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Abjuring Loyalty To Ourselves For A Mess Of Pottage

I also suspect, and the title of the blog has always suggested that Americans are primarily consumers of products – that our other pre-political bonds or identities are overwhelmed by our identities as consumers. We don’t look at each other as members of sections, or religious communities so much as we latch onto hobbies and rank […]

I also suspect, and the title of the blog has always suggested that Americans are primarily consumers of products – that our other pre-political bonds or identities are overwhelmed by our identities as consumers. We don’t look at each other as members of sections, or religious communities so much as we latch onto hobbies and rank whether someone is relatively close to our status. Oh you like hot wings too? Have you ever tried this kind? You’re into audio equipment? Have you seen that new tube-driven CD player in Audiophile magazine? This used to be just a tiny part of a man’s eccentricity. But in the age of Patio-Man it is his identity. ~Michael Brendan Dougherty

There is a lot of truth to this.  I think this is partly why Austin Bramwell criticises defenders of “ancestral loyalties,” partly why the anti-crunchies literally cannot understand the virtue of putting obligations to a community first, partly why some libertarians view opponents of immigration as madmen and proto-Nazis.  It is one of the reasons why neocons think it is an insult to claim that other peoples have greater attachment to “tribe or religion or whatever,” because they so plainly regard the accusation of any such attachment as the worst kind of insult, and it is one of the reasons why the only tribal loyalty David Brooks can muster is loyalty to the anti-tribal, universalist tribe of the proposition nation, an imaginary tribe, a tribe bound by ideas and not blood or custom or faith.  It is partly why Trent Lott cannot understand why Sunnis and Shi’ites are killing each other, and perhaps also why most Americans could only shrug in confusion when they were confronted with the wars in the Balkans.  It is why they had to attribute sectarian and ethnic warfare in the rest of the world to disputes that stretch back centuries.  This falsehood was often uttered in relation to the Yugoslav wars–“they’ve been killing each other for centuries!”–as if the sheer antiquity of the grudge was the only thing that made it understandable to people whose blood and sect loyalties are as weak as ginger beer. 

This represented the failure to understand that these feuds have everything to do with immediate loyalties to kith, kin, church and place and less to do with unusually long memories about slights and battles from long ago.  The memories of old injuries are kept alive because the rivalry is ongoing and fresh in the minds of those who remember.  The old fights are not old, but continue in some form even now.  Only antiquarians would normally bestir themselves over the outcome of Culloden, but for Scottish nationalists who have a mind to detach their country from Great Britain it might have an immediacy and relevance that more recent battles do not.  The characteristically short American historical memory, which prevails everywhere except perhaps for some areas in the South, is a product of having kept few powerfully strong attachments to the old ties of blood and faith that cause men to tell the stories of their past victories and defeats and the old outrages against their people.  There is an advantage to this ongoing amnesia, which is that Americans are unlikely to resent one another over the injuries that your people did to mine 50 or 100 or 200 years ago and are less likely to engage in actual violence against their ancestral foes, but it also means that they have no idea who they are and only passing antiquarian interest in where they came from (genealogy is most popular, naturally, in the country where it is also supposed to be the most irrelevant).  Because we are trained to be less atavistic than other peoples, we are tied less to our history, which is from my perspective mostly a blight and a curse; because the conventional national myth today is one of progression away from the old ways, we consequently have much less respect for our forefathers and find ourselves increasingly unable and unwilling to defend the patrimony they have left to us.  This keeps us from the extreme declensions of vendetta and brutality against neighbours from another tribe or sect, but it also dissolves and eats away at our capacity to have meaningful community and to have neighbours who are more than geographically proximate.  There is something deeply unnatural and abnormal about this, and if Europe is any indicator of where we are headed we should be able to see that no people can long survive the abjuration of loyalty to itself.   

The Marching Season in Ulster appears to Americans bizarre and difficult to comprehend (what do battles in the 17th century really have to do with people today, some might ask) because we rarely attach our current status in society to the outcome of old internecine fights.  The Russian commemoration of the victory over Polish occupation during the Time of Troubles probably strikes many of us as odd in the extreme for similar reasons.  The Orthodox recitation of the Synodikon on the first Sunday of Great Lent, listing and re-condemning the errors of all of the major heresies of the past, is for many other confessions slightly inexplicable, because for many others this emphasis on right teaching is, if not foreign, hardly as ingrained as it is in the Orthodox Church.  Catholics, while many take doctrine very seriously, do not annually get together and denounce the Cathars, Luther and Calvin.  There is a certain mentality tied to this kind of ritual denunciation that Americans usually share only in the context of endorsing their own universalist political ideas against the list of enemies of the 20th century.  That enthusiasm for America as something other than a Brooksian universalist tribe is not really permitted in much of the current discussion is proof of the self-destructive tendency in denigrating and minimising pre-political loyalties.  If men are not defined by kin, birth, place and the web of traditions handed down to us, no enduring identity exists that is not subject to the dictates of a state and the whims of individuals.

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