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This is the second in a short series of excerpts from "PQ's Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts from The Second Millenium of the New World"... Enjoy!

Fair Warning: wall of text follows.

This is part one of a two-part series on "Nationalism and Universalism in the New World". This first part deals with.. surprise, surprise... Nationalism (and, by means of lacunae that I leave it to the reader to fill in, the crisis of post-modern e-capitalism).

The next part will deal with Universalism and, quite a bit more explicitly, the crisis of e-socialism.





NATIONALISM and UNIVERSALISM IN THE NEW WORLD



NATIONALISM

"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious."
-- Oscar Wilde


We e-citizens tend to have lots of fun adapting, adopting, modifying, promoting and criticizing various RL ideologies in the New World. The most common one, of course, is Nationalism. It's easy to do and Bonte's matrix encourages it. So it's almost a natural law -- if there was such a thing -- that players will be drawn towards some mode of expressing RL nationalism when they start their e-lives. Many -- perhaps the majority -- never bother trying to reach beyond that.

Over time, there've been numerous interesting critiques and observations on this theme from a variety of thoughtful players. Not least of all: the well-known Romanian writer and game mechanics whiz, mihael.cazacu. In a recent list of ideas he posted for improving the game, he suggested that all players should be assigned to the same country where their IP originates.

This led to an intriguing interchange in the comment section over whether a RL Romanian-born and -resident player who happens to belong to the Magyar linguistic group should play as a Hungarian or a Romanian. What was kinda interesting to note in that discussion was plenty of good-humor on both sides with respect to the idea of either a "Greater Romania" or a "Greater Hungary".



While they disagreed on whether players should be assigned a nationality, or be allowed to choose one, and in particular who should play as a a Romanian and why, both Mr cazacu and his correspondent seemed to recognize that the whole thing is fairly silly.

Taking a rather different perspective, the prolific e-British insurrectionist Johnobrow Dadds wrote an extensive philosophical excursion a while back on the deadening quality of narrow nationalism. He traced the in-built nationalist game model directly to the capitalist profit-goals of the Admin, a point that would be difficult for anyone to contradict. But Mr Dadds' main point, if I recall correctly, was along the lines that this construct is fundamentally boring and mind-numbing, that it short-circuits potentially more interesting and creative approaches to playing out a "massively social" strategy.


So, dear reader, what do you think?...

Is exploiting nationalism for profit "bad"? Mr cazacu would likely say no, because it is fun. Mr Dadds would likely say "yes", exactly because it limits our fun. But as you can see, both of these smart fellows base their arguments, at least to some degree, on what it means to have fun, which after all is a big part of why we play games in the first place.

Now. For my own perverse part in this somewhat esoteric puzzle...

Those familiar with my obscure ramblings may remember that I've posited that the socio-political model of the New World, intentionally or not, is based on the RL political theories of Carl Schmitt. He was a 20th century German intellectual who more or less argued that the world -- and Europe in particular -- had entered a post-civilizational period of permanent civil war.



Schmitt was a supporter of the Nazi Party and a legal adiviser to Goering. Despite that, his influence on modern European intellectual life is contradictory and complex, having influenced thinkers on both the Right and the Left from time to time. If we were to condense his philosophy into a simple slogan, we might say that he was a right-wing Hegelian in that he promoted the idea that the modern nation-state is the highest and final accomplishment of history. Or to put it negatively, we might say that he was determinedly anti-Kantian. In other words, he thought that attempts to form a universalized conception of human social development were futile and wrong.

For some help in untying this philosophical knot, we might look to the postmodernist French sociologist Jean Baudrillard (who is often referenced popularly as an influence on The Matrix movies). Baudrillard wrote about "the condescending and depressive power of good intentions, a power that can dream of nothing but rectitude in the world, that refuses even to consider...an intelligence of Evil." It is in this sense that Schmitt is sometimes "rescued" from his less-than-reputable associations by those who see in the nation-state a bulwark against unfathomable evil.

It should be obvious, I hope, that such resuscitations of Schmitt can occur from both a socialist or from a liberal-conservative perspective.

Does it seems that I am wandering too far away from the affairs of the New World? Let me assure you that I am not.

What intrigues me about all of this is how many of my friends in the game -- from both the e-Right and the e-Left (and the e-Center and the e-Who-Gives-a-Crap) -- latch onto the ersatz nation-state in "Baudrillardist" ways. All tend to get caught up in the same construct.




For those loyal to some point on the liberal-conservative spectrum the attachment is typically expressed as a straightforward nostalgia for RL patriotism in opposition to nationalisms aligned with "the other" camp, who of course are conceived of as embodying "evil".

For the vast majority of rightists (and I mean that as a roughly philosophico-political grouping, encompassing both liberals and conservatives as well as right-libertarians), I would surmise that there is no evil intention in this. It is done entirely for fun, with a "cazacuist" attitude, so to speak. I would further observe that, though at times it can veer into nastiness and racism which is usually quick to be corrected via peer pressure, it can also become quite funnily absurd. As when e-Americans refer to all e-Russians as "commies" and so on, when in fact the in-game Communist Party - Soviet Union was a fierce opponent of the entirely bourgeois-nationalist ruling class and their rubot minions.

As for players within the socialist spectrum (again, meaning that as a broad philosophico-political grouping, and trust me, that is a widely varied group), an e-attachment to the "bulwark against evil" is typically expressed in one of two ways:

Either in terms of anti-fascist nostalgia revolving around iconic images of the Soviet Union's Great Patriotic War or some other favored RL historical Event. (The defense of Madrid from fascist attacks is a popular one). This approach strikes me as a type of "left-cazucuism". The same spontaneous reflex for a nationalistic nostalgia is present. It has simply been adopted from a somewhat different, from a presumably more appealing RL story, than one's "natural" current-day nation-state.

Or, a desire is expressed to build a simulacra of an idealized state. This type of desire seems to coalesce from a variety of causes and within a fairly complex contextual web of its own. Here we begin to see much more of the "Daddsian" approach, where players (at least some of them) want to revolutionize the use of e-nation states towards a universalized goal... of some kind.

I should note that, while I am thinking primarily of e-socialists, e-communists and e-anarchists in this regard, such an approach is by no means limited to overtly political e-leftists. The whole "left/right" paradigm, as traditionally understood, is in all likelihood deeply flawed, both in RL in the New World. The most meaningful political questions of our time likely revolve around a contest between exclusive devotion to the nation-state, on the one hand, and support for programs to develop a universalized sense of the rights and duties of mankind as a whole, on the other. That the latter is often expressed in the language of socialism is merely an accident of history.

An interesting paradox confronts the second group: my "Daddsians". Those who, often somewhat reluctantly, approach the e-nation-state as the only viable mechanism for pursuing a gaming strategy that seeks some kind of transformative normalization within the constraints imposed by the software are clearly "anti-Schmittians", at least to some degree. And yet. The only really workable tool they have at hand is, as I once characterized it, "the Schmittian horror".

Trying to unravel one or two threads of that paradox will be the topic of the next section of this essay.


(Next: UNIVERSALISM)





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