The Financial Crisis and an Interimly Limited Nationalism

By: Submissions

Mark Blair writes:          Again, readers, I’m writing about a Big Picture Issue; but again, there is immediate sub-issue relevance. Again, I beg your pardon for my ignorance of your field.

There’s an old Arab proverb that goes: ‘My brother and me against my cousin; my cousin and me against the stranger.’ The proverb provides sharp insight into human relations, particularly what anthropologists call ‘reciprocity,’ which concerns the relation between kinship, trust (contracts, if you will), and the apportionment of resource.

Now, before we go on, let me provide some context for this article:

the politics (that is, the economic and social practice) of the last hundred years have been underpinned by the left-right binary (in an authoritarian framework, but that’s another essay). One of the sub-binaries was internationalism-nationalism. These binaries sentenced us to wasted decades of did-didn’t-did-didn’t-ism: no middle ground, no nuance. Toe the line. Stifle your concern about the ragged edges of your doctrine. Well, I opine here that it’s imperative that we dispense forthwith with this binary. Moreover, let us set in abeyance the terms ‘left’ and ‘right.’ Welcome to the era of ‘NRNL’ politics: Neither Right Nor Left.

Okay, let’s get back to oracle-ising the market: it may be that the global economic system is about to be influenced by fundamental human behaviours and social practices in the same way that a household would be influenced by the Mississippi coming over the levee at its front door. However, we will have a great deal more control of events if we rejigger our concept and practice of ‘nationalism.’

           Interimly, we will need to place in abeyance the project of integrating all humanity into one great big competition- and violence-free family (internationalism). The project was undertaken on the basis of the political left’s conviction that all historical animosity and competition between humans was solely a consequence of mis-acculturation. Sadly – though the left has either simply knee-jerk-rejected the science, or not even found time to read it – it seems that realities like xenophobia and ‘in-grouping’ and partiality to kin will forestall the attainment of that happy state -- at least while our environment is characterised by shortage of resource. (Those readers with a background in Marxist theory know that ‘superabundance of resource’ is the lodestone of socialism.)

           However, putting this project in abeyance is not a green light for herding people into gas ovens. It is the recognition of the fact that what is happening in the markets today is the manifestation of an imbalance: too little resource available in a bureaucratically top-heavy system of too great an abstractness (there are a goodly number of qualifications I’d add here, upon request). It can’t go on; and indeed, the reason that you’re reading this article right now is that it isn’t going on!

Conclusion: for some interim decades, it will be necessary to accept that our situation will provide us with only enough resources to support smaller and fewer – and therefore more ‘local’ -- social structures. Secular nation states are what it is how the world map is drawed up at this second, so secular nation states will perforce be central to our future (though I don’t advocate for a second that parliamentary systems as they presently exist be the governing mechanisms of these geo-political structures, but that also is an essay for another day). We will have to (shall gleefully?) abandon the U.N., the E.U. (etc.), and most other internationalist structures. For example, I’d keep the international postal system, and quarantine practices if we can; but we can certainly dispense with the likes of C.H.O.G.M and all things of its ilk. We will, instead, be forced to fight for and find a balance between technology, and land-and-water, and rat race lifestyles of unsustainable affluence, and family and friends, and the type and number of our ‘social superstructures,’ and our responsibility to create/manage/dispense with such structures.

Go, N.R.N.L.!!

Mark Blair

<mark.blair@internetsat.com.au>

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