Nationalism- how to inculcate it

 

Nationalism how to bring it

 

I was in a hurry going out for some work in the morning.

 

He is narrating the obvious. It is naive of any country, especially India to presume that the US must promote India's interest. 

 

It would be stupid of any country that wants to become an economic power or claims to become one to depend on another country to sponsor its growth. 

 

It must get it generated from within.

 

It may take India a few more years to come close to China on various parameters of economic prosperity.

 

However, there are too many unpredictable and uncertain aspects in geopolitics like any economically powerful nation may implode from within due to political, ideological, cultural, religious reasons etc. Or due to some natural calamity or bad leadership and policies an economy can collapse. Such situations can happen.

 

We don't have any synergetic and cooperative overall (combination of legislative, bureaucratic, legal, financial structure) conducive ecosystem for various verticals of economic development and progress. So, there is no point in self-praising in ethnocentric pride, instead, methodically resort to serious hard work. 

 

We need a multitude of factors of unification to create a nationalistic feeling other than common enemies. 

 

This is tough but can be and must be worked scrupulously by the rulers over a period, of course, with clear cut boundaries on judiciary and media, otherwise, no reform is possible. 

 

There are two practical examples I would like to share here one a recent interview of Jaggi Vasudev on how USA ensured nationalism and another is a chapter from a book on how Singapore did it. 

 

 

https://youtu.be/lrsXC17M5vk?si=ZZ2DVbkt-JI_lovK

 

While reading the book In “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft

Belief, and the Future of the West” by Alexander C. Karp (Author), Nicholas

W. Zamiska (Author). In the 11th Chapter titled Piety and Its Price: Balancing

Ethics with Effective Action, I came across the following of which many things

are relevant not exactly but in the context of our nation. Though, I am no great fan

of Singapore especially I detest comparing it with India. However, there are certain

aspects of governance model, in certain aspects especially, how to bring about

nationalistic feelings amid the chaos that goes in the name of differences [

inevitable variety of nature- often promoted, propagated and perceived as

differences] in languages, religious denominations, castes etc.

I felt it would be better to share the whole chapter so that one can appreciate the

importance of the whole thought process of a single leader who decided to put in

place a system which would ensure unity for a common cause whose inevitable

outcome would be national interest.

“On October 3, 1965, Lee Kuan Yew gave a speech at an association of

Singapore’s liquor retailers, hoping to drum up support for the newly

independent nation’s cause. It had been only a couple of months since the

country split from Malaysia, and Lee was charged with convincing a

skeptical public that the island nation had a future on its own. “I am

calculating in terms of the next generation, in terms of the next hundred

years, in terms of eternity,” he said. “And believe you me, for the next

thousand years, we will be here.” He added, “It is people who calculate and

think in those terms that deserve to survive.” To many, Singapore’s odds of

survival after separating from the British Empire and later winning

independence from Malaysia in 1965 were slim. The tiny nation, not much

more than an island, lacked the natural resources or population that would

seem necessary for any sort of longevity. The country’s citizens also spoke

nearly a dozen languages and came from distinct cultural and religious

traditions, each of which had ancient and deep roots in southern China, on

the Indian subcontinent, and across the Malay Peninsula. Lee worked to

manufacture some form of national identity for the young country, stitching

together what he hoped would become a coherent whole from a diverse array of

constituent parts. To that end, he and others unabashedly involved

Singapore’s government in any number of aspects of the private lives of its

citizens, including everything from appropriate manners to the search for a

spouse.

 

At a political rally in 1986, Lee made the case that intervention in the

 

private domains of the country’s citizens was a necessary component of

constructing and building a nation. “We sang different songs in different

languages,” he said. “We did not laugh at the same jokes, because you can

crack a joke in Hokkien,” he added, referring to one of the country’s

Chinese dialects, but “forty percent of the population won’t follow you.”

For most of the twentieth century, at least twelve Chinese dialects had been

spoken in Singapore, including Cantonese, Hokkien, Hainanese, and

Shanghainese. The rise and increasing prominence of Chinese dialects in

the territory was a relatively recent development. The British colony,

through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had emphasized

Malay, as opposed to Chinese, given that, as one historian has noted,

Singapore was considered “part of a larger Malay world in which Malay

was the main lingua franca.”

A government review completed in 1979 found that the vast majority of

children in the newly independent nation—85 percent—spoke a language

other than English or Mandarin at home. The authors of the report wrote,

“One of the dangers of secular education in a foreign tongue is the risk of

losing the traditional values of one’s own people and the acquisition of the

more spurious fashions of the west.” A shared language was seen as vital to

the nation’s ability to defend its culture against encroachment and indeed

survive over the longer term. “A society unguided by moral values can

hardly be expected to remain cohesive under stress,” noted the government

study, which came to be known as the Goh Report, after its principal author,

Goh Keng Swee, Singapore’s deputy prime minister under Lee. “It is a

commitment to a common set of values that will determine the degree to

which people of recent migrant origin will be willing and able to defend

their collective interest.”

 

A plan was hatched shortly thereafter to require that all Chinese students

 

learn Mandarin at school instead of the dialects that they had been speaking

at home. It was a decisive and controversial move, one with far-reaching

consequences for generations of the country’s families. “Singapore used to

be like a linguistic tropical rain forest—overgrown, and a bit chaotic but

very vibrant and thriving,” Tan Dan Feng, who served on the country’s

national translation committee, said in an interview in 2017. “Now, after

decades of pruning and cutting, it’s a garden focused on cash crops: learn

English or Mandarin to get ahead and the rest is useless, so we cut it down.”

For his part, Lee continued to make the case that learning Chinese, and

an ability to converse with citizens across the country, was essential for the

psychological development and coherence of young Singaporeans of

Chinese descent. And many credit Lee for essentially rescuing the nation

from devolving into a clash of competing bands formed along ethnic or

linguistic loyalties. Saravanan Gopinathan, a former dean at the National

Institute of Education in Singapore, wrote in 1979 that the country’s

language policies were instrumental in constructing and maintaining “the

cultural personality of the nation.” Lee later considered relaxing his grip on

the country’s development in certain limited domains. “This is a new

phase,” he explained at the National Day rally in 1986. “Give them the

option. You decide. You make up your mind. You exercise the choice. You

pay the price.” The ascent of Singapore, whatever the mix of causes that

propelled its rise, has been undeniable. In 1960, Singapore’s per capita

gross domestic product was only $428. By 2023, its GDP per capita had

risen to $84,734—one of the steepest and most unrelenting climbs of any

country in the twentieth century and perhaps in modern history.

• • •

Few, if anyone, could take issue with the view that a single individual, Lee,

was absolutely critical to Singapore’s rise over its first half century of

existence. As Henry Kissinger put it, in the case of Lee’s leadership, “the

 

ancient argument whether circumstance or personality shapes events” was

“settled in favour of the latter.” That ancient argument had stretched back to

at least the nineteenth century, when Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish historian,

wrote in 1840 of “the Great Man” who had “been the indispensable saviour

of his epoch;—the lightning, without which the fuel never would have

burnt.” The view that lone individuals were the principal drivers of history

was common at the time. The Panthéon in Paris, which was built in the

eighteenth century to house the remains of the country’s most distinguished

politicians, philosophers, and generals, includes sculptures of Voltaire,

Rousseau, and Napoleon, in a pediment above twenty-two soaring and

imposing Corinthian columns. An inscription in the stone, in large capital

letters, is legible from the street: “Aux Grands Hommes La Patrie

Reconnaissante” (To the Great Men, the Grateful Nation).

A singular emphasis on the acts and thoughts of lone individuals, in

assessing a sweep of human affairs that was also driven by economic and

political forces, among others, was undoubtedly misplaced. Many may also

be unable to look past the reference to men at the exclusion of women. But

why are we incapable of disavowing the sexism and parochial sentiment

without jettisoning any sense of the heroic as well? Our shift away, as a

culture, from this type of thinking, from veneration of leaders, is both a

symptom and a cause of our current condition. We have grown weary and

skeptical of leadership itself; the heroic has for most gone the way of the

mythological—relics of a past that we tell ourselves are irredeemably

rooted in a history of domination and conquest. The loss of interest in this

way of thinking, narrow and flawed as it was, coincided with the culture’s

broader abandonment of much interest in character or virtue—seemingly

ineffable concepts that could not be reduced to the psychological and moral

materialism of the modern age. Our mistake, however, was to throw

everything out, instead of simply the bigotry and narrow-mindedness.

 

The essential failure of the contemporary left has been to deprive itself

of the opportunity to talk about national identity—an identity divorced from

blood-and-soil conceptions of peoplehood. The political left, in both Europe

and the United States, neutered itself decades ago, preventing its advocates

from having a forceful and forthright conversation about national identity at

all—an identity that might have been linked to a culturally specific set of

historical antecedents but rose up beyond them to encompass those who

were willing to join. Indeed, a generation of academics and writers refused

to patrol the boundaries of the emotional nation at all—the imagined

community of Anderson. Richard Sennett, a sociology professor at the

London School of Economics, suggested that it may be possible to find

“ways of acting together” without relying on what he described as “the evil

of a shared national identity.” The political philosopher Martha Nussbaum

similarly castigated “patriotic pride” as “morally dangerous,” urging that

our “primary allegiance” should be “to the community of human beings in

the entire world.” Their project, essentially, was post-national. That move,

however, toward an abolition of the nation was ill-advised and premature,

and the left has been slow in recognizing its mistake.

In 1882, Ernest Renan, a French philosopher who was the descendant of

fishermen, delivered a speech at the Sorbonne in Paris that was titled

“Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” (“What Is a Nation?”). He was among the first

writers to attempt to distinguish the concept of a nation from a more limited

or narrow sense of ethnic or racial identity, noting the “graver mistake”

occurs when “race is confused with nation.” Renan gave voice to a far more

enduring and robust concept of the nation, that grand and mysterious

collective project, in a way that the educated class all but abandoned in the

postwar period. He described the nation as “a vast solidarity, constituted by

the sentiment of the sacrifices one has made and of those one is yet

prepared to make.” A national project, for Renan, “presupposes a past,” but

 

is “summarized in the present by a tangible fact: consent, the clearly

expressed desire to continue a common life.” It is that “common life” with

which we are at risk of losing touch. Renan famously described the nation

as “an everyday plebiscite.” And it must now be renewed.

The necessary task of building the nation, of constructing a collective

identity and shared mythology, is at risk of being lost because we grew too

fearful of alienating anyone, of depriving anyone of the ability to participate

in the common project. It is this disinterest in mythology, in shared

narratives, that we have as a culture taken too far. Palantir takes its name

from The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien, and some have suggested

that Tolkien references are favorites of the “far right.” The critique is

representative of the left’s broader error, both substantive and strategic. An

interest in rooting the aims of a corporate enterprise in a broader context

and mythology should be celebrated, not dismissed. We need more common

tomes, more shared stories, not fewer, even if they must be read critically

over time.

Such stories, the parables and small myths that animate and make

possible a larger life, will find refuge in other domains if we continue to

insist on excluding them from our civic and public lives. Randy Travis,

whose melodies spurred a sort of neoclassical revival in country music in

the 1980s and 1990s, recounted tales that had been cast out by American

culture as facile and nearly regressive. His song “Three Wooden Crosses,”

which told the story of “a farmer and a teacher, a hooker and a preacher,”

epitomized the type of parable that no longer quite fit within ascendant elite

culture—an unabashed and unironic account of virtue and redemption. Yet

Travis, and his music, remain immensely popular among certain swaths of the

public. Our yearning for story and meaning has not withered. It has rather been

forced to find expression in domains other than the civic.

• • •

The challenge is that a commitment to participating in the imagined

community of the nation, to some degree of forgiveness for the sins and

betrayal of one’s neighbor, to a belief in the prospect of a greater and richer future

together than would be possible alone, requires a faith and some form of

membership in a community. Without such belonging, there is nothing for which

to fight, nothing to defend, and nothing to work toward. A commitment to

 

capitalism and the rights of the individual, however ardent, will never be

sufficient; it is too thin and meager, too narrow, to sustain the human soul and

psyche. James K. A. Smith, a philosophy professor at Calvin University, has

correctly noted that “Western liberal democracies have lived off the borrowed

capital of the church for centuries.” If contemporary elite culture continues its

assault on organized religion, what will remain to sustain the state? What have

we built, or aspired to build, in its place? It is true, as Robert N. Bellah wrote in

1967, that there “exists alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the

churches an elaborate and well-institutionalized civil religion in America.” He

made the argument that “this religion—or perhaps better, this religious

dimension—has its own seriousness and integrity and requires the same care and

understanding that any religion does.” A loose constellation of “biblical

archetypes,” as Bellah put it, including stories from Exodus and sacrifice as well

as resurrection, may be a start, but we have grown skeptical and dismissive of

even those modest references in public life.

The leaders of Silicon Valley are drawn from a disembodied generation

of talent in America that is committed to little more than vehement

secularism, but beyond that nothing much of substance. We must, as a

culture, make the public square safe again for substantive notions of the

good or virtuous life, which, by definition, exclude some ideas in order to

put forward others. It is the “pluralism which threatens to submerge us all,” as the

moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has written, that must be

resisted. It is now time, as he made clear, to construct “new forms of

community within which the moral life” can “be sustained.”

An aspirational desire for tolerance of everything has descended into

support of nothing. The contemporary left establishment inhabits a prison of its

own making. Like a caged animal, it is left to pace furtively, unable to

offer an affirmative vision of a virtuous or moral life, whose content it long

ago stripped away to the bare essentials. We must instead now conjure a

new “resolve,” as the author and art critic Roger Kimball has written, and

indeed “self-confidence, faith in the essential nobility of one’s regime and

one’s way of life.”

• • •

In 1998, the German Publishers and Booksellers Association decided to

award its international peace prize to Martin Walser, one of the country’s

leading writers and public intellectuals. Walser was born in 1927 in

Wasserburg am Bodensee, a town on the shore of Lake Constance, which

sits at the southern end of Germany and borders Switzerland and Austria.

His parents were Catholic, and he grew up just as Hitler was coming to

power in the 1930s. It would later emerge that he joined the Nazi Party

when he was seventeen years old, according to reporting by a German

magazine that had obtained a 1944 party registration card with Walser’s

 

name from the German federal archives in Berlin. Walser told the magazine

that he had likely been added to a party roster without his knowledge. He

was eventually recruited to the German army and served under Hitler’s

command through the end of the country’s defeat by Allied forces in 1945.

His complexity as a literary and moral figure was perhaps part of his

appeal to the German public, and to the publishers’ association that had

awarded him the peace prize that year. For decades, the country had been

subsumed by moral debates and furtive efforts to construct an industry of

remembrance of Germany’s descent into darkness in the late 1930s and the

1940s. A certain exhaustion had taken hold, and the public, many of whom

by that point had been born well after the end of World War II, had grown

confused and fatigued by reminders of a horror in which their parents or

grandparents, but not themselves, had participated.

At his speech in St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt in October 1998, Walser

departed from the standard script of self-flagellation and dutiful acceptance

of what many believed was a nation’s collective guilt and responsibility.

Instead, he suggested that the yoke of an enforced remembrance should be

thrown off and abandoned—that the imposition of shame on a

contemporary German public had ceased to serve any productive purpose.

Walser said, “Everyone knows the burden of our history, our everlasting

disgrace.” He did not, however, stop there. The daily reminders of

Germany’s past, for Walser, were more of a self-serving attempt by the

country’s elite to relieve “their own guilt” than anything else. Walser

confided to the audience that he had found himself turning away, refusing to

look, at the images of brutality that had become a routine part of German

television programming at the time. He explained, “No serious person denies

Auschwitz; no person who is still of sound mind quibbles about the

horror of Auschwitz; but when this past is held up to me every day in the

media, I notice that something in me rebels against this unceasing

presentation of our disgrace.” Walser denounced efforts to, in his words,

trivialize Auschwitz, to make it “a routine threat, a means of intimidation or

moral bludgeon.” A commentator at the time noted that for Walser the

moral failure of a nation had “been instrumentalised by large sections of the

media,” as well as a “dominant left-liberal intelligentsia as a means of

defying German national identity.”

The audience during Walser’s speech that day included some of the most

prominent figures of “the political, economic and cultural German elite,” an

observer would later write. Roman Herzog, the German president, was in

attendance, along with members of the publishing and financial industries.

The moment was deeply cathartic for nearly everyone listening, who,

according to several accounts, stood up at the end of Walser’s speech to

 

give the author sustained applause. He had articulated the forbidden desires

and feelings of a nation, and in doing so relieved an immense amount of

internal dissonance for his audience, most of whom had been immersed in a

culture in which speech had been tightly patrolled and monitored for even

the slightest signs of deviation from the received wisdom, the national

consensus.

A lone figure in the audience that day declined to stand and applaud.

Ignatz Bubis, the chair of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and a

towering figure of moral authority in the country, believed that Walser’s

remarks, while strenuously couched in language aimed at providing cover

against charges of antisemitism, were essentially divisive, threatening to

take the country back, not forward. The day after the speech, Bubis issued a

statement to the German press accusing Walser of “spiritual arson,” or

geistige Brandstiftung. The two, Walser and Bubis, engaged in a lengthy

public debate that captivated the public, with dueling factions lobbying for

either holding on to the past or letting it go.

For us, today, the episode provides a reminder of the discomfort and

challenges in pressing forward with the task of stitching together something

shared from the disparate strands of individual experience. An intense

skepticism of German identity, of allowing any sense of the nation to take

hold in the wreckage of the war, has had significant costs and deprived the

continent of a credible deterrent to Russian aggression. The dismantling of

a German national project was, of course, necessary after its descent into

madness in the 1930s and 1940s. But many have strained to ensure that

nothing quite substantial is permitted to rise from the ashes. This is a

mistake, and one that we, in America and other countries, are at risk of

repeating. Our persistent unease with broader forms of collective identity

must be set aside. To abandon the hope of unity, which itself requires

delineation, is to abandon any real chance of survival over the long and

certainly very long term. The future belongs to those who, rather than hide

behind an often hollow claim of accommodating all views, fight for something singular and new.”