Irrespective of the extent of their success in adopting
modernity, all
societies that made the attempt faced a problem of which the British
(and overseas populations of British origin),were for the most part
blissfully ignorant, though Ethelbert of Kent had long ago put his
finger on it. In a moderqizing world one is liable to discover that—as
the Nigerian Christians in the year 2000 remarked uncivilly of Islamic
law—one or another aspect of one's inherited culture is "not Y2K
compliant." Humans, as we have seen in this book, can be very adaptive,
but they do not feel good about abandoning their ancestral cultures in
favor of the ways of foreigners. In these circumstances the natural
impulse is to compromise, and nationalism is, among other things, the
name of this compromise.
If we want an example of nationalism, we need go no
farther than
Ireland—an island whose historical experience over most of the last few
centuries has been altogether less benign than Britain's. It did not
take the Irish long to realize that they needed to become part of the
modern world brought into existence by their neighbor; indeed, as early
as the 1790s, an Irish nationalist was insisting (with vivid use of a
high-tech metaphor of the day) that if Ireland were free and well
governed, "she would in arts, commerce and manufacture spring up like
an air balloon, and leave England behind her at an immense distance."
The Irish were also fully aware of the advantages they derived from
having become for the most part native speakers of English; one
bilingual nationalist observed in 1833 that, in view of "the superior
utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern
communication," he could "witness without a sigh the gradual disuse of
Irish." But they had no intention of giving up on being Irish, and to
make the point they ended up putting a great deal of energy into a
sentimental revival of what had once been their national language,
since "a people without a language of its own is only half a nation."
Above all, while they might want the British to continue to give them
access to their labor market, they had no desire whatever to be ruled
by them. "My object," as a radical nationalist remarked in 1847, "is to
repeal the conquest—not any part or portion of it but the whole and
entire conquest of seven hundred years." In short, the Irish wanted to
become modern like the British, but they also wanted to be and rule
themselves. Irish nationalism legitimated their attempt to do both.
Outside Ireland the precise cultural and political circumstances of
such efforts vary from people to people, but the basic idea is
everywhere the same: modernize your current culture while holding fast
to your ancestral identity.
What this means, ironically, is that nationalists have
often done as
much to liquidate their traditional cultures as to preserve them; they
slaughter sacred cows as blithely as they adopt them, and display
little substantive patience for aspects of their cultures that no
longer work for them. Of course, drawing the line between preservation
and liquidation is a difficult and often contentious matter, as we can
show with a handful of Japanese examples from the period after the
Meiji Restoration of 1868—the event that represents the end of the dual
state and the foundation of modern Japan. Mori Arinori was a secular
nationalist who was assassinated in 1889 following a visit to the Ise
shrine during which he reputedly used his walking stick to raise the
curtain concealing the inner sanctuary; in 1873 he had even proposed
that the Japanese language be abandoned in favor of a rationalized form
of English. Yet he had great admiration for Kusunoki Masashige, the
tragic hero of the fourteenth-century imperial restoration. The no-
nonsense rationalist Fukuzawa Yukichi (d. 1901), by contrast, had no
use for loyalists who "died like dogs," throwing away their lives in
hopeless causes—though he was prudent enough to avoid explicitly using
such language in speaking of Masashige, saying rather that "we must
admire his spirit, but not take his deeds as our model" (had he been
alive today, Fukuzawa argued, Masashige would have acted quite
differently). Another of these scandals involved Professor Kume
Kunitake, an exact textual scholar in the Chinese tradition that had
taken shape in the seventeenth century; in 1891 he published a
historical essay on the native Shinto religion of Japan in which he
viewed it as "the survival of a primitive form of worship." Predictably
the essay was denounced bytiritoists as sacrilegious, and Kume was
forced to resign his university position. In the ensuing controversy
one intellectual, an anti-nationalist who believed in world government,
championed freedom of research; but a progressive nationalist whose
peers could read the novels of Walter Scott more easily than the Tale
of Genji insisted that one must "refrain from making a public problem
of anything that relates to the imperial household." The bottom line in
all this is perhaps that whatever cultural idiosyncrasies nationalists
choose to celebrate, they are constrained by the fact that the elites
of all nations have to be pretty much alike if they are to function
effectively in a global context. Anything else is a prescription for a
life as a frog in a well.
