The professor, delicious monster that he is, has popped in for tea. I am surprised. The last time he came, I batted my eyes at him so much that I thought he must have written us off. Moi for being batty, Noah for failing to sort me out, the house for being a belfry.
“I am especially pleased to see you,” I cry out. My eyelids are firmly under control. I know how to do this when sober, and I am quite sober now. It is, I remind you, teatime, and the sun has yet to pass over the yardarm. This is a nautical term, I am told, and naughty I can quickly become when the sun has done its passing-over stuff.
“Especially pleased?” He misses nothing, our adorable prof.
“Yes, I wondered if you had grown weary of us,” I say. Noah looks at me uncertainly.
“Quite the contrary,” exclaims the prof. “I think you are great: both of you, but you in particular, dear Wanda. I called to say how impressed I was with your last piece.”
“The one on rugby?” It’s my turn to be uncertain.
“Well, it wasn’t on rugby, really, was it? Not by me, it wasn’t. I read it as a critique of the way the game’s, indeed every game’s, promoters commandeer patriotism to boost their profits.”
“Well …”
“No, I am wrong. It attacks the very idea of patriotism. You cleverly cited the Irish, who fought each other bitterly so as to divide their country in two, and now suddenly find themselves brought together again to show support for beefy men arbitrarily pictured as their Celtic champions. Who, I ask, gives the organisers the right to reframe people in this way?”
“The people who create nations, I suppose,” Noah replies. “They provide the platform upon which national pride can be fostered, and the organisers simply exploit the passions they evoke.”
“You’re right, so right. What you point up is that nations are fabricated, a social construct if you like. There is nothing inherent, innate, immanent in them. Somebody took out a map and, with a few strokes of the pen, drew a set of boundaries within which people would be governed. What price your national pride now?”
Spectra periculosa
“Give us examples, please. My head is beginning to spin.” This is me talking. My eyes, those spectra periculosa, are now open very wide.
“Think Congress of Vienna, when Europe was carved up after the Napoleonic wars. Or the Treaty of Versailles, when the victorious powers did the same after WWI. The examples can be multiplied.” Thankfully, they are not.
“Is this true of every grouping?” asks Noah.
“Yes, every one. The family, the clan, the tribe; whites, blacks, Asians, and coloureds; upper, middle and lower classes; the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; Protestant and Catholic; Jew and Arab. Whatever and wherever.”
“Surely you are not saying the groups are arbitrary, that the members have nothing in common?” Noah begins to look a little horrified.
“No, no one would go so far. I accept that they often comprise people who speak the same language, share a common culture, worship the same God, and, at its most mundane, live in the same area.”
“Well, doesn’t that undermine, perhaps even destroy, your contention?” Noah, believing he has found a safe haven, looks more comfortable now. Not smug, exactly, but a trifle complacent.
“No, Noah, no, not at all. There is nothing decisive about the common traits. We must still ask why we select the common characteristic as a criterion by which to create a group, and what consequences we visit on the groups once delineated in this way.”
“They are the product of social engineering, then? Always?” asks Noah.
“Social constructs”
“Yes. When we group people together, we are in the business of creating the social constructs I referred to. The result can be good or bad, benign or harmful, but artefacts the groups are, and will always be.
“Take the grouping we call the Swiss. They comprise three language groups, perhaps arguably a fourth, but they are not segregated and dealt with by reference to this fact. They are happy to group themselves geographically, and the world is happy to treat them in this way. In common with every other group, their identity is constructed, in this case by reference to geography.”
Every time I think of the Swiss, I think of that ‘cuckoo clock’ put-down. I have since googled it. Graham Greene apparently said: “In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!”
The peace and so on I like, but perhaps I shouldn’t dwell on the cuckoo right now. I mean, being batty and all.
“Nationalism or patriotism – they can be coupled together for present purposes – are passions contrived for us in order to promote the social construct created for us. If we are to remain sane, we should see them for what they are.
“Reach for our guns”
“By all means rally behind the flag and sing the national anthem when one country is under threat. Self-protection by a common grouping is typically to be lauded. But in general, we should live by the proposition that, when we hear a call for patriotism, we should reach for our guns.”
Wow, and here am I, about to serve cups of English tea and distribute rounds of French bread crowned with Italian salami. All this is enough to make a sauerkraut.
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