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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26613 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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Well, some wish to build a sentiment of worldwide community for the Human Race - the planet Earth as one big commonwealth, with countries and borders as an administrative tool not different from a country itself dividing itself up into Länder or counties or regions with varying degrees of local government.

I agree with the notion that all humans do owe each other some things. Off the top of my head, non-aggression and a degree of respect for one example. I this all national identities, both ethnic and civic, are contingent on history and convenience. I don't think a global identity is any more or any less invalid philosophically than a national identity from first principles. I think that internationalism has actually had a decent amount of success both materially, pax-Americana has been the best time to be alive in human history, and ethically, most people agree in the value of the international community to a greater or lesser extent. At the same time, I think nations are a Chesterton's fence that we should be careful about rapidly changing, now that they exist.

You might think this is utopian, but it's not a contradiction - and I think this was genuinely the dream of many in the late 20th century, explicitly or implicitly, with the infrastructure of the EU and UN as steps towards implementing such a thing. The hope was that national identity would simply become irrelevant to fostering civic spirit as progress and globalization and the Internet built up a sentiment that we're all in this together. People would genuinely become citizens of the world in their hearts, and vote for the good of their countrymen as a special case of voting for the good of Homo sapiens in the same way that you vote for the good of your town as a special case of voting for the good of your country.

I think, then, that the current malaise results from resurgent (or simply stubbornly-not-fading-away-on-schedule) nationalist sentiment making itself known loudly enough in various parts of the world that what was once merely optimistic now looks genuinely unreachable in the short term.

I think the problem comes as follows: what happens when the interests of yourself/your family/whatever relevant community you are a part of conflict with those of the nation or, in this case, the human race?

Ever single nation has had to deal with that question: there are always parts of the nation that get elevated and other parts that get shafted. It can be as personal as sacrificing your wellbeing in a war for that of a nation, or as abstract/community based as your language being suppressed like in the case of Occitan vs French or your religion being seen as seditious or semi-seditious such as in the Kulturkampf in Germany or Catholicism to many regimes in France. I think the recent surge of the populist right is less about a pro-active increase in national sentiment and more about subsets of different nations feeling culturally and/or economically shafted by the recent economic and social changes in their countries.

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