Perversions of Nationhood: Enlightenment and Empire

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The last post looked into some inherent problems in the thought and politics of the English Enlightenment and what these looked like architecturally. A couple of really important developments came up that play major roles in the rise of Postmodernism and the current attack on Western culture. We'll run through them quickly.


Foreign rulers

John Michael Wright, Charles II of England in Coronation Robes, circa 1661-62, oil on canvas, 281.9 x 239.2 cm, Royal Collection, Hampton Court Palace

Samuel Wale, The Bill of Rights Ratified at the Revolution by King William, and Queen Mary, Previous to their Coronation, 1783, engraving on paper, 30.1 × 21.5 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London




In post-Tudor England, this meant literal foreigners, but it applies to any rulership structure that doesn't share the culture and values of the people it rules over. At a time when Western leadership is hostile to its national cultures and treasonously promotes global subservience and foreign invasion, this is obvious. 

The Great Rapprochement, 1898, promotional poster for the United States and Great Britain Industrial Exposition, Donaldson Litho Co.

Fake national personifications Uncle Sam and  John Bull shake hands while fake "goddesses" Britannia and Columbia, look on. 

The idea of building fake "national" culture around alien subjugation is nothing new. But the strain of it infecting the West today is a direct descendant of the fugazi patriotism spun up during this time. 













The Aristocracy

The English nobility had ancient privileges that were enshrined in the Magna Carta, and enriched by the belief in the inherent superiority of their own blue blood. When the Glorious Revolution established Parliament as the supreme ruling body, the presence of the House of Lords made the aristocracy even more powerful. But they were a completely separate culture from the English people, kept apart by rigid class, physical, economic, familial, and institutional barriers. 

William Hogarth, Assembly at Wanstead House, the family and friends of Sir Richard Child, Viscount Castlemaine, circa 1729–31, oil on canvas, 64.7 x 76.2 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

The separate 

culture.

Jean-Baptiste Charpentier, The Family of the Duke of Penthièvre, 1768, oil on canvas, 176 x 256 cm, Versailles 

The aristocracy had more in common with their European counterparts than their English "co-nationalists". This made them proto-globalists. It's not surprising that their policies benefited them, without thought for the people. This should also seem familiar.

Sir Godfrey Kneller, The Harvey Family, 1721, oil on canvas, 234.8 x 283.8, Tate

The aristocracy provided an aspirational  model for the growing wealthy merchant class to emulate. Class envy drove traders and bankers to LARP as gentry. This should also seem familiar.











"Rationalist" Empiricism

The English system advanced behind a version of one of the most basic and pernicious Enlightenment bait and switches - pretending a local tendency is a universal law. The Scientific Revolution made empiricism systematic and pushed it to the forefront of epistemology. This is not a problem, because empirical methods are the only way to obtain objective knowledge of the world around us, however we define that world ontologically.

Diagram of a Newcomen engine from Nehemiah Hawkins, New Catechism of the Steam Engine, New York: Theo Audel, 1904, originally published in 1897

The Newcomen engine was invented in 1712 and is a forerunner to Watt's more famous steam engine. It was an important step on the road to the Industrial Revolution, and an example of English empirical science.








 As the leading adopter of this new scientific attitude, England shot to the forefront of innovation and would eventually become the world's most powerful economy. None of that seems strange - it is logical that the first nation to embrace systematic empirical thought would also be the first to benefit from the unprecedented economic boom called the Industrial Revolution that followed. 

William Hogarth, The Tavern Scene from A Rake's Progress, 1732-35, oil on canvas,  62.5 x 75 cm, Sir John Soane's Museum, London

Hogarth's satirical series tells the story of a young commoner who inherits his father's fortune and blows it on a debauched, aristocratic lifestyle. A monied leisure class serviced by syphilitic whores - the black spots hide the sores - is not an index of cultural progress.



What isn't logical is to claim that measurable technical and scientific progress is the same thing as the metaphysical "progress" dreamed up by intellectual con men peddling fictions of teleological history. Figuring out how to transform thermal into kinetic energy with a steam engine is utterly irrelevant to the moral or cultural direction of a nation. 

Getting to the point more quickly than usual:

We'll start with a broad premise:

Empire is an extension of nation, but a perverted one. 

A working definition of nation is necessary. This will have to be general, since we are tracing large historical patterns. Generally speaking then, this opening from Infogalactic will do:


"A nation (from Latin: natio, "people, tribe, kin, genus, class, flock") is a large group or collective of people with common characteristics attributed to them - including language, traditions, mores (customs), habitus (habits), and ethnicity. By comparison, a nation is more impersonal, abstract, and overtly political than an ethnic group. It is a cultural-political community that has become conscious of its autonomy, unity, and particular interests."


The edges are always blurry, because any collective movement or entity is made up of a variety of individuals, some of whom will be misaligned with the dominant values. This has long been exploited by pedants on the globalist left with what can be describes as weaponized absolutisms. Organic, somewhat messy communities are attacked from the two extremes of absolute atomism and absolute collectivism. 

"Absolute atomism" is approached from different angles, both stemming from that Enlightenment idol "Equality", itself a fake absolutism. 

The initial lie is that basic fairness - equal protection under the law - and metaphysics - souls are the same in God's eyes - means we are all the same, full stop. 

We can break that down into its structure.

Here's an analogy to make the dishonesty clearer. 

Put this way, it is retarded, but this is the precondition needed to the Marxist/Communist/ Postmodern/globalist transformation of humanity into fungible units of production and consumption. 

Promo image from Pink Floyd's The Wall, 1982

But it's hard to sell people on becoming pink slime. So fungibility has to seem cool. What's "image is everything" but "everything's fake" put another way?






Institutions are corrupted, then corrupt voices use the corruption as an excuse to gain more control. For example, leftist policies cause failing schools which cause leftist policies to "fix" them. Big government becomes an ally in the war against community standards, always pushing materialist atomism while gathering more control. It's not like local school boards were given a choice.

Fake "rebellion" is the fig leaf of cool over the fungibility - dress wacky, put things in untraditional orifices, but do nothing to impede the creep of central control. 

In hindsight, an argument can be made for hanging dyscivic poseurs like this.

Stock photo of Victoria Josepha Sackville-West, Vita's mother, circa 1885

Quelle suprise. Leftist darling Vita was an aristocrat. We thought those values looked familiar. In other words debauch your way through the trust fund because as long as we keep the estates and dance for the bankers, there'll always be more!

"Iconic" Woodstock photo

Vita's advice plays out differently without daddy's money. 

It is worth noting that the media is still pushing this dreck as aspirational. 





So communities can't say a word, but central authorities can encroach in more and more aspects of life, erode rights, and attack the idea of values other than theirs with impunity. The endpoint is pure Marxist fantasy - a fungible pink slime of humanity under the heel of a totalitarian cabal.

The reality is that outliers are outliers, and have historically been dealt with on a case by case basis, as they should be. 

Indignities Heaped on Massachusetts's Editor from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper  (New York, N.Y.) 1861.
The left would have us believe that it is wrong for communities to set community standards, but remote, faceless bureaucracies should force universal obedience to empirical falsehoods. Their "philosophy" is too moronic to be just stupidity. Willful evil, even if just the bitter malicious resentment of the perennial loser or the sadism of the psychopath, is necessary for leftism to thrive. Moronic? Evil? Try both.


So "nation" is a blurry concept, which has no bearing on its reality - sorry deconstructionists. It's actually worth taking a moment to think about the nature of people who pedantically fixate on irrelevant details in a broad theoretical discussion. Some of this is just sperging - someone with knowledge in an area of keen interest who can't restrain themselves. But derailing broad questions with anecdotal concerns is a typical leftist ploy, because identifying "marginalized" victims or sensationalizing statistically irrelevant crimes are preludes to demanding more state intervention. These pedants tend to fall into two camps:

Those too intellectually limited to grasp the broader framework, but too simple or arrogant to admit it...

...and deceivers who have no counter-argument for the larger conclusions, but oppose them ideologically and try and derail with tangents and red herrings.














Just to be clear, this is not a criticism of granular analysis. Precision is as important as scope, as far as history is concerned. But conversations have to set a range or distance from their subject - broad survey or detailed analysis - which determines how they are conducted. There is too much stuff for a universal history of everything. Something like setting a working definition of nation has to take a broad view, and engaging in this implies the ability or willingness to participate in good faith. 

This might be easier to visualize with an analogy. This isn't perfect - a painting is the product of a single creative mind, while a national culture evolves organically over time. But if we stick to the present tense and think of the painting and the broadly defined nation as existent facts, then the parallel is really good.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, By the Water or Near the Lake, circa 1880, oil on canvas,  46.2 x 55.4 cm, Art Institute of Chicago

Renoir was a French Impressionist painter known for bright pleasant scenes. 

But look closely at this detail of the hat. It is just a mess of brush strokes that don't look anything like part of a hat. In fact, there is no obvious resemblance between any of these individual blobs of paint and the overall picture. This is similar to the relation between an individual and a nation. No definition of the nation will fit everyone perfectly. 

But fixating on outliers is as stupid as assessing this painting by fixating on one brush stroke.








So, "a large group or collective of people with common characteristics attributed to them - including language, traditions, mores, habits, and ethnicity" will do for nation. By any account, it is an organic formation based on commonalities that develop over time. Ethnic kinship is not the only factor, but it is an important one, and cannot be waved away in the name of Enlightenment delusion. 

Barberini Diptych, early 6th century, ivory, 34.2 x 26.8 x 2.8 cm, Louvre Museum

This carved ivory shows a Justinian or another early Byzantine emperor surging to victory with Christ's blessing. The figures on the bottom represent conquered nations paying tribute. The anti-nationalist nature of empire is obvious. 

Empires begin with national groups imposing their will over their neighbors. Once this happens, we have crossed into logical incoherence, since subjugating nations for "nationalist" reasons is intellectually self-contradictory. But empire building has proven irresistible to ascendant nations as a source of resources and a release for demographic pressure. 

Cesare Maccari, Cicero Denounces Catiline, 1889, fresco, 400 x 900 cm, Palazzo Madama, Rome

Historically, so-called Imperial values are generally projections of the dominant culture masquerading as a new collective identity. Conquered peoples go along to get along, but they don't change ethnos.





But an empire is made up peoples that don't belong to the imperial nation. 

See the World and get paid for doing It, 1920, British Army recruitment poster

Little did they realize that if you added a few rain clouds, you'd have contemporary London

This leads to three possibilities, all of which are doomed. 

1. Try and forge one new nation. 

This is the fake patriotism approach and has proven not to work. The ethno-cultural aspects of nationhood are too deeply rooted to be replaced with some other people's instinctual preferences. 

K.C. Byrde, Empire of the Sun, 1920

Arthur Wardle, The Empire Needs Men!, 1915, World War I recruiting poster

If there is one thing empires need, it's cannon fodder. 

Keep in mind that these symbols of  "Great Britain" were a fake patriotism first imposed on the nations of the British isles. 

Our Allies the Colonies, Royal West African Fontier Force poster from the Second World War

How much less compelling are they for alien nations of the colonies?

Neither Roman civic piety nor restless English empiricism were traits shared by the people that they conquered. There were individual exceptions (outliers) but they were not numerous enough to shift the general pattern. Modern American civic nationalism and one world globalism are current failing examples of this same pipe dream.











Since this is impossible, inter-national conflict within the empire becomes inevitable, since some sets of national characteristics are better correlated with success than others. 


2. Try and keep a two-tier "citizenship"

This model seems to have been invented by the Persians and was used by the Romans as well. It maintains a distinction between the ruling nation and everyone else by setting up or maintaining local governance under imperial oversight. The advantage is that life went on more or less unchanged for most people. Leaders were local, and since ineffective ones could be removed, tended to favor social peace. 

Munkácsy Mihály, Christ before Pilate, 1881, oil on canvas, 417 x 636 cm, Déri Museum, Debrecen

The trial of Jesus was shaped by this system of governance. Pilate is a representative of imperial Roman law, while the Pharisees were authorities in the Jewish community. Pilate's willingness to accede to their wishes is an example of how the empire accommodated local leaders to maintain social peace.






But the disadvantages are crippling. There is no enculturation. Empire brings change, but on a superficial level. Things like tweaking the law code, changing tax structure, building new infrastructure, or more choices at the market that don't effect people on the level of identity. Resentment becomes inevitable when nations are forced to bear the costs of empire without having a seat at the ruling table. At this point, there are two outcomes:

A. The empire fragments once the ruling nation can no longer suppress rebellion by force. There is a return to nations, but it's messy.

For example, Europe broke into kingdoms based on tribal identity after the fall of the Roman Empire.
















B. Full citizenship is expanded to all. This was the Roman plan, and we just saw how that worked out. It would seem to be the globalist one as well, although globalism is more Postmodern, in that it doesn't originate in a founding nation as much as a transnational aristocratic class. That's a thought for later.

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (designer), Gustave Eiffel (builder), dedicated 1886, New York City; bronze plaque with Emma Lazarus' The New Colossus added 1903.

Read this screed literally. It is an assault on the posterity and legacy of the American people. What nation could possibly be built out of the world's least effective people?

Better question - what people would propose it?






















The problem is obvious. We are right back to 1. Try and forge one new nation. Dacians aren't Roman and they never will be. Indians aren't English and they never will be. Even pretending the opposite requires fake "patriotic" idols that no one except the Imperial nation and a handful of outliers feel anything for. We also know what happens to those idols once the imperial nation no longer has power.

Leslie Illingworth, Free India, May 20, 1947

Imperialism involves more than governments. As trade and finance became increasingly global, various economic interests complicate things. 

Empires are the kind of big authoritarian structures that allow important stakeholders to do enormous damage. 



Hard to believe, but taking Enlightenment fictions about blank slates progressing to equality global doesn't make them any more true.

C. Try and set up a federation. This fails for the same reasons of national self-interest and uneven trait distribution. It is inherent to any federation that the system either artificially limits the weight of the larger partners or subjugates the smaller ones. "Checks and balances" are irrelevant. 

Mort Künstler, The Last Rally, Sayler's Creek, Virginia April 6, 1865

The US Civil war brought an end to the constitutional fiction that states could leave the federal imperium by choice. When largely immigrant Northern armies suppressed the right of southern Americans to self-governance and free association, America had become an empire in all but name.



Resentments are inevitable in any imperial system, and these are made worse by exposure. Empires force incompatible peoples into shared structures. The same connectivity that expands trade and supports infrastructure brings different populations into sustained contact, where differences and disagreements become more pronounced.

A.H. Zaki, The Modern Civilization of Europe, circa 1908-14, lithograph

Bangladeshi Muslims burn a U.S. flag during a protest on Sept. 13, 2012

It is much easier to ignore someone when you aren't forced into violent contact.















In the case of the British Empire, Enlightenment delusion and good old greed joined forces to bulldoze what was left of the historic English nation. Opening the doors to the "Commonwealth", the EU, and Islam are the layers of salt on the earth. Can it be resurrected? The English people can reassert themselves, but with new, organic expressions of their national identity, not by living in a past that was largely fabricated. But consider the layers of stupidity and malevolence needed to promote ideas like "the White Man's burden" - that stone age peoples are blank slates, and it is the moral imperative of exploitative colonial overlords to transform them into enlightened universalists. The actual moral imperative is defend your nation's borders and interests, and expect others to do the same, as it ever was. 

Dip Chand, Portrait of an East India Company Official, circa 1760-64, watercolor, 26.2 x 22.6 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The reality was that the British Empire was driven by elite greed. The entity known as the British East India Company was a fine precursor to the unaccountable globalist multinationals of today. 

The fact that the company ruled India for a century before being absorbed into the Imperial government shows us that the fake left/right, public/private distinction is a long-running canard. 

This was the era of the nation-state, a bizarre attempt to centralize the administration of national groups with monarchical and/or bureaucratic structures. 

Paul Hadol, Comic map of Europe, lithograph, Paris: Vallee, 1870.


Strong nation-states, described as "Great Powers" competed for European dominance in an endless series of conflicts and wars, all sides generously funded by elite financiers, that reached an apotheosis in the World Wars of the twentieth century. 







There is nothing inherently wrong with this, except for the problem that happens any time two totally unrelated things are forced together - the arbitrary decision to combine them can easily be misrepresented as natural. The nation-state takes something man-made and subjective - the government - and pretends that it is part of something that evolved organically - the nation. This is utterly false, but does benefit rulership.

John Bernard Partridge, Only William's Way, from Punch, 1905

A cartoon on the Triple Entente, one of the webs of "Great Power" alliances that led to the horrors of the World Wars. 

Speaking of elite disdain for life...
















This isn't limited to early Modern European leaders and financiers. It is an inevitable consequence of large, class-divided, hierarchical authoritarian structures that the political and economic elites don't just detach from national concerns, they view them with hostility and disdain. This is how so much devastation can be unleashed with so little concern. 

The more things change...






















  
Of course these same leaders were so very enlightened and progressive that there is a name for it.

Adolph von Menze, King Frederick II Round Table in Sanssouci, 1849-50, destroyed 1945

Along with the king and some of his generals, the party included Enlightenment personalities like French philosophers Voltaire, Jean-Baptiste Boyer d'Argens, and Julien Offray de La Mettrie, and Italians Cassanova and philosopher and critic Francesco Algarotti. 

It is important to be steeped in murderous fake egalitarianism when harvesting your people in great games.

Stupid people call it being "woke". 

But we digress.












This is the geopolitical context for the age of colonial empire building. Although relatively small, European states possessed advantages in technology and organization that let them claim huge overseas empires. Spain and Portugal were pioneers in this regard, but England and France got in the game soon after. 

European empires circa 1754. England's empire was relatively modest and mainly centered in North America at that time. Outposts in Africa and India were links in a developing global trading network.














British North America didn't have the populous civilizations and lootable gold that the Spanish and Portuguese empires did, but the territories were were rich in other resources. 

John Hull, James Forte at Jamestown, Plan of Jamestown, 1607

After a few false starts, the English were able to make a colony stick at Jamestown. The colony was driven by financial interests, which contributed greatly to the disastrous early planning. 

Charles William Jefferys, Champlain superintending the building of his habitation, 1608, 1925, watercolor and crayon on tablet, 38 x 25.8 cm, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa

This was right around the same time that New France was being established. 

The fortress of Quebec exchanges cannon fire with the British fleet during the War of Quebec in 1690.

The outcome was predictable. The English and French fight over waterways, the fur trade, and other resources for almost a century and a half before England completely conquers New France.






By the mid-eighteenth century, it was clear that England was becoming a significant imperial power, and imperial pretensions needed imperial buildings. The Palladianism of Burlington and Kent was augmented and expanded to a grander scale.

John Vardy after a design by William Kent, Horse Guards, 1751-53, London

Due to the tumultuous history and relatively weak monarchy, England didn't develop the same tradition of grand official architecture that we find in France or Spain. The Imperial eighteenth century saw that begin to change.

The Palladian substructure is still apparent in the simple massing of the building, but there is a lot more decorative detail. It is also much larger than the Palladian building we saw in the earlier post.

A close-up shows a Palladian window in the center with triangular pedimented windows on the sides and a balustrade on the flat roofline. These are typical ,features in Palladian buildings. 

The massive feel of the stonework, especially the rusticated arch, is more reflective of the imperial aspirations of the British state.

John Vardy, Spencer House, 1752-54, London

The Earl Spencer's show house designed by Kent's prominent student. That's the Burlington chain of influence. 

The same grandly imperial Palladianism that we saw at Horse Guards if present here. That's also the same Spencer family that gave us Princess Diana. 

Thomas Malton the Younger, East India House, circa 1800, watercolor over etched outline, 21.6 cm x 30.3 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Hry, that's the corporate elite's music! But it's the same grand Palladianism.

The East India Company headquarters was rebuilt in the late 1720s, expanded in the late 1790's, and demolished in 1861.




Well that's interesting. Government, aristocracy, and the corporate elites shared the exact same architectural symbolism. Coincidence? 

Remember that architectural symbolism was meaningful enough that Louis XIV had rejected the fluid Baroque designs of Bernini as too Italian, opting instead for a more restrained  version that became associated with French kingship. Burlington opted for a an even more restrained Palladianism as a symbolic alternative to the more continental Baroque of Wren.