Over the past decade, I have been sounding the alarm about the recent resurgence of nationalism all over the world. Many commenters have had trouble understanding what the fuss is all about. Some confuse nationalism with patriotism.
If you are still having trouble understanding why the rise of nationalism is the crisis of the 21st century, then I suggest you take a peek at today’s headlines.
Utilitarianism is based on the idea that the welfare of all humans is equally important. It’s not the only alternative to nationalism, but in my view it is the most persuasive.
The 20th century saw a giant battle between nationalism and utilitarianism. By the 1990s, it looked like utilitarianism was winning. Now those gains are being reversed.
PS. You will likely encounter a great deal of misinformation about Putin’s motives. Here is what actually happened:
When Mr Putin became president in 2000, he showed no overt hostility towards America or the West, despite a recent NATO bombing raid on Belgrade without a UN resolution that had triggered a shrill anti-American response. In his first interview with Britain’s BBC, Mr Putin said: “I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe, so it is hard for me to visualise NATO as an enemy.” Russia, he said, might become a member of NATO if it were treated as an equal partner. Even when the three Baltic states joined NATO in spring 2004, Mr Putin insisted that relations with the defence organisation were “developing positively” and he had “no concerns about the expansion of NATO”.
The breaking-point in Mr Putin’s relationship with the West came towards the end of that year when several seemingly unrelated events coincided. The first was a terrorist attack on a school in Beslan, in the north Causasus, in which 1,200 people, mostly children, were taken hostage. After Russia’s special forces stormed the school, leaving 333 people dead, Mr Putin accused the West of trying to undermine Russia. He cancelled regional elections and handed more powers to the security services.
Let’s hope that Russia can join NATO someday.
READER COMMENTS
Mark Z
Feb 24 2022 at 1:04pm
I’ve never come across anyone other than Scott who thinks utilitarianism is the opposite of nationalism. Virtually every critique of nationalism I’ve seen has been framed in terms of classical liberal (more or less deontological) values like individual rights and self-determination. Kant has at least as much a claim as Mill to be the intellectual grandfather of modern opposition to nationalism.
That story and it’s aftermath sounds suspiciously similar to the US and 9/11.
Scott Sumner
Feb 24 2022 at 1:19pm
“That story and it’s aftermath sounds suspiciously similar to the US and 9/11.”
But our motive after 9/11 was not nationalism.
Kevin Corcoran
Feb 24 2022 at 1:36pm
“Opposite” isn’t quite the word I would choose here, but I would certainly agree with the idea that the idea of utilitarianism at least works in opposition to nationalism. Without wanting to get too much into the weeds about how one precisely defines “nationalism,” I would at least take it to include a preference for the well-being of the citizens of one’s own nation over and above the well-being of the citizens of other nations. That seems like a necessary (though not sufficient) part of the definition of nationalism. And given that utilitarianism places weight on the well-being of all people equally regardless of citizenship or national residence, it seems almost tautologically true that utilitarianism and nationalism are incompatible, even if not literal opposites.
I say this as someone with no particular fondness for utilitarianism – in my view it’s one of the least persuasive of the major moral theories. But Scott’s claim that utilitarianism as a moral theory is opposed to nationalism seems basically correct. You are also correct to not that, say, classical liberal and deontological arguments against nationalism can also be made, but Scott also noted that utilitarianism isn’t the only moral theory opposed to nationalism – it’s just the one he finds most persuasive.
Kevin Corcoran
Feb 24 2022 at 2:14pm
Ugh. The sentence “You are also correct to not that, say, classical liberal…” should just say “You are also correct to that, say, classical liberal…” Note to self – proofread before posting.
Scott Sumner
Feb 24 2022 at 5:34pm
Kevin, That’s right, and of course I never said utilitarianism was the opposite of nationalism; I said it was an alternative view.
Steve
Feb 25 2022 at 11:54am
Right. A nationalist assigns a higher value to the welfare of his countrymen than to the welfare of foreigners, and therefore accepts policies that have negative net utility, considered globally.
Put a different way, a cosmopolitan utilitarian seeks to maximize global utility, whereas a nationalist utilitarian seeks to maximize “relation-adjusted utility”.
Suppose a nationalist is ten times more concerned with the welfare of his fellow countrymen than of foreigners. And suppose a certain action-say, admitting one unskilled immigrant- would generate 3 utils for the immigrant and -1 util for a native. The cosmopolitan would support this action because generates 2 net utils. But the nationalist would calculate the relation-adjusted utility as 3 + (10)(-1) = -7 utils, and therefore oppose it.
Nationalists regard the bonds of the nation like those of the family, albeit broader and weaker. This entails a degree of biological relatedness. (The English word “nation” comes from the Latin word for birth.) Immigrant citizens are like adopted children. But immigrants, like adoptees, are the exceptions to the rule.
A huge weakness of cosmopolitan utilitarianism, therefore, is that it implicitly condemns the family. Virtually all cosmopolitan utilitarians, like Bryan Caplan, are hypocrites. They reject the concept of “relation-adjusted utility” at the national level but practice an even more extreme version of it in their personal lives.
Caplan condemns “anti-foreign bias” in one blog post. Then, in the next post, he brags about the enormous effort he made to marginally improve the educations of his already-fortunate children. Even without that exceptional effort, his kids would have been upper-middle class Americans raised in a stable white-collar suburban household- near the top of the global distribution. Caplan could have generated more global utility if he had pierced his family’s “beautiful bubble” by adopting homeless foster children and devoted that all extra effort to helping them. His biological kids would come out pretty well anyway.
Perhaps Caplan addresses this argument somewhere, although I haven’t seen him do so. In general, as far as I can tell, the anti-nationalists simply ignore this obvious implication of their reasoning.
robc
Feb 25 2022 at 2:36pm
Does Caplan consider himself a utilitarian?
Steve
Feb 25 2022 at 3:05pm
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/08/the_efficient_e.html
In any case, there’s no need to get into an overly technical debate about theories of ethics. The point is simply that the anti-nationalist, pro-immigration crowd reject the idea that one can prefer smaller benefits for one’s countrymen to larger benefits for foreigners. But this logic also implies that it’s wrong to favor one’s children over random children 5 or 5000 miles away. Yet they do favor their own children, and they don’t acknowledge the contradiction.
Kevin Corcoran
Feb 25 2022 at 3:55pm
This is false – nothing about being anti-nationalist or pro-immigration precludes you from preferring your own child to a different child 5000 miles away. This would be true if the only possible basis for being simultaneously anti-nationalism and pro-immigration was pure utilitarianism, but of course that’s not true. There are all sorts of moral outlooks that allow you to oppose nationalism, support immigration, and prefer the well being of your children to that of strangers, without any internal contradiction. Including Bryan’s own views – libertarian individualism. If you’re an individualist libertarian, there is no contradiction in holding all of these views simultaneously.
Regarding the Caplan post you reference, I think you misunderstood the point. Yes, he mentions “utilitarianism” in it, but he doesn’t endorse utilitarianism by doing so. I mean, he also mentioned egalitarianism too, but he’s obviously not a fan of egalitarianism. By referring to open borders as the “efficient, egalitarian, libertarian, utilitarian way to double world GDP”, he’s pointing out that whether your views are based on economic efficiency, egalitarianism, libertarianism, or utilitarianism, you should support open borders, because open borders is the best policy under all these very different systems. If you’re a nationalist who prefers to thinks upholding nationalism is so all important it overrules all of these other things plus it’s worth passing on the chance to double the total wealth of the world, then yes, your commitment to nationalism will be unmoved by that argument. But that’s not much of a surprise.
Kevin Corcoran
Feb 25 2022 at 3:05pm
Indeed, this is one of the reasons I find nationalism unpersuasive as an idea – I think it’s very denigrating to the idea of family bonds to suggest that because I and a random stranger in Tennessee I’ve never met, and never will meet, happen to occupy the same federal jurisdiction, my relation to them is at least somewhat comparable to my relationship to my family. I don’t see that as elevating the non-existent relationship between myself and that stranger, I see it as devaluing the relationship between myself and my family.
This made me do a double take, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone accuse Bryan Caplan of being a utilitarian! Indeed, Caplan is and has always been savagely critical of utilitarianism. When Scott Sumner began blogging here on a regular basis, one of the first things Bryan did was make a post criticizing Sumner for his utilitarianism! In fact, Caplan himself has argued repeatedly on this blog that utilitarianism would require people to drastically reduce the resources they give to their families and send it to the poor, and in doing so he takes this as an obvious reductio ad absurdem of utilitarianism.
I don’t think this is necessarily true. Most utilitarians these days endorse rule utilitarianism, which recommends people behave according to rules that would maximize overall utility. Rule utilitarians allow for the rules to account for things like limited human benevolence, and it recommends rules that would lead to the best results given human nature, as it actually exists. One could easily believe a system where people focus most on those closest to them would lead to overall better results for everyone compared to a system where you’re supposed act as if you’re utterly indifferent between your own daughter and a Finnish cobbler. Given human nature, this seems extremely plausible. Therefore, one can easily, on utilitarian grounds, endorse a rule of giving preferential treatment to your family over your neighbors, and to your neighbors over distant strangers.
Steve
Feb 25 2022 at 3:37pm
It’s likely that I have a lot more in common with a randomly selected person from Tennessee- in terms of language, religion, culture, ancestry, traditions, etc.- than I do with a person randomly selected from the entire world.
Once you concede this, it’s extremely easy for me to construct an argument that one should also give preferential treatment to one’s fellow citizens over foreigners.
Kevin Corcoran
Feb 25 2022 at 4:11pm
That is very likely true, but I’m not sure I see the point. The fact that I’m likely to have more in common with someone who lives relatively near to me, but I’ve never met, compared to someone else I’ve never met who lives further away, doesn’t remotely get to the conclusion that therefore I ought to view my relationship to them as akin to a family relationship, even if weakly akin to it. Saying I have more in common with Stranger A compared to Stranger B along all those measures doesn’t entail I ought therefore prefer the well being of A over B for those reasons, nor do those coincidental similarities give me moral license to prefer policies that harm B for the sake of A.
Yes, that was my point, one could make a utilitarian argument for preferring the well-being of people who live near you compared to those who live far away. But that does nothing to rescue your initial claim that Bryan was being hypocritical or contradicting himself. Saying “Here’s a utilitarian argument for why you should do X, but you’ve been advocating Z instead, so you’re a hypocrite” only holds water if the person you’re talking to is actually a utilitarian. But Bryan isn’t a utilitarian. Nor am I. Even if you think that the moral systems of Bryan Caplan (or Michael Huemer, say) are wrong, and therefore they are wrong to support open borders, it’s just false to say that their views are hypocritical or internally contradictory.
Jon Murphy
Feb 25 2022 at 4:14pm
Steve-
Be careful: you’re conflating a few different things.
First: Cosmopolitanism does not imply that Person X in China and my twin brother should occupy equal status in my heart. All it says is I should not discount basic human dignity to X simply because he is not of a specific jurisdiction.
Second (and related to the First): to prefer someone more than someone else does not undo cosmopolitanism. I will always be closest with my family, and then my friends, my neighbors, and various other groups (circling outwards). My brother’s happiness factors in a lot more into my utility function than some random stranger. Cosmopolitanism means, though, that I still owe some basic things to the random stranger, like justice. Though the random person’s unhappiness does not affect me much, I should not strive to cause him unhappiness.
The issue with nationalism is not so much that one “prefers” the happiness of certain individuals to others just because they are your “people” (however defined). Rather, the problem is the active negative harm that certain people do not deserve basic human dignity just because they are not “your people” (or, stated another way, we owe something specials to each other just because we are the same “people.”).
If you’re serious about learning the various nuances, I highly recommend Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments or Fonna Forman’s The Circles of Sympathy. Both works (but Fonna’s in particular) deal with the various issues you raise.
Steve
Feb 25 2022 at 4:36pm
@Jon Murphy:
This all sounds nice, but it doesn’t provide much help in resolving specific policy questions.
I agree that we should “not discount discount basic human dignity” to a foreigner, and that the foreigner is owed “justice” and that I should not do him “active negative harm”. But the rubber hits the road when Jean the undocumented Haitian is trying to cross the U.S. Border, or the threshold of your house. Does justice demand he be admitted? Is a law enforcement officer who turns him away doing him active negative harm?
You have your answers to those questions, as do I. But those principles you outlined won’t be much help in resolving the dispute.
Mark Z
Feb 25 2022 at 3:44pm
But my contention is, most opposition to or rejection of nationalism is not, as Scott thinks, rooted in utilitarianism. Scott sees a decline in nationalism as sufficient evidence of rising utilitarianism. Utilitarianism isn’t unique in its rejection of greater moral weighting of one’s countrymen; it’s not even the most popular basis for rejecting it as I see it. That’s why Scott’s assessment of the conflict as “giant battle between nationalism and utilitarianism” seems wrong to me. He’s imputing is a very particular moral philosophy onto anti-nationalism in general.
Kevin Corcoran
Feb 25 2022 at 4:41pm
Those are all fair points. But if your overall “contention is [that] most opposition to or rejection of nationalism is not, as Scott thinks, rooted in utilitarianism,” it’s not well expressed by including the statement “I’ve never come across anyone other than Scott who thinks utilitarianism is the opposite of nationalism.” There’s an important difference between the claim “most opposition to nationalism isn’t rooted in utilitarianism” and the claim that Scott is the only utilitarian you’ve ever come across who sees utilitarianism as opposed to nationalism. It may be true that you’ve never come across any other utilitarian who does so, but they aren’t at all rare.
Andrew_FL
Feb 24 2022 at 3:20pm
You and I read the 20th century very differently. The great conflicts of the 20th century were between political systems, economic systems. But nowhere did any of those in the conflicts claim “I’m doing this to maximize utility!”
Except maybe the Socialists.
Jon Murphy
Feb 24 2022 at 3:53pm
He doesn’t disagree. Note what he says: “Utilitarianism is based on the idea that the welfare of all humans is equally important. ”
The totalitarian systems of political and economic thought rested on the idea that the welfare of all humans is not equally important. Certain groups (nationals) were of higher value than others. The cosmopolitan ideas of liberalism (and, in Scott’s case, liberal utilitarianism) were directly opposed to the totalitarian ideas of “certain groups simply do not matter.”
What socialist literature are you reading? The socialists explicitly were not utilitarians.
Andrew_FL
Feb 24 2022 at 7:32pm
The fact that some of the political systems of the 20th century were incompatible with Sumner’s idea of utilitarianism, does not imply that the systems opposing them were utilitarian in Sumner’s sense.
And sure, there are non-utilitarian socialists. But to suggest there are no utilitarian socialists, when socialism follows so inevitably from utilitarian thinking, is simply false.
Jon Murphy
Feb 25 2022 at 7:36am
Not opposing. Alternative. Like he says multiple times above.
That’s the claim I’m asking you to justify. Who are you reading that makes the case for socialism on utilitarian grounds? All the theorists I’ve read, from Proudhon and Marx to Lange and modern socialists either explicitly or implicitly reject utilitarianism.
Scott Sumner
Feb 25 2022 at 12:27pm
“But to suggest there are no utilitarian socialists, when socialism follows so inevitably from utilitarian thinking, is simply false.”
You are correct that there are utilitarian socialists, mostly people who are not well versed in economics. But socialism is hardly an “inevitable” outcome, as I am a utilitarian libertarian.
TGGP
Feb 25 2022 at 9:40am
Communism is explicitly internationalist. “Workers of the World”, “The Internationale”, etc. And in the good old days they could easily think of themselves as representing “the greatest good for the greatest number”.
Jon Murphy
Feb 25 2022 at 11:53am
Well, yes and no. Communism in practice is largely nationalist (eg, the Holodomor).
But also, as a point of fact, “internationalist” is not the same as “cosmopolitan”
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Feb 24 2022 at 3:35pm
I think what Scott is getting at is the idea of a “nation” having interests that do not derive from the interests of its citizens, that a terrorist attack on Russian citizens created a national interest in hostility to the West.
Mark Brophy
Feb 24 2022 at 3:56pm
It would be better to abolish NATO and drastically cut the defense budget. We shouldn’t be defending Europe. We shouldn’t defend Asia, either.
Scott Sumner
Feb 24 2022 at 5:38pm
NATO is the most successful peacekeeping organization never. I hope that someday all nations belong to NATO.
E. Harding
Feb 24 2022 at 8:45pm
NATO has done nothing to keep the peace. Remember Cyprus? Libya? Kosovo?
Jon Murphy
Feb 25 2022 at 12:24pm
Remember: the big question is always “what’s the counterfactual?” Even the great Pax Romana or Pax Britannia had conflicts. The question is: how many wars would have occurred if NATO never existed.
Would Cyprus, Libya, and Kosovo have happened regardless of NATO? I suspect so, because those issues are centuries old (especially in Cyprus and Kosovo). If NATO never existed, would there have been more conflict? We’d have Kosovo, Libya, Cyprus, and (hypothetically) Moldova, Belarus, Scandinavia, etc?
Scott Sumner
Feb 25 2022 at 12:32pm
“NATO has done nothing to keep the peace.”
Here’s a suggestion. Read a book on what European history was like before 1950. Then read a book on what European history has been like since 1950. It’s not complicated.
And the three countries you cite are not even members of NATO. Notice a pattern? NATO members don’t attack each other. That’s why I wish the entire world belonged to NATO. Of course that will only be possible when all countries agree to the principle of non-aggression.
MarkW
Feb 24 2022 at 4:07pm
I would say the battle has been between nationalists and cosmopolitans (or the the ‘somewheres’ vs the ‘anywheres’). You can be an cosmopolitan or a nationalist regardless of whether you ascribe to utilitarian or deontological ethics.
Personally I lean toward cosmopolitanism and against utilitarianism both for ethical reasons (no, it’s not a good thing to shove the fat guy onto the tracks to use as a trolley brake) and also for empirical reasons (people with deontological ethics behave better).
Scott Sumner
Feb 25 2022 at 12:35pm
“people with deontological ethics behave better”
Actually, the places with the most utilitarian value systems (such as Denmark) tend to be the places where people behave best.
Mark Z
Feb 25 2022 at 3:49pm
Can you share a citation that Danes are more utilitarian? Not implausible but it’s news to me.
Scott Sumner
Feb 25 2022 at 6:18pm
I discuss this issue in more depth in a paper entitled “The Great Danes”, which you can google.
Ted Durant
Feb 24 2022 at 5:22pm
I think the notion of utilitarianism as an alternative philosophy to nationalism is confused. Utilitarianism is a way of thinking about how to make collective decisions. Nations are a way in which people are aggregated, in our current world based on geographic boundaries. There is nothing about utilitarianism that specifies the level of aggregation at which it is to be applied.
Humans have generally moved from tribalism to nationalism. I have not read or heard any serious proposals to eliminate the physical boundary method of defining nations. Plenty of people seem to think we need some form of “globalism,” i.e. some form of government with authority over all humans. Thus far, though, the only serious movements in that direction are in the form of international organizations, rather than complete elimination of nations.
In my opinion, the big political arguments are not about the rise-fall-rise of nationalism, they are about the level of aggregation at which people are comfortable subjecting themselves to governance. Those aggregation levels range from individualism to globalism, with many stops in between. We can’t even figure it out in the USA, despite being designed from the start to adapt as we learn.
Putin rolling tanks into Ukraine isn’t indicative of a rise in nationalism. Rather, it is his expression of what he believes is in the best interest of his nation, given the current state of nations and international organizations.
I think it’s obvious that the right move at the fall of the USSR would have been to start a conversation about what replaces NATO, rather than who is in or out of NATO. But, what do I know?
Scott Sumner
Feb 24 2022 at 5:37pm
I would encourage you to look into the history of nationalism. It’s not about nations in the sense of political boundaries. Think about German nationalism, white nationalism, Chinese (Han) nationalism, Hindu nationalism, Russian nationalism, etc.
TGGP
Feb 25 2022 at 9:42am
One of those things is not like the others: “white nationalism” doesn’t have obvious political boundaries, and whites aren’t a “nation”.
Jon Murphy
Feb 25 2022 at 11:54am
That’s Scott’s point: nationalism isn’t defined by political boundaries.
Scott Sumner
Feb 25 2022 at 12:36pm
German nationalism was not about people living in Germany, it was about ethnic Germans everywhere (and it excluded Jews in Germany). Ditto for the other cases I mentioned.
Ted Durant
Feb 25 2022 at 12:21pm
I have studied it quite a bit, particularly German. There are two contentious processes. One is the establishment of geographic borders. The other is the establishment of which tribes are in and which are out (politically and/or physically).
Mark Z
Feb 25 2022 at 3:57pm
Scott, nationalism has not historically been defined as equivalent to ethnic nationalism. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_nationalism and the citations as well. The consensus definition of ‘nationalism’ and as it is has been used by historians is generally inclusive of both civic and ethnic nationalism. If the meaning of words is defined by consensus, then your definition of nationalism seems off.
Scott Sumner
Feb 25 2022 at 6:20pm
Over the past 100 years, when the term nationalism has been used it’s almost always been ethnic nationalism, not civic nationalism.
Weir
Feb 28 2022 at 4:11am
Nationalism includes Quebecois nationalism. It includes the Canadian nationalism in Margaret Atwood’s books.
Scottish nationalism is nationalism. So is Hawaiian nationalism. First Nations nationalism. The nationalism in the Bjork song about the Faroe Islands. The song by Enny called Same Old.
The Greek nationalism of Byron. The ethno-nationalists at MSNBC. The nationalists dividing students up into “affinity groups” in high schools now. The nationalists who police each year’s “day of absence” at Evergreen.
The campus nationalists everywhere who insist on study spaces segregated by race. The campus nationalists who insist on graduation ceremonies segregated by race.
The nationalists who came up with the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, dividing restaurant owners into Afghan oppressors and oppressed restaurateurs with Indian parentage.
The ethno-nationalists in the admissions department at Harvard, and the ethno-nationalists at TJ High School who cut Asian-American enrolment by 20 percentage points.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Harold Schmidt in the New York Times: “Older populations are whiter. Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
Richard Carranza. The Smithsonian. Centennial Elementary’s Families of Color Playground Night. The Art Institute of Chicago. There’s too much to keep count.
Phil H
Feb 24 2022 at 8:06pm
This invasion is obviously not a good thing, but I do think that some level of comparison is necessary: compared with the last European war, in the former Yugoslavia, this one looks like it could be very civilized. I think religious extremism is still much more dangerous than nationalism. Nationalists mostly want the country to still exist at the end of their military tantrums. The religious don’t care.
Scott Sumner
Feb 24 2022 at 11:11pm
No, this is far worse. Yugoslavia was a civil war. To find a comparable war in Europe (one country invading and annexing territory from another) you need to go back to the two world wars. Obvious the death toll is far lower this time, but an important precedent has been set. The 75-year taboo on wars of conquest in Europe is over. There’s a real danger this could lead to something far worse, which wasn’t true in Yugoslavia.
When Hitler annexed the Sudetenland in 1938, a pundit could have truthfully said: “This is trivial compared to WWI.” Of course the world is far different today and I don’t expect a repeat of WWII, but the point is that it could lead to something much worse down the road. What if Putin goes after Estonia, which we have a formal obligation to defend?
TGGP
Feb 25 2022 at 9:45am
I don’t think there were enough self-identified utilitarians for them to be the ones who successfully struggled with nationalism. Instead there were just varieties of internationalism (such as capitalists vs communists).
Jon Murphy
Feb 25 2022 at 12:25pm
Is “self-identified” the relevant measurement?
David S
Feb 25 2022 at 11:20am
I wonder to what degree any domestic political party can talk and perform nationalism before they start pissing off their citizens and losing power. Trump and his most loyal followers liked the talking part of nationalism, but it was never performed to any great extent other than a useless border wall, dumb trade policies towards China, and tariffs on Canadian lumber. Boris Johnson and his merry band of Brexiteers have both talked and performed, and I don’t see them holding office much longer.
For authoritarian regimes the self-destruction of performative nationalism can persist for longer, but for countries like China that have strong global economic connections extreme actions can threaten prosperity. This is being played out to some degree with their posturing on Covid and Taiwan.
And Putin is just a disaster. I hope we can make him fail without spilling our own blood.
John Brennan
Feb 25 2022 at 4:50pm
Written almost 28 years ago:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1994-09-02-9409020263-story.html
Eisenhower also identified the Military Industrial Complex in 1961–which has transmorgrified to the point of NATO nations selling or providing high tech weapon systems manufactured by multinational corporations to nations like Ukraine (Taiwan next) to “defend” themselves into their own graves.
See John Mearsheimer with more context from 2014:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4&t=4s
The Military Bureaucratic Complex must end.
Weir
Feb 28 2022 at 3:17am
“An abstract term is like a box with a false bottom; you may put in it what ideas you please, and take them out again without being observed.” Tocqueville’s example was equality.
Utility works just as well. Terms like “Russian imperialism” or “Ukrainian nationalism” start to look precise by comparison. Every man and his dog can say he’s just being utilitarian.
Nationalists and imperialists have claimed that, when you add it all up, they have the welfare of all humans on their side. The ideal world is the world in which their ideal has won. Everybody flourishes under the one triumphant ideal. Nationalists and imperialists believe in human flourishing. That’s not what they disagree about.
Kenan Malik: “Whereas Enlightenment philosophes saw progress as civilisation overcoming the resistance of traditional cultures with their irrational prejudices and outmoded institutions, for the Romantics the steamroller of progress was precisely what they feared. For Johann Gottfried Herder, the eighteenth-century German philosopher who best articulated the Romantic notion of culture, each people or volk was unique and this uniqueness was expressed through its volksgeist–the unchanging spirit of a people refined through history. Rejecting the Enlightenment belief that the same institutions and forms of governance would promote human flourishing in all societies, Herder held that the values of different cultures were incommensurate but equally valid.”
The welfare of all humans is like the voice of God or history or science, which is awesome. Whatever it is, it speaks through us. We are merely its messenger.
Except that’s not true. Every oracle is a flim flam man. The utilitarian has a forecast and calls it history. The man with the calculus turns out to be another planner and utilitarianism means pretending to have gamed out every consequence and every consequence of those consequences. But the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, and everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
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