The lectures of India’s greatest author will help you stand up against Nationalism.
Tagore’s lectures show the ties between nationalism, modernity and science. But they show how universalist values can prevail.
The last decade has seen our progressive sinking back into a new pit of nationalism — a deep black hole that all across the world has crafted fresh fault lines for the twenty-first century. No-one should doubt that strong and coherent national identity was a powerful tool in the creation of the modern world. Yet no-one should doubt that it has been the cause of many of humankind’s greatest horrors.
Nationalism is a powerful force because it speaks to a very deep part of what makes us human. The biologist E.O. Wilson in The Social Conquest of the Earth defines a concept he calls ‘eusociality’ as the pivotal development in human history. 50,000 years ago, he says, humankind worked out what some kinds of ants had done some 150 million years beforehand, and only 20 other species ever have: that a form of social behaviour based on individual altruism for the wider good in the protection of a nest we can all call ‘home’ was a way of super-charging evolutionary development. This eusociality combined with our good fortune of physical attributes and geographical location and let us become the globe-conquering thing that we are now.
As we conquered the earth, so we created new kinds of ‘home’ in new kinds of context. Family and religion gave it different names, but perhaps the most potent invention of them all has been the nation state. Nationalism speaks to the deepest needs for eusocial behaviour embedded within us, making a nest to be protected of the arbitrary lines of state boundaries, and giving a strong narrative form to sequences of random histories and shared cultural innovations. It lets us love and hate with boundaries we can point at on a map. It has done much good. It has caused, particularly amongst the absolutism of the 20th century, unimaginable volumes of death.
Many great thinkers have spoken out against it, but few with the apparent lyrical simplicity but boundless depth of Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore is the great poet and thinker of Bengal. A polymath, he ranged across poetry and novels, politics, philosophy and music. Patha Bhavana, the great and radical school he founded in Santineketan, West Bengal, has also been a fertile ground for Indian thinkers, including the brilliant Amartya Sen. Tagore is under-read in the West, but to Bengalis of my parents-in-laws generation his verse and songs are what they sing together with their friends at parties. His words are the wisdom they quote to their children. His work is the binding cultural touchstone of their diasporic community in a way I’ve not seen with any other writer in any other culture.
The small, slim volume ‘Nationalism’ collects three lectures Tagore gave over the period of 1913 to 1917. In them he passionately argues for a turn away from the rising Nationalism he could see just before and during World War One. Its lessons have not aged. But their simplicity is only apparent — their argument touches on painful complexities we must un-knot to properly appreciate their power.
Across the lectures, his rejection of what he calls the ‘this political civilisation’ is absolute.
To make intellectual sense of the lectures, which are beautiful, lyrical and emotional, three still dangerous ideas at their centre need to be understood, and I will try to give them shape below:
- How nationalism is an outcome of modernity
- How science and nationalism are indivisible
- How nationalism can be overcome through universalist values
Why nationalism is an outcome of modernity
Nationalism in Tagore’s telling is an outcome of political, social and economic modernisation— a place a few major economies in the West, plus Japan, had reached in the early 20th century. When Tagore describes what a nation is, he sees it not as a set of shared values or virtues, but as a mechanism turned towards a single purpose: the creation of power. The power the modern nation state creates is brutal, destructive and boundless:
‘We have seen this great stream of civilization choking itself from debris carried by its innumerable channels. We have seen that with all its vaunted love of humanity it has proved itself the greatest menace to Man, far worse than the sudden outbursts of nomadic barbarism from which men suffered in the early ages of history. We have seen that, in spite of its boasted love of freedom, it has produced worse forms of slavery than ever were current in earlier societies — slavery whose chains are unbreakable, either because they are unseen or because they assume the names and appearances of freedom.’ (Tagore, Nationalism, p.6)
When we think about what western-influenced modernity means, to understand it as Tagore does, we must situate the last three hundred years as the outcome of a choice that took the worse of two paths. The brilliant scholar Jonathan Israel, identifies this in his A Revolution of the Mind as the outcome of a conservative choice the West took when faced with two paths back in the 17th century. The first path was a movement towards universalism and values based on absolute equality. This path was shaped by the thought of philosopher Baruch de Spinoza in his Ethics. Spinoza saw humankind, the world and God as part of the same universal ‘substance’ — a reimagining of meaning that maintains its potency many hundreds of years later:
PROPOSITION 7:
Existence belongs to the nature of substance.
Proof
Substance cannot be produced by anything else and is therefore self-caused (causa sui); that is, its essence necessarily involves existence; that is, existence belongs to its nature.
Proposition 8:
Every substance is necessarily infinite.
Proof:
There cannot be more than one substance having the same attribute, and existence belongs to the nature of substance. (Baruch De Spinoza, Ethics, p.34)
In the neutral space of universal substance, all things are truly equal and all hierarchies collapse. This dangerous echo of Democritus in Greece, of Lucretius in Rome, saw Spinoza persecuted and his influence become a touchstone for radical thinking that flowed through to thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari, and is an underground current that flows through to today. It will go on as a radical influence long into the future because it is thought without the possibility of compromise or of retreat from the values of equality.
The second path was the conservative one chosen by Voltaire and Rousseau. Their conservatism supported tyrants, loved the nation state, and diminished the potential of equality and democracy to truly reshape human freedoms. Theirs is the legacy Tagore attacks, which in pursuit of circumscribed freedoms created slavery and death on a scale never seen before. Both the French and American revolutions, and the Western world that’s followed has been shaped by their withdrawal from the possibility of real change and the formation of the grotesque mockery of freedom in ‘representative democracy’ we live with now.
To understand nationalism as the outcome of modernity we have to flip modernisation this way, and make of it not a positive but a great missed opportunity. We see these moments throughout history, where just before a great failure of political change their lives a radicalism whose vision is diminished by the ‘revolution’ that follows. John Berger saw it in the wild dreamings of Malevich and Kandinsky just before the Russian Revolution. Jonathan Israel saw it with Spinoza and the other enlightenment radicals. David Graeber saw it in the Occupy movement. The conservative alternatives created the world we live in now — created nationalism, and let its sorry stew fester. We should not forgive them, and Tagore sees beautifully the connection that leads from modernity to nation-state based identities of hatred.
‘The truth is that the spirit of conflict and conquest is at the origin and at the centre of western nationalism; its basis is not social co-operation. It has evolved a perfect organisation of power, but not spiritual idealism. It is like the pack of predatory creatures that must have its victims’ (Tagore, Nationalism, p.47)
The great trick of nationalism is that it seems to speak to our deepest impulses — those parts of us that go back right to the birth of modern humanity 50,000 years ago as our ‘eusocial’ world began. But it’s a lie. A trick. What seems most deeply human is only scientifically mechanical. Power wins where humanity fails. That leads us on to Tagore’s second great insight.
Science and nationalism are indivisible
The most painful connection Tagore makes is one between Nationalism and Science, which he sees as moving towards the same destructive ends.
If scientific method is the single great discovery of modernity, then Tagore asks, where does it lead?
‘The real truth is that science is not man’s nature, it is mere knowledge and training. By knowing the laws of the material universe you do not change your deepest humanity.’ (Tagore, Nationalism, p.4)
Later he says:
‘Therefore we must not forget that the scientific organisations vastly spreading in all directions are strengthening our power; but not our humanity. With the growth of power the cult of the self-worship of the Nation grows in ascendancy, and the individual willingly allows the Nation to take donkey rides upon his back.’ (Tagore, Nationalism, p.62)
Building on the first core insight of these lectures as unveiling the failed path of modernity, we can unlock a second by rethinking the last three hundred years of scientific discovery not as progress, but as an acceleration towards human-caused global destruction.
Our search for knowledge of the meaning of things has gone hand in hand with an ever extending destruction of our mother planet. The age of enlightenment became the age of fossil fuels, became the age of extremes and has become now the Anthropocene — the geological age shaped by humankind. Was Science worth that? Oil, the atom bomb, Zyklon B, climate change, the hole in the ozone layer, the death of a million species of animal and plant. Those are the moral questions we will have to come back to as we face the possibility of our world collapsing as societies like Easter Island have done before.
We have seen great minds use Science as a weapon to try and strip away the support of faith. Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett bear large blame here, The God Delusion and Breaking the Spell are as cruel and divisive as the religious tyrannies they both rail against. Brute divisionism cannot be our path if we are to work towards a shared overcoming of the great threats we face.
Tagore’s reminder to us is of the need to separate the mechanical from the moral in our quest for knowledge. This does not discount science, but requalifies its purpose.
‘The answer is that the West has been systematically petrifying her moral nature in order to lay a solid foundation for her abstractions of efficiency’ (Tagore, Nationalism, p.56)
We can have some hope that Tagore’s words might be beginning to be heeded. For that to happen, a reconciliation between Science and Faith needs to take place that creates a position of shared and mutual understanding, rather than the wars of identity we see, whether in Dawkins or in radical Evangelism. We could see the basis of this back with Tagore himself, who met with Einstein in 1926, and who shared with him the same hatred of war, the same retained mystic wonder at the universe. We can see it now in the work of complexity theory pioneer Stuart Kaufmann, who attempts to bring together contemporary science with faith in Reinventing the Sacred. And a work like Larry Seidentop’s Inventing the Indivdual which re-situates the invention of the secular modern self inside Judaeo-Christian tradition, and makes it clear that it is impossible without it, makes sense of a historic continuum that is breaking up into conflict.
Science is useful to us, Tagore says, when it helps on our quest for moral understanding of the world and of ourselves. That leads us to his third great insight, and the most important of this remarkable little book.
Nationalism can be overcome by holding to universalist values
Nationalism is threaded through with a doctrine of universalist values. The notion of a global set of universal values has been attacked from both the Left and Right over the last two decades. But we must return to it, and qualify it, if we are to have hope first of the overcoming of our new nationalism, and later of some better world in which to live.
On the right, Universalism is presented in Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations as a Western idea, and Western Civilisation’s primary failing that it must retreat from to have a future in face of both the rise of Islam and China:
‘Multiculturalism at home threatens the United States and the West; universalism abroad threatens the West and the world. Both deny the uniqueness of Western culture. Both deny the uniqueness of Western culture. The global multiculturalists want to make the world like America. The domestic multiculturalists want to make America like the world. A multicultural America is impossible because a non-Western world is not American. A multicultural world is unavoidable because global empire is impossible.’ (Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, p.318)
These hard dualities, multiculturalism or empire, Western or non-Western are the strains of scientific, mechanized society against which Tagore rails. We should rail against them too, and see shared universalist ideals that operate at at the level of all humanity rather than categorical sub-divisions that are neither rooted in fact nor in reality. Universalisms roots are deeply global, and Tagore’s words resonate both to the Vedas and to Spinoza. Remember the words of the Yajur Veda:
The one who loves all intensely
begins perceiving in all living beings
a part of himself.
He becomes a lover of all,
a part and parcel of the Universal Joy.
He flows with the stream of happiness,
and is enriched by each soul.
Tagore’s lecture speaks across continents, joining the language of Hinduism to Tolstoy’s pacific love, to the radical enlightenment traditions of Spinoza in a way that collapses imagined boundaries between civilisations, religions and races.
If we have true hope for the defeat of our current nationalism, it is to universalist values we must turn. In 1901 Tagore set up Patha Bhavana, a school north of Kolkata that still holds to his ideals. Its greatest pupil remains Amartya Sen, double Nobel Prize winner for Economics. In his book Identity and Violence he picks up the universalist argument Tagore advances, and diminishes the arguments of both Huntington and his multiculturalist opposers in a single paragraph:
‘The difficulty with the thesis of the clash of civilisations begins well before we come to the issue of an inevitable clash; it begins with the presumption of the unique relevance of a singular classification. Indeed, the question, “do civilisations clash?” is founded on the presumption that humanity can be preeminently classified into distinct and discrete civilisations, and that the relationship between different human beings can somehow be seen, without a serious loss of understanding, in terms of relations between different civilisations. The basic flaw of this these much precedes the point where it is asked whether civilisations must clash.’ (Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence, p.11)
We must not confuse universalism with economic globalisation, but neither must we confuse ourselves that the latter creates the conditions in which the former can prosper. Globalisation’s march has seen the overcoming of two of three barriers of cost and complexity that Richard Baldwin in ‘The Great Convergence’ identifies as ‘great unbundlings’ — huge changes in cost which make global trade possible in new ways: transportation cost, communication costs and the costs of having people work face to face. By breaking those barriers we interconnect the world more deeply, and begin to render national boundaries a functionally meaningless concept as multi-country supply chains make the production of a single product or service a ‘world-system’ in and of itself.
Yet whilst Globalisation creates the possibility for a shared universal world-culture, it does nothing actually to create it. As we have seen through the rise of inequality and the decline of growth in the G7 since the 1970s, it may do much in fact to prevent it. We have to make it, as a shared act both of thought and deed. That begins by standing up for a universalist world-view in face of nationalism’s advance, and then thinking hard to work out what it means. There is no real map here, and only fragmentary historic examples to which we can turn. A shared world culture will, ultimately, be a product of simple, common values and the critical behaviours and deeds they lead to. The simplest and most common of all? The ones Tagore highlights: Love, morality and creativity, not as platitude but as hard base for new kinds of co-existence.
Where, finally, would that leave the nation state?
This is the great ending to Nationalism’s insights, as Tagore turns against the idea of a nation in itself:
‘I am not against one nation in particular, but against the general idea of all nations.’ (Tagore, Nationalism, p.76)
As we see walls being built, quotas and targets for immigration being raised, and even great models of liberal and social democracy like Denmark and Sweden retreat behind borders and passport controls in face of a ‘flood’ of refugees, the unit of the nation state must be one we turn to and wonder, ‘why’? Why do we have them? Do we need them? Do we want them? Are they the thing that holds us back most in a globalised world? It has taken such a journey to create strong states that throwing them away may seem a travesty, but if they are agents of destruction? This argument will not go away in the decades ahead, as we see the next wave of globalisation both further collapse geographical difference, and both the positive and negatives that leads to.
We should remember then Tagore’s words, that universal values are possible and desirable, and we need to reach out, think, and hope that we can find them. If that takes tearing down the walls that separate us, then that is a price worth paying:
‘I will persist in believing that there is such a thing as harmony of completeness in humanity, where poverty does not take away his riches, where defeat may lead him to victory, death to immortality, and where in the compensation of Eternal Justice those who are the last may yet have their insult transmuted into a golden triumph’ (Tagore, Nationalism, p.91)
Liked this piece? Reading Tagore, Amartya Sen, Samuel Huntington, Richard Baldwin and other books mentioned above is part of my project, 1001 Books to Save the World. Read more about it here.
