A Brief Meditation On The Nation State

According to Wikipedia when on this day Aetheistan, who was king of England obtained a promise from Constantine II of Scotland that the Scotts would not join with the Vikings in their continues conflicts, one can argue the beginning of the formation of the United Kingdom. Doubly interesting as we race toward the September Scottish referendum on whether to continue within the United Kingdom.

Not a bad moment to reflect, if just for a moment or two, on the nation state.

I have to admit I’m not much of a team person. After a lifetime of no interest after our move to New England some fourteen years ago Jan was caught up in the Red Sox run to its first World series win in, oh, I forget, something on the order of a million years. And with that I became a half hearted Sox fan. I work on hating the Yankees, but, it, too, is pretty half hearted.

Now, as we begin to look at returning to California in a year, I find myself trying on the idea of being a Dodgers fan. I like that it is a tip of the hat to my father who was from childhood a devotee of the bums from Brooklyn, and after swallowing hard, even when they moved to LA, he continued a true fan.

I don’t know but I suspect it is a broken gene. Because I’m pretty sure our desire to team up, to pick sides, is a deeply human thing.

We are herd animals. We need each other. It’s as basic as that.

And as the great generalized animal, we extend this herd inclination toward all sorts of things. Sports teams just one among them.

It moves on to very important things. Matters of human prosperity and the alternatives. Matters of life and death.

Still, this missing, or broken, or most likely merely defective gene forming my personality has given me a tiny bit of perspective that might be useful.

Now, as I think about our nation states it is hard not to see it as part of the same deal. We like our kind. What holds these things together has been a mixed bag. After a long period, a very long period where our bands were mostly genetically related, the rule of strong men, and with that tribes emerged. It was perhaps only a matter of time before the rise of empire. Along the way there’ve been various experiments, but for the most part it has been strong man rule.

The modern nation state is the direct descendent of this strong man rule, over thrown in the name of democracy, although for the most part in fact oligarchic republics. We Americans live in one of those.

We have some interesting and nearly unique characteristics. While we are bound together by language and some vague cultural affinities with that United Kingdom from which we separated ourselves some two hundred years and change ago, we are also a wildly multi-cultural experiment. The truth of which has created some serious tensions with which we continue to wrestle, particularly as we shift from our majority being European descendants.

For a world of reasons, well, because of the world, in many ways I see myself as an internationalist. I feel we need to see our connections beyond family and tribe, beyond our nation states for many reasons, basic survival as a species not the least among them.

And, so, with that missing, or malformed gene, I’ve spent most of my life pretty clearly aligned with those aspirations for a one world. I had great hopes for the United Nations. I still hope for a united nations, some sort of unified action plan, but it has been attenuated by the monumental failures of the United Nations as an institution.

And, something else.

Somewhere along the line I noticed that the successor to the nation state doesn’t appear to be shaping up as a united nations. Rather we seem to have lumbered into the age of the multinational corporation.

And that scares the shit out of me.

This is a brief meditation, so I won’t spend any real time with my hopes for shoring up the nation state, particularly our nation state, to make it a strong and healthy institution, something that furthers the well being of its citizens and immigrants who want to join in the project, a nation that cares for others and wishes to be a genuine city on the hill, a beacon of promise and hope for the world, and, with this, something that can oppose the rising power of the multinationals.

As I see it the multinational corporations exist only to further the wealth of a small part of the people connected to them, and, for the rest, well, it isn’t pretty. They must be controlled. They must. For the sake of our children and their children, we need to control the power of the multinational corporations.

And, given the givens, I am standing with the nation.

My nation.

By accident. By good fortune…

And so…

God bless America.

The country it is.

Messy. Compromised. A deeply human enterprise with glorious ideals at its heart and all the villainy of the human condition in its practice.