaders and movements across the democratic world are increasingly focused on enforcing narrow national identities of the sort that defined the late 19th and early 20th centuries. [...]
What is National Identity?
The concept, scarcely 200 years old, holds that humanity is divided among fixed communities, each defined by a common language, ethnicity and homeland. Those communities are nations; membership is one’s national identity. The core tenet of nationalism so pervades today’s world that it feels almost self-evident: Any nation of people should have a country, and any country should consist of a nation.
The concept of an overarching identity tied to one’s country was invented not by ancient poets or warriors but by 19th-century European governments. As monarchies teetered and the church declined, governments saw engineering common languages and ethnic heritages as a way to justify their rule over polyglot empires, as well as an opportunity to marshal their populations for collective pursuits like industry or war. [...]
The world, unable to unwind a global order built on national identity, sought to manage its worst tendencies by promoting cultural pluralism, international integration and protections for minorities and migrants. These values did not so much replace national identity as sit uneasily alongside it, eventually leading to a backlash.