Motus Mentis

In yesterday’s post about the looming showdown between Texas and Washington over securing the border, I wrote:

The so-called “rule of law”, and obedience to the formal structures of government, are all that stand, in a vast and divided nation, between order and chaos; they are the load-bearing walls that support the great (and trembling) edifice of American civilization. Every crack in them weakens its structural soundness, and puts more strain on other parts of its frame and foundation; and as the little fractures multiply, they lead to bigger and bigger ones, until the whole thing comes crashing down. (I’m not making this up, mind: this is, over and over again, how nations die.)

A commenter posting as “Max” (writing, I believe, from Germany), had this to say:

Your use of “nation” is hard to comprehend for a European. Outside of the US, a nation is usually understood as a people having common ancestors as well as a common language, culture, and religion.

From my perspective, the US is lacking all that. Hence, there are several nations inside the territory of the US rather than just one. The word “empire” is therefore a better fit than “nation”.

So far empires have not nearly been as durable as nations. What you describe is how empires die. Nations are not held together by rule of law. Empires are held together by rule of law or — as you might find out soon — by brute force.

Max is right. I’ve written for years about the importance of a shared culture to nationhood, and about the plain fact that America, by that criterion, hardly exists as a nation anymore. See, to offer a few examples, my posts The Narrowing Effect Of Diversity (2017); Simple Common Sense About Diversity And Immigration (2013); Gradually, Then Suddenly (2015); Commonality Of Atoms (2015); and Is America A “Proposition Nation”? (2019).

In the last of these I quote John Jay, writing in Federalist #2:

With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people–a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

So, yes, I have long understood that commonality of heritage, language, folkways, etc., are essential for nationhood. Given that, then, I have to ask myself: why did I still use the term “nation” to describe the United States? Max’s term, “empire”, is really far more apt (and I have used it often to describe America’s position in the wider world).

The best answer I can give is that I am old, and that I can still remember the Before Time, when we really did, despite our small amount of baked-in diversity, still think of ourselves as “One nation, under God, indivisible”. When I was a child, America’s composition was roughly 90% white people of European descent, just under 10% black, and a fraction of 1% anything else. It was also unabashedly Christian, with a sturdy sense of the transcendent and of the role of Providence (as noted by Jay, above) in our fate and fortune. As a schoolboy I put my hand over my heart each morning, along with every other child in America, and pledged allegiance to what we genuinely believed was “one nation”. In that America of the Before Time, from sea to shining sea we honored our founders, and our shared national mythos, with a reverence and gratitude that was deep and genuine. Yes, we had our troubles and disagreements, but even so we always felt that they were more like family quarrels, and that despite them we were all in it together. We knew that our history, like any family’s history, was stained and imperfect, but beneath it all we still thought America was fundamentally — exceptionally! — good, and we were proud to be part of it.

None of this is true any longer. That core American family still exists, mostly outside our major cities — but its numbers are dwindling, and as it fades into minority status, so does its political and cultural power. What exists outside that shrinking circle is nothing that resembles a “nation” in any meaningful sense at all, but rather a congeries of squabbling tribes and factions from everywhere on Earth, who form loose political coalitions when it suits them, but who are bound together in commonality and reciprocal duty by nothing at all. Above it all, doing whatever it must to retain its grip, is our ruling class, sitting astride the colossal Federal behemoth. They divide to conquer:

Their vision of America is a rootless, deracinated, atomized people, cut off from tradition, heritage, religion, and all reverence for the past; they seek to encourage this not only by reviling and denouncing America’s past in education and mass media, but also by flooding the country with uncountable millions of aliens who share none of America’s traditions, folklore, culture, byways, or mythos, thereby making any reliance upon such things for the preservation of social cohesion — and without such shared values and beliefs there can be no more social cohesion within a nation’s borders than there is in an airport lounge — an act of “bigotry”, “xenophobia”, and “exclusion”. The aim is to eliminate altogether the “civil society” and horizontal ligatures that have throughout all of human history bound people into organic and healthy communities, leaving behind a flattened and stifling two-level hierarchy: below, a solipsistic, radically individualized populace, stripped of everything but the appetites of the present moment, and severed from the extension in time, and thereby the deep sense of duty and connection to the dead and the unborn, that has been the hallmark of healthy societies always and everywhere; while above them squats a vast, tutelary, managerial bureaucracy.

And just as the horizontal bindings of the former nation are withering away, so is its extension in time:

Until now, every generation of every civilization saw itself as a living bridge between past and future — as heirs and beneficiaries of the productive labor of their forebears, and stewards of that treasure for children yet unborn. But now, having pulled up our roots (and salted the earth from which they sprang), we have no inheritance to cherish and preserve; that which we have not simply squandered, we have taught ourselves to despise. We have, therefore, nothing to offer our posterity, and so if we think of it at all, it is only to turn away in guilt, and to focus on what we can take for ourselves right now. If that weren’t enough, we also find ourselves in a time of exponential social and technological change. Even those of us who do seek to preserve our inheritance can hardly imagine how.

It’s often been said that civilization is, at bottom, the organization of “low time preference”: the deferral of present consumption to take advantage of the increase of the relative value of future goods. But in order for that strategy to work, one has to be confident in a stable future. When things change too rapidly, and we can no longer be sure that our efforts today stand a reasonable chance of bearing fruit in later years, it drives time preference toward the present. And that, in turn, undermines the very foundation upon which civilization is erected.

So when a civilization becomes unstable, or when the pace of change becomes too rapid, there is a cascading time-preference effect, a kind of negative-feedback loop that begins to take hold.

All of these things, then, work together: multiculturalism, through a process of historical “stenosis”, severs the past; this loss of heritage, in turn, diminishes a society’s sense of obligation to its ancestors, and stewardship for its descendants; rapid technological and social change diminishes the surety of the future. All of this drives time-preference toward the present — which manifests itself in hedonism, present consumption, loss of social cohesion (why pull together when there’s nothing to pull for?), and declining birth-rates. Finally, the foreshortening of time-preference attacks the bedrock of civilization itself, in an accelerating, destructive cycle.

In conclusion: I stand corrected. For me to have called the America of 2024 a “nation” was, as much as it grieves me to accept it, a sentimental inaccuracy.