Gellner's thesis flatters the educator: A nation state is not a monopolist on violence. A nation state is a monopolist in setting general-education standards.
A nation is a labour market. A nation state is the entity that supports this market by supplying the public good that enables it: general education. With this interpretation, one can construct nonesensical sentences (typically referring to pre-industrial or post-industrial societies), for instance, to imply that mathematicians are a nation. Whenever such a sentence reads nonsensical, replace "nation" with "identity." The mathematician is an identity.
Another, equivalent, interpretation of Gellner is that a nation is a language, which circumscribes the labour market in a modern economy.
Cambridgeshire is not a nation state because the success of Cambridge University relies on the pool of applicants and the set of employment opportunities that transcend the boundaries of Cambridgeshire.
Gellner asserts that unique to a nation state is the culture that is shared across all social classes, instead of a collection of cultures, one for the ruler and many for the ruled. A test of a common culture is incidence of jokes, whether humour travels across class and ethnic boundaries, and whether there is humour at all.
9 January 2019
4 January 2019
Ainars Mielavs
(Mūzikas nams Daile, 30 December 2018)
The band is excellent. They actually know how to play (rock, rockabilly, country) and, true to the spirit of their art, appear to harbour no suicidal tendencies (at least not on stage, not by boredom). The vocalist, continental, is just the right mixture of parochial and worldly to please the small-town unprovincial urbanites in attendance.
The urbanites in question are the southerners of the north, not the northerners of the south.
Kurt Vonnegut’s observation (recalled by Mielavs) that, if left to themselves, individuals live out their lives as stories is by now experimentally confirmed and has both a positive and a normative appeal. While one should enjoy many a moment the way one enjoys a good meal, for its instantaneous gratification, when a meal is unwelcome or inaccessible, a good story (or its anticipation or its memory) is a valuable diversion, if not a lesson.
It is unclear whether individuals devote excessive or insufficient effort to writing their life stories. On the one hand, a good story nourishes many and serves as a prologue for future stories. On the other hand, one can overindulge in Instagramable storytelling at the expense of living, the same way that one can overindulge in eating.
Vonnegut also opines that countries, in contrast to individuals, most certainly should not pursue story telling. Vonnegut is right. Good institutions would encourage both the government and private citizens to undertake long-term investments that would coalesce in a non-trivial narrative, a good story. But this story would be a byproduct of good institutions, not an extrinsic goal imposed by the country’s rulers. If a country needs a narrative on which to bring up its citizens, it will do better by inventing this narrative rather than by putting generations of its citizens through living it.
When at loss, one can crowdsource one’s storyline by drastically changing one’s environment. Repeat.
The band is excellent. They actually know how to play (rock, rockabilly, country) and, true to the spirit of their art, appear to harbour no suicidal tendencies (at least not on stage, not by boredom). The vocalist, continental, is just the right mixture of parochial and worldly to please the small-town unprovincial urbanites in attendance.
The urbanites in question are the southerners of the north, not the northerners of the south.
Kurt Vonnegut’s observation (recalled by Mielavs) that, if left to themselves, individuals live out their lives as stories is by now experimentally confirmed and has both a positive and a normative appeal. While one should enjoy many a moment the way one enjoys a good meal, for its instantaneous gratification, when a meal is unwelcome or inaccessible, a good story (or its anticipation or its memory) is a valuable diversion, if not a lesson.
It is unclear whether individuals devote excessive or insufficient effort to writing their life stories. On the one hand, a good story nourishes many and serves as a prologue for future stories. On the other hand, one can overindulge in Instagramable storytelling at the expense of living, the same way that one can overindulge in eating.
Vonnegut also opines that countries, in contrast to individuals, most certainly should not pursue story telling. Vonnegut is right. Good institutions would encourage both the government and private citizens to undertake long-term investments that would coalesce in a non-trivial narrative, a good story. But this story would be a byproduct of good institutions, not an extrinsic goal imposed by the country’s rulers. If a country needs a narrative on which to bring up its citizens, it will do better by inventing this narrative rather than by putting generations of its citizens through living it.
When at loss, one can crowdsource one’s storyline by drastically changing one’s environment. Repeat.
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