Off The Shelf: Back to Basics

Editor’s Note: Every week, Michael Brendan Dougherty writes an “Off the Shelf” column sharing casual observations on the books he’s reading and the passing scene.

Are nations modern or ancient? It seems like an obvious question to every scholar who answers it. Except, they tend to give different answers. And this is true whether they think nationalism is on the whole good, or wicked. This I know, because I am just back from moderating two panels at a conference on nationalism and populism at the University of Pennsylvania’s World Perry House, which gathered together scholars who study nationalism day in and out. And I have to give the conference organizers immense credit, for really endeavoring to bring together a diverse set of scholars.

Admittedly, the number of intellectual defenders of nationalism is rather small. But they were there, yesterday. Including Liah Greenfeld, the author of Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Greenfeld identifies nationalism as almost exclusively co-incident with the modern concept of popular sovereignty and a sense of equal membership in society. She sets the date of the modern nation’s emergence in 16th-century England and says it spread outward from there, to the United States and beyond. Her emphasis of nationalism as the ground for egalitarian thinking leads her to the same place I often go when thinking about anti-nationalism. That is, the modern anti-nationalists are seeking liberation from “the people.” They want to return the people to the status of a rabble. A dangerous force, but one fundamentally kept away from power and politics in a proper sense.

And while I found myself nodding along with her, I also take something like the position on the origin of “nations” that was offered by Yoram Hazony. For Hazony, there are a few modes of organization. There is the tribal form that is almost anarchic and was the most common form in human prehistory. But the emergence of real civilization has seen competition between the national model and the imperial model. The Biblical God gives his chosen people borders. And the purpose seems to be to keep Jews within them rather than to keep other peoples out of them. Hazony sees the revival of nationalism in the modern West as a self-conscious return to the Biblical idea, led by Protestants. Hazony’s book The Virtue of Nationalism comes out later this year.

The whole event was intellectually revivifying, but travel and the days around it left me physically exhausted. In the day before I left for this conference, I had to fix some things in the back end of my baseball newsletter, The Slurve. Done and fixed. But there’s always more to improve. What else? Jonah Goldberg came whirling into the National Review offices to record a podcast with me, in which I hoped we modeled the way to talk when you disagree. Jonah is a fundamentally small-l liberal with a conservative view of human nature, and an appreciation for a limited amount of nationalism. I’m more of a small-r republican and nationalist with a conservative view of human nature, and I have an appreciation for liberal arrangements in markets.

I wanted to emphasize with Jonah something that is on my mind lately, and that I’ll elaborate on more in the future. In an age of ideology, there is a tendency among everyone involved in politics to seek agreement on the longest possible list of particulars, and ideally to rank every concern in the proper order. I think this has atrophied our sense that political action is also in some ways organized by an unseen hand. Not the market, but the hand of Providence.

In the context of human health or life, Western culture is slowly making the word ‘dignity’ into our way of saying euthanasia.

That very morning, my son had developed a fever. Meaning another thing for my wife to worry about when I’m gone for a day. The fever bothered me because, like so many other young fathers I know, I keep trying to put the story of Alfie Evans out of my mind. Poor Alfie is being kept against the will of his parents in a Liverpool hospital that has made it clear that it has given up on giving him medical treatment. The thick fog of euphemism in the court decisions and hospital statements about quality of life are chilling. In the context of human health or life, Western culture is slowly making the word “dignity” into our way of saying euthanasia. Most of my friends have talked about this kind of usurpation of parental rights as “the future” that waits for us. And I agree with them.

But that’s not all that’s happening here. A case like that of Alfie Evans is exactly the kind of thing I would have expected to happen to Western culture if you had presented it to me as a hypothetical five or ten years ago. But there is an unseen hand at work that does things I could not have anticipated five years ago or five weeks ago. Namely the surprising level of coordination across the Catholic world in response to our little co-religionist Alfie. Millions of people are praying for him. The pope has sent a helicopter and requested his release. The Italian and Polish governments — increasingly the Italian and Polish peoples — are crying out for Alfie’s release from prison, and working to effect that outcome. This is a sign of life in Western Christianity I never expected to see again in my lifetime. I’ve found it deeply consoling. And as I write, Alfie Evans continues to defy the expectations — perhaps the wishes — of his medical kidnappers. He breathes without the assistance of machines.

Beyond that, I’ve dedicated this week to practicing the basic pronunciation of the sounds in the Irish language, to try to improve my listening comprehension and untie my tongue. Which means messing with the international phonetic alphabet more than I anticipated. And in all the preparation for the conference I did not finish the book I started, A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada, by Edyta M. Bojanowska. The book follows the travelogue of Ivan Goncharov as Russia tries to examine its holdings, and open up Japan to trade. It’s a useful time to in history to examine, as it shows us a Russia that is trying to assert itself on a world stage when others believe it is a peripheral power. Nothing new under the sun.