“We are unexpectedly losing numerous vital elements of a civilized, salutary society. We are seeing a sharp boom in human beings suffering alienation or simply feeling adrift … we recognize a widespread increase of inhabitants struggling with a lack of sense of community, identity, and continuity.” That quote speaks to our age. It speaks to an experience of dislocation and insecurity that has ruptured global politics.
In a world of porous borders, open trade, deindustrialization, the mass movement of human beings, technological revolution, developing inequality, heightened fear and suspicion, international terrorism, and the march of robot armies, that quote speaks to want for retreat, for nostalgia, for desire in a beyond that perhaps by no means existed instead of a frightening future we can not manipulate. But that quote isn’t always written now; it comes from over again, earlier than globalization, the Islamic State, or the European Union.
The American journalist and social critic Van Packard made that commentary more than forty years ago in his 1972 book, A Nation of Strangers. He had traveled the duration and breadth of his way of handing out questionnaires and speaking to human beings. This changed into a time of the Cold War, a battle in Vietnam, and China, nonetheless, mired in its Cultural Revolution. Packard reminds us that every age has uncertainty and reputed existential crises. He additionally reminds us that a few matters are perennial. In 1972, he touched on the human need for connection and belonging. Packard’s Nation of Strangers is now a global community of strangers. Societies anywhere are splintering along ideological, magnificence, ethnic, racial, cultural, and sectarian lines.
How does the center maintain itself? Can we even locate that center?
In his latest ebook, The Fate of the West, Journalist Bill Emmott identifies an erosion of belief. “The clash between tribalism and openness reflects feelings of fear,” he writes. Much of that worry is targeted at the stranger. Migration has to turn out to be a potent political fault line. Old borders are being reinstated, and partitions are being built to hold people out. The European test is fraying. Right now, Britain is negotiating the phases of its exit.
My bookshelf is teeming with tomes foreshadowing the stop of times as we realize them. At The End of Europe, scholar James Kirchick writes, “Great Britain’s choice to go away from the European Union … has begun the bloc’s gradual unraveling, emboldening nationalist forces throughout the continent”. Associate Editor of the UK’s Spectator magazine, Douglas Murray, is near hyperventilating in his ebook, The Strange Death of Europe. Murray sees the conflict of cultures as undermining the very nature of European identity. It is a wake-up call to a Europe digging its grave.
“We can not become Indian or Chinese, for example. And we’re predicted to agree that anybody in the world can move to Europe and turn out to be European,” he writes. Murray’s argument is not racial; it is far built across the concept and maintenance of European values. “The global is coming into Europe,” he says, “at exactly the moment Europe has lost sight of what it is.” The International of strangers, it seems, is making us strangers to ourselves. Australia is grappling with those strains.
English and citizenship
This week, the talk was on citizenship. The government wants to make it harder for people to turn out to be Australian. It argues that the right to turn out to be one’s folk’s wishes is earned. It is becoming a topic. Last week, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull began speaking of patriotism. Earlier this year, he began extolling the virtues of “Australian values.” A not-unusual denominator is language. English proficiency, Mr. Turnbull says, should be considered necessary for citizenship. The consciousness of language goes to the heart of what it means to be a country.
Writing in 1882, the French Historian Ernest Renan set his mind on nationhood, which might be considered seminal. He disregarded the concept of racial and linguistic bonds. Languages, he wrote, “ask to be united; they do not now pressure it.” To Renan, languages have been “ancient formations that mean nothing regarding people who talk them.” For Renan, a state was a “soul, a religious principle.” It is born of the past, “a rich legacy of memories,” and the existing, “the desire to live collectively.”
But Renan no longer stays in the world of strangers we now inhabit. The father of psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, wrote of what he knew as “the Uncanny,” repressed impulses born out of uncertainty. In an article, Australian teachers Ken Gelder and Jan stated that an “uncanny experience might additionally occur when one’s domestic is rendered, somehow and in a few experiences, unusual.” They quote Julia Kristeva’s book, Strangers to Ourselves, which offers the tension of disentangling what home is and what is foreign. Our global is now experiencing an “uncanny” experience. Politicians are seizing on the impulses of fear and distrust in the face of developing uncertainty.
This is the blowback of globalization. The liberal cosmopolitan dream becomes an international order that would unite us in shared values that would sit astride the borders of nations. But countries are persistent. They want to belong to a powerful and enduring organization. But defining that belonging is not a smooth factor. Broadcaster and creator Michael Ignatieff distinguishes between civic and ethnic nationalism. Common ethnicity, he said, “now does not afford the glue that binds the country to the state.” He says “thick” definitions of national cohesion demand assimilation into a dominant countrywide way of life. But he prefers a “skinny” definition, a “civic settlement” that binds us to the legitimacy of the regulations — democracy, rule of regulation, and possibility for all.
Of course, that increases questions on fairness and whether or not the country returns that legitimacy to all its humans; however, Ignatieff’s “civic nationalism” permits us to live as a “country of strangers.” I walked amongst the “strangers” for my software, The Link, this week. We were asking whether being an Australian meant speaking English. I met people of all colors and faiths who spoke more than one language. Some were no longer as fluent in English as a locally born speaker. However, all professed love of Australia’s country has provided them with unswerving loyalty to a “civic nationalism” that speaks louder than words. One young woman from Africa advised me to learn English as a young scholar; she also spoke French.
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