Kurukshetra War as a marker of Bronze Age Collapse is an fascinating suggestion. I can see how that tracks.
Your analysis of the difference between war conducted by Kshatriyas and non-Kshatriyas is interesting, and largely true, I think. There is something egregious and/or perverted about battles that aren't conducted by warriors; there is no honor.
Perhaps this is why the Western leadership class is upset that the mythos of WWII is breaking apart. Many are waking up from the spell that it was a 'just cause', and realizing it was just a form of large-scale mercantile plundering (and devastation of human capital).
I feel sad at your suggestion that our current Turbo American Politics™ offers no room for dignity, because I suspect you are correct. 😔
Different colonies of ants, bees, herds, hives, or collectives, tribes, sub-species, breeds, or races all exhibit ethnocentrism in nature
This is kind of muddled. The first set are social insects who are members of something like a single hive organism, or herd animals, evolved to live in large groups.
But then you shift to tribes, sub-species, breeds, or races. These I am assuming refer to people. Dogs do not act as if different breeds are different.
Humans are primates, which are NOT herd animals. We do not have the genes to operate in large groups like herd animals. We do so because of culture. All groups larger than the tribe are cultural constructs. They do not exist "in nature". We do have built in tribal "in-group" bias, and our cultural apparatus allows "tribe" (for which the default indicator is "speaks like me") to be overwritten by all sorts of things, such as ethnicity, religions, fandom, race etc. Laboratory studies have shown this facility can be invoked (temporalily) to show in-group favoritism along purely abitrary lines created by the researchers.
"We don't have the genes to operate in large groups." Well, we do it every day. You can say "humans did not evolve to live in large groups," which is fair, but you don't need a large group to "exhibit ethnocentrism in nature." Ethnocentrism can be a purely cultural phenomenon, but has obvious genetic implications.
But I’m a chemical engineer with no particular expertise in this subject. I have no deep understanding of things like polygenic scoring in the genetic papers on recent human evolution and find various claims in substacks to be contradictory. Mostly I dabble in cliodynamics and cultural evolution.
"hives, herds, and other biological collectives with sufficient ethno-centrism engage in hostile destruction of competing sub-species. Often times, when two species compete in the same environment, the victorious species is described as an “invasive species,” while the declining species is described as a “native species.”"
That is not the same thing as what ethnocentrism means in humans. Ethnocentrism in within species so invasive species is a different category.
And we don't usually think of rejection of an organ transplant as an example of ethnocentrism, yet that is human cells attacking human cells recognized as "other". A social insect nest rejecting other members of the same species who are not related to the nest members (nest members are siblings) would be analogous, though I am not sure this actually happens.
With human groups the members are unrelated, the ethnocentrism here is not like an immune response.
As primates were how hostile those from outside our group. For chimps and gorillias the groups is a band. For humans is a tribe (multiple bands in tribe). Humans cultural facility allows us to reprogram this to duplicate the tribe-band structure over and over to create complex hierarchies with additional "social scale up technologies" that stability larger groups allowing increasingly large concentrations of people to be feasible.
"History is not monodirectional. Just as imperialism gives way to nationalism, nationalism can give way to imperialism."
I think we could define next nationalism as "continental nationalism", a nationalism not based on small nations like used to be in 19th- 20th century but on giant continental states. Many thinkers from all political sides like Nietzsche, Orwell, Drieu La Rochelle, Koudrenove Kalergi and Altiero Spinelli precognized the surge of great continental powers even before the concept was fashionable.
If anything, 'continental nationalism' seems way less likely in the 21st century as compared to something like 'network nationalism' à la Balaji Srinivasan.
With the rise of instant global communication and mass cheap national/international travel, staking a claim on a particular piece of land whose sovereignty nominally belongs to a centralized machine doesn't seem to be enough to engender ideological coherence and voluntary submission to a larger organism.
Most groups do not have the luxury of trying to offer a complete ideological or moral vision, but instead must seek to 'stake the ground' one or two moral innovations (or moral claims, if you don't believe in such things as moral innovations) – which Srinivasan calls 'The One Commandment' in his book – and using those as focal points for their 'nationalism' to compete against the centralized edifice of globohomo.
I suspect that many 'nations' are going to exist primarily digitally, and that the physical and logistical space they each occupy is going to have to overlap. Smaller, more nimble merchant unions and militias will contract to different groups based on how much 'market' or 'protection' share respectively they can capture and serve without being seen as engaging in moral arbitrage.
If ones view Christianity as a fundamental building block for whatever happens next in the West: the Printing Press in the 1400s led to the Thirty Years' War two centuries later, with Protestantism expressing a decisive victory over Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
The 2000s may either see Orthodoxy/Catholicism take back ground from Protestantism and become dominant, or else all three of them may lose to a fundamentally new, yet unseen denominational shift – similar to the consequence of Westphalia – that can outcompete all of them in the Age of AI. Personally, I place my bets on the latter, especially if Orthodoxy finds a way to transform itself by integrating the powerful strains of Santana Dharma and post-war Mahayana/Zen that have taken root (but my views on this are not super well-developed).
"With the rise of instant global communication and mass cheap national/international travel, staking a claim on a particular piece of land whose sovereignty nominally belongs to a centralized machine doesn't seem to be enough to engender ideological coherence and voluntary submission to a larger organism."
That could be true if we were in 17th century when America or Australia were still largerly undiscovered. But with governments banning foreigners to buy lands (see Florida banning Chinese purchasing of state lands) I see it very difficult.
"With the rise of instant global communication and mass cheap national/international travel, staking a claim on a particular piece of land whose sovereignty nominally belongs to a centralized machine doesn't seem to be enough to engender ideological coherence and voluntary submission to a larger organism."
Good stuff. I like how you're problematizing nationalism, highlighting its moral presuppositions, and emphasizing that nationalism is not ready-made, invariant across time, nor has a universal application for all times and places.
Fredric Jameson once suggested that while modernism temporalized, postmodernism spatialized; this is undoubtedly true of various minimalisms that emerged during the Cold War era, or Pax Americana more broadly. This contrasts with the historicism of the nineteenth century, which aimed to understand things not only by using facts and logic but also through intuition and context, understanding a particular as a particular and not solely as a function of abstract laws plus initial conditions.
In the current year, nationalism, free markets, Darwinism, etc., appeal to people who are still running mentally on the Cold War operating system. (Edward Dutton, for example, is a crankish parody of this slovenly type of facts and logic guy.) Granted, the neo-Darwinian synthesis of W.D. Hamilton, George Williams, John Maynard Smith, and Robert Trivers, popularized by Dawkins, was a significant leap in human understanding, as it theorized the gene as the locus of natural selection. Some use this stuff to justify nationalism, or neoliberal economics, or manosphere stuff, as if, given the assumption of Darwinism, something else "therefore" works out of the box, no assembly required, just get state coercion out of the way so elite human capital, however defined, can thrive. This ignores that creeds like nationalism aren't something concrete and preexisting and prepackaged that you can heat in the microwave; history is littered with nations and languages (e.g., Burgundy) that didn't make it.
With Rousseau, national-ism was a genuine innovation, the idea being that if we replace ecclesiastic, aristocratic, commercial elites with representatives of peoples, imperial torpor will be broken, men will see themselves in their surroundings and identify with it and aspire to great, creative, virtuous deeds since you now have an audience and a peer group, and a collective interest will develop in punishing vice. It is a moral, emancipatory argument.
There are also technological and strategic consequences that can make nationalism desirable and undesirable. France once made itself invincible through the mass armies nationalism could supply, while today, we're drifting back to a world where technological superiority makes more of a difference than swarms of meat.
Kurukshetra War as a marker of Bronze Age Collapse is an fascinating suggestion. I can see how that tracks.
Your analysis of the difference between war conducted by Kshatriyas and non-Kshatriyas is interesting, and largely true, I think. There is something egregious and/or perverted about battles that aren't conducted by warriors; there is no honor.
Perhaps this is why the Western leadership class is upset that the mythos of WWII is breaking apart. Many are waking up from the spell that it was a 'just cause', and realizing it was just a form of large-scale mercantile plundering (and devastation of human capital).
I feel sad at your suggestion that our current Turbo American Politics™ offers no room for dignity, because I suspect you are correct. 😔
You write well
Different colonies of ants, bees, herds, hives, or collectives, tribes, sub-species, breeds, or races all exhibit ethnocentrism in nature
This is kind of muddled. The first set are social insects who are members of something like a single hive organism, or herd animals, evolved to live in large groups.
But then you shift to tribes, sub-species, breeds, or races. These I am assuming refer to people. Dogs do not act as if different breeds are different.
Humans are primates, which are NOT herd animals. We do not have the genes to operate in large groups like herd animals. We do so because of culture. All groups larger than the tribe are cultural constructs. They do not exist "in nature". We do have built in tribal "in-group" bias, and our cultural apparatus allows "tribe" (for which the default indicator is "speaks like me") to be overwritten by all sorts of things, such as ethnicity, religions, fandom, race etc. Laboratory studies have shown this facility can be invoked (temporalily) to show in-group favoritism along purely abitrary lines created by the researchers.
I would be happy to discuss in a video or audio interview format.
"We don't have the genes to operate in large groups." Well, we do it every day. You can say "humans did not evolve to live in large groups," which is fair, but you don't need a large group to "exhibit ethnocentrism in nature." Ethnocentrism can be a purely cultural phenomenon, but has obvious genetic implications.
What I was getting at is what I wrote about here.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/rise-of-civilization-part-i#:~:text=Human%20groups%20living,scaleup%20technologies%20began.
But I’m a chemical engineer with no particular expertise in this subject. I have no deep understanding of things like polygenic scoring in the genetic papers on recent human evolution and find various claims in substacks to be contradictory. Mostly I dabble in cliodynamics and cultural evolution.
Can you give an example of what you mean by ethnocentrism by animals in nature? Maybe it was not clear to me what you mean by there term.
"hives, herds, and other biological collectives with sufficient ethno-centrism engage in hostile destruction of competing sub-species. Often times, when two species compete in the same environment, the victorious species is described as an “invasive species,” while the declining species is described as a “native species.”"
That is not the same thing as what ethnocentrism means in humans. Ethnocentrism in within species so invasive species is a different category.
And we don't usually think of rejection of an organ transplant as an example of ethnocentrism, yet that is human cells attacking human cells recognized as "other". A social insect nest rejecting other members of the same species who are not related to the nest members (nest members are siblings) would be analogous, though I am not sure this actually happens.
With human groups the members are unrelated, the ethnocentrism here is not like an immune response.
As primates were how hostile those from outside our group. For chimps and gorillias the groups is a band. For humans is a tribe (multiple bands in tribe). Humans cultural facility allows us to reprogram this to duplicate the tribe-band structure over and over to create complex hierarchies with additional "social scale up technologies" that stability larger groups allowing increasingly large concentrations of people to be feasible.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F66b4a5b9-eea0-4da2-92c3-85a4537a4c15_546x270.gif
"History is not monodirectional. Just as imperialism gives way to nationalism, nationalism can give way to imperialism."
I think we could define next nationalism as "continental nationalism", a nationalism not based on small nations like used to be in 19th- 20th century but on giant continental states. Many thinkers from all political sides like Nietzsche, Orwell, Drieu La Rochelle, Koudrenove Kalergi and Altiero Spinelli precognized the surge of great continental powers even before the concept was fashionable.
If anything, 'continental nationalism' seems way less likely in the 21st century as compared to something like 'network nationalism' à la Balaji Srinivasan.
With the rise of instant global communication and mass cheap national/international travel, staking a claim on a particular piece of land whose sovereignty nominally belongs to a centralized machine doesn't seem to be enough to engender ideological coherence and voluntary submission to a larger organism.
Most groups do not have the luxury of trying to offer a complete ideological or moral vision, but instead must seek to 'stake the ground' one or two moral innovations (or moral claims, if you don't believe in such things as moral innovations) – which Srinivasan calls 'The One Commandment' in his book – and using those as focal points for their 'nationalism' to compete against the centralized edifice of globohomo.
I suspect that many 'nations' are going to exist primarily digitally, and that the physical and logistical space they each occupy is going to have to overlap. Smaller, more nimble merchant unions and militias will contract to different groups based on how much 'market' or 'protection' share respectively they can capture and serve without being seen as engaging in moral arbitrage.
If ones view Christianity as a fundamental building block for whatever happens next in the West: the Printing Press in the 1400s led to the Thirty Years' War two centuries later, with Protestantism expressing a decisive victory over Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
The 2000s may either see Orthodoxy/Catholicism take back ground from Protestantism and become dominant, or else all three of them may lose to a fundamentally new, yet unseen denominational shift – similar to the consequence of Westphalia – that can outcompete all of them in the Age of AI. Personally, I place my bets on the latter, especially if Orthodoxy finds a way to transform itself by integrating the powerful strains of Santana Dharma and post-war Mahayana/Zen that have taken root (but my views on this are not super well-developed).
"With the rise of instant global communication and mass cheap national/international travel, staking a claim on a particular piece of land whose sovereignty nominally belongs to a centralized machine doesn't seem to be enough to engender ideological coherence and voluntary submission to a larger organism."
That could be true if we were in 17th century when America or Australia were still largerly undiscovered. But with governments banning foreigners to buy lands (see Florida banning Chinese purchasing of state lands) I see it very difficult.
"With the rise of instant global communication and mass cheap national/international travel, staking a claim on a particular piece of land whose sovereignty nominally belongs to a centralized machine doesn't seem to be enough to engender ideological coherence and voluntary submission to a larger organism."
Nah, people are tired with Christianity (and Abrahmitic religions in general). To learn more about the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Fin_de_la_Chr%C3%A9tient%C3%A9
Good stuff. I like how you're problematizing nationalism, highlighting its moral presuppositions, and emphasizing that nationalism is not ready-made, invariant across time, nor has a universal application for all times and places.
Fredric Jameson once suggested that while modernism temporalized, postmodernism spatialized; this is undoubtedly true of various minimalisms that emerged during the Cold War era, or Pax Americana more broadly. This contrasts with the historicism of the nineteenth century, which aimed to understand things not only by using facts and logic but also through intuition and context, understanding a particular as a particular and not solely as a function of abstract laws plus initial conditions.
In the current year, nationalism, free markets, Darwinism, etc., appeal to people who are still running mentally on the Cold War operating system. (Edward Dutton, for example, is a crankish parody of this slovenly type of facts and logic guy.) Granted, the neo-Darwinian synthesis of W.D. Hamilton, George Williams, John Maynard Smith, and Robert Trivers, popularized by Dawkins, was a significant leap in human understanding, as it theorized the gene as the locus of natural selection. Some use this stuff to justify nationalism, or neoliberal economics, or manosphere stuff, as if, given the assumption of Darwinism, something else "therefore" works out of the box, no assembly required, just get state coercion out of the way so elite human capital, however defined, can thrive. This ignores that creeds like nationalism aren't something concrete and preexisting and prepackaged that you can heat in the microwave; history is littered with nations and languages (e.g., Burgundy) that didn't make it.
With Rousseau, national-ism was a genuine innovation, the idea being that if we replace ecclesiastic, aristocratic, commercial elites with representatives of peoples, imperial torpor will be broken, men will see themselves in their surroundings and identify with it and aspire to great, creative, virtuous deeds since you now have an audience and a peer group, and a collective interest will develop in punishing vice. It is a moral, emancipatory argument.
There are also technological and strategic consequences that can make nationalism desirable and undesirable. France once made itself invincible through the mass armies nationalism could supply, while today, we're drifting back to a world where technological superiority makes more of a difference than swarms of meat.
If future wars are like the Ukraine war, conscripted armies of a large size will still be important.