READING: Cosma þe Gellnerian

A very good precis by Cosma Shalizi of Gellner's "Nations & Nationalism", +

Cosma Shalizi: Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism: ‘This book contains the most convincing theory of nationalism I’ve seen, and has profound implications for anyone concerned with modern history, contemporary politics, or the possibilities of multi-culturalism.

Pre-modern socities which possess agriculture and literacy, the inhabitants of what Gellner sometimes calls “Agraria,” were economically static and internally culturally diverse, at least compared to their industrial successors. Cultural differences in fact often went with economic specializations, and so served to fix people in their inherited professions. It is Gellner’s thesis that economic change requires cultural homogeneity, and that the demand for cultural homogeneity, and the state apparatus to provide it, is what drives nationalism. The argument runs as follows.

Because industrial economies continually make and put into practice technical and organizational innovations, they continually change how they employ resources, especially human resources. Their occupational structures change significantly in a generation at most, and often more quickly, so no one can expect to follow in the family profession. (A hundred years ago, there were no system administrators, but there were carriage-drivers.) In Agraria, training could be left to families or guilds, be largely tacit and physical and tied up with the rituals and social context of the trade, and different parts of the same society could be almost unintelligible to each other, provided only they could go through the customary haggling or tithing. None of this will do in an industrial, changing society, in which training must be much more explicit, be couched in a far more universal idiom, and emphasize understanding and manipulating nearly context-free symbols (even manual work increasingly becomes controlling a machine, which must be, as we say, read); it must in short take on the characteristics formerly associated with the literate High Cultures of Agraria, and moreover this training must be received by the entire economically effective population. (A rough definition of an industrial society might be: one where you can learn a trade from books, a society of reference manuals.) So far, such training, on such a scale, has always needed at least elementary literacy, and it hasn’t been reliably provided by any institutions weaker and smaller than states. Moreover, the teachers employed by this system must themselves be trained in the same High Culture, and so on, quickly escalating to the point where the culture needs an entire university system, at the least, to be self-sustaining. States become the protectors of High Cultures, of “idioms”; nationalism is the demand that each state succor and contain one and only one nation, one idiom.

To be without such an idiom is to be cut off from all prospects of a decent life. To have the wrong idiom, that is, a different one than those in charge about you, adds the constant humiliations of being a stranger, outcast, isolated, constantly doing “the wrong thing” — quite possibly while knowing that one’s own ways would work at least as well. Thus the passion behind nationalism derives, not from some atavistic feeling of tribal belonging (supposing such a thing to exist at all, outside of the immediate circumstances of mass rallies and the like), but from the hope of a tolerable life, or the fear of an intolerable one. Faced with an difference between one’s own idiom and that needed for success, people either acquire the latter, or see that their children do (assimilation); force their own idiom into prominence (successful nationalism); or fester. Thus industrialism begets nationalism, and nationalism begets nations.

This last point requires more emphasis. Agraria was a mess of partially overlapping ethnic, religious, linguistic, political and cultural distinctions. On the issue of language alone, Gellner calculates that the Old World contained several thousand dialects, each of which could have been the basis of a formalized literary language. (This calculation excludes Papua New Guinea.) Nations are constructed, in a highly arbitrary way, out of this raw material, often with a great deal of false consciousness (e.g., thinking one is reviving peasant culture and folk traditions, while actually creating a formalized, school-dependent High Culture) and outright fabrication. It is an error to suppose that nations have always existed, or even that modern nations are very old. (Serbo-Croat, for instance, was created as a literary language in the 19th century; in the last decade it has “officially” become two languages, Serb and Croat, which obstinately persist in being mutually intelligible.)

To recap: industrialism demands a homogeneous High Culture; a homogeneous High Culture demands an educational system; an educational system demands a state which protects it; and the demand for such a state is nationalism. The theory is coherent, simple, widely applicable, convincing, and empirically testable (which tests, to all appearances, it passes).

In the sixties, it is said, the Right and the Left in Britain agreed on only one thing: Gellner would be up against the wall when the Revolution came. He was quite proud of that, and the same spirit comes through abundantly in this book. It is hard to decide whether nationalists or anti-nationalists will find Nations and Nationalism more disturbing; rootless cosmopolitan though I am, it changed my mind on a great many subjects. This is already a rare enough achievement for a philosopher or social scientist, let alone someone like Gellner, who was both, since they typically change no one’s mind. Even if Gellner was talking utter rubbish, Nations and Nationalism would be worth reading simply for his style, a trademark Bertrand-Russell-meets-Grucho-Marx combination of powerful logic working from very general premises and laugh-out-loud (literally) wit. Unfortunately for those of us not enamoured of nationalism, he wasn’t talking rubbish at all.

LINK: <http://bactra.org/reviews/nations-and-nationalism/>

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PLUS:

Cosma Shalizi: Ernest Gellner, 1925–1995: ‘On the far side of the ditch from us lies Agraria, a realm of “agro-literate polities” subject to “the tyranny of kings or cousins (or both)”, consisting mostly of highly isolated, custom-bound, illiterate rural producers with magical, ritualistic, socially-oriented religions, dominated and exploited by “the red and the black,” expert coercers and literate classes practicing various technically ineffective, self-confirming, meaningful or enchanted forms of cognition, which tended more towards universalism, rule-boundedness and scripturalism than did the folk-cults.

Those of us on this side of the ditch have “escaped from the idiocy of rural life” (a phrase he cheerfully took from Marx) through a lucky accident, a “miracle”. Sometime about three or four hundred years ago, in an otherwise none-too-promising peninsula of Asia, circumstances conspired to bring forth a kind of cognition which was cumulative, technically effective, and of no value as either a social cement or an emotional comfort — science, and the epistemologies descended from Descartes (in Gellner’s view, much better as charters for science, and prescriptive accounts of how to go about it, than as descriptions of how the world works or how messy human beings actually think). This was combined with classes of people who were more interested in producing wealth than in either theological or political disputes, and polities which, in exchange for tax revenue, were willing to let them alone. Wealth accumulated, and accumulated faster as technological progress became regular and accelerating; production became dominant (an unusual condition; in Gellner’s view, Marx’s main mistake was to think that production was always dominant, to deny the “autonomy of coercion”), eventually buying off the population at large (“the social bribery fund”; Gellner probably under-estimated the degree of struggle needed to establish “the Danegeld state”). Socially, these societies are (at least relative to their predecessors) liberal, permissive, rich, powerful, secularized, engaged in “single-stranded” activities (e.g., in buying food we worry about taste and cost, not marriage alliances or the need not to alienate our grocer lest he not stand with us in the next feud), peaceful, atomized, economically unstable and culturally homogenous.

The last two, economic change and cultural homogeneity, are, Gellner claims, connected, and together give rise to nationalism: his theory of how this happens is brilliant, innovative and convincing, and I’ve summarized it in my review of Nations and Nationalism, so I shan’t repeat it here.

There’s more, of course, though related to this: thoughts on how to get beliefs to spread without their passing proper tests of cognitive legitimacy; general considerations on the “legitimation of beliefs”; the effects of crossing the ditch on the former “artisans of cognition”, the humanist intellectuals; how, if at all, liberal, industrial, charter-less societies can hold together; the “Rubber Cage” of advanced industrialism, where rationality in science and production co-exists with exuberant nonsense in the rest of life; the idea that “positivism is right, for Hegelian reasons”; Ibn Khaldun and traditional Islamic society; why contemporary Islamic societies are not secularizing; the problems with the philosophies of Popper, Quine; his inspiration from Hume, Kant, Weber, Durkeheim; the impossibility of Cosmic Exile and the necessity of its function.

The two books I’d recommend starting with (it’s hard to pick between them) are Plough, Sword, and Book, and Nations and Nationalism.

LINK: <http://bactra.org/notebooks/gellner.html>

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&:

‘Reductionism, roughly speaking, is the view that everything in this world is really something else, and that the something else is always in the end unedifying. So lucidly formulated, one can see that this is a luminously true and certain idea. The hope that it could ever bee denied or refuted is absurd. One day, the Second Law of Thermodynamics may seem obsolete; but reductionism will stand for ever. It is important to understand why it is so indubitably true. It is rooted … not in the nature of things, but in our ideal of explanation. Genuine explanation, not the grunts which pass for such in “common sense”, means subsumption under a structure or schema made up of neutral, impersonal elements. In this sense, explanation is always “dehumanising”, and inescapably so.’ —Ernest Gellner, Legitimation of Belief

‘Political control of economic life is not the consummation of world history, the fulfilment of destiny, or the imposition of righteousness; it is a painful necessity.’ —Ernest Gellner, The Rest of History

‘I like to imagine what would have happened had the Arabs won at Poitiers and gone on to conquer and Islamise Europe. No doubt we should all be admiring Ibn Weber’s The Kharejite Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism which would conclusively demonstrate how the modern rational spirit and its expression in business and bureaucratic organisation could only have arisen in consequence of the sixteenth-century neo-Kharejite puritanism in northern Europe. In particular, the work would demonstrate how modern economic and orgisational rationality could never have arisen had Europe stayed Christian, given the inveterate proclivity of that faith to a baroque, manipulative, patronage-ridden, quasi-animistic and disorderly vision of the world. A faith so given to seeing the cosmic order as bribable by pious works and donations could never have taught its adherents to rely on faith alone and to produce and accumulate in an orderly, systematic, and unwavering manner. Would they not always have blown their profits in purchasing tickets to eternal bliss, rather than going on to accumulate more and more?

‘A Muslim Europe would also have saved Hegel from the need to indulge in most painfully tortuous arguments in order to explain how an earlier faith, Christianity, nevertheless is more final and absolute than a chronologically later one, namely Islam. (In fact he did it by invoking the fact that Europe was only Christianised at the time of Charlemagne, who is at least suitably posterior to Muhammamed.) Had Islam, the later and by some plausible criteria purer faith, prevailed, no such problem would have arisen for a Muslim Hegel. There would have been no embarrassing boob in the welthistorischer timetable. Altogether, from the viewpoint of an elegant philosophy of history, which sees the story of mankind as a sustained build-up towards our condition, it would have been far more satisfactory if the Arabs had won. By various obvious criteria — universalism, scripturalism, spiritual egalitarianism, the extension of full participation in the sacred community not to one, or some, but to all, and the rational systematisation of social life — Islam is, of the three great Western monotheisms, the one closest to modernity.’ —-Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society

‘If we look back at the logical devices men have employed to provide anchorages for their values, we see how very unsatisfactory they are: these seeming anchorages are themselves but floating seaweed. The notion of arguing from given desires and satisfactions (as in Utilitarianism), from the true nature of man (as in the diverse variants of the Hidden Prince doctrine, such as Platonism), from a global entelechy, or the notion of harmony, etc., are all pretty useless, generally because they assume something to be fixed which is in fact manipulable…. This point has been obscured in the past by the fact that, though it was true in theory, it was not so in practice: human needs, the image of man, etc., were not changing very rapidly, still less were they under human control…’ —-Ernest Gellner, Thought & Change