Image: by @youseddmuhammedd
Hello!
How was your week?
I am 36 years old, but I am only on my Learner’s permit. Over the last couple of months I have been practising driving with my partner and his parents — something I should probably have done twenty years ago with my own parents. On Sunday night I drove quite a few kilometres around Sydney’s eastern suburbs. I slowed down, I stopped, I changed lanes, I indicated, and I was even beeped at when I hesitated at an intersection!
I find it equally amusing and terrifying, and it’s wild that we let teenagers do it, but maybe that’s a cautious 36-year-old retrospect talking. I can’t imagine how people enjoy driving. How does the fact you’re in control of a speeding metal box around other idiots in speeding metal boxes escape you? Anyway. It was about time I added a license to my toolkit and I do look forward to road trips in the future.
In last week’s newsletter I alluded to a passage in the book, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, that has stuck with me and further elucidated the critique of nation states and the ‘West’ that I’ve always had a general understanding of, but never understood in greater context.
To digress a little: I have always loved maps and flags. I love world cups and the Olympic Games. I love the idea of nation states. I love the idea that borders can contain a culture. But these are just ideas, and relatively new ones. From Empires to Colonialism to the idea of a country that we have today, these concepts are all ways to unite a populous and justify expansionism/imperialism. Outside Europe, a vast majority of borders were drawn inorganically and usually by Europeans themselves. Perhaps my blind acceptance of the political world map — that patchwork of shapes and colours — was to do with being from a fairly homogenous (Anglo-wise) island country, like Australia. In my ignorance, other cultures and languages were always from elsewhere, and you couldn’t drive across borders and experience a gradient of changing communities. Even the accent stayed (mostly) the same.
The nation state, according to Rana Dasgupta, “emerged in the 19th century from a globe-conquering ideology of unique national destinies”. Australia, being the benefactor of the largest global empire of the time and exporter of British (read: white) exceptionalism, and having a majority white population (enforced for many years by the White Australia Policy), has had a relatively easy national history. We haven’t had revolutions, civil wars, an independence day. We are a lucky country, as Donald Horne pointed out in his seminal 1964 book, but purely by a fluke of being established post-industrialisation and developed post-WWI (and, of course, by means of genocide of the Indigenous population). Rana Dasgupta goes on to state that “The international order as we know it is not so old. The nation state became the universal template for human political organisation only after the first world war, when a new principle – ‘national self-determination’, as US President Woodrow Wilson named it – buried the many other blueprints under debate.”
Commentators and historians look at today’s rise in populist, conservative governments in power around the world and point to the idea of the nation state as a cause and symptom of bullish generals and blind patriotism. Since the end of the Cold War, we have retained the 20th century feeling that the narrative of history will continue to involve a clash of countries, but, as Dasgupta points out, “Since 1989, barely 5% of the world’s wars have taken place between states: national breakdown, not foreign invasion, has caused the vast majority of the 9 million war deaths in that time”. A strong, powerful leader, who convinces their subjects that the country is worth dying for and above critique, rises to power in the last gasps of a nation about to evolve… or collapse. All eyes on the US, eh?
I bring all of this up to preface the quote from the book that has burrowed into my brain. In the aftermath of September 11, journalists scrambled to figure out exactly what the terrorists meant when they condemned the ‘West’. For almost 20 years we’ve had a ‘culture war’ with Islam, and Muslims have suffered far worse than Westerners have in that time. From invasion and expulsion to domestic terrorism and mass shootings, and the world’s politicians stoking fear of the ‘other’, Muslims just point to the West and say “you’re proving our point”.
So the quote goes like this:
[To Muslims] Western customs, legal systems, and democracy look like a project to atomise society down to the level of individual economic units making autonomous decisions based on rational self-interest. Ultimately, it seems, this would pit every man, woman, and child against every other, in a competition of all against all for material goods.
What looks, from one side, like a campaign to secure greater rights for citizens irrespective of gender, looks from the other side, like powerful strangers inserting themselves into the private affairs of families and undercutting people’s ability to maintain their communal selves as familial and tribal networks. In short, what looks from one side like empowering each individual looks, from the other side, like disempowering whole communities.
The conflict wracking the modern world is not, I think, best understood as a “clash of civilizations”, if that proposition means we’re-different-so-we-must-fight-until-there’s-only-one-of-us. It’s better understood as the friction generated by two mismatched world histories intersecting.
— Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted
Today we found a flyer in our letterbox from Australia First, a grassroots racist organisation not to be taken too seriously (unless, you know, they get firearms and decide to shoot up a mosque). The flyer claimed that the Black Lives Matter movement is fraudulent and just ‘Trotskyesque’ propaganda — whatever that means. White supremacy is often tied to Christianity and certainly supports the idea of a nation state. In their confusing logic, they support the idea of Zionism (when they wouldn’t go as far as supporting Native Title, let alone a treaty with the First Australians, lol), and denounce anything outside of white, Christian, capitalist exceptionalism, even though they enjoy the socialist structures embedded in Australian culture, like free healthcare and a workers’ rights.
Anyway.
Unchecked nationalism is dangerous, as is any type of bigotry. I’m continuing to read more on what the future holds. Is secular capitalism going to last? What’s the difference between globalism and internationalism? What would an Australian republic look like and how would it be possible with our history? Etc etc. If you have any thoughts, I’d like to hear.
Other things of interest:
This guy, who I linked to a couple of newsletters ago explaining the YouTube algorithm, has made a new video about dust. What’s interesting is that the video is sponsored by Google Search, which means this video will inevitably come up first when people search the question: Is Dust Mostly Dead Skin. The guy cleverly makes the video more about the process of researching online, rather than the answer itself. It’s a clever strategy, not only to keep people watching, but a necessary reminder and/or lesson about confirmation bias.
How Social Justice Slideshows Took Over Instagram
Image: Eve Ewing, Instagram
Longread: You think being called ‘Karen’ today is bad, try being called Osama
New single from Matt Corby including the brilliant dance stylings of Clarence Kent:
Orville Peck and Shania Twain!
These guys are very popular on YouTube, but I love this series (especially when they go overseas) and it just came back for another season. Andrew and Steven try popular foods at 3 different price points and decide which one is more ‘worth it’:
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Until next week!