[lit-ideas] Re: French effiiciency spawns riots?

  • From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 11:42:06 -0800

Eric, how would nationalism be defined? Who gets to be the member of the nationalist state? Those who live within a certain geographical boundary? Skin color? Religion? Political or ideological attitude? Cut or uncut? Which criteria can be used that wouldn't discriminate?

Followup question: In a world with 130 national states, each with their own agenda and interests (based on the winning criteria above), how would conflict be prevented? Or is conflict a desirable good, in that it keeps the nations in vigor?

yrs,
andreas
www.andreas.com


----- Original Message ----- From: "Eric Yost" <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2005 4:08 AM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: French effiiciency spawns riots?




MC: So goes the dialectic of nationalism. If this is the kind of future Eric has in mind for France, may I respectfully request that he stick it where the sun don't shine?


EY: Obviously it's not what I have in mind, so I will refrain from sticking it for the time being. Instead I'll try to explain why our views differ.

My view is that people are best able to solve problems that are closest to them. It's also in the nature of our sympathies that we care about the things that are closest to us.

Mike views nationalism as "the maginification to a nation-wide scale of our most basic, and base, tendencies : egocentrism, aggressiveness, machismo." What Mike is describing is a psychotic nationalism, an imperialistic nationalism--and we have certainly seen enough of that in the 20th century.

My view of nationalism is that it need not be so perverse. I think true nationalism need not lead to ethnocentrism, imperialism, or parochialim. To care for one's nation, in my view, is to care for all the inhabitants of one's nation. If we really had true nationalism, then people would matter, the miserables of France would not be excluded from the rest of French society because they would be recognized as "French" and cared for as French.

Whereas I see globalism as devaluing people--treating them as interchangeable "labor pools," ignoring people as part of global statistics, dealing with groups as "migrant populations," and subjecting them to policies framed ten thousand miles away.

In short, I support nations, or even more decentralized power structures, precisely because I don't think human beings have the capacity to care much about things beyond the local.

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