Liah Greenfeld writes in this 2016 book:
* The worth of the nation—the psychological gratification afforded by national identity and therefore its importance—is related to the experience of dignity by wide and ever widening sectors of humanity. The remarkable quality of national identity—and also its essential quality—is that it guarantees status with dignity to every member of whatever is defined as the national community. It is this quality that recommended nationalism to European (and later other) elites whose status was threatened or
who were prevented from achieving the status they aspired to, that ensured the spread of nationalism throughout the world in the last two centuries, and that explains its staying power in the face of material interests that often pull in the other direction.In the early days of nationalism, different elite groups, exposed to nationalist ideas, reacted dissimilarly to them, in accordance with the relative ability of nationalism to aid them in their status-maintaining and status-aggrandizing pursuits. An example is furnished by the nobility in various German lands who as late as the 1800s remained indifferent to the appeal of nationalism, embracing it rather reluctantly during the Wars of Liberation.
* Among non-noble intellectuals, the second of the two elite groups that were responsible for the initial establishment of nationalism in Europe, the idea of the nation also had to compete with other status-bestowing frameworks. As long as other identities appeared to promise more dignity, the nation failed to captivate them and secure their commitments. French philosophes were above particularistic self-content. Voltaire wrote that “a philosopher has no patrie and belongs to no faction,” and that “every man
is born with a natural right to choose his patrie for himself.”1 Abbe Raynal believed that “the patrie of a great man is the universe.”2 Great men, explained Duclos, “men of merit, whatever the nation of their origin, form one nation among themselves. They are free from the puerile national vanity. They leave it to the vulgar, to those who, having no personal glory, have to content themselves with the glory of their countrymen.” …So long as one could reasonably hope to become world famous (and French philosophes in the mid-eighteenth century still had a reasonable chance of that), it was foolish to limit oneself to a small part of the world. And if one was confident in one’s superiority and felt assured of recognition, one had no need for shared dignity of a nation. In fact, one had no need for nation at all, a republic of letters was enough.…German intellectuals remained faithful to their cosmopolitan ideals long after their French brethren had abandoned theirs. Nicolai considered German nationalism “a political monstrosity”;4 Schiller claimed to have given up his fatherland in exchange “for the great world” and wrote “as a citizen of the world.”5 Fichte was a principled cosmopolitan as late as 1799… Nationalism did not appeal to German intellectuals prior to the Napoleonic campaign because they were the only group interested in the redistribution of prestige in society, and without the support of the nobility and the bureaucracy, they lacked the means to enforce it. To insist on such a redistribution (implied in the idea of the nation) in this situation would have only invited ridicule and damaged the chances of social advancement which some of them had. It was more satisfying to dream that one was an equal member of a community of intellectuals…
* Most of our experiences, however, are not experiences of physical or biological realities, but of the social reality. This reality is also constituted by our experiences, but we don’t experience it through our bodily senses, we experience it through, or in, our minds. Most of our empirical reality, in other words, is neither material nor organic, it is mental.
* While all other animal species, irrespective of the level of development and place on the evolutionary tree, essentially transmit their ways of life genetically, we overwhelmingly transmit our ways of life through symbols.
* No human group of any duration, and no individual, unless severely handicapped or (as an infant) undeveloped mentally, can live without an identity. Having an identity is a psychological imperative and, therefore, a sociological constant… An identity defines the position of its individual or group bearer in a more or less extensive sphere of the social world that is relevant for this bearer, and serves as a map or blueprint for this sphere…
* [P]opulations homogeneous as to any particular such characteristic do not necessarily share the same identity and consciousness: medieval peasants and lords in Europe, though all Christians, did not share an identity—peasants identifying as peasants and lords identifying as lords—and, beyond all doubt, thought differently. To return to language, they did not speak the same language… identities were estate-based… there were no ethnic identities before nationalism…
* Language, above everything else, is the medium of thinking, thinking representing the explicitly symbolic component of our consciousness, the explicitly symbolic mental process… traffic lights well may be the most efficient system of communication among humans… To capture symbolic experiences (experiences produced by the specifically human, cultural environment) language is necessary; only it can incorporate them into reality. A stable sphere of new experiences presupposes the annexation to human existence of a new sphere of meaning which only language can create, the emergence of a new semantic space. Therefore, while one can imagine a social current without the participation of language, institutionalization without language is impossible. Any social order starts with the creation of a new vocabulary, and this is demonstrated by every case of nationalism…
* collectivistic nationalisms are more likely to engage in aggressive warfare than individualistic nationalisms… Collectivistic nationalisms, by contrast, are forms of particularism, whether perceived in geopolitical, cultural (in the sense of acquired culture), or presumably inherent, ethnic terms. The borderline between “us” and “them” is relatively clear… collectivistic nationalisms are articulated by small elite groups… To achieve the solidarity of this larger population, made of diverse strands, they tend (though not invariably) to blame their misfortunes not on agencies within the nation, whom they would as a result alienate, but on those outside it. If they do blame internal elements, they define these as agents acting on behalf of or in collusion with hostile foreigners. Thus, from their perspective, the nation is from the start united in common hatred.
* During war, ethnic nationalism is more conducive to brutality in relation to the enemy population than civic nationalism. This is so because civic nationalism, even when particularistic, still treats humanity as one, fundamentally homogeneous entity.
* In the sixteenth century, English emotional vocabulary dramatically expands: numerous new terms appear (redefined concepts as well as neologisms) without equivalents in any other language, which capture widely experienced emotions that had not been experienced before. On examination, they are all related to the three principles of nationalism: its secularism, fundamental egalitarianism, and popular sovereignty.
All three of these features place the individual in control of his or her destiny, eliminating the expectation of putting things right in the afterlife, making one the ultimate authority in deciding on one’s priorities, encouraging one to strive for a higher social status (since one is presumed to be equal to everyone, but one wants to be equal only to those who are superior), and giving one the right to choose one’s social position (since the presumption of fundamental equality makes everyone interchangeable) and therefore identity. But this very liberty, implied in nationalism, both empowering and encouraging the individual to choose what to be—in contrast to all the religious pre-national societies in which no one was asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?” since one was whatever one was born—makes the formation of the individual identity problematic, and the more so the more choices for the definition of one’s identity a society offers and the more insistent it is on equality. A clear sense of identity is a condition sine qua non for adequate mental functioning, but national consciousness—modern culture—cannot help the individual to acquire such clear sense, it is inherently confusing. This cultural insufficiency, the inability of a culture to provide individuals within it with consistent guidance, is what Durkheim named anomie…
A member of a nation can no longer learn who or what she or he is from the environment, as would an individual growing up in an essentially religious and rigidly stratified, hierarchical order, where everyone’s position and behavior are defined by birth and divine providence.
* Ambition, aspiration, romantic love, and happiness… appears with a corresponding form of suffering… Ambition was the main cause of the characteristic suffering in sixteenth-century England. The defense against threats—or experience—of a thwarted ambition was love.
* Like ambition, love made it possible for the free and therefore rootless modern individual, whom the society around would not define, to find one’s proper place and to define oneself. Functionally, both love and ambition were identity-forming devices. This, above all else, explains the tremendous importance of this emotional complex in our lives. Moreover, in distinction to ambition, which led the searcher by a circuitous way, made an obstacle course by the myriads of simultaneous, crisscrossing and overlapping searches of others, which demanded unceasing effort on one’s part, and never guaranteed the result, love required no effort whatsoever—it happened to one, one fell into it. Thus it led to the discovery of one’s true identity directly. The supreme and truest expression of the sovereign self, it was, in effect, a miracle, for which one was in no way responsible.
What made it an expression of the self nevertheless was the immediate recognition of the true love’s object, the One, that particular her or him who was one’s destiny and yet, paradoxically, was most freely chosen. One’s identity, one’s true self, was found in that other person and what he or she saw in one. This was the central theme of Romeo
and Juliet.* since no genetic or any other organic origins of functional mental disease have ever been found, despite constant and constantly very well-funded attempts to find them (in fact, schizophrenia and affective disorders are defined as diseases “of unknown organic origin” and this is precisely what the term “functional” emphasizes), our knowledge of it essentially consists of clinical observation, that is, observation of visible symptoms…
* Madness spread with national consciousness and already in the seventeenth century was severely affecting Scotland, Ireland, and the English settlements in America. But until the French Revolution it was known elsewhere only as “the English malady.”
* No disease caused by an outside agent—plague, tuberculosis, common flu, and so on—affects populations exposed to it uniformly: while some succumb, others don’t, and among those who succumb, some catch the severe form with a lethal outcome, and some get away with weaker, curable expressions of the disease and survive. This depends on the interactions of the agent with the environment, on the conditions in which it operates: predisposition of the patient, availability of therapies, and so on. The same applies to functional mental illness. Its agent—national consciousness itself—is always present in modern society; it makes anomie pervasive and the formation of individual identity one’s own responsibility, and therefore problematic. This general problematization of individual identity and specific problems with the formation of identity led to degrees (clinical and subclinical, permanent and temporary) of mental impairment, derangement, and dysfunction, today recognized as schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness. The common symptoms of these conditions are social maladjustment (chronic discomfort in one’s environment) and chronic discomfort (dis-ease) with one’s self, the sense of self oscillating between self-loathing and delusions of grandeur, megalomania, most frequently (in cases of unipolar depression) fixing on self-loathing, and in rare cases deteriorating into the terrifying sense of a complete loss of self (in the acute psychosis of full-fledged schizophrenia). This mental disease reaches its clinical level in a minority of cases (even if it is a very large minority, as in the United States). But the pervasive anomie of modern national societies affects very large numbers of people—statistics claim, close to 50 percent of Americans today, for example, are occasionally mentally disturbed—and therefore, makes very large numbers of people socially maladjusted and deeply dissatisfied with themselves…
* nationalism radically changes our social and political experience. Because of its secularism, egalitarianism, and insistence on popular sovereignty, it makes people activist. It follows logically from the explicit or implicit recognition that man has only one life, that social reality, at least, is a thing of his making, and that all men are equal—that nothing can justify this one life falling short of giving full satisfaction, that men are responsible for all its disappointments, and that everyone has the right to change reality that disappoints.
* An example of individual ideological activism is “lone-wolf” Islamic terrorism: young Western-born or Western-educated people from generally secular, mostly Muslim but quite often Christian backgrounds, converting to Islam (as a rule without acquiring much knowledge about the tradition) and carrying out violent acts against targets which symbolize the West. In the overwhelming majority of cases of apprehension and post-act investigation the person is revealed as a consciously maladjusted, unhappy, confused individual—a misfit, frequently complaining of one’s loneliness and unhappiness on the Internet. Why do these mildly disturbed people, who clearly suffer from the modern malaise, rally to radical, particularly violent, version of Islam? They do this for precisely the same reason young people in their existential situation earlier rallied to
Marxism.* …ideological politics is a specific form of politics brought about by nationalism. They are irrational in the sense of being motivated by a dedication (passionate, if not fanatic) to causes which in the large majority of cases lack the remotest connection to the personal experience—and therefore objective interests—of the participants, but characterized by their capacity to justify and explain the discomfort these participants feel with their self and social environment. At their core invariably lie visions that bear the most distinctive mark of a schizophrenic delusion: the loss of the understanding of the symbolic nature of human social reality and the confusion between symbols and their referents, when the symbols themselves become objective reality.
* Different types of nationalism favor different types of self-medication through social/political activism. Thus individualistic nationalisms naturally encourage individual activism, which explains why lone-wolf terrorism is particularly widespread in liberal democracies… When suffering from the modern malaise, each one of them turns against the society that makes them, each individually, uncomfortable: their own society, their own nation.
* Collectivistic nationalisms, in distinction, encourage violent collective action. Thus all the great revolutions—the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the German, that is, National Socialist, revolution—happened in collectivistic nations.
* the rates of severe (clinical) mental disturbance should be inversely proportional to the possibilities of engaging in ideologically motivated collective activism, that is, necessarily the highest in individualistic nations, and higher in collectivistic and civic nations, than in ethnic ones. Thus most aggressive and xenophobic nationalisms—the worst for the world around—would be, in fact, of all nationalisms, the best for the mental health of their individual members.
* oppositional movements in them, as a rule, insist on ever greater group equality, superimposed on the equality of individuals before the law (equality of opportunity) and at the expense of individual rights. Dignity of personal identity in nations derives from membership in a sovereign (that is, self-governing, free) community of equals—those who share in sovereignty or freedom, which, in individualistic nations implies the right to distinguish oneself. The goal of oppositional movements in individualistic nations is to assure the dignity implicit in this equality without exercising this right, thus escaping competition and personal responsibility for one’s possible failure in it.
