Introduction
Nationalism and humanism in democratic society may be understood by the statement:
Nationalism and democracy are siblings that contribute to humanity !
This may be an odd argument at first parse; but when we evaluate it closely, we will be able to understand the interesting relationship between them.
Let us brainstorm on what is Nationalism and how it is related to Democracy. The shortest possible or the most appropriate definition of nationalism may be that “Nationalism is a modern government”. This definition is better understood when we realize how it was evolved.
Kingdom States
Before the curtain raise of “money” as a form or medium of exchange, most of our governing systems were local in nature. We used to produce items mainly to consume them within the local boundaries. There were cross border trades; they used to happen relative to how much consumable an asset is and to some extent how much effort is involved in shaping it. This was feasible, only when the producer and consumer are capable to judge production effort and goodness for use. Another interesting fact is that most of the services were offered for good will and status than for returns. Mostly, kings and priests used to control the governing bodies, via channels of belief and loyalty.
The boundaries of the localities used to be volatile; they used to change via different factors such as wars, treaties, exchanges, gifts, marriages, etc. The onus of governance was mostly around fixed governing groups and the hierarchy built around them. These local governing setups may be conveniently referred to as kingdoms. Forced labor, slavery and casting of jobs based on birth etc. can be seen as salient features of kingdoms. As we have mentioned earlier, some of the kingdoms were not only governed by formal kings, but also used to be governed by group of influential people, priests etc.
The kingdoms, contributed a lot to humanity and human values during its existence. Several interesting concepts and prototypes evolved during these types of states, like ideal state concepts of Plato, fair trade concepts of Adam Smith, etc. But, later, kingdoms became notorious for its oppression on civil rights and freedom.
Humanity and Religion in Kingdom States
There were always beliefs on how life in general and humanity in particular was originated, why they are existing, where it is heading for etc.
The very thing that is making us different from others sects of life is our ability to name. This technique of abstraction and encapsulation is fundamentally based on beliefs. Different types of beliefs are always the backbone of humanity. All sub sects of people, the philosophers, the thinkers, the scientist, the writers, the readers, the workers and even the slaves had the ability to name and build explanations on the ambiguity in their own way.
In kingdom era, mostly subjective reasoning and subjective evaluation were in place. Groups were formed around relatively logical explanations. Such groups were present throughout human evolution – from the beginning of humanity, in different forms.
One of the significant change happened in kingdoms were the effective use of such groups in governance. This was the beginning of organized religions as institutions. For example, the beliefs and philosophy of the Greek thinkers were utilized by the city states around Athens, the messages of Moses, Jesus and Mohamed paved way to Jewish, Christian and Muslim kingdom states. Similar developments happened in China, India and the rest of the world as well.
The golden mixture of belief and power was an interesting game changer. This was the backbone structure of the kingdom states in general. The governing machinery was largely built on the institutions structured on beliefs, known as religion. The origin of formal religion was a significant development happened on humanity under the kingdom era. The emergence of religion as an establishment was a characteristic of kingdom states.
Thirst of change and quest for freedom were always in the corners.
The Money
With the emergence of money as a form of exchange, more possibilities started evolving. While earlier, the intention of production was consumption and exchange of goods were in terms of consumption value, it is the money which made it possible to produce purely for exchange. It also made it possible to do “service” for a return, rather than good will. The term “profit” got prominence over “usability” in the society.
Money brought a significant change to us. Several local groups, transformed into production owners, who wanted to establish identity and security. The influence of money as “mere form” and its ability to accumulate value without actual possession of assets fueled the emergence of person as the center of society. The emergence of fixed boundaries was much needed to establish the authority of money.
Individual and Democracy
In one hand, these changes, lead to nation states and on the other hand, the concept of an individual – who can accumulate and exchange money – emerged as the center of society. The concept of powerful self-defining individual paved way to democracy. Hence, these two phenomena appeared as siblings, as a result of the emergence of the virtual medium of exchange – popularly termed as money. This was the most fundamental and progressive change that was possible on kingdoms states, which gradually ended the explicit slavery.
Kings failed to Money
The concept of self-deterministic individual was widely accepted and his/her right to have share on the production and governing system became a side product of conversion of kingdoms to nation states. In another words, person and money were the weapons of profit, in its war against kingdoms.
Every change will also invite ample resistance or inertia. The power corridors based on religious establishments fought against the change, for its existence. After a while religion got adjusted with the change and reinvented themselves by accepting a more convenient indirect role in nation states. Though I have tried to represent it as a swift change, it was actually a very long journey, which took centuries and may be still happening.
Kingdoms to Nation States
Unlike kingdoms, nation states generally had fixed boundaries. One of their founding reasons was to protect production for exchange, for which fixed boundaries were helpful.
The revolt against kingdoms also destroyed or disturbed the hierarchical structures supporting it. As we have seen, mostly, these backbones were built on religious beliefs or conventional practices. Interestingly, most of the modern nations presented themselves as being governed by representation of people. These trends got an official momentum with the English “Magna Carta” charter, that cut short erstwhile monarch to a formal king, allowing the rise of popular governments.
Transforming Religious Institutions
Though church had been formally part of transition, it lost its official relevance, compared to erstwhile governing mechanism of monarchy. The electoral representative systems that replaced royal structures were built on elected bodies – representatives of production owners and trained officials – instead of bodies based on beliefs and procedures. Like, its predecessors, nation states also contributed its own share to human values to elevate humanity to next level.
Money and Democracy
Ideal democracy and real people representation exists as a myth, though technically it came to existence. Limited representation abilities and end of formal slavery was a very progressive development, to bring paid workers available for them.For production houses, collective farming and production for exchange was a common cause.
The protection of produced goods and ensuring fair (or unfair) exchange value became an implicit responsibility of nation states.
Once matured, nation states started the roll out of fully virtual money, based on pure virtual state guarantee. Earlier, money was issued against real assets like gold (with a consume value). Such changes made nation state responsible for protection of money and financial institutions.
National Money
The protection of currencies was the need of the bigger production controllers to ensure safety of trade values. Protection of projected values forced nations to build strong forces around them. The effort to protect dollar and revolt against dollar may be seen as the untold reasons of the conflicts in the Middle East Asia and diplomatic uncertainty in Europe and Latin America.
Religious Upset
Kingdoms and its royal structures effectively used organized religions as tool to protect their systems. Initially, nation states were not in need of them as the focus was on production and transition to a more practical framework of administration. They also wanted to release the assets withheld by large religious institutions to participate in the trade circle.
The re-purposed establishments based on fixed beliefs known as religions turned as a baggage on them. In the beginning, money and person even started revolt against religion, on various grounds. We could visualize the upraise of atheist movements in this context.
Protection of Money
Over the time, demand for safety to protect exchange value of products and money (medium and asset) became a necessity.
Modern nation systems started building dubious perceptions of greatness on different aspects to build false emotional values. Such emotional values remained as reasons for building forces around them.
Repurposed Religions
Nations not only revitalized the debris of religious establishments but also tried to utilize every form of segmentation.
Divides in the society were used to keep society in closed and disintegrated power groups, who fights each other. Powerful segments and conflicts were silently entertained by system. They, effectively guarded the system from awareness on tricky nature of money and from a possible integrated resistance against the distance between actual value and trade value.
In my analysis, most of our current nation states are going through this stage.
Humanity in Nation States
Throughout humanity, the ability to believe, think and realign continue to exist and is inherent to us.
Subjective knowledge and subjective wisdom were not actually contradicting with the objective knowledge or objective methodologies of validating observations. Prominence to objective thinking and acceptance for experimental proofs can be seen as two major fruits granted to humanity as part of our conversion from kingdom states to nationalist states.
Fight of Religions against Objective Thinking
The drift between subjective thinking and objective thinking were primarily encouraged by formal religions.
Revitalized religious bodies found the divide helpful in its struggle for existence. It helped them to find an amicable space in national states. The comparison of religion to opium by Carl Marx should be read in this context.
The alienation from free beliefs and blind affinity to religious structures could be understood as the need of nation states to encourage power groupings within the society.
Money Nations
We have also seen that the concept of representative democracy was a byproduct of nation states. Both of them were primarily evolved to safeguard the interests of production houses.
Interests of production houses were many; exchange value, profit and hire-able workers were some among them. The exchange value of an asset purely exists only in the form of its medium called money. Thus, exchange value does not represent the actual consumption value of an asset. It also does not represent the genuine effort society is investing to produce it. It actually exists as a mere trade value and is becoming more and more bogus.
Similarly, the more bogus trades are happening through it, money itself is becoming bogus. As the primary aim of nations were to protect the trade value and validity of money, the very existence of nations itself were becoming bogus.
The chain of meaningless values and the struggle to maintain it, changed the characters of nationalism. It emerged with democracy to change the kingdoms to end its mindless systems. Now it fights against democratic values to defend the mindless menace channeled by money.
Money grows beyond Nations
While we are discussing the increased false nature of the trade value mechanisms, the large production houses and their exchange interests have grown beyond the ability of nation states to protect them. To have a comfortable existence, they need more access to resources and more larger bodies to protect them.
Concepts like globalization, liberalization, crypto-currency, etc. are direct and indirect efforts to break the boundaries of nations. The larger corporate houses want to overrule the nation states. They also want to drastically reduce the effort or labor involved in production. Along with the increase in profit, effort is also there to truly unlink production with the trade value. We may evaluate the over importance of intelligent systems in this context.
Nationalism
Relatively smaller players still want the nation states to represent and safeguard them more aggressively.
Within a nation itself we can see different segments fighting for different interests. As we can observe, they dramatically wear the feather of cast, religion, language, color etc. Any form of effective grouping within or around a nation state inherently represents trade value interests, willingly or not.
The height of this may be visualized from the division of states like Yugoslavia, which is now disintegrated to form closed interests of on multiple lines. The difference between fair nationalism and over nationalism is always subjective and opportunistic.
The characteristics of grouping and re-grouping is inherent to nationalism. But, the common necessity of protection of authority of money and profit indirectly overrules glues different segments.
Conflicts to protect Purchase Cycle
There are conflicts for protection of trade values and profit. There is also a cost on society for protecting bogus and artificial trade. Over the time, the value of money decreases. This directly affects the purchasing power encapsulated by nations.
Purchase cycle is the life of any trade based system. The main objective of production by nation state is trade and profit, and is not its consumption. Hence, system cannot afford a stop in the trade flow; it is looking for continuous restructuring of the purchasing sector to facilitate its existence.
Once again, system is relying on fundamental groupings to bully each other and create conflicts to shuffle the market place to facilitate running ground. Thus, conflicts between nations and conflicts within the nations with closed outlooks are to be seen as the symptom of a larger problem.
The basic problem is the distance between the actual consume value and the projected trade value. The trade value is chained and the cost of its protection is bared by conflicts and aggression.
Nations fights Democracy
The idea of representation of people, the concept of individual rights and governance by people were characteristics of nationalism. On its saturation, due to the conflicts within nation system, it is fighting against its own values. Often values and ideas are bigger than systems. The ideas and values are slowly building a resistance against the meaningless and endless chain of false trade value based systems. But, any resistance may be easily branded as a revolt !
Unlike kingdoms, which was representing an ecosystem of consumable values and assets, nation systems are backed by chain of powerful and conscious profit promoters. This is a significant difference. This not only creates inertia against any attempt to change, but also is capable (and willing) to fight against (or manipulate) any change. Hence, effective atrocities against change should be understood as a natural outcome of nationalism.
Evolution of Humanity
Every stage in our evolution had enhanced humanity and humanism in its own capacity. Similarly, every stage also used to hurt its own values during its decay. Several steps make a dance perfect. Likewise, several stages make the rhythm of evolution of humanity.
In a careful examination, we can understand that the production in kingdoms and systems prior to them was more social and true in nature. But, the oppression, slavery and attack on human values were high towards the end of its existence. We may still observe this in trailing kingdoms around us.
The automation, democratic upraises and facilitation of free thought can be seen as most progressive outcomes of nation states. The over importance of bogus values, profit and related protectionism introduced by nationalism may be summarized as the most difficult and tricky challenges for democracy and humanism. There are several ideas introduced by nationalism, like freedom of expression, freedom of representation etc.
Social Human
But, human beings are social beings; in the ground, we work in tandem to produce collective results for consumption and evolution. Only when we are social, humanity makes sense. As we have seen, the idea of individual rights and representative governance are not social in nature. For a social being, social rights and social governance makes more sense than individual representation or rights.
Social Democracy
A true democracy, as a representation of people, is not necessarily individual centered; rather, it should be social centered. Only then it can truly represent demos (“people”), only then it can facilitate people kratos (“rule”). A more realistic people rule may not be one represented by individuals, it would be a collective, collaborative and social initiative. Such an initiative may be a facilitator of collaborative production aimed primarily for consumption against the production aimed for profit by nation states.
Nationalism is largely troubled by conflicts of pseudo medium, false trade and lust for profit. It may fail to protect democracy in long run. I believe that the waves of freedom and collective democracy, with a social context, may outlive nationalism.
Waves of Change
Stringent oppression of decent and vibrant upraise against them may be treated as a common scene during any significant social change. A careful evaluation of history may give us more interesting points to support this argument. This can be assumed as a natural tendency during any change.
During the growth, the humanitarian waves shows the signals of confidence and great art and poetic works of that time may be spreading the news of happiness. During its decay, at first this space used to be monotonous and art exists for the sake of art.
After the stagnant period, art and poetry takes ups the arms first to reflect the needs for change; the great works of all times that takes us through the pain and oppression used to appear during this time. Before every change a cultural revolution takes place, that invites a lot of hard measures from the rulers. Once the cultural waves take momentum, overcoming the resistance, it forms the base of the change, that usually brings a fresh air and hope of restructuring.
Waves are on ..
The raise of nation states faced difficult period and struggled a lot to present person as the central entity or theme. It was person who fought against the more social kingdoms for the establishment of money and profit. In the initial phases, most of the nation states were welfare states. Most of the common services were not tradable and welfare and liberty was deemed as the silent aim of the change.
After establishing the authority of money and the saturation of commercialization, all the services were converted into chargeable or exchangeable assets on its monitory value. The profitability started becoming the de-facto standard for measuring success and to some extend life.
The buying capacity of people in a closed boundary is mostly understood as the credibility of that society. The more the credibility is in crisis, the more the stability of any money based system is at crisis. When assets are logically accumulated to fixed groups, the credibility reduces.
Most of the nation systems uses wars and conflicts as natural solution to address this problem. A war brings restructuring of units as well as it amplifies sales of weapons, medical aid, constructions etc. and becomes a natural choice for a short-term treatment.
Still we are Social ..
The social nature of humans is inherent on us.
Raise of individual and over focus of person was not natural and was a hidden technique that helped the end of kingdoms. While technically enjoying person, we were always longing for social actions. The wide acceptance of visual media and social networking options has to be seen in this regard. The social media vendors are becoming more powerful than nation states in that sense.
New dimensions and definitions of boundaries may arise due to the entry of social platforms. In reality, man enjoys himself as a member of a society than as an individual. Money as a medium and the delinking it bought between assets and value has been under review for the agonies it brings. It is not only counterproductive, but also fights against human values (as it understands everything in terms of return/profit).
Money Decays
Any attempt to question authority of money and dreaming about more social governing systems are naturally seen by the nation systems as a decent. As money is approaching its expiry date, various attempts like wars, global trades, pseudo social mingling via networks etc. are being experimented as way out.
On the other hand, intelligent systems are being developed to reduce production effort (thus increasing the power of delinking between assets and its values). Majority of humanity are out of this peripheral make up and the search for a more realistic solution is on.
Unhappy Events
The recent increase in brutalities against thinking people should be seen in context of decay of money, and should not be read in isolation.
It is painful, but we should understand that every change in humanity used to be divided. There will be one side that fights for the system and another for a change. The brutal killings of scientists, artists and journalists (like the brutal murder of Gouri Lankesh) may be seen in the context of demand for a change and the natural inertia against it.
More clearer resolve and cleaner understanding that we are leading humanity to its next level gives us more confidence to fight back against the forces for inertia.
Some Words of Wisdom ..
Most of the eminent thought leaders were skeptical on the future of humanity under nationalism (based on boundary, cast, religion, language or even political groupings in the name of change). The next level of nationalism is the merger of state with profit houses. We generally experience it as fascism or autocracy.
The profit houses take over the state and its puppets emerges as great authoritative leaders or governing groups. All the virtues of freedom, democracy and humanity becomes vulnerable at this stage as hatred and fear runs the show. Understanding the dishonest egos of nation states, several well-known personalities became critics of nationalism.
Even during our independence struggle (that resulted in formal formation of Indian nationalism), Gandhiji was very careful to keep him away from violent nationalism by saying “My love of nationalism is that my country may become free, and if need be, the whole of the country die, so that the human race may live”.
Albert Einstein is being quoted as saying “Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind” and “Nationalism, on my opinion, is nothing more than an idealistic rationalization for militarism and aggression”.
Noam Chomsky described it precisely by “Nationalism has a way of oppressing others”.
Rabindra Nath Tagore categorically rejected it by saying “Neither the colorless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship, is the goal of human history”.
We are evolving !
The relationship between humanism, democracy and nationalism is tricky and is still evolving.
Our duty is to understand and take sides to lead it to next level. We have tried to understand how nationalism evolved. We also tried to examine why it is counterproductive on humanism in general and democracy in particular during our times.
A clearer understanding and debate on how and why, should help us to dream about more true ideas that strengthen humanity.
Kennedy quoted (or misquoted) Dante: “The hottest places in heaven are reserved for those who are silent during the great moral crisis”.
Time plots the moral crisis before us indicating the need of change, it is our responsibility to choose the right stand to take humanity to its next stage.
Reference
Internet Wiki Pages, online version of Encyclopedia Britannica and books like “How to Read Marx’s Capital”.
Thanks
To my mother (Kadijamma) and niece (Sara Siyaudeen), who helped me to correct sentences, grammar.
Originally written from Prathidwani 2017 Essay Competition
