We were binge-watching BBC British history shows last night, which I enjoy mostly to see -- in absolutely every episode no matter the topic and without fail --
what costumes will Lucy Worsley wear?
Episode begins: it's the history of the British living room since medieval times.
Me: "how is she going to wear a living room?"
Later: Lucy Worsley in 17th century costume in 17th century living room...
So I started to worry. I casually know more British history than American history. Is that bad? Why doesn't the Discovery Channel replace one of those stupid shows about aliens with some breezy and colorful histories of American culture? Olive-drab WW2 documentaries on the History Channel do not count.
And then that got me thinking about cultural/political fragmentation or polarization in the US, and so on. I wonder what role pop-culture pieces like those BBC history shows have in maintaining a kind of cultural solidarity that is politically/socially useful? By useful I mean leads to better outcomes for more people.
This reminded me of an interesting panel at the ASA last year which I didn't see in its entirety, but which began with a speaker setting up a conversation with the premise that the creation of most, if not all, modern social welfare states was associated with various kinds of nationalisms, and that it was the fostering of national identities (and associated cultural solidarity) which, at least historically, seemed to be a necessary foundation for the creation and maintenance of those institutions. The core idea being more or less that people tolerate social programs whose benefits are felt to be intended for in-groups, where in and out correspond to national identity. This seems more or less incontestable to me as a matter of history, but the obvious downside of course is that "national identities" have also historically tended to be ethnic identities, and so the cultivation of larger "national" in-groups has invariably been associated with various kinds of ethnocentrism, racism, and discrimination against out-groups in general, anti-immigration sentiment, and so on. The speaker's question then was something like: is it possible to create the kind of solidarity which is necessary for broad modern social welfare states without ethno-nationalism, and how might we help bring that project along?
So, back to the BBC history show, I wonder if it comes off the same way to a British citizen of Indian descent, for example. I was thinking of it as a vehicle for expressing and reinforcing shared identity, and the potential value in that, but I guess it doesn't necessarily work that way for everyone, nor would an American equivalent focusing on the lives of European immigrants in the US (in the way that these BBC specials tend to be focused on
English history in particular).
It seems like a difficult problem. Properly speaking, "ethnicity" (vs. race) entails shared history and culture, so conceptually it's probably incoherent for me to formulate this as "nationalism without ethnic identity". It's more like, how do you create
new and more inclusive ethnic identities? A British identity which isn't exclusively Anglo-Saxon, or an American identity which isn't de facto white? How do you foster a sense of shared identity, history, and consciousness when the shared history is, at best up until very very recently, a history mostly of domination and oppression? And yet it seems clear that the present divides in American culture and politics have a lot to do with this problem, although obviously not every American cultural divide fits neatly in this scheme (religious differences maybe? Urban/rural cultural differences don't reduce to ethnic identity, etc.)
I guess the other idea is I think implicitly at least progressives (I'm counting myself) tend to respond to nationalism as an idea by thinking that we should just think bigger? Why should shared identity be limited by imaginary political borders? But even leaving aside tendencies towards in-group/out-group biases it seems difficult to imagine people forming in-groups which include people they have no social connection to whatsoever. Whereas forming more inclusive in-groups across racial/cultural boundaries with people we live closer to seems at least plausible (segregation, both racial but also urban/rural seems indicated as a cause here. We live nearby but we don't really interact...)
That's probably enough rambling for now.