Bauman says that the “arousal and beefing – up of emotions” needed to maintain patriotic attachment to a nation has been outsourced to private entities. Patriotism is, in this sense, not that different from all of the other functions that the state has been outsourcing with what I could describe as near desperation: incarceration, education, war – waging, welfare, etc.
I’m very interested in the outsourcing of patriotism as a new practice. Does anybody have examples?
Does Bauman give any examples?
At first, I wondered whether he meant “emotions are switching from nation-state to something else, like loyalty to religious groups.” Since why would private entities invest resources into disseminating pro-state propaganda for free?
One example (if you squint a bit, you may see it as one) is connected to the “Milky protest” or the “Berlin protest”. In short:
” The protest began when an Israeli who went to live in Berlin, claiming that it was the price of the dairy treat “Milky” that caused him to do so, launched the Facebook page […] urging Israelis to move to Berlin due to the lower cost of food prices there [However, in Tel Aviv] only a few dozen people arrived at a cost of living protest ”
Today I read an opinion column (in Hebrew) condemning the protest by Oren Helman, a former “an adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu” and currently enjoying a cushy job in Israel Electric Corporation. Some users replied that corporations may promote patriotic propaganda to protect their profits and crush social protests before they are born. That’s the only example I may think of, for now.
The funniest thing was that Helman ended his column with a patriotic poem by Lea Goldberg, a famous Hebrew-language poet whose “writings are considered classics of Israeli literature.” [wiki] But then readers claimed that the poem was about Lithuania, her motherland, which she left when she decided to move to Israel. 🙂
At school, her poem “Pine” was one of the few poems I loved at first sight. Here is English translation I found:
http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.co.il/2010/03/leah-goldberg-pine-from-hebrew.html
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The poem “Pine” and the one in Helman’s column are two different poems.
Turns out, the patriotic poem has also been translated:
FROM THE SONGS OF MY BELOVED LAND
My homeland — land of beauty and poverty.
The queen has no home, the king has no crown.
There are seven spring days in the year
And cold and rain all the rest.
http://www.hebrewsongs.com/?song=mishireieretzahavati
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I-phones? (or smartphones, whatever the infernal things are called)? Facebook?
At ground level in Europe, it largely seems like ideas of loyalty and emotion are steadily being transferred away from state functions and into conformist consumerism (across countries)
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Does he mean the phenomenon where people become rabid fans of particular corporations and products? The best example of this is people who are completely irrational about Apple products, either passionately for them or passionately against them. I once heard a guy at a party launch into a long tirade arguing that the iPhone was the best designed and best supported product that had ever been brought to market at any point in the history of the world. I agree that the iPhone is pretty nice, but there are lots of other nice phones too. These kinds of people seem to derive some important part of their identity from owning or not owning a particular product.
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Gamergate, f’rex. For most of the folk on both sides. And pretty much anything that calls itself a “community” nowadays.
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Exactly! #gamergate vs SWJ’s is essentially a low stakes non-physical (so far) war.
I’d extend that to anything that calls itself “an identity”, more specifically any kind of reactive or oppositional identity.
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Open source development communities. For example WordPress recently promotes quite ardently to developers to work for free for them so they can give back to the WP community, and be part of it. Voluntary work for greedy foundations with multimillionaire executives. Crowdsourcing communities (of course always for some noble cause). This whole system reminds me to the communist Saturdays (at least the rhetoric is quite similar). I can’t help but I’m cynical as hell.
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Yes, exactly, these are Soviet subbotniks (Saturdays that people had to dedicate to working for free) Buy at least the Soviet people weren’t enthusiastic about this form of exploitation.
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As far as I can remember in Hungary there were many people who seemed to genuinely like these voluntary Saturdays. However they never repeated it after communism went away. I was a kid then, so I didn’t have to participate in the sabbats, only collect rubbish and sweep the street in the neighbourhood of the school with the other happy kids on weekday afternoons. When the rotting capitalism came, paid workers began to do this job.
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Meh, the product is free as well, and sometimes of high quality, so it’s not a bad exchange for some devs 😉 But yeah, stuff can definitely get downright patriotic at times (“Install Gentoo”)
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Yes, WordPress is one of the best quality CMS, and it’s definitely worth for developers to fix the bugs, so they can facilitate their own jobs as well. However when the WP team wants to persuade devs to participate as volunteers, their strongest and most frequently quoted argument is the community feeling which is quite patriotic.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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