How to Be a Proper Country

Thinking seriously about the 'foundations of a nation'

Every fundamental order is a spatial order.

-Carl Schmitt

In a recent post on Pimlico Journal an anonymous author came to an interesting, and importantly illustrative, conclusion. Writing in the context of a comparison between Japan and Britain, he made the claim that ‘the principal foundations of a nation remain its ability to create wealth and citizens’. And in respect of both of these tasks, the author declared, ‘Japan can’t offer us any solutions’. Its economy has flatlined and its birth rate is far lower than ours. And it therefore is no sort of model for Britain to follow.

It is a good, thought-provoking piece of writing. But I was struck by two things in reading this bold conclusion. The first is that, in declaring that ‘the principal foundations of a nation remain its ability to create wealth and citizens’, the author had quite pithily summarised the very essence of our predicament, but not in the way in which he or she had planned. This is because if a nation has a foundation, it is most certainly not its ability to create wealth and citizens. Indeed, it is precisely the idea that the creation of wealth and citizens is the foundation of the State that is the problem. The last thing we want is a State that tries to create wealth and citizens, and this thinking is in fact the very seed of the destruction we see around us.

The second thing I was struck by about the piece is that while Japan may not be able to tell us how to create wealth and citizens, it can certainly tell us a great deal about what the foundations of a nation are. This is because if there is one thing that characterises the political sphere in Japan, it is an (admittedly largely implicit and tacit) understanding of how to sustain national sovereignty in the modern age. The Japanese, in short, know what the business of being a country is all about. Most other places have forgotten. And this means the Japanese can offer us rather a lot of solutions if we are only willing to think more deeply.

I am going to return to several recurrent themes on this substack in this post - namely, Carl Schmitt’s writings on ‘the political’, Thomas Hobbes as a ‘political hedonist’, and the vexed issue of immigration. Players of the News from Uncibal drinking game will also be pleased to learn that Machiavelli will make an appearance.

Let’s begin with Hobbes and delve a little deeper into Leo Strauss’s declaration that he was the first ‘political hedonist’. The most important section of Leviathan in this regard is Chapter XIII, which bears the title ‘Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning Their Felicity, and Misery’. It is the most well-known part of the book and anybody who knows anything about Hobbes will be familiar with it. But familiarity has served to conceal from us how deeply weird and radical it is - and this causes us to overlook its implications.

Hobbes begins by positing human beings as basically equal in terms of ability. Yes, some may be a bit stronger than others, or a bit more intelligent, but the differences are not great and tend to decline over time as people get older and wiser. And this equality of ability gives rise to ‘equality of hope’ - we are all legends in our own lunch hours, and we are therefore all naturally rivalrous and competitive with one another. (We are, if you like, in a sibling society by default.)

The effect of this, Hobbes tells us, is that we have a tendency to become ‘enemies’, squabbling over the things we mutually desire, and driven to ‘destroy’ or ‘subdue’ one another in the name of our ends (even where those ends are mere ‘delectation’). We therefore desire above all to be given the means of ‘conservation’ in this dog-eat-dog world - and this means a ‘common power’ to keep us ‘all in awe’ by dispensing and preserving law and social order.

The ‘common power’ is of course the State, but it is something which Hobbes is at pains to make clear is ‘artificial’ - it is a product of human ‘imaginings’. It is not divinely ordained; it rests on no doctrine of natural right (and indeed, as he makes clear, there is no such thing as objective justice or injustice without it). It is merely a figment that we have endowed with authority to rule, in the name of protecting us from the descent into war of all against all.

This is politically hedonistic because it places ‘conservation’ - the absence of suffering, displeasure, discomfort - at the heart of the matter of reason of State. The State, for Hobbes, exists purely because of, and to satisfy, material, temporal wants. It has no connection whatsoever to an underlying cosmic, spiritual, or even merely moral, order. And it is therefore only in the end a glorified instrument or tool. It exists for hedonistic ends alone.

Hobbesian political hedonism is now - as our friend, the anonymous author in the Pimlico Journal, makes clear - the dominant framework within which to understand the State. The end has shifted, it is true, away from ‘conservation’ in the sense merely of maintaining order - the State nowadays has much loftier goals than that. But the underlying rationale is the same: the State exists to achieve material or temporal ends, connected to the promotion of what might best be called human well-being in the here and now. It is not just there to make sure we do not all ‘destroy’ and ‘subdue’ each other at a moment’s notice, like a pack of Komodo dragons fighting over a buffalo carcass. It is there also to ‘create wealth’ (and redistribute it), and produce new citizens, and a whole host of other pleasant things. But the drive remains hedonistic in scope because the whole enterprise is conceived on the basis of an understanding of politics as being founded on material questions connected to matters of utility.

The problem with this, of course, is that it - to use Michel Foucault’s word - makes the relationship between State and society ‘synthetic’. The two are bound together, for sure, but only transactionally and superficially. The State needs the people for support, and the people need the State for conservation and promotion of their well-being, but it is a loveless union. And it is also contingent on delivery - if the State ceases to satisfy the hedonistic needs of the people, sooner or later they will decide they prefer a different sort of arrangement instead. Thus, although the Leviathan is an ‘artificial man’ without a will of its own, it remains cast in the role of Machiavelli’s Prince, who (as we have seen time and again) is constantly forced to try to buy the population’s loyalty so as to maintain his status as ruler.

This makes the modern State unstable and is ultimately its undoing. And it is our old friend Carl Schmitt who points out why: it is because, as an instrument or tool, the modern State has no way in the long term to engender genuine commitment in the population. We are not loyal to tools; they simply do a job. And since the State’s authority has no real moral, divinely ordained, or natural grounds, it cannot speak to its subjects’ inner moral lives. Vestigial commitment to the nation lasted a long time, until the middle of the twentieth century perhaps, and fragments of it remain, but the State’s politically hedonistic nature in the end has proved to be its undoing as loyalty to it slips away. And we can, of course, see this all around us, manifested as a curious mixture of apathy, economic migration at mass scale, and - at the elite level - a desire to transcend the State entirely, in the name of global governance.

The idea then that the State is supposed to ‘create wealth and citizens’ sounds plausible to the modern ear, but it is really at the root of the State’s own demise. This is because it makes the State hostage to fortune. Sooner or later, it will stop being able to give a plausible account of being able to make life better. And at this point its people will check out, leave, or dream of things that are bigger and better. And the entire model of political modernity is therefore always on a trajectory towards collapse into demoralisation and decrepitude.

To say that Japan has nothing to teach Britain because it does not have the capacity to ‘create wealth and citizens’ is then to speak to a category error. Our problem lies in the very notion that the State has purposes in the first place in this instrumental sense. It is this that is undermining it, and it is this that is simultaneously devouring it from within. The British people are perfectly capable of creating wealth and citizens largely (not entirely - we’ll come to that) if left to their own devices. It is not for the State to do this, and it is the identification of the State’s goals with those of political hedonism which has produced our present malaise.

What, then, does Japan in fact have to teach us? The answer to this question lies, of course, in the true nature of nationhood as such. If the State’s goals are not properly to be understood as politically hedonistic, then why do States exist at all? What does a proper country do?