Benedict Anderson's Cretinous Imagined Communities

Nationalism exists where it is useful for a Nation to exist. A Nation exists where a bunch of people who exchange brides and information using common linguistic or other protocols band together for mutual defence. Such a Nation may merge into a larger Nation but choose to recover its sovereignty at a later date. Thus Scottish Nationality exists alongside British Nationality and would be revived if the United Kingdom breaks up. 

The word Nation was used in medieval Universities in Europe to distinguish scholars with the same mother tongue. Thus, the 'German Nation' was the German speaking students. The 'English Nation' was the English speaking students and so forth.  But this was scarcely a new idea. It has always existed. The most ancient Empires mention their Great Kings as subjugating Nations. The word 'Goy' in Hebrew means 'Nations'. The Goyim are the various types of non Jews, but the Jews too were a Nation- one chosen by God.

The ancient literatures of China and India became the basis of Chinese and Indian political theory. Both culminated in the development of a distinctive Nationalist ideology. But Arab Nationalism too has deep roots as does the Nationalism of every other ancient polity. What about Societies where a written language and literature is a relative novelty? In my experience, they have as vivid a sense of Nationality as any other type of country.

This does not mean that any Nation's boundaries are not contested or that any Nationalist ideology does not have contain some bizarre or unrealistic claims. But then almost everything in the social sphere involves an 'essentially contested concept' as well as rivalrous interessement mechanisms.

Since there is a little money to be made in writing a book about 'Nationalism' so that cretins in a worthless University Department can get and grant credentials, it follows that all sorts of silly books will be written on this topic. Perhaps the silliest book still widely referred to by stupid people was Benedict Anderson's 'Imagined Communities'.

Consider the following quotes from his magnum opus

I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. 

This is foolish. The Welsh are a Nation. They are not sovereign.  Some people imagine that the Scots will be better off being completely sovereign. Others that it would be better off sovereign with respect to Westminster but not sovereign with respect to Brussels. 

There are other 'imagined communities' - e.g. 'Christendom' or 'the Islamic Ummah' or 'the Peace Loving Jew Haters of the World' or whatever- which may or may not be imagined to be sovereign or inherently limited. 

Furthermore, there is no reason believe Nationalism is 'limited' at all. A particular Nationalism may want to enslave or exterminate everybody to gain more and more Lebensraum. Indeed, it may want to storm the Heavens or sublate the Multiverse or dam up the rivers of Time so as to irrigate the deserts of solitude.

It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.

This may be true of Churches or Covens or certain Vocations. It is not true of even the smallest nation. Iceland is tiny. Icelanders don't believe 'the image of their communion' lives in any of their minds. I found out the hard way. I phoned everybody in the Icleandic phone directory asking them why the 'image of their communion' which was living in their mind had defrauded me? Those who took the trouble to reply assured me that this was not the case. Did I myself have an 'image of communion' in my mind? No. I'm not saying I can't imagine a world in which Anderson might not be right. But that world isn't this world where we evolved by natural selection.

Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.... 

This is nonsense. If people say 'this is a Community' and 'this is how you need to imagine it'; you don't take their word for it. You test it out for yourself. Only if it really is the case that you can have high confidence in making transactions with Community members such that protocols are observed in the manner envisaged or imagined; only then will you yourself accept that this a Community and that you are a member of it. Otherwise it is just 'cheap talk' bullshit. 

Communities, like other things in the Social Realm, are to be distinguished by only one criteria- utility. It may be useful to pretend that something which is useless is actually very useful. But this is the case only for a very small number of people. 

Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.

Sadly, this is not the case. It may be useful to pretend that it is at certain times. Indeed, there may be a convention of this sort. But it is a convention of a purely ritualistic kind. 

 Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.

Anderson knew that Communism- which is not Nationalistic- had been directly responsible for the rise of Hitler and Mussolini and Franco. Stalin's purges and the holdomor were repeated by Mao. People were killed or they starved to death because of an imagined 'horizontal comradeship' which was anti-Nationalistic. 

It is odd that an old Etonian who lived in America should write-

What the eye is to the lover — that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with - language - whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue — is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at mother's knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed.”

This may pass as a stupid type of poetry. But it is worthless as analysis. Blind people fall in love same as sighted people. The 'eye' is nothing to the lover. Neither does language matter to the patriot. Welsh speakers have been demonstrating their patriotism since before Agincourt. Throughout history, patriots have quit their village, where the dialect, more often than not, would have been unintelligible to the 'patriots' in the Army or other National institutions, and acquired a very different mode of speech. It is sad but true that we forget the 'mother tongue' and acquire the jargon that helps us advance in life. We woo in that language. We wed in that language. Times may change. We may emigrate elsewhere and start speaking a different language. Another wooing and another wedding may make the language in which we end up mothering being entirely foreign to that of our own nativity.

Had Anderson been a rustic idiot, we could understand why he might write such tripe. But the guy was smart and cosmopolitan. Why commit the 'no true Scotsman fallacy' as if he'd never received more than a Dame School education?

“No one can be a true nationalist who is incapable of feeling ashamed if his or her state or government commits crimes including those against their fellow citizens”

A neuro-diverse person may not 'feel shame' where it would be conventional to at least pretend to feel shame. But such a person can be a 'true nationalist' or a 'true anti-nationalist' or anything else they please.

Anderson was a good linguist. But he didn't get why Muslims in Java and Hindus in Bali might want to kill and chop off the dicks of Communists. This wasn't because he was shite at Indonesian Bahasa. It was because he was an Old Etonian. He did not feel personally threatened by news of what Stalin had done and what Mao was doing to peasants and religious people.

“It is important to keep in mind that to learn a language is not simply to learn a linguistic means of communication. It is also to learn the way of thinking and feeling of a people who speak and write a language which is different from ours. It is to learn the history and culture underlying their thoughts and emotions and so to learn to empathize with them.” ― Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries

Once again, there is no evidence that autistic savants or neuro-atypical people perform worse at learning languages. The poet savant Daniel Tammet can learn a language very quickly. His artistic achievements suggest that having different emotional responses is not a barrier to empathy or linguistic creativity.

Did Anderson understand his own English culture?

“It is nice that what eventually became the late British Empire has not been ruled by an 'English' dynasty since the early eleventh century: since then a motley parade of Normans (Plantagenets),

whose rule was resented as foreign till the reign of the English speaking Henry IV- a theme of much popular literature and represented in the sorts of History books used in schools at the opposite end of the social scale from Eton.

Welsh (Tudors),

 Henry VII was a quarter Welsh and half English. They are considered an English dynasty.

Scots (Stuarts),

The Lowland Scots have always been English speaking

Dutch (House of Orange)

William of Orange's Mum was English. His wife, Queen Mary, was English and it was in her right that he ruled.

and Germans (Hanoverians) have squatted on the imperial throne.

The Hanoverians were only brought in so as to keep the Catholic Stuarts out. There was no 'imperial throne' at that time. Disraeli gave Queen Victoria an Imperial throne which she took because her daughter had become an Empress and it wouldn't do if she took precedence over her own dear Mum.

No one much cared until the philological revolution and a paroxysm of English nationalism in World War I.

Nonsense! Look at Thackeray's 'Four Georges' or the Scott's Ivanhoe which turns Robin Hood into a Saxon hero. This was very much a Regency or Early Victorian notion.

Still, Shakespeare's historical plays represent the never to be re-achieved high water mark of presentment of Englishry as the highest possible claim to a place, like that of Falstaff, 'in the bosom of Arthur'. In other words, from the point of view of English literature itself, Henry IV was English and Henry V a wastrel redeemed by the Nation's need.

All this may be beneath the notice of an Old Etonian. But it is how ordinary English people imagine their history.

Consider the following line-

House of Windsor rhymes with House of Schönbrunn or House of Versailes.” ― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Why is this un-English? The answer is that there had been 'Merry wives of Windsor' at the time of Falstaff, but more recently a 'Widow of Windsor' when England attained an acme of relative power and prosperity. Thus House of Windsor does not 'rhyme' at all with vainglorious Versailles or Schonbrunn's sugary confection.

The problem with Anderson was that he had not been thought to think. All he could do was spout bullshit of a vaguely poetic sort.

Look at this-

“All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias.

Is it true? No. Amnesia does occur- but it is not associated with 'profound changes in consciousness'. Rather, it is associated with trivial things like being hit on the head or drinking too much.

Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives…

Rubbish! Confabulation may occur. But confabulations aren't narratives because they merely fill in gaps in memory with whatever seems plausible or is 'ready to hand'.

The photograph… is only the most peremptory of a huge modern accumulation of documentary evidence… which simultaneously records a certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory.

Photographs- like paintings- are valuable as evoking memories or helping us visualize things important to us which may have happened before we were born or are happening far away from where we now are. They don't record 'apparent continuity'. CC footage may do so- but we know that the Lizard People from Planet X are tampering with them so as to erase evidence of their complicity with the Neo-Liberal nomenklatura.

The selfies I take don't emphasize any 'loss from memory'. God alone knows what Anderson's major malfunction was. Perhaps he was a victim of alcoholism and needed someone to follow him around taking photos so as to discover what he had been up to while black-out drunk.

Out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity… which, because it cannot be “remembered”, must be narrated.” ― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Narrations can be wholly fictitious. They are autopoetic. Confabulation fills in gaps. But, in general, this happens only when one is questioned or a question arises in one's mind.