Pro Patria Mori
From above and from below, the Nation is faltering, and Ukraine seems to have become both its rallying cry and perhaps its last stand.
This essay also published at Another World.
The military invasion of Ukraine by Russia has triggered no small amount of renewed debate about certain institutions and ideas otherwise forgotten or consigned to extreme political movements. War does that, of course. War brings to mind things we otherwise keep out of mind, peoples, militaries, and powers we do not normally think to think about. Ukraine, for instance, was rarely on anyone’s mind in the United States until just a few months ago, nor was the very existence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), of which the United States of America is a primary military power, ever really thought about. Then war came, and suddenly everyone’s got an opinion about these matters because everyone’s suddenly aware of them again.
This is a normal and very human process, of course. We do not direct our attention towards things that do not concern our everyday lives unless some reason suddenly arises to draw it there. We do not think about our health until it has been disrupted somehow, or about the security of our jobs until something threatens that security. Nor do we think about people in a far-off land unless news has traveled to us that some tragedy has befallen them, or even about the unseen yet fully real mechanisms of production and distribution which supply our food until something has disrupted them.
Humans have limited attention, because we are ourselves limited. We care for those we know and love—rather than those we have never met or even ever heard of—not because we are selfish and narrow-minded beings, but rather because care, love, and attention are physical actions arising from our physical realities. We can only attend to a finite amount of matters or express physical care and affection for a finite amount of people, because we are not infinite.
Thus we can say that there is a natural limit to our attention and care, a limit bounded by our existence as beings within nature. Though we might imagine ourselves otherwise, and perhaps even say that there are no such natural limits, we can only do so by diminishing and degrading the meaning of care and attention. Therefore, though we might say it is possible to love everyone in the world or to give attention to many more things than just our own realities, love and attention in these formulations become something divorced from our physical bodies and enter the realm of the ideological.
That is, there is a profound difference between the acts of love we physically manifest for those we know and our ideas about love. I love and care about my husband in a physical manner, just as I love and care about my family and my friends in physical ways. I might say that I care about an indigenous tribe in South America or about the victims of a US bombing in the Middle East, but I don’t actually do any physical things to care for them. In other words, by “care” in this latter sense we are merely talking about a sentiment, an ideological position rather than an actually-existing physical relationship.
The matter of relationship is the key to understanding our limited attention and limited capacity to care, and it’s a concept which has become almost hopelessly muddled and confused through our interactions with digital technology. Through social media in particular, we’ve come to expand our idea of what friendship means, but through that expansion we’ve made friendship a rather pale and neutered thing. My mostly-defunct Facebook profile states I have 4600 ‘friends,’ but in reality I—as with I suspect most people—have only about twenty or thirty people in my life with whom I interact regularly in any physical definition of friendship. They are the ones to whom I talk to, whom I meet with, and whose lives are truly relevant to my own.
My experience mirrors the anthropological concept of the “band,” the most fundamental grouping of humans throughout our collective history. Such groupings, usually consisting of between ten and fifty people, repeat throughout all societies and form the basis of a secondary group formation, the tribe. A tribe in anthropological terms is a collection of several bands unified under a common governance (an elder, a chieftain, etc), and before cities and sedentary agricultural societies became common practice, the average size of a tribe was around one hundred and fifty people.
This number, 150, is generally held to be the average maximum of human relationships an individual can maintain in any real sense of relationship. Called “Dunbar’s Number” after the researcher who proposed it (Robin Dunbar), this limit is not without its criticism. However, skepticism regarding this number is primarily based upon a secondary aspect of Dunbar’s theory, which is that this limit is related to the evolution of cognition. In other words, Dunbar proposes we can only comfortably maintain 150 significant human relationships because of the size of our brains (specifically the neocortex). Others suggest this number is much lower, though a few have proposed it should be twice as high. Regardless, though, no one rejects the idea that there is an upper limit to our meaningful relationships.
Whether the maximum is 300, 150, or even lower, we can each observe from personal experience how limited our attention really is despite how digital technology seems to obscure this fact. We can all usually engage in oral conversation with one person or a group of people, but the moment several people start talking at the same time, we cannot hear everything that is being said. If another person tries to directly speak to us while we are listening to someone else, we may get confused or even irritated, because conversation requires direct—and singular—attention.
Of course on a social media thread, it might appear that we are able to do what cannot be done in person. Multiple people all commenting on a post, reacting to each other or to the person who originated the post, can appear to undermine or circumvent the natural limits of our attention. But this is hardly the case, as we cannot actually read several comments at once. Instead, we read them each individually, directing our singular attention to each after another.
The particular usefulness of “Dunbar’s Number,” or more generally this understanding of a natural limit to human relationships, is that from it we can then start to notice external mechanisms which seek to artificially expand our sense of relationship. Important to this limit is that beyond it our ability to co-exist with others in meaningful and peaceful ways breaks down without such external mechanisms. For instance, while a person might naturally and easily avoid doing something which harms someone they know and care for, our avoidance of actions that might potentially harm strangers is usually tied to an external moral code or legal regime.
In other words, maintaining peaceful and co-operative relations with more people than this natural limit requires some sort of external mechanism or authority.
Moral systems, for instance, function as codes of conduct in circumstances where natural affection and physical relation cannot guide us. Most would never think of stealing from people they know and care for, specifically because they value being in continued relationship with them. However, stealing from someone you do not know and may never meet comes with no natural consequences to your relationship to them (because you have none). Moral codes, however, compensate for this lack of relationship by asserting a larger principle (“theft is bad”), replacing relationship with an external mechanism.
Of course, moral systems are rarely uniform and can only function if everyone adheres to them. Legal regimes (external authority, laws, and punishment) are one way of ensuring people adhere to moral codes, as are religions. In legal regimes, morality is enforced and inculcated in public ways through external consequences. Theft, murder, and other acts are punished in public ways not just to redress the harm done to the victim but also to remind others not to do those things, either. Religion, on the other hand, enforces and maintains morality through externalizing the consequences of actions. Theft becomes not just a crime against another person, but against a cosmic order, a sin against God, a dishonor before the gods, or a violation of dharma.
Moral codes, legal regimes, and religions are all ways of maintaining peace and stability in societies of numbers much larger than the natural human limit. Regardless of their specific benefits and drawbacks, they all function by creating other modalities of connection, identification, and obligation. To have large societies that do not collapse into chaos and violence, most of the people within them must come to see themselves in relationship with each other, as part of imagined communities much larger than they can humanly experience.
A deep problem with these imagined communities is that they inevitably come to replace our natural relationships and communities, because the imagined community demands different things from us that do not arise from relationship. This problem can be seen in what is probably the strongest yet fully unnatural imagined community, the Nation. As the author Benedict Anderson put it:
I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion....
Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.
In the idea of the Nation, we each see ourselves as part of a larger collective of humans with shared interests, shared characteristics, and most of all a shared fate. But unlike with the more organic and natural groupings of humans (the family, the band, the tribe), the Nation is an imposed, artificial form that must be continuously maintained and cultivated by rituals, narration, and symbols. Thus flags, and national holidays; thus also borders, and propaganda.
The Nation is an imagined community, meaning that it exists only as an idea in our heads. Ideas, however, have profound and often terrible power over the lives of humans, compelling us—as Benedict Anderson states—to be “willing to die” for those ideas. We might be more than willing to risk our life for a lover, a family member, or a friend, but the Nation demands we treat members of its imagined community—people we may never meet and who do not care for us—just as we would those we love.