Notes in response to Tim Fransen’s book In Our Time.
Wednesday 10 July 2024
I’ve read In onze tijd, by Tim Fransen, and I’ve made a few initial notes on my main blog: “In onze tijd, Tim Fransen”.
More notes to follow here.
The following is taken from pp. 296-298; My emphasis:
Some will say that it is not possible at all to identify ourselves with humanity as a whole. That it is too big or too abstract. They will say: ‘It's all well and good for the John Lennons of this world to sing songs about “imagine all the people sharing all the world,” but the reality shows that people are not capable of seeing themselves as part of a global community’.
Personally, I am not convinced of this impossibility. Political scientist Benedict Anderson pointed out in his book Imagined Communities (1983): every community larger than that of a village is necessarily an imagined community. The more than seventeen million inhabitants of the Netherlands do not all know each other personally. This is even more true for larger countries, such as America with its more than three hundred million inhabitants, or India and China with more than a billion inhabitants. The shared national identity is based on a mental construct. In other words: it relies on imagination. Philosophically speaking, John Lennon was not far off with his 'imagine.' Our imagination does not balk at a few million more or less. Furthermore, consider this: the imaginative leap from a village (where you know almost everyone personally) to a nation (where you know almost no one personally) is proportionally much greater than the mental leap from a nation to the entire world. The point is that we tell the right story. Because communities are connected by stories: stories of adversity and trials, of (often unspoken) dark pages and glorious achievements; stories that together tell a creation history and provide a collective orientation towards the future.
These stories are usually told at the level of nations and peoples (or at the level of sports clubs that publish a booklet about 'seventy years of Swimming Club The Ducklings' on their anniversary). But our time just as much demands a larger, global story.
For example, the story of an astonishing coincidence of cosmic circumstances, and improbable strokes of luck in the origin of complex life, resulting in the appearance of self-conscious beings in a corner of the cosmic No Man's Land; beings who, over a period of many thousands of years, hundreds of successive generations, accumulated their knowledge to the point where not only a highly modern civilization was possible, but also unprecedented possibilities of (self) destruction. Shocked by its own technological and ecological superpowers - a period the human called 'the Crisis Era' - humanity eventually learned a wise lesson about peacefulness and mutual dependence.
In such a story, people are heirs to a collective history and allies in a struggle against common threats. (Ideally, this story is of course told with an epic string orchestra in the background.) But the only way such a collective story can be credibly told is if we make justice and meaningful solidarity our guiding principles. That is what it means to take ourselves seriously as one and the same political community. Only then will humanity be able to propel itself to great heights, instead of working against itself. And only in this way will humanity be able to extricate itself from the Crisis Era.
I find the above argument by Fransen appealing, and way back before I had read Jonathan Haidt, I would probably even have agreed with it. But the best I can say is that, indeed, in theory, this should be possible. Or as he himself writes: ‘Philosophically speaking...’.
In practice, there is a limit to what most people can imagine. Specifically: as soon as other people seem different, seem to have different (conflicting) values, and even worse, when those people seem to compete for resources, that limit of imagined unity is reached for, probably, a majority of people.
Fransen mentions India and China. Both are excellent examples for limits being reached. First, India only exists because Pakistan (including Bangladesh at the time) and India swapped large numbers of people. But even now Hindu nationalism is threatening the unity of what remains. As for China, part of it is relatively homogeneous, and the state uses harsh us versus them propaganda (against the US, against Japan) to artificially create more unity. But there are of course the Tibet and the Uyghurs. Interesting examples, India and China.
Rather then make a more complete argument myself, I simply point and link to a few of Haidt’s articles. (Oh BTW, the irony of Fransen using Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’. Haidt has been using it for a long time to identify the difference between ‘globalists and nationalists’; I’m sure Fransen knows that, he should have cited Haidt).