Interesting and thought-provoking! But, similar to how he mentions that the predominance of monogamy in the modern world might be a result of cultural evolution, this line from the end raises a question:
"Perhaps we should accept gracefully the inevitable sundering of ‘national’ cultures, and learn to operate within a truly multicultural world."
Well, maybe...or maybe those few national cultures that persist, will find that they can steamroll over the fragmented once-were-nations that cannot muster the joint effort to resist them. There's a reason large states arose in the first place, to displace hunter-gatherer tribes, and it is precisely this. If you don't maintain a national culture, you're not going to have anyone willing to fight to defend it. Which, if every single nation has that happen, maybe that's fine. But if even one persists, it will find itself an elephant in a world of mice, who wonder why no one else is willing to defend them when they are trampled on.
The data doesn't support that: The predominant, most prosperous, safest, most free societies have been the internationalist ones, in Europe, the US, Canada, Japan, S Korea, etc etc.
There are strong hypotheses to back the data: Nationalism divides people at arbitrary borders, limiting their ability to travel, trade, and work together. Nationalists isolate themselves. We know well from economics that trade is best when it depends on economic merit, not on which artificial border you happen to live behind; it helps buyers and sellers - nobody will buy your goods if you don't buy theirs. Imagine science without internationalism. Imagine the IT industry - FOSS has contributors world-wide; the web was developed in Switzerland by a Brit, and shared by the world. Linux in Finland, etc.
In terms of security, the nationalists have only themselves; the internationalists have each other, such as the most successful and powerful alliance in history, NATO. Imagine the Cold War without internationalism in Europe, as the USSR took one small country after another. The free world's enormous advantage in military competition with China is that they have each other, they have allies.
Nationalism has a horrible track record, creating war and poverty, and the underlying curse, hate - arbitrarily, purposefully created - often by leaders using nationalism for their own power: 'be loyal to the nation, and I am the nation, I make the decisions'. Many, including Churchill, blamed nationalism for WWII (which is why the survivors built the UN and the predecessor of the EU).
The internationalist world has produced freedom, security, and prosperity at orders of magnitude beyond what humanity ever experienced before. It seems bizarre to me to trade that in for the old nationalist ideologies.
In what sense is Japan "internationalist"? Their culture is nationalist, and more closed to foreigners compared to other countries.
In their relatively recent past they were outright xenophobic. It is my (possibly outdated) understanding that even today they make distinction between descendants of Japanese born abroad and the "true" Japanese, to the point they have different words to tell them apart.
> It is my (possibly outdated) understanding that even today they make distinction between descendants of Japanese born abroad and the "true" Japanese, to the point they have different words to tell them apart.
And the USA distinguishes "natural-born american citizens" from "american citizens". The law in America forbids a foreign-born citizen from being president.
Similarly, English also has a special term, a "natural-born citizen", to distinguish this difference. Having different phrases for two different things doesn't really mean much.
By contrast, according to the wikipedia page on the subject (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_Japanese), Japan has no restrictions on foreign-born citizens. They can become Prime Minister and hold other political offices. The difficulties lie in gaining such a citizenship, not in what you can legally do once you have it.
I do think there are valid points you could make about how Japan's policies and culture have resulted in relatively low foreign immigration, but the talk of "having different words for things" and types of citizenship doesn't further your point nor seem based in fact.
> The law in America forbids a foreign-born citizen from being president.
This is incorrect. John McCain was born in a foreign country, but he was born to American citizen parents, which made him natural born anyway. Someone who was born to noncitizen parents, but born within the geographical US would also be considered natural born. The US definition of "natural born citizen" is a lot more flexible than what most countries will allow even for naturalized citizens.
Which was a mildly interesting law review topic pulling in various aspects of English common law and practices--although, had it became relevant, there is little doubt that "McCain isn't natural born" would have been widely seen as a fringe position.
"In some sense" is what gets interesting :-) But I agree that both fall into an interesting (if probably not ultimately very important) area of ambiguity in US constitutional law and common law.
The arguments as I recall were basically two-fold: 1.) At the time, it was the Canal Zone (which wasn't quite US soil but maybe close enough) and 2.) There were some long-standing common law precedents related to agents of the king, diplomats, etc.
US law has traditionally held that if both parents are US citizens then the child is a natural-born US citizen regardless of where in the world they are born. This was specifically in support of diplomats, military, etc. I am not aware of a context in which this wasn’t true.
The only complicated area in law is when only a single parent is a US citizen and the child is born overseas. This was a consequence of the 20th century reality that the US had vast numbers of military personnel stationed globally.
If either of your biological parents is an American citizen, you are automatically a natural born American citizen, regardless of where geographically you are born.
This is why Obama, McCain and Ted Cruz are eligible for the Presidency
The phenomenon the previous post was responding to of kikokushijyo (ie returnee kids) is pretty strange and unique to somewhere like Japan (or other closed highly mannered social groups like 19th C. British aristocracy) with complicated social rules and obligations that one is supposed to internalize from very early in life. Kids are bullied or denied certain opportunities essentially because Japanese culture is so peculiar that they are in an uncanny valley of looking, speaking and being Japanese but not knowing all the rules perfectly.
Japan actually has much narrower restrictions on who can become head of state than the US does. It just doesn't combine that role with the head of government.
Ah, thanks for clarifying my understanding of the "natural born citizen" rule. I was operating under this misconception due to the whole nonsensical birthplace drama around Obama's election, and I appreciate the nudge to read up on it.
It seems like I was operating under a false understanding of it, and I'll remember that for the future.
> Japan actually has much narrower restrictions on who can become head of state than the US does. It just doesn't combine that role with the head of government.
Sure, fine, you can only be the Emperor of Japan by blood, just like you can only be "The Queen" (as recognized by the UK, Canada, and Australia) by blood. It's a ceremonial role, and I don't think it impacts my overall point.
The US rules are not only complicated but they have changed over time, and the determination is usually based on the rules at the time you were born. If both parents are American, or you are born in the US, it is pretty straightforward and mostly always has been. If only one parent is American and you are born overseas, “natural-born” citizenship is not automatic and depends on other factors. Having a single American parent is not sufficient on its own to be a natural-born American under US law.
This is why it became a thing with Obama. If he was born in the US then it was unambiguous. If he was born outside the US then the aggregate circumstances of his birth had a legitimate potential, under the rules at the time, to deem him not “natural-born”. It isn’t terribly surprising that people with a political angle were going to litigate that in the court of public opinion, and the vast majority of Americans have no idea how those citizenship laws work.
> True, though there is no clear consensus on what the former means, it is clear it is narrower than the latter.
No the consensus is pretty clear and only gets muddied up when there are political reasons for trying to invalidate someone's presidential candidacy. To become a citizen involves going through a "naturalization" process. A natural-born citizen is anyone whose citizenship came by birth rather than through naturalization. There may have been some ambiguity when the Republic was young, borders were porous, and documentation to track births and deaths and such was scarce or easily forged. But today we've got that all pretty much locked down.
> the USA distinguishes "natural-born american citizens" from "american citizens". The law in America forbids a foreign-born citizen from being president.
The US has one law making that distinction, and another in the Constitution guaranteeing equal protection under the law, which controls every other law. Beyond a doubt, and one minor, extremely narrow case, the US does not distinguish.
I think he tried to avoid mentioning heritages. He would have had to throw in a dozen racism terms to explain it in full and that might not be for the best interest here.
Clearly you want to introduce them, without introducing them yourself - and so putting them in someone else's mouth. I agree with the other thought; please take the racism elsewhere.
Japan has scarce natural resources. It's also situated on an archipelago. Without international (and, importantly, overseas) trade, it ceases to exist as an industrial civilization. The necessity (and, yes, in contradiction with the traditionally collectivist and exclusive character of its people's culture) of international relations to the survival of the 21st century Japanese state is well-known, and the source of no small amount of consternation on the part of those concerned with the notion of a Japanese identity. I'm not educated or familiar enough with their cultural dynamics to say for certain, but I can imagine the exclusivity of Japanese identity being partially a reaction to its precariousness.
> In what sense is Japan "internationalist"? Their culture is nationalist, and more closed to foreigners compared to other countries.
That's a fair point, but we need to talk about matters of degree. What is happening today and since WWII is nothing like what happened before. Japan isn't about to invade neighbors and butcher them, and that is in part an intentional outcome of the postwar order - to rid the world of (that kind of) nationalism.
Japan's constitution even forbids having a military, a clause strongly supported for generations (unless something changed very recently).
It is outdated indeed. First, take care not to mix what Japan is and what Japanese random people in the streets think it is. Japan is a Chinese spinoff from the first millenia, an american-influenced economical force with a heavy (relatively) Russian illegal immigration.
My point is going to be weird, but I'm now Chinese having been born in the north of France, and my skin happens to be white. Even China, a country most would say is nationalist, is not monocultural - it just moved the needle of what they claim is a culture (love of the land, obedience to the party, instead of language, color purity, ethnic roots) and embrace the fact they are diverse while trying to enforce an interface (mandarin). And, well, we're not an internationalist democracy by your definition but probably a multicultural dictatorship by your other definitions. And I think Japan is a lot less archetypal than you (and to be fair, communist propaganda too) think, as well.
I'm not sure what you think "my definitions" are, but do note I specifically mentioned Japan and not China. I never said or claimed anything about China.
This is a wishful idea and on the surface very captivating. The problem is that of doves and hawks in the social dynamics and evolutionary theory. Referencing Richard Dawkins' thesis, population comprising of only doves - this internationalist world view - would lend itself to extremely high probability of hawks rising to exploit. A single hawk has so much advantage that it leap frogs the doves in population growth. The total equilibrium of the population shifts from mostly doves towards a hawk-dominant population. This balance oscillates over evolutionary periods.
I suspect something like that is going on in the world of nations. 1970-2010 enjoyed great success in globalisation. It bankrupted American manufacturing industry, created the rust belt and asymmetrical trade practices exploited the dove-dominanet globalist society. Remember, even today, China does not allow western companies to exist independently. They're forced to work with a domestic 50/50 joint venture to operate in China. We're seeing a huge rise in authoritarian regimes and I suspect aforementioned imbalance is the reason.
These are sophisticated words, but I the argument is about strawpeople (hawks, doves, "population of only doves", etc.) and provides no factual basis. The facts are that nobody in history has been more secure.
> 1970-2010 enjoyed great success in globalisation. It bankrupted American manufacturing industry, created the rust belt and asymmetrical trade practices exploited the dove-dominanet globalist society
The free world did extremely well in that period, including the US. It was the biggest, most productive, wealthiest economy in the world, 'won' the Cold War, and became the sole superpower, all as freedom and democracy expanded around the world.
Of course it is imperfect, imbalanced, and could (and should) be done better. But it has been the most successful international order ever, with no competition in sight.
Also, the rust belt began rusting back in the 1950s.
Those states had strong national cultures but an internationalist foreign policy outlook. Most European countries are ethnic national states with one dominant culture. The only real not ethnostates are the UK and maybe...Bosnia?
There are Different flavors of nationalism, but I don’t think you can lump them all as isolationist
> Those states had strong national cultures but an internationalist foreign policy outlook.
Are you using the past tense for a reason? And don't forget trade, the lack of passports or border controls in the EU, etc.
> Most European countries are ethnic national states with one dominant culture.
Don't forget Spain, Italy, and I'm sure we can come up with many more. Clearly they all have participated in the EU for decades, as well as many other international groupings.
> There are Different flavors of nationalism, but I don’t think you can lump them all as isolationist
It depends on how you define it; I was using the (implied, as I understood it) definition in the parent of my comment. If we define nationalism as 'roots for the Olympic team', then we are talking about something completely different.
There is, no question, such a thing as too much preoccupation with a national culture. But, the article posits that a national culture more or less evaporating, is not a problem. All of the nations you mention ("Europe" is not a nation) have had to fight to maintain their identity (and both Europe and Japan have relied on US military protection for a couple generations now). It should not happen often, and if you have too many enemies you are probably misusing or ignoring "soft power". But, if you have no national culture which you find important (enough to defend), then another nation will take advantage of that fact.
> But, if you have no national culture which you find important (enough to defend), then another nation will take advantage of that fact.
Modern militaries don't defend cultures - fighting for "American ideals" or because "they hate our freedoms" is just propaganda. Militaries defend assets, territories and wage war for national interests, and their ability to do so is entirely orthogonal to their nation's sense of culture, or lack thereof.
I don't think it's orthogonal though. You can argue which are the true goals of modern war, and I may find myself in agreement with you, but you can't convince people to support a war "for assets"; not unless you convince them those assets mean something to them, their culture, their religion, their patriotism, their way of life, something. So symbolism and the sense of the "group" (culture) remains very important.
What "not wanting a goddamned military invasion" isn't enough of a motivation for defensive military? There is no need to go that abstract for actual defense as opposed to the old Orwellian euphemism in the Department of Defense.
Perhaps, but how many purely defensive militaries do you know of? If a single soldier steps outside the country's borders to do anything but prevent a demonstrable imminent invasion of their country (so peacekeeping, preemptive strikes, fighting terrorism don't count) then it's not a defensive military.
>fighting for "American ideals" or because "they hate our freedoms" is just propaganda
Close... It's a narrative. And without a compelling narrative, no one is going to sweat and toil to make your spreadsheet tracker of assets look pretty.
Those are only the classical tried-and-true narratives. There are always many narratives, and if one of the old ones happens to fail, new ones will rise to take their place.
> All of the nations you mention ("Europe" is not a nation) have had to fight to maintain their identity (and both Europe and Japan have relied on US military protection for a couple generations now).
When have they fought to maintain their identity? They fought for conquest or freedom. Japan, Germany, and Italy lost WWII, but their identities didn't (substantially) change.
Imperialist Communist dictatorships try to destroy the identities of conquered countries and 'foreign' internal regions, including the USSR and China (Tibet, Xinjing). That fails spectacularly - when the USSR collapsed, all the ethnic identities reappeared.
Interestingly, in free democracies, such as the US, ethnic identities tend to vanish. I read one study (many years ago) that said for most immigrants, in the third generation, only ~5% speak the original native language and (IIRC) ~80% marry outside the ethnic group.
It's hard to be more wrong when postulating that USSR tried to destroy ethnic identities.
USSR took a centrally run Russian Empire and carved a dozen of ethnic states from it - ones such as Belarus and Azerbaijan. These were de-jure countries with right of secession and USSR rouble bill featured writings in all of these countries' official languages.
When talking about Eastern Europe, USSR did some rebordering but it never prevented any of countries from having a language, a government and they got to keep a national flag.
> It's hard to be more wrong when postulating that USSR tried to destroy ethnic identities.
Their propaganda insisted it didn't exist. They literally moved communities across Asia to eradicate it. They insisted they were harmonious, unlike the divided US (sound like a familiar story?). There's a book by Daniel Patrick Moynahan which predicted the breakdown when the USSR disappeared.
> with right of secession
:D
> USSR did some rebordering but it never prevented any of countries from having a language, a government
:D They never prevented them from having a government that submitted to Moscow. Ask Hungary and Czechoslovakia, not to mention Tito, about what happens otherwise.
Russians did not get to keep a national flag. Russians only got their land and their souls given away to newfound nationalistic republics here and there, with no say about it.
Your comment shows the total futility of catering to ethnic minorities - they would eat through any amount of privilege and then backstab at the first opportunity. This was unexpected to USSR and Yugoslavia alike.
The success of China as an authoritarian state relies on not doing that mistake.
> free democracies, such as the US, ethnic identities tend to vanish
The US had legally mandated ethnic identities until 1967. It does tend to flatten other identities into "black" and "white", but that doesn't mean they've disappeared entirely.
> When have they fought to maintain their identity?
In case of Czech and Slovak Republic, at the very least in the second half of the 19th century, during WW I, and during WW II.
> Japan, Germany, and Italy lost WW II, but their identities didn't (substantially) change.
Another red herring; it wasn't the intention of victors to change the identities of Japan, Germany, and Italy, but it was DEFINITELY an intention of Germany to remove the identities of their Slavic neighbors. Had Germany won WW II, the losers wouldn't have been anywhere as lucky.
"Imperialist Communist dictatorships try to destroy the identities of conquered countries and 'foreign' internal regions, including the USSR and China (Tibet, Xinjing). That fails spectacularly - when the USSR collapsed, all the ethnic identities reappeared."
I'm pretty sure this stuff happens in countries that aren't communist nor dictatorships, too. See the treatment of First Nations people in the US and Canada for examples.
That last line doesn't tell us much unless you can compare it to what happens in other countries: I'm guessing that in most places, the outcome is similar. And to be absolutely fair: My grandmother didn't learn Arabic because her mother insisted the children not speak anything but English. They had moved from Syria to the US long ago. Realistically, it was so they did not get treated badly. No wonder her children and grandchildren (me) do not speak Arabic.
> I'm pretty sure this stuff happens in countries that aren't communist nor dictatorships, too. See the treatment of First Nations people in the US and Canada for examples.
Are we going to bring up slavery too? It's 2021.
> My grandmother didn't learn Arabic because her mother insisted the children not speak anything but English. They had moved from Syria to the US long ago. Realistically, it was so they did not get treated badly. No wonder her children and grandchildren (me) do not speak Arabic.
That is a common story, actually. Again, the immigrants want to erase the ethnic distinctions (to a degree, of course).
> Imperialist Communist dictatorships try to destroy the identities of conquered countries and 'foreign' internal regions, including the USSR and China (Tibet, Xinjing). That fails spectacularly - when the USSR collapsed, all the ethnic identities reappeared.
To be fair the USSR had scarcely 3 generations to make this work and they were nominally committed to respecting the cultures of the nations they subsumed, they just wanted to eradicate all the ideologically 'incorrect' aspects of cultural expression. China is likely to be much more successful if it has another 40 or 50 years because they will have successfully conducted a complete ethnic cleansing of Tibet and Xinjiang, which the remaining ethnic population there reduced to a discriminated against curiosity.
Historically plenty of subnational identity groups DID get successfully wiped out or have it be near enough to not matter. Germany, France, and Italy, for example were all the products of a big nation-building project that involved standardizing linguistic differences (sometimes even forcing German speakers to switch to French and vice versa) through public education and other state interventions.
In Europe it's hard to disentangle the nation-building process (as a cultural thing) from the formation of the modern, industrial, bureaucratic state (as a technological and social thing) because they both happened at the same time. We see the same processes play out with state-formation and nation building in the developing (post-colonial) world and if you apply the same trends back to what was happening in Europe around the start of the 100 years war it's a little easier to see the commonalities.
But we can see examples in Spain, where the state didn't get quite as advanced as in France or Germany until after WWII, and there still are several sub-nationalities that never got fully absorbed, like Catalonia or the Basque region. But once upon a time many of these https://i.redd.it/qw2f5wir7mq31.jpg would have been considered different identity groups, with the distinctions between them considered as salient or more salient than national identity (though probably less salient than whether you were catholic or protestant).
You are conflating internationalism with globalism.
Globalists believe that the time of Westphalian nations is over and everyone should live in one big borderless capitalist utopia ruled by global institutions/MNCs.
Internationalists believe in bilateral diplomacy and trade between sovereign nations, sometimes through international institutions like the UN. Internationalists value national sovereignty.
The key difference is that the basic unit of internationalism is the nation, while the basic unit of capitalist globalism is the individual or corporation.
Secondly, nationalism does not have a horrible track record. America was incredibly prosperous in the "big government" era of the mid 20th century. If 2021 USA existed in 1941, it almost certainly would not have effectively waged war across the Atlantic and Pacific. Once the global capitalists took power in the 70s, things have been going downhill every since. Nationalism got replaced with the fake performative "nationalism" of Reagan, et al.
Meanwhile, strong nations are currently on the up and up. Much to the chagrin of the global capitalists.
> Secondly, nationalism does not have a horrible track record. America was incredibly prosperous in the "big government" era of the mid 20th century.
That is conflating two clearly different definitions of nationalism.
The nationalism I'm talking about led to WWI, WWII, Bosnia, Rwanda, etc. It has nothing to do with what you are describing:
I've never heard an active government in economic affairs, such as the US in the mid-20th century, called 'nationalism'. Whatever you call it, it's a completely different thing, as other US policies were the opposite, purposely worked against, the actual nationalism that destroyed (and destroys) so many.
Nationalism was a secondary factor in WW1 (the elites failed in their alliances, and later used Nationalism as a recruiting tool, but it was not a driver), and was not related to Bosnia and Rwanda which were ethnic wars.
I think you have a misunderstanding of what the term 'Nationalism' means.
USA already had its genocidal expansionist moment as a nation before the great World Wars. An entire continent ethnically cleansed and replaced with Anglo settlers. Of course, there was no one to hold it accountable as with the Germans and Japanese. This greatly inspired 20th century fascist thinkers around the world, including Adolf Hitler.
Lebensraum, spazio vitale, manifest destiny.
Even ignoring that, if "nationalism" does not include the massive public projects and social cohesion of 1930s-50s USA, then frankly you have a bizarre definition of nationalism.
> Meanwhile, strong nations are currently on the up and up. Much to the chagrin of the global capitalists.
The East Asian miracles were based on nationalist economic policies as well as strong nationalist policies more generally in areas like natonal solidarity, immigration policy, cultural output, etc. The last 20 years have been a golden age of nationalism in rising Asia, as well as a deepening globalism in stagnant Europe. Contrasting the two regimes is useful.
GDP per-capita growth 2000-2019 (ignoring Covid slump in 2020):
GDP growth of (actively) developing nations vs developed nations is not the best indicator here. Hard to compare.
Instead, compare China with India. Two huge developing nations with similar post-colonial timelines. But their post-2020 fortunes could not be more different. India was racked with the largest protests in human history last year, and then got hit hard by the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant. China contained COVID-19 spread and is politically very stable. What happened in the last 20 years? Simplification is that China took a hard nationalist route and sought to protect its sovereignty. See GFW. India remained very open.
Indeed, China is unified ethnically -- basically 91% Han and extremely nationalistic. India is divided into a patchwork. Modi has been attempting to harness Hindu nationalism, but only recently and not nearly as effectively as China, which was strongly nationalistic from Mao. It was always a proud ethno-state fighting to develop to overcome the century of national humiliation.
In terms of comparing developing and developed, a CAGR of 0.8% is anemic by any standard, particularly when you have the world's premier R&D centers, rule of law, etc. It is just not the case that poorer nations grow faster than richer nations -- most poor nations do not experience catch up growth at all. That the East Asian nations managed to do it really is a miracle, and they did it on the back of nationalism. It's not to be expected, and it's not the typical experience of low and middle income nations:
> That the East Asian nations managed to do it really is a miracle, and they did it on the back of nationalism.
It's worth noting that East Asian nations are not clones of each other. In the one I grew up in, I don't think nationalism played much of a role.
The government actively tries to foster a national identity but I don't think all that many people are buying into it - party due to the modus op of the government in my opinion; being a small nation the government has opted "being a leaf on the wind" pragmatism as its guiding principle and I believe it has rubbed off on (a significant percentage of) the people.
Raw pragmatism that involves toss aside anything that "doesn't work" isn't particularly compatible with dogmatic ideals of nationalism - i.e. people noticed the government isn't practicing what they preach.
> China is unified ethnically -- basically 91% Han and extremely nationalistic.
The Chinese people who have the freedom to express their views, in Taiwan and formerly in Hong Kong, weren't so nationalistic. Can you back up your assertion about the rest?
Also, nationalism is global trend; there is no correlation with whatever China does.
> It is just not the case that poorer nations grow faster than richer nations
I think you know that's not what anyone was saying.
"Simplification is that China took a hard nationalist route and sought to protect its sovereignty. See GFW. India remained very open."
I don't think this has nothing to do with anything really.
And frankly, India has been taking a harder nationalist/populist line in the last 20 years.
India and China are completely different places.
China is authoritarian, and ordered, there is reasonably effective central policy.
India is from a civic perspective a mess of inanity and corruption.
The relative 'openness' as measured in flow of goods, capital, information etc. isn't anything really. If India could magically impose the same constraints as China it would probably hurt them.
In fact, the argument could be made that those constraints actually hurt China as well.
What's wrong with protests? That is not political instability, unless you are a dictator.
> China contained COVID-19 spread and is politically very stable.
You have no idea, because there is no freedom to report otherwise.
> China took a hard nationalist route
Only under Xi. Before that, China spent decades opening up (since Deng), and much of China's growth came from adopting capitalism and free international trade. And before Deng, Mao was a hardline Communist, working with international Communists (though not always agreeing with Stalin).
It's primarily a qualitative comparison, not a statistical analysis. 1/3 the human population also.
> You have no idea, because there is no freedom to report otherwise.
You have to be intentionally obtuse to not glean that China has effectively contained COVID-19 at this point. Not only are 1.4B Chinese and tens of millions of foreigners on the conspiracy, but the entire global economic system as well!
> Only under Xi.
GFW started in 1997 as globalization was accelerating. Try again.
Developing economies will of course grow faster. Also, their economic success is generally credited to internationalism, especially the global markets for which they could manufacture goods, and the protection of the US and other Western countries (Taiwan, S Korea, Hong Kong, etc.).
> Developing economies will of course grow faster.
No, they don't. Their GDP is more volatile, but over prolonged periods of time, they do not grow any faster. Most developing nations do not grow any faster at all. Very few do (only about 7% of poor nations managed to rise to middle income nations since 1870 or since the nation came into existence[1]. And in the same time, middle income nations are twice as likely to become poor than to become high income[1]).
The idea that there is "convergence" in which poor nations rise to become middle income and then middle income rise to become rich nations is a myth.
Yet it's one of those "cockroach myths" that never seem to die, because it appeals to people's intuitions, even though the data is clear on this point. Today, development economists no longer speak of "convergence" but of "low income trap" and "middle income trap".
But what the East Asian nations did by breaking out of these traps was incredibly impressive and equally rare. Think of a prison of poverty that no one has been able to escape, and they managed to escape it. It's an amazing feat.
For example, see this research article with transition probabilities:
> The predominant, most prosperous, safest, most free societies have been the internationalist ones, in Europe, the US, Canada, Japan, S Korea, etc etc.
I can't speak about US, Canada, Japan, S Korea, etc etc., but Europe is the birthplace of the nation state. In fact the current state of Europe (such as for example the fact that my home country exists in the first place, and isn't instead a province of Germany or Austria) is a direct result of nationalism.
> Imagine science without internationalism. Imagine the IT industry - FOSS has contributors world-wide; the web was developed in Switzerland by a Brit, and shared by the world. Linux in Finland, etc.
A red herring. Dictatorships (such as USSR) censored international communication, but nation states did not.
>The internationalist world has produced freedom, security, and prosperity at orders of magnitude beyond what humanity ever experienced before.
- wouldn't be possible without being under the wing of the US
- most of them wouldn't even exist as independent states if they didn't have a nationalist period
all that distaste for nationalism would vanish the moment some tanks had showed up on their borders.
>Nationalism has a horrible track record, creating war and poverty, and the underlying curse, hate - arbitrarily, purposefully created - often by leaders using nationalism for their own power: 'be loyal to the nation, and I am the nation, I make the decisions'. Many, including Churchill, blamed nationalism for WWII (which is why the survivors built the UN and the predecessor of the EU).
every country in both world wars was nationalist. even the USSR had toned down commie stuff for the duration of WWII - which they called "The Great Patriotic War" in defense of "motherland", by the way.
> every country in both world wars was nationalist
I think this overstates the similarity to the point of meaninglessness. It's like saying Bezos and I both have money, so we're economically the same.
The US fought for freedom of Europeans (with some interest of their own). WWII was won by a massive internationalist alliance by the Allies, in fact - and that was the difference; nationalist Germany lacked the allies to match them; they were virtually alone; conquered countries are much different than free allies.
The US was well aware of threat to them. Had Germany won and really acquired whole Europe, it would be virtually impossible for US to defend themselves after.
It was not about abstract freedom or distaste toward racism. The danger was very real.
> The US was well aware of threat to them. Had Germany won and really acquired whole Europe, it would be virtually impossible for US to defend themselves after.
> It was not about abstract freedom or distaste toward racism. The danger was very real.
There were geopolitical threats to the US. The US could have defended itself physically - protected by an ocean and an enormous economy - but the belief then was that it would have been impossible to maintain democracy and freedom in a world controlled by the Nazis.
Freedom isn't abstract, it is a very real thing that people have taken great risks, suffered, and died for over centuries, all over the world (and to great success - look at how many people are free today compared with just 50 years ago). And Nazi horrors certainly motivated Americans, far beyond 'distaste'. I'm not sure how you can say otherwise.
> The US could have defended itself physically - protected by an ocean and an enormous economy - but the belief then was that it would have been impossible to maintain democracy and freedom in a world controlled by the Nazis.
The end of that sentence is in direct opposition to the begining. It is not clear at all the US could have defended itself. And it was not clear.
> And Nazi horrors certainly motivated Americans, far beyond 'distaste'.
Most of those became known only later. The most killings, the currently notorious ones happened in the latter years of the war. At the time, Nazi was not the only dictatorship existing. Stalin himself was one of allies.
> Freedom isn't abstract, it is a very real thing that people have taken great risks, suffered, and died for over centuries, all over the world
Yes. But quite rarely for the people of other country. At the time, US was racially segregated and not exactly free for large amount of population. Soviet Union was literal bloody dictatorship, right after purges. Nazi Germany had long term plan to kill even more people then soviet union and had plan to rule the world.
But the US involvement in war cant be reduced to the "lets make France free" only.
> At the time, US was racially segregated and not exactly free for large amount of population. Soviet Union was literal bloody dictatorship, right after purges. Nazi Germany ...
We're comparing segregation in the US to the Soviets and Nazis? I made a mistake engaging here.
I can’t get into the US as a tourist without a visa, even though I’m a EU citizen, not sure how internationalist the US really is. Maybe from the inside the perspective is different.
The US requires visas, therefore it is hardline nationalist? The US has free trade and (usually) an essentially open border with Canada, so does that make the country hardline internationalist? Which is it?
Yes, restricting access to your territory to actual international people makes you less of an internationalist country, I fail to see the contradiction in that.
A bit worse than wrong because your postulating 'data' that fairly clearly indicates the opposite of what you are saying. Also there are some serious misunderstandings here.
China is 'a free society' and 'internationalist'?
(Han) China has always been the opposite of 'free', which of course is a modern concept, that's not a judgement, just what it is. And they have not really ever been 'internationalist' only just recently joining the internationalist order, and vaguely so.
But that aside:
China, Japan and Korea, if we were to apply our reasoning objectively to them as we do ourselves, are objectively 'far right ethno-nationalist' states.
They are technically, quite fascist. I wouldn't want to use that label in normal discussion as I don't want to trigger or flame war, but in all reality, this is the fact.
All three have very, very strong national narratives about who they are, their origin, their superiority (to greater or lesser extent). They are ethnocentric culturally (i.e. a Black person in Korea might be very respected, but nevertheless considered 'not Korean').
Their religion, elite, and culture tie together, literally in Japan with the God Head Emperor, and in all three places elite families ruling by long held extra-governmental power networks.
'Samsung' is not a corporate formation that we would understand in North America, though Europeans might understand it a bit.
Japan and especially China historically have conquered and assimilated vast territories in the vein of de-facto superiority, some of this goes on today in E. China and Tibet.
This is not a condemnation or anything of the sort, it's obviously complicated, it's just what it is.
But those nations are the furthest thing from 'internationalist' in anything but the modern, economic sense with respect to trade and some institutions.
Europe, historically, has had fuzzy political lines, but they bounce around and generally land along ethnic borders.
Yugoslavia did not break up into random political territories, rather, ethnic one's. Same with Hapsburg Empire. Same with Soviets. Etc.
Scandinavia is not a hodge-podge: most of the ethnic Swedes live under the same flag. Not all, but most.
Obviously, especially on the continent, it's not so clear - yes - German speakers are scattered a bit in Poland, France and Czech - but they are overwhelmingly in Germany/Austria. That there are lot of 'fuzzy lines' doesn't mean lines do not exist.
"The internationalist world has produced freedom, security, and prosperity at orders of magnitude beyond what humanity ever experienced before. It seems bizarre to me to trade that in for the old nationalist ideologies."
This statement implies a misunderstanding of what 'Internationalist Order' and what it means.
The 'Internationalist Order' is literally about 'Nation States' cooperating in some reasonable, common ground for trade and security. If anything, that 'order' is predicate upon the very notion of Nation States, it's literally part of the definition.
'The International Order' reinforces the notion of Nation State, and indirectly, nationalism.
It's literally in the word: 'Inter'+'Nationalist'.
Canada, US and Brazil are probably the leading examples of what 'pure' nation states are, i.e. not fully ethnocentric, and culturally more plural. I do believe there are material advantages here, but 'net net' I'm not so sure they are in the long-long term, I think it's more of a wash.
But even with that plurality 'Nationalism' is still quite strong: paradoxically (or maybe not) 'Overt Nationalism' is stronger in Canada and the US than it is in Europe, because of weak local social ties, it is actively encouraged in North America. Germans (and Han Chinese, Japanese, Koean) don't need a flag to know who they are, flag waving for them is something completely different as we learned in the last decade or so where they are finally allowing the 'don't wave flags because we don't want to seem like Nazis' taboo fade a bit.
I think the OP you are responding to is essentially correct, but the future is so much harder to predict.
Even as we travel more and are exposed to more, we have more well-defined and managed borders than ever before, and there are few places to just 'go to', so maybe there will be less diversity in change than there was before? It's so hard to say.
>> the predominant, most prosperous, safest, most free societies have been the internationalist ones...
I'm not sure there are rules to this. A lot of the narrative depends on how we define terms, and the story can be told in radically different ways.
For example, European and ME multiculturalism existed. The empires were multicultural, in various ways. Ottoman, austrohungrarian... Under these regimes, multiple national/religious/language groups coexisted in most major cities. Warsaw was barely 50% Polish at times. Istanbul 50% Turkish. Budapest, Etc.
In this telling, nationalism, liberalism, democracy & republicanism are the same movement. They're the anti-empire, anti-monarchy radicalism that ended multiculturalism. Nations were became self governing. This was followed by population exchange, ethnic cleansing and worse. WW2 shifted borders and populations until we were left with culturally homogeneous "nations." Jews during & after the holocaust, Germans of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and other post war population shifts & cleansing. The Greek/Turkish populations "exchanges." Cyprus dividing, more recently. Yugoslavia violently breaking into nation states. Multicultural societies that existed, often for centuries, under imperialism. Under nationalism, democratic or otherwise, that multiculturalism came under attack.
Much of the middle east current troubles, can also be seen as nationalism playing out after centuries of Ottomanisms. The multiculturalism of Bagdad, for example, is much diminished after every round of violence and war. Familiar story. Baghdad has been shedding diversity for a long time, as have many other post-empire cities.
>>Many, including Churchill, blamed nationalism for WWII (which is why the survivors built the UN and the predecessor of the EU)
You could also argue that the UN is a very strong pro- nation state force. The UN assumes that nations exist, everyone belongs to a nation state, that national sovereignty is supreme and that there are no other ways to be. You have to fit this framework to even exist, from the UN's perspective.
In any case... in my (this time) telling the multicultural, international order was empires. The force that brought this order down was "liberalism," which also, generally was closely linked to democratic mandates, republic-seeking, national liberation. National liberty came at the expense of non-national liberty.
I'm not making a case for empires. I'm just making a case for complexity of perspective. There is no "X leads to Y" in history.
Internationalist is code word for "we can auction off our need for an underclass to other nations so we don't actually have to address their cultural needs"
That is the basis of the international order since WWII based on the US economic resources (~50% of the world GDP around 1945, IIRC). But Europe and others have come a long way since then, work together (e.g., the EU!), and could clearly support themselves.
> How do you know someone's a European? They tell you all about how Europe is better than America?
> How do you know someone is american? They tell you all about how great America's freedom is?
That doesn't match my experience of many Americans and Europeans. It also doesn't seem to fit a definition of "incredibly nationalistic". Incredibly nationalistic leads countries to wars and massacres, such as in Bosnia, Rwanda, Germany in WWII, etc. The EU and the US aren't going to war or massacring anyone.
The term 'European' is a strong sign of modern internationalism.
What are your definitions for "nationalist" and "internationalist"? You seem to be using meanings which are not operative here or even meaningfully coherent.
For example, nationalism doesn't preclude cooperation or even immigration. That would be some extreme form of jingoism and isolationism that rarely exists. On the contrary, it is cooperation between diverse groups that leads to more fruitful results because of the differences in perspective. Internationalism understood as a homogenizing force could only lead to global provincialism and therefore the destruction of the very diversity that allowed fruitful collaboration and exchange in the first place.
In the case of the USSR, it backfired for a few reasons, one of which was the failure to impose a manufactured identity onto its conquered peoples in place of individual national and ethnic identities (ethnic identity came roaring back after its collapse). EU federalists are repeating the same mistake. "European" is not a real identity. No one would die to protect "Europe". No one speaks "European". It probably should come as no surprise that many significant figures in the federalist camp have communist pasts or sympathies (Barroso comes to mind; he was a Maoist in his youth).
If you want to point to empires, then what you find is that they were ruled by a dominant culture. Sure, the empire may have been multi-ethnic, there may have been a good deal of cultural exchange, and that dominant culture may have included members of various ethnic extractions, but those members of the ruling caste were assimilated into that culture, thus becoming part of a certain "nation". The Romans actually had a process for assimilating people into Roman culture. E.g. if you were Germanic, then you might be sent to Syria as part of the Roman Legion to keep you away from other members of your ethnic group. This would force you to learn Latin and to adopt Roman culture (probably not a bad deal for a Germanic person overall). The ruling caste unifies the empire, but they can only do that by setting the parameters within which the other ethnic groups can operate. This is like liberalism. The idea that liberalism is "culturally neutral" is ridiculous. Liberalism IS a culture. It does not tolerate anything that conflicts with liberalism.
All of this is to say that I'm not entirely sure the opposition as framed makes sense. But know that mass migrations tear apart societies and will only lead to catastrophe. The result will be a period of chaos followed by some formation of (potentially new) nations and empires in the wake of the old.
Isn’t the „Identity“ situation the reason why Afghanistan went back to the Taliban the moment the NATO left? I‘ve read[0] about it at least and apparently there was no real idea of a country called „Afghanistan“ among the citizens of the country.
> There's a reason large states arose in the first place, to displace hunter-gatherer tribes, and it is precisely this
That's a big leap, from the paleolithic world of 10 000 BC to the iron age armies of 1000 BC. Other things happened too: sedentism, agriculture, metals, buildings, money, writing, and so on. No doubt being able to feed and pay your soldiers made a big difference to their motivation!
This is a really silly, outdated world view. You don't need everyone to fight to defend countries now, we have autonomous fighter jets, satellites, nuclear submarines, robots that can do parkour while carrying hundreds of pounds of gear (machine guns, rocket launchers), remote control drones that can deliver predator missiles to targets across the globe. You don't need everyone to fight to defend countries anymore. You just need a faction of the population to be into militarism and nationalism and they'll be the warrior class that commands the robot armies that will wage the warfare of tomorrow.
And looking even more forward, as corporations replace/control the government (basically already happening), the corporations will mediate armed conflicts and facilitate global cooperation in the interest of global profits. Warfare will be waged via tariffs, sanctions, and embargoes.
Thanks for the optimistic world view! :) Well, if warfare does become entirely automated, I think you would still need a nation willing to pay for that, and also willing to run the risk of it when, say, another nation tries to pick off Hawaii or whatever.
Plus, warfare waged via tariffs, sanctions, and embargoes, by throwing it back into economics, would definitely require a feeling of national solidarity to stand up to it. If a supplier of oil, coal, lumber, iron ore, etc. declares an embargo until your country changes some policy, do voters tell their leaders to cave in to keep the supply coming, or do they tell them to be uncompromising and tighten their belts? If they have no real sense of national identity anyway, I think it would be harder to get them to tighten their belts.
> If you don't maintain a national culture, you're not going to have anyone willing to fight to defend it.
I have some doubt to this. As travel increases and salaries normalize across nations cultures are bound to meld whether people like it or not. Maintaining a national culture, at that point, will likely be looked on very negatively.
There are a lot of cultures around the world that have the same salary and travel as other cultures, and they have not melded. Perhaps it is because culture is something that specifically resists melding.
At the same time, some people's idea of what a culture is, or what is "melding" culture, are amorphous and ill-defined. Is McDonalds culture? Are the many regionally-specific dishes at McDonalds around the world a result of "melding" culture?
Is the Poutine at McDonald's in Canada a "melding" of culture? Or is it just Canadian culture expressed through a McDonalds? Is the Banana shake at McDonald's in Japan a "melding" of American and Japanese culture? Or is it actually just "McDonald's" culture, since it's offered in Great Britain and Italy?
I'll leave you this quote from the 1976 movie Network!:
Arthur Jensen: "You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear? You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU... WILL... ATONE!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel."
And yet, the single most expensive item ever created is... a painting.
Capitalism is an illusion. An overt simplification that doesn't even begin to describe the truth. Mathematics were discovered, numbers were forcibly taught to all children and now we all think we can see the matrix.
Throughout history, humans have been put to shame by how little we actually understood what was happening, especially compared to how much we thought we did.
> Maintaining a national culture, at that point, will likely be looked on very negatively.
Only by those making a particular salary, which is ultimately the cause of the great right-wing movements in most parts of the world, America, Europe, Asia, S America, etc.
There are two classes forming... a globalist class where there is no national culture, just an international one, and nationalism is a dirty word. And a nationalistic culture of all the 'deplorables', where patriotism is still a virtue.
An organization capable of steamrolling over nations need not be another nation. I could see huge international companies the like of Google having the might to fight nation states.
True that. If nations have no sense of national culture and identity, then corporations inevitably become more powerful because they are still able to operate in a coordinated fashion, by "virtue" of being directed by a single person.
Actually, I suppose a lack of national culture or sense of national identity would also weaken democracies more than dictatorships.
This is worth reading in its entirety. There's a fair amount of original thinking, including in the notes at the end.
His big point about subcultures is about scale. Most other writers about subcultures focus on behavior or alienation or something like that. This author's key point is that subcultures form a way to get out of competing with the entire planet.
The author’s absolutist dicta (“There is essentially no common ground…”, “ostracism means death”, ”People are absolutely obsessed with money”, “you can’t be truly successful in mainstream culture”) makes this essay sound foolish. Maybe Ayn Rand fans might like it. I couldn’t stop giggling.
The analysis of “older people” is a hoot and a half. I imagine the author striding about in his/her father’s bathrobe and carrying a broomstick, intoning wisdom. Maybe the author should talk to one or two (or a thousand) before theorizing.
The author’s world view seems to be centered around “success” as the primary motivation behind human behavior. I am also guessing that “success” means to the writer some degree of celebrity and money, and the more the better. The author should consider the possibility that such a world view is not deeply held by a large part of the population, or perhaps the grip that “success” holds does weaken with age. A trip to a hospice or assisted living center might be a worthwhile experience for the author.
And the key point is hardly original. That’s why the phrase “big fish in a small pond” has been around for so many decades…that particular motivation for developing/joining subcultures has been a thing for a long, long time. There are many other motivations, never mentioned by the author. This imbalance is another problem with the essay.
Some of the glossing over cultural differences did strike me as a bit naive (I maintain an American and Japanese anime fan are still very different), but the piece as a whole is poignant and very well written. I don’t think there’s a “key point,” rather than an explanation of one facet of modern society and some synthesis as to why these online subcultures have developed as they have. Astral Codex Ten (on Substack) has a piece in this vein: “Epistemically Minor Leagues.” If you’re not familiar, Gwern (OP) doesn’t so much “argue” a key point but rather explore ideas and document various internet cultural artifacts and ideas. It’s quite the rabbit hole. But yeah, this piece has quite a bit of insight still in my opinion, despite some minor - not flaws, but weirdness let’s say. It’s exploratory, not argumentative.
>The author should consider the possibility that such a world view is not deeply held by a large part of the population, or perhaps the grip that “success” holds does weaken with age.
This read resonates with me strongly. Especially that David Foster Wallace quote, about the sacrifices to get very good at one particular thing.
After my last job, I decided to go all in on the childhood dream as an indie game maker. I knew that most fail.
I had reasons to believe that I wouldn't. Revulsion with company feudalism made it enough.
I'm a year in. My tweets about my progress are in the top 10% among indie gamedevs on twitter.. Wishlist heuristics tell me that at release, I'll make about minimum wage(*).
The price in hours to get here has been so high that the economic calculus screams that I should give up.
The prices to self of the "right" way to survive still seem higher.
Hikikomori seem like they jumped out of the boat. They want to live, passive in their dream until the tide pulls them under. I don't think you can live serenely in the dream without acceptance of the tide.
I feel a certain kinship to that, the only difference is that I'm still swimming. How could the outcome ever be different though?
The outcome will be different if I can cobble enough flotsam together to make my own boat. Then I can go sailing with an eye out for the swimmers.
But money is just a tool to enable you to do what you want, so if you already can do what you want and earn enough money to get by, you win, in economic terms?
My hat is off to you, in any case. Especially with the highly competitive indie games markte. There are just so, so many competitors. I am afraid being successful also involves things that many game developers probably won't enjoy that much, like marketing.
Overall it seems likely that you acquire a lot of skills while making the game, though. With the demand for Software Developers still being high, it seems to me the risk is low, as you could always find another job. Of course you can't make back the money you didn't earn. But perhaps you could find a better paid job than before to make up for it.
For now, I wish you success with your game so that you don't have to go back to "standard employment".
Thanks! Yes the marketing is the most challenging part. I happen to enjoy showing my work off, I try to post a video a few times a week on twitter. ( https://twitter.com/LeapJosh )
The finer points of marketing still elude me, but as I come up with things to try I test them. I've written some machine learning models to try and optimize things, no breakthroughs yet.
My game is a creative writing game / text editor where you're a tentacle monster with a magic typewriter. It's called Tentacle Typer. The idea is that you power up machines, activate magic devices, and progress through levels by creatively writing next to things.
You learn different magic spells depending on what genre you're writing in. (horror, love story, something technical -- all different spells)
You use that magic to fight monsters and take on bosses. It also exports txt files. It's pretty weird! :)
Great article. The author explores, among many things and in a sensitive way, finding a closer approach to Dunbar's number.
One way to approach Dunbar's number which the author does not discuss is combining "special interest" with "local geography" as well. For example, you don't need to find a subculture of DIY telescope makers who only use brand X drive software and brand Y gearing; it used to be enough to be a DIY telescope maker within say a club of county scope -- e.g. DIY Telescope Makers of Ventura County. When that was the dominant approach, you weren't comparing your work to the best result to be found on Instagram in the last year.
Liberal cosmopolitan cities can thrive as a subculture society. Not going against each other is the real meaning of tolerance–liking, approving, or supporting is not necessary.
Geographic sorting between fractured and non-fractured is dangerous. One group of people believes there is still a nation-state.
The urban-rural divide in political and nationalistic lines is clear in many countries. In countries with strong religious/conservative urban/modern populations like the US[1], Iran, Turkey it can become very problematic. Iran is probably closest to the civil war due to this fractionalization.
>If someone really prefers their subculture, which gives them mental ease and physical health, then what right do the rest have to interfere and drag them into the main culture?
Sure, whatever works for you.
But if you then stay awake at night crying "I'm so alone", are chronically depressed and demotivated, you swallow drugs like they're candy, and so on, you might want to revisit this "whatever new living fad became possible after 100s of thousands of year of evolution emphacizing human connection is equally valid".
A subculture is more similar in scale to human societies during the majority of those 100s of thousands of years of evolution than to the mega/giga scale of modern society.
>A subculture is more similar in scale to human societies during the majority of those 100s of thousands of years of evolution than to the mega/giga scale of modern society.
Yes. But the subculture in TFA is about people staying at home, and only/mostly human connection with the subculture online (and few/nobody else).
Normies can't sacrifice facebook, can they? Rare people connect online because they are geographically separated. Can you run this site offline, at which location, and what will be the resulting engagement?
All of the above is neither here, nor there though. This is not about "where to find info and others interested about a subculture" (sure, online will be easier). Or where to host gatherings for it (sure, online will be easier).
It's about what else you do.
"Normies" still have (or some have) the evolutionary human IRL connection (meetings in meetspace, touching, partners and friends they see face to face, etc).
The subcultures as described in TFA (and what I'm saying might not be the best for them) is lacking that.
That is, the subject is about persons shut-in, with no IRL contact, and connected through the web to some subculture(s). A hikikomori like existence.
Not about some everyday person that is fan of medieval bard songs, and aside their regular meatspace partners, friends, spouses, acquaintainces, etc. also frequent some forums.
Let's put it another way: "Rare people connect online because they are geographically separated" puts the cart before the horse. Connecting online is not the problem (as I see it). Not connecting offline as well is.
And the idea of "a rare person", whose criterium for connecting to someone else is them being part of the same subculture is part of the issue.
Not sure if all hikikomori must literally live like a lich in the dungeon 24/7. I'd say people who only prefer to spend their free time that way would qualify as hikikomori just fine. Then you can't really evade offline contact if you don't live in literal wilderness.
>And the idea of "a rare person", whose criterium for connecting to someone else is them being part of the same subculture is part of the issue.
In my experience subcultured people have more permissive criteria for connections, and mainstream people want to kill all nonconformance with fire.
No, that's a made up, long after cities, retroactive explanation.
Cities were made so people can co-live and co-operate in larger scales.
In ancient cities people (the people who made the first cities) weren't isolated at all.
In fact, in a city like Athens all life was public, in the sense that private matters didn't count culturally as something worthy of pursuing - it was all about contributing to public life, to be seen, talk, have fun, discuss, vote, participate, in the agora (public market), the pnyx (voting place) and other such places.
The same goes not just for ancient cities, but for most cities well up into the 20th century (just not ones dominated by car designed roads, large non-walkable distances, and/or scyscrapers).
Even in a place like New York, you very well knew your neighbors, and there was a community around the area, street, etc. Kids played together (80's suburbs style), grown ups collaborated, had fun, and gossiped with one another, etc (for example check most accounts of the ethnic neighborhoods, Jewish, Italian, Irish, etc. in 20th century New York).
Much more so in older cities, in Europe, Asia, Latin American, and so on, where most of the living neihborhoods where built as smaller communities, with small low-rise houses, central gathering places, and so on, and people knew each other.
This is a great read, but I'm not sure that it succeeds in making its case - there is a lot of weight put on the idea of a big fish in a little pond being happier, but realistically, does a culture flourish when it's composed of complacent masters of tiny points of subculture? Is a person more successful who masters a tiny area than someone who recognises something bigger and strives to master that instead?
It's probably better that people realise their real place in society as far as material wellbeing is concerned, and fight to improve it.
Yeah, it kind of blows my mind at how ergonomic it is. It's also recursive, if you hover over a link within a pop-over box, it'll open up another pop-over box, you can just keep going deeper into the rabbit-hole without ever leaving the main text.
I'm glad that the article does mention what the title is a reference to, namely "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya", but somewhat disappointed that it didn't go completely meta by talking about "The melancholy of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya subculture".
I wish he had mentioned Haruhi though (not the Haruhi subculture). That's the most extreme case of a single mind generating the entire world in which they exist, and having to keep itself distracted from that fact so it doesn't all come crashing down in meaninglessness.
My own opinion of _Haruhi_ is that it is (or at least, should be) a more positive retelling of Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger", and Haruhi is an ordinary girl made special by her wish to be extraordinary: https://www.gwern.net/The-Melancholy-of-Kyon
I haven't read the LNs, and have no opinion on whether it's Haruhi's mind or Kyon's.
Either way, after watching it, I was left with a feeling of emptiness and the sense that life is meaningless if you're not able to interact with other minds that are independent of your own but can still understand you.
If the world is wholly a product of your own mind, and there is no objective reality, you had better delude yourself in to believing that the other minds that populate it are independent. Otherwise you'll constantly be destroying and recreating the would in search of novelty because you've given up on meaning.
The best way to convince yourself the world is real is if the other beings in it know things you don't know and can do things you can't do.
"Haruhi" refers both to the show, which asks some existential questions in line with the article (there's one line quoted), and to the show's main character. "The subculture" in refers to the fandom, which is... you know how crazy fandoms can get, and this one got there.
> And if we were to take it even further? If we chose a subculture that was online, and we never went outside? Then all the stress would be gone; if one doesn’t walk down the street, one isn’t bothered by strangers in such close proximity.
I'm not sure how to parse this: is this meant ironically or as a genuine endorsement of physical isolation as a way of life?
IMHO, this aspect -- physical isolation -- is the biggest problem with the move towards digital subcultures, and I'm not sure how it can be solved.
I never met right people in real life and I spent majority of my life in Internet subcultures, with physical isolation.
Then I moved to capital city and "boom" - majority of my Internet friends live here and we meet on regular basis. For first time in almost 15 years, I'm not affected by dysthymia or depression.
This is what I hope for. I expected that eventually the right job would expose me to a community with overlapping interests. So far I have been fairly unsuccessful.
This is annoying to read because it makes unfounded assertions and then builds on them, as if they were true, repeatedly. When given the chance to uncritically construct an entire manifesto, it is very easy to get lost in one's on own narrative.
This happens many times:
"The national identity fragments under the assault of burgeoning subcultures. At last, the critic beholds the natural endpoint of this process: the long nightmare of nationalism falls like a weight from the minds of the living, as the nation becomes some lines on a map, some laws you follow. No one particularly cares."
This sounds grand, but it's flimsy because he just made it up with no evidence.
Then after the hypothetic money example:
"But what effect does this have on people? I can tell you: the average person is going to be miserable. If everyone genuinely buys into this culture, then they have to be. Their talents at piano playing, or cooking, or programming, or any form of artistry or scholarly pursuit are denigrated and count for naught. The world has become too big—it did not use to be so big, people so powerless12 of what is going on:"
Again, total fallacy based on anecdote. Sure there are plenty of cliches about money and happiness, but extrapolating to everyone is a naive approach to a manifesto.
I could go on, but this is just word salad masquerading as profundity.
" the Internet by uniting small groups will divide larger ones."
Is this a bad thing? I think, only if we keep falling for collective narcissism.
I love the idea that I can now choose people to hang out with via interests and not geographical location.
That divided me from a pretty large group in my home town, but I'm happy about it, because my life got better in turn.
The other side of the coin is, the more I'm split up from mainstream, the more I see the mainstreams transgressions. Stuff I wouldn't think about twice when I was still living in a village is now pushing me away from mainstream more.
The chess stuff resonated with me. I was a top 10 U18 player back in the day in the US, but I never set much stock by that and quit chess when I went off to college, because I couldn't find a way to feel content with devoting my life to something so narrow, and because it felt very likely that I was only that high up the chess ladder because a very large number of smarter people weren't bothering with the game
Thinking about it more, there's something similar to leaving the Matrix I think about leaving a subculture you were deeply involved in. It becomes hard(er) to willingly submerge yourself in another one once you spend some time at the "surface" level. You have to keep working to sustain your suspension of disbelief or risk snapping out into a crushing awareness of the subculture's arbitrariness and insignificance. But the "main" culture (if it's even not just another subculture, anyway) is so goddamn ugly and bland
If a society or community looks meaningless, it's often because meaning has been purposefully removed. Why? Because that meaning would have destabilised society.
That is rather conspiratorial in mindset - asserting there must be a single "entity" as an actor as the universal or driving force. Like the old freaked out monarchist conspiracy theory which blamed the Jews and the Illuminati for the French Revolution. The idea that people were simply too fed up, the relative balance of noble vs commoner in combat changed over time making the fight winnable unlike prior forgotten revolts, went against their world view and had to be psychologically denied at all costs.
The charge of "destabilized society" is basically meaningless for a mutating ship of Theseus. Did it count as razing Constantinople when it was officially renamed to Istanbul? Even when the Saxons conquered the Anglos it did not destroy their society, it killed their ruling class and mutated it. Technically even the cultural group description is an anachronism with Feudalism dealing with subdivisions via bloodlines and allegiences.
Collapse of an entity or entities in which there was widespread dependency has lead to a vacuum, at least briefly.
I love the concept of this entire site - writing about things and revisiting them and linking them. Lots of great stuff to read here and an inspiration to write more.
Such a beautiful piece. Gwern always manages to handle these niche topics with care and universality, the marks of a great writer. Also perhaps strangely apt considering the recent discussion around the metaverse/metaverses.
>will be able to achieve little in his ‘hobby’ due to lack of time and a desire to not go overboard)
Huh, no, you get 80% result for 20% effort. Diminishing returns are actually a big problem. Drawing may be not innate, but artistry is innate: even if I learn how to draw, I won't be able to draw anything, because I have no idea what to draw.
Subcultures are attempts at substitutes for ethnic identity especially in the absence of religion. People in countries like the US are particularly vulnerable. According to the triple melting pot theory, as members of ethnic communities intermarry, each successive generation sheds the previous generation's ethnic identities. Religion then becomes a substitute ethnic identity, especially when intermarriage is more likely between members of the same religion. Since "American" isn't really an ethnic identity and has little substance, and because traditional religions are losing ground in the US, the result is an identity crisis. Subcultures are one attempt to fill the void. Both white nationalism and "wokeness" are examples, as are Harley gangs and all the mushrooming "sexual identities".
"Perhaps we should accept gracefully the inevitable sundering of ‘national’ cultures, and learn to operate within a truly multicultural world."
Well, maybe...or maybe those few national cultures that persist, will find that they can steamroll over the fragmented once-were-nations that cannot muster the joint effort to resist them. There's a reason large states arose in the first place, to displace hunter-gatherer tribes, and it is precisely this. If you don't maintain a national culture, you're not going to have anyone willing to fight to defend it. Which, if every single nation has that happen, maybe that's fine. But if even one persists, it will find itself an elephant in a world of mice, who wonder why no one else is willing to defend them when they are trampled on.