Arnab Goswami’s nationalism turned to be shallow. Would scratching the surface of other nationalists expose the same shallowness?
Well the politically right answer for this is I do not know. But the truth is whether shallow or not the very concept of nationalism is like measles and I’m quoting Albert Einstein here.
Have we ever sat down and though about what is nationalism and why is it relevant?
Nationalism is an excessive feeling of pride or allegiance to one’s nation. Usually to the nation of which we are citizen or our ethnicity, sometimes even heritage. This breeds a sense of cultural superiority. Feeling good about our country also makes us feel good about ourselves. Good news right. WRONG its bad news because we do not know what we are feeling good about. Racism, extremism are all different avatars of the same nationalism.
In reality Nationalism in itself is a fallacy. Let’s look at this very objectively on earth there are groups of homosapiens who live on inhabitable land. These groups could be guerdoned off through natural geographic challenges. Sometimes these boundaries are imaginary. Sometimes acceded through agreement.
For a long time I held that our nationalities lay in our language and not geography but if we were to muse even the languages have a common origin. Then where does nationalism arise from, why do we segregate ourselves to tribes and get into mutual conflicts and competition? It’s not even as if people identified with their tribes very strongly either. There were migrations.
If you notice nationalism peaks when we perceive threat. Creating a fear of threat from vast complex and overpowering world brings us to face our mortality. This causes insecurity and anxiety. In turn we look for security that the tribe brings with shared identity. In this context nationalism, status and success become very important.
The insecurity caused by crisis and uncertainty renews a sense of ethnic identity and a desire for independence. This in turn is exploited by media and politicians. Increased insecurity brings a stronger need to attach labels to ourselves so that it strengthens our identity. Security comes from being part of a tribe with shared beliefs, conventions. We to an extent need to have rivals and enemies so that we can define ourselves more strongly and clearly. As a group we then have common goals and purpose. Steven.M.Taylor’s book The Leap www.stevenmtaylor.com gives amazing insights on this. He discusses a fundamental sense of separateness and incompleteness in human. A feeling of being enclosed inside our mental space as “me versus rest of the world out there.”This makes us fragile and vulnerable threatened by the vast complex world outside. Culture provides meaning, organization and a coherent world that diminishes the terror caused by the knowledge of eventual death.
A study by Cohen et.al. (2004) made an interesting observation. The test looked at the preferences leadership in people post September 11th attack. Three different candidates were presented to the participants
- Task oriented – emphasized by goal setting, strategic planning and structure.
- Relationship oriented — compassionate, trust and confidence in others.
- Charismatic leader
Participants were placed in two conditions. First being mortality salient the other being the control group. The first group was asked to describe their emotions surrounding their death as well as the physical act of death itself. The control group was asked about upcoming examination. The result was in the mortality salient condition the favoured choice of leader was the charismatic one, men were preferred over women (this is from a study done by Hoyt et.al.2010) the leaders were preferred from their own group. With knowledge we know the need for Pulwana or Balakot.
The fear of mortality also brings about the need to support our values and beliefs bringing a semblance of immortality. So we choose our nationalist leaders, or celebrities to endorse. By endorsing them we are preserving our legacy.
From where I see it Nation is an imagined political community and imagined as inherently limited and sovereign. Think about it, the members of even the tiniest nation will not know most of their fellow members; forget about meeting or hearing them. However in the mind lives an image of their communion…communities are distinguished because they align to a way we imagine them. The nation is imagined as a community despite actual inequality and exploitation, simply because it is conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship. It is this fraternity that makes millions of people both die and kill for such a limited imagining!
The long and short of it, if we were to scratch any nationalist would similar hollowness be discovered… well Tomichan I don’t know about hollowness, but I do know we will find an insecure human who is trying to claim his immortality by endorsing an abstraction.
Cantadora - The keeper of stories. 
Well said. In the past few years, Nationalism happens to have polarized our society further by creating ultra-nationalists and ‘all others’, the latter being often exhorted to migrate to a country which is deemed to be an enemy. The latter are painted as ‘desh drohis’ or anti-national simply because they dare to speak up and try to register their point of view or dissent. A potent tool to suppress dissent and paint it as unpatriotic.
Permit me to share an enlightening post by Prof Badri Raina which explains the distinction between nationalism and patriotism: https://ashokbhatia.wordpress.com/2020/06/17/why-the-wren-is-a-patriot-and-not-a-nationalist-guest-post-by-prof-badri-raina.
Thank you hope at least this will get people thinking.