Nationality: A Case of Mistaken Identity
An Essay by Laird Stevens, PhD
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Copyright 2014 by Laird Stevens
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Nationality: A Case of Mistaken Identity
by Laird Stevens
It is commonplace to divide people into nations, and to think of nations the way we think of individuals, to think that nations possess characteristics that define them and distinguish them from other nations. These classifications are always without merit, although some are more obviously silly than others. When Michael Flanders writes, in his “Song of Patriotic Prejudice” that
The Scotsman is mean, as we’re all well aware,
And bony and blotchy and covered with hair;
He eats salty porridge, he works all the day
And he hasn’t got Bishops to show him the way,
he is clearly making fun of national stereotyping (The Songs of Michael Flanders and Donald Swann (London: Elm Tree Books and St George’s Press, 1977), 78). And yet, many Americans think of individualism as a trait that defines them, many British people think that a sense of “fair play” is native to their character, many Germans prize their own efficiency, and many Chinese think of themselves as tireless workers. It is just as easy to accept the good traits uncritically as it is to reject the bad ones, although neither judgment has more value than the other.
Now, we classify all kinds of things–we classify cutlery and beer, for instance–so why is it wrong to classify people? Well, to classify something is often to make it into a subgroup of a larger group, or to divide the group itself into subgroups. Cutlery, for instance, is a subgroup of tableware, which also includes dishes, glasses and so on, and cutlery itself can be divided into the subgroups of knives, forks and spoons. Beer is a subgroup of beverages, and it is itself divided into lager, stout and so on. All these groups and subgroups can be defined and then compared and contrasted with each other.
The same cannot be said of people. People cannot be a subgroup of anything, unless we mean to classify them biologically. Then, of course, they can be a subgroup of the vertebrates. But when we want to talk about the character of a geographically specific people, we don’t mean to compare them to invertebrates or other vertebrates. We mean to compare them to people who live in different geographical locations. Secondly, while there are common and accepted ways to divide people into groups, dividing people up according to geographical location is not one of them. But this is what we are supposed to be attempting. We ignore the common ways of dividing people up–according to race, sex and religion–and instead lump them all together. We want to say that the different races, sexes and religions to be found in a particular place all exhibit a definable character. We want to say that people can fruitfully be broken down into geographical groups.
Let me rush in with an example which I hope will show the main absurdities contained in this idea. I live in an apartment building that contains 120 apartments. Half of the apartments have one bedroom, and half have two. Let’s assume, so I can put numbers into my example, that the two bedroom apartments each house two people while the one bedroom apartments each house one. My apartment building, on these assumptions, has a total population of 180 people. Now, these 180 people live on a very narrowly defined patch of ground. They are in very close proximity to each other. In fact, many of them may come to know each other and even become friends. But the obvious question is this: do the 180 people in my building share a common characteristic? Does my building have an essence that determines the characters of those who live there? Would you expect to find a trait that all the people in my building share just because they live in the same building?
The answer, unless we are determined to save the theory, is no. We would expect that people who live there moved into the building for different reasons, and that they continue to live in the building for different reasons, and that if we did find characteristics–or even one characteristic–that every resident shared, we would laugh at the absurdity of the coincidence: who would have thought that every single resident was polite, punctual, kind, respectful, and shy, for instance? But I can’t imagine that anyone would expect there to be such shared characteristics.
From here, the argument proceeds simply. If you wouldn’t expect a small apartment building to house people all of whom shared even one common characteristic, then neither would you expect this to be true of a street, even a short street where there weren’t many houses. You certainly wouldn’t expect it of a neighborhood, where people are almost always more diverse as to age, wealth, education and so on. And you would never expect it of a city, where diversity is the norm. Indeed, you would expect a city to be as close as possible to a good statistical sample, with no shared characteristics to speak of in the general population.
Why, then, would anyone expect a country to have a national character? If it’s true that the greater a population is, the more diversity it is likely to contain, and the more statistically unlikely it is that each member of the population will have a common characteristic, then the idea that there are national characteristics or identities loses all of its plausibility. And if this is true, then a sentence like, “I am an American,” can mean that I was born in the United States or that I carry an American passport–or both–but it can’t mean anything more than that.
Now, even amongst those who are persuaded by the above argument, there will be people who want the word American (or German or Brazilian or Latvian) to mean more than that, and who think that it does. The desire to identify with a national group is strong in many people, because belonging to one nation rather than another is an easy way for people to define themselves, and we are all taught to define ourselves in this way. Not only do we define ourselves in terms of our nationality, but we are taught that it is good to do so: it is good to be proud of our country, to be patriotic.
However, if it is absurd to claim that geography dictates character, or even part of our character, then those who believe in national characteristics must find a stronger platform on which to base their beliefs. And this platform is not difficult to find. It is commonly argued that people in a particular geographical location (or country) do share common characteristics, but that this is not due to geography, but rather to their shared culture, their shared history, and their shared language.
Let’s look first at the idea that nationalities share a common culture. In order to avoid getting bogged down in a long and ultimately irrelevant discussion, I’m going to rely on a dictionary definition of what constitutes a culture. A culture, then, consists of “the ideas, customs and social behaviour of a particular people or society.” (This and subsequent quotes come from the 2014 online version of the Oxford Dictionary of English, eISBN 978-0-1917276-6-5.)
This seems very clear. The list could easily be expanded, or at least elucidated, so that ideas, for instance, could include ethics and law, customs could include psychological norms and religious beliefs, and social behavior could include sports and the arts. But as a basic list, it seems good. When we talk about culture, we are interested in what the people of that culture do, think, and feel. We can distinguish people by virtue of the culture they belong to: the people in this culture do, think and feel one set of things, and the people in that culture do, think and feel another set of things.
But there’s a problem. The existence of a cult
ure depends on the existence of a people or a nation. You can’t have a culture unless there is a people. So you can’t say that what unites a people is its culture–and that the culture defines who they are–unless there is already a unified group in existence. The group has to come first, because only it can generate a culture. If there is no group, then there cannot be a culture that defines and unifies it.
This may account for one of the most unsettling features of any culture. We use the word to refer to an almost impossibly large set of ideas, customs, and behaviors, and we assume that these form a coherent whole, called our culture, or, if we don’t assume it forms a coherent whole, we at least assume that all its parts are somehow interconnected, that no part of our culture is entirely unrelated to another part of it, and that no part flatly contradicts another part. Otherwise, how can we contrast what people do, think and feel in one culture with what people do, think and feel in another? When we use the word culture, the assumption on the table is that we could, if called upon, give examples of the ideas, customs, and behaviors that define it.
But that assumption is a
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