The Health of the Nation
The Global Village Makes a Nice Fat Target
Nations exist. They are biological facts. As with all facts, they can evolve and shift their identities, and they can end. But they don’t cease to be real on that account. Reducing them to a linguistic fiction will not serve. Removing a powerful source of a human’s identity does not make him greater. Quite the opposite. That is how empires are built.
At present, we are shutting the nation down due to a virus. We can speculate about the agents responsible — wet markets, weapons labs — until the Eschaton, but hard evidence from a country dominated by a single-party oligarchy will be hard to come by and even harder to disseminate. We have too many sources of truth, too many checkers of facts, too many discordant mulitiplicities for any single fact to emerge. Facts are stubborn things, but so are “truths” — especially truths upon which a person’s whole identity is contingent.
This dynamic is how empires fall. You can pour your way through Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — and you should, his prose is sparkling — but the press summary is this: The Roman Empire stopped existing because it stopped being Roman. The Greek-heavy population centers in the East became more essential. The Gaulish and British and Iberian populations in the west became more trouble than they were worth. But their needs and their realities and their narratives wore down the Roman-ness of Romans. Economic and political stratification correlates with this. By the fourth century AD, the city itself was irrelevant.
What had to happen, happened. The Greekish parts broke off into the Byzantine rump. The weaker populations in the West were overrun by Germanic immigrants. The city became headquarters to a transnational institution trading on prestige to shape the moral life of the kingdoms that succeeded. There were no Romans left to hold onto what they had built. First they invaded the Empire, then then Empire invaded them.
What has this to do with our current age? Nothing, maybe. But it speaks to the difficulty of the global village. Why, asks a reasonable person, should a bat-market in a province of China I’ve never heard of be the reason I cannot leave my house? Why does a dislocation there mean a dislocation here? Why have we no factories?
When the answer to all of these is “Because of the Global Village”, i.e. the free movement of labor and capital across national boundaries, with no value permitted to limit it, then our reasonable person asks “Can we get rid of that?”
Dissidents right and left harp on this string. Who are the true beneficiaries of the Global Village, they ask, and they both provide the same answer: a transnational hidden oligarchy that buys elections, erases expressions, and adulterates the culture of everything it touches. Perhaps this is overspoken, or even paranoid. And certainly no sensible person wants to give Nazis or Communists a mulligan for their 20th-Century butcheries. But as with the Roman Empire, the Global Village’s very size and multiplicity increases its vulnerabilities. Whatever COVID-19 came from, we cannot shut ourselves down every time a new variant emerges. Some redundancies will have to be built.
The Global Village doesn’t do redudancies. It streamlines: single supply lines, single internet search engine, single content producer. GoogleDisneyApplePlus doesn’t want individuated national economies. And to be sure, we may not wish to return to early-modern mercantilism. But a sensible discussion of a nation’s material ability — it’s economic ability — to produce what it needs in a crisis will give rise to other assessments. When we are lining up in masks to buy produce, the charms of cheap goods at Wal-Mart dissipate accordingly.
