ABSTRACT
For several years, the authors of this essay have begun their classes on nationalism by asking students to draw a pictogram of their “world”—the reality that they experience as significant. These pictograms usually consist of some indication of our globe, often with national flags on it, houses representing homes or schools, and figures of generic humans, often drawn in one or another way that stresses their basic interchangeability. The striking feature of these telegraphic representations has been their uncompromising secularism: they are focused on this mundane experiential world; transcendental forces appear nowhere on these drawings. God, clearly, is absent from these students’ thoughts, even though many of these students would define themselves as religious. Their image of significant reality differs dramatically from the image we find represented in Western art even as late as El Greco, the canvases being filled with the depiction of God and his saints, canvases in which all of the action-everything of significance, that is to say, everything to which the artist strives to attract attention-takes place above the heads of diminutive mortals crowded into the lower quarter (or less) of the painting. The second salient characteristic of the students’ images is the stressed equality of the humans, again contrasting with the representations of humanity in the art of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, in which the size of the figure quite often serves as the indication of the person’s social status. Our students’ pictograms invariably reflect the modern form of consciousness-the
secular and egalitarian image of reality that was brought into being by nationalism (Greenfeld 2006: 64-92). Nationalism is the constitutive element of modernity, and it provides the foundational form of consciousness in all societies defined as nations (Greenfeld 1992: 3-26). The perspective of nationalism is the cultural (i.e. symbolic) foundation of modern reality and the foundation on which our students build their identities (Greenfeld 1992; Greenfeld and Eastwood 2007). Our students live in the world created by nationalism. In a short essay such as the present one, the best way to define culture is by analogy
to DNA (for a detailed discussion of culture and the nature of social science, see Greenfeld and Malczewski 2009; Greenfeld 2006: 115-34, 203-23; Greenfeld 2005: 101-16). In human society, culture is the functional equivalent of the genetic code in
animal species: whereas animal social orders are replicated genetically, the bases of our social orders are transmitted symbolically, or culturally. This means that the information contained in a particular form of culture is represented in various social, political, economic, and other arrangements in human society, just as the information contained in a particular genetic code is represented in the patterned behaviors of animals in various situations. Understanding the form of culture that serves this function in a particular society is, therefore, the central task in understanding that society, just as understanding the genotype of a species is the central basis for understanding that species (Durkheim 1995; Greenfeld and Malczewski 2009; Greenfeld 2007: 132-36). An accurate understanding of nationalism brings us much closer to the accurate understanding of the culture of modern society-its politics, economy, and all other aspects of modernitythan any other approach we can take.
