Power, Magic and the Nation
Globalists, be they capitalist, communist, techist or environmentalist, can never win
Is love of country and family a tricky thing for you? Me neither. But how, if at all, are we to value it at a time when, we are told, problems, powers and principalities are global rather than national? If they are truly global, what room does that leave for democracy, let alone national autonomy?
Does a common-or-garden patriotism now imply a disdain for international problems? If so, when did that happen?
Related question: is democracy just a fig-leaf veiling the real exercise of power by a new bunch of uber-wealthy, uber-powerful people and institutions which all just happen to think the same way about what is good for us?
I started sketching out this essay weeks ago, never suspecting that I’d be completing it at a time when we’ve had a change in monarch and government, when we’ve seen an overt attack by a tech tyrant on the defence of free speech, and that a higher-rate tax cut trivial or even positive in its direct fiscal implications brought down public condemnation from the IMF, or that a change in fundamental UK policy sparked hysterical selling frenzy against Sterling.
(BWT. Can I recommend another read of ‘Why It’s All Happening Now’. I concluded then: “And so a world which believes it has a structural ‘savings surplus’ will discover it has to compete for resources. Truly, a mess like this has taken decades to arrange. The first challenge will be to survive. The second challenge will be to muster the courage and imagination to embark on the re-build. It’s a long march, folks.”
It’s happening to Britain today, but it will be happening throughout the world soon enough.)
If nothing else, it warns you that the issues of national identity and political accountability are both complex and urgent, and in very active play right now. This I didn’t expect. So buckle up.
The tone of hysterical condemnation of those believing in the importance of nation, and democratic accountability, first surfaced in all its volcanic fury when the British voted to leave the European Union. The fear and loathing this still generates among Britain’s power-adepts is strange indeed. Love of the EU rarely seems the motivating factor (and, seriously, how could it?), rather it seems fuelled by loathing of Britain. Or perhaps not Britain necessarily, but the idea of a nation-state accountable to its people. In this case, Britain.
Certainly, the same collegium of institutions and people seem to be the ones reacting with similar hysterical aggression to Kwasi Kwarteng’s partial-budget. It is not ‘a Remainer conspiracy’, but just an extension of their shared instinctive loathing of national accountability.
Facing such powerful enemies, is the cause of identity grounded in family and nation already lost? Would this be a sort of pyschic ground-clearance allowing for new overlords to make our homes theirs?
Paul Kingsnorth, whose Abbey of Misrule I recommend, thinks determinedly about the nation and about patriotism. He's been on the subject for years, and his thoughts are very challenging. At the one extreme, he laments the way that, he contends, modernity has displaced home, hearth and nation as the focus of our identity. But at the other extreme, he is profoundly wary of where a 'blood and soil' obsessive identification with nation can lead. His 2014 novel The Wake is a long exploration of how the one can lead disastrously to the other.
His fear, expressed in a thousand powerful ways, it that the modern world has abandoned spirit, and with it home, hearth, nation. Sometimes he calls this secular modernity the Grid, or Progress, or Moloch, or the technium.
At his most extreme, Mr Kingsnorth fears we live in a truly Satanic age, or perhaps just the age of the anti-Christ. 'Imagine for a moment that some force is active in the world which is beyond us. Perhaps we have created it. Perhaps it is independent of us. Perhaps it created itself and uses us for its ends. Either way, in recent years that force seems to have become manifest in some way we can’t quite put our finger on, and has stimulated the craziness of the times.'
It reminds me of Walter de la Mare's short story 'All Hallows'.
But there is this difference: the forces challenging and eroding the power of the nation-state are all-too visible, all too powerful. One can say they are legion. The US tech tyrants are quite content, or almost quite content, to practice their own alien forms of extra-judicial punishment on those who attract their ire, without explanation or process. But they are only the most overt tyrants, given licence by other super-national bodies and organizations which at least for now may retain some power over them.
(Or do they? I can imagine a panicked Mark Zuckerberg attempting to rectify a particularly outrageous piece of censorship over-reach only to have the AI which actually controls Facebook issue the soft categoric: ‘I’m sorry, Mark, I can’t do that’. )
I have wanted to challenge this profoundly pessimistic account of nation, society, humanity, because I don't really believe it. I think the notions of family, home and nation live as powerfully in us as they ever did. More so probably than they did in the terrible dog-eat-dog world of the 17th century.
But perhaps it is China which provides the ultimate recent example of how ancient allegiances to family, home, faith and country will survive even the most extraordinary attempts to eradicate them with violence (ie, the Cultural Revolution).
To Mr Kingsnorth’s surprise, the public rites surrounding the Queen's death provided an unexpected jolt of hope. As the overhead camera looked down on the coffin from on high it exemplified for a moment, for him, the way "authority, in this model of society, flows downward, from God, and into the monarch, who then faces outward with that given power and serves - and rules - his or her people." This is the fundamental concept underpinning sacral authority has been, he contends, universally accepted.
"Pharaonic Egypt recognised it, and so did Native America. The Anglo-Saxons believed it and so did the Japanese Emperors. Cultures large and small, imperial and tribal, on all continents over many millennia, have shared some version of this understanding of what the world is. Power, it tells us - politics, it insists - is no mere human confection, because the world is no mere human confection. There is something - someone - else beyond it, and if we are silent, in these cathedrals or in these forests, we can hear it still."
Until now.
"The understanding now is that authority flows upward from below, from ‘the people’ and into the government, which supposedly governs on our behalf. In this model there is no sacred centre, and there is no higher authority to whom we answer. . . . There is only raw power, rooted in materiality, which in itself has no meaning beyond what we ascribe to it. There is only efficiency. There is only management."
But look! "Watching the vast, snaking queue that all week has spread-eagled across London, as the crowds came to bow their heads before the coffin; watching the emotions on display today, and the massed crowds again across the country, bringing something to this event that perhaps they didn’t even understand themselves, I thought: no. We don’t really believe that there is nothing else. It is just what we think we have to say. Look: we believe in a bigger story. It is still there. It never left.'
He could, and I think should, have recognized this all along. For what he overlooks is that although we rarely make a fuss of it, the experience of the sacred or the numinous is very common, even now, and usually occurs in a local context to which we are bound. It is ever-harder to find the right words to express it, however, uncomfortable as we are with words like ‘god’, or ‘Jesus’.
Words, however, are not everything. Very often we can feel the mysterious or sacred potential in the landscape. To my eyes and soul, Britain's landscape has a proliferation of what I'm prepared to call 'sacral experiences'. Just to take one at random: can you honestly stand at the White Horse of Uffington and remain unmoved by something you don't fully understand?
For me personally, Yorkshire alone contains enough places I experience as ‘sacred in some way’ to fill a whole Bible (Gregory’s Minster, Kirkdale; Briggflatts Meeting House etc).
Sacral locations are not confined to Britain (obviously). China's geomancers have left them all over their empire, surviving both Cultural Revolution and subsequent barbarous restorations. Some are so powerful, even the Chinese Communist Party trembles at them - why do you think the tomb of the First Emperor remains untouched? Japan's woodlands and waterfalls feel sacred. You also feel their absence: so far Barbados, though beautiful, seems genuinely unconsecrated. Maybe it is to do with the rich mythic settlement of history.
Nor is the locus of an experienced national identity confined to the country’s geography. Like it or not - and again, I’m prepared to bet the same group do not like it - national consciousness surfaces in music. To divorce it for a moment from discussions of British patriotism, every well-listened music-lover will immediately distinguish music from Germany/Austria, from French, or Italian or Finnish or American. In each of these cases, there is in the spirit of the music, and consequently its construction and narrative, a particular identifiable ‘national’ character.
It goes without saying that it is there too in British, and particularly English, music.
How could it be otherwise. As Ralph Vaughan Williams (RVW) put it in his 1934 lecture ‘National Music’: “Is it not reasonable to suppose that those who share our life, our history, our customs, our climate, even our food, should have some secret to impart to us which the foreign composer, though he be perhaps more imaginative, more powerful, more technically equipped, is not able to give us? This is the secret of the national composer, the secret to which he only has the key, which no foreigner can share with him and which he alone is able to tell to his fellow countrymen.”
RVW says these necessarily national characteristics make it wrong to think of music as ‘the universal language’. That is a phrase made up by ‘some misguided thinker, probably first cousin to the man who invented the unfortunate phrase “a good European” ‘
Sincerity in music-making is what matters, and nothing gives RVW earache more than a pretend cosmopolitanism. “There is nothing in the world worse than sham good music” says Vaughan Williams, and he is undoubtedly right, as Tony Britten’s UEFA anthem so forcefully demonstrates.
You may wish to add your observations of the ‘national’ characteristics in other fields of art: poetry, drama, painting, film. Sport too: national rugby teams have their own characteristics which re-emerge doggedly across the generations despite attempts to eradicate them. Cooking. Transport.
Weather.
Experiences, feelings, ways of thinking and expressing those thoughts, are ineradicably ‘national’ in character, which I expect are practically indelible even in the long-term. Attempts at homogenisation on a cultural level, let alone on economic or political lines, will have to negotiate with and respect these differences if they are to achieve any success. In other words, to succeed at all, the globalization project must remain small, partial, unhegemonic.
This is why, despite all claims to the contrary, ‘woke’ hasn’t won, and won’t and can’t: the world has neither need nor space for an alternative post-sacral ordering principle.
By extension, those claiming or demanding an ever-smaller space for national political accountability will forever discover to their disappointment that their demands will be rejected. Rejected either by omission or commission.
Today, what Britain faces is, in part, the fear and loathing of those who are naively wedded to the assumptions that global hegemonic forces can, will and must flatten all before them. They got so close. . . .
Power, Magic and the Nation
I see nothing wrong whatsoever with 'blood and soil' nationalism if that is a euphemism for ethnonstionalism rather than the civic variety. Nationalism or patriotism cannot be separated from ethnicity and culture. There is no England or Britain without native English and British people.