"Pro Patria Mori"
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The military invasion of Ukraine by Russia has triggered no small amount of renewed debate about certain institutions and ideas otherwise forgotten or consigned to extreme political movements. War does that, of course. War brings to mind things we otherwise keep out of mind, peoples, militaries, and powers we do not normally think to think about. Ukraine, for instance, was rarely on anyone’s mind in the United States until just a few months ago, nor was the very existence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), of which the United States of America is a primary military power, ever really thought about. Then war came, and suddenly everyone’s got an opinion about these matters because everyone’s suddenly aware of them again.
This is a normal and very human process, of course. We do not direct our attention towards things that do not concern our everyday lives unless some reason suddenly arises to draw it there. We do not think about our health until it has been disrupted somehow, or about the security of our jobs until something threatens that security. Nor do we think about people in a far-off land unless news has traveled to us that some tragedy has befallen them, or even about the unseen yet fully real mechanisms of production and distribution which supply our food until something has disrupted them.
Local store announcement declaring shortage of products made from wheat on account of the Ukraine/Russia conflict.
Humans have limited attention, because we are ourselves limited. We care for those we know and love—rather than those we have never met or even ever heard of—not because we are selfish and narrow-minded beings, but rather because care, love, and attention are physical actions arising from our physical realities. We can only attend to a finite amount of matters or express physical care and affection for a finite amount of people, because we are not infinite.
Thus we can say that there is a natural limit to our attention and care, a limit bounded by our existence as beings within nature. Though we might imagine ourselves otherwise, and perhaps even say that there are no such natural limits, we can only do so by diminishing and degrading the meaning of care and attention. Therefore, though we might say it is possible to love everyone in the world or to give attention to many more things than just our own realities, love and attention in these formulations become something divorced from our physical bodies and enter the realm of the ideological.
That is, there is a profound difference between the acts of love we physically manifest for those we know and our ideas about love. I love and care about my husband in a physical manner, just as I love and care about my family and my friends in physical ways. I might say that I care about an indigenous tribe in South America or about the victims of a US bombing in the Middle East, but I don’t actually do any physical things to care for them. In other words, by “care” in this latter sense we are merely talking about a sentiment, an ideological position rather than an actually-existing physical relationship.
The matter of relationship is the key to understanding our limited attention and limited capacity to care, and it’s a concept which has become almost hopelessly muddled and confused through our interactions with digital technology. Through social media in particular, we’ve come to expand our idea of what friendship means, but through that expansion we’ve made friendship a rather pale and neutered thing. My mostly-defunct Facebook profile states I have 4600 ‘friends,’ but in reality I—as with I suspect most people—have only about twenty or thirty people in my life with whom I interact regularly in any physical definition of friendship. They are the ones to whom I talk to, whom I meet with, and whose lives are truly relevant to my own.
My experience mirrors the anthropological concept of the “band,” the most fundamental grouping of humans throughout our collective history. Such groupings, usually consisting of between ten and fifty people, repeat throughout all societies and form the basis of a secondary group formation, the tribe. A tribe in anthropological terms is a collection of several bands unified under a common governance (an elder, a chieftain, etc), and before cities and sedentary agricultural societies became common practice, the average size of a tribe was around one hundred and fifty people.
This number, 150, is generally held to be the average maximum of human relationships an individual can maintain in any real sense of relationship. Called “Dunbar’s Number” after the researcher who proposed it (Robin Dunbar), this limit is not without its criticism. However, skepticism regarding this number is primarily based upon a secondary aspect of Dunbar’s theory, which is that this limit is related to the evolution of cognition. In other words, Dunbar proposes we can only comfortably maintain 150 significant human relationships because of the size of our brains (specifically the neocortex). Others suggest this number is much lower, though a few have proposed it should be twice as high. Regardless, though, no one rejects the idea that there is an upper limit to our meaningful relationships.
Whether the maximum is 300, 150, or even lower, we can each observe from personal experience how limited our attention really is despite how digital technology seems to obscure this fact. We can all usually engage in oral conversation with one person or a group of people, but the moment several people start talking at the same time, we cannot hear everything that is being said. If another person tries to directly speak to us while we are listening to someone else, we may get confused or even irritated, because conversation requires direct—and singular—attention.
Of course on a social media thread, it might appear that we are able to do what cannot be done in person. Multiple people all commenting on a post, reacting to each other or to the person who originated the post, can appear to undermine or circumvent the natural limits of our attention. But this is hardly the case, as we cannot actually read several comments at once. Instead, we read them each individually, directing our singular attention to each after another.
The particular usefulness of “Dunbar’s Number,” or more generally this understanding of a natural limit to human relationships, is that from it we can then start to notice external mechanisms which seek to artificially expand our sense of relationship. Important to this limit is that beyond it our ability to co-exist with others in meaningful and peaceful ways breaks down without such external mechanisms. For instance, while a person might naturally and easily avoid doing something which harms someone they know and care for, our avoidance of actions that might potentially harm strangers is usually tied to an external moral code or legal regime.
In other words, maintaining peaceful and co-operative relations with more people than this natural limit requires some sort of external mechanism or authority.
Moral systems, for instance, function as codes of conduct in circumstances where natural affection and physical relation cannot guide us. Most would never think of stealing from people they know and care for, specifically because they value being in continued relationship with them. However, stealing from someone you do not know and may never meet comes with no natural consequences to your relationship to them (because you have none). Moral codes, however, compensate for this lack of relationship by asserting a larger principle (“theft is bad”), replacing relationship with an external mechanism.
Of course, moral systems are rarely uniform and can only function if everyone adheres to them. Legal regimes (external authority, laws, and punishment) are one way of ensuring people adhere to moral codes, as are religions. In legal regimes, morality is enforced and inculcated in public ways through external consequences. Theft, murder, and other acts are punished in public ways not just to redress the harm done to the victim but also to remind others not to do those things, either. Religion, on the other hand, enforces and maintains morality through externalizing the consequences of actions. Theft becomes not just a crime against another person, but against a cosmic order, a sin against God, a dishonor before the gods, or a violation of dharma.
Moral codes, legal regimes, and religions are all ways of maintaining peace and stability in societies of numbers much larger than the natural human limit. Regardless of their specific benefits and drawbacks, they all function by creating other modalities of connection, identification, and obligation. To have large societies that do not collapse into chaos and violence, most of the people within them must come to see themselves in relationship with each other, as part of imagined communities much larger than they can humanly experience.
A deep problem with these imagined communities is that they inevitably come to replace our natural relationships and communities, because the imagined community demands different things from us that do not arise from relationship. This problem can be seen in what is probably the strongest yet fully unnatural imagined community, the Nation. As the author Benedict Anderson put it:
I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion....
Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.
In the idea of the Nation, we each see ourselves as part of a larger collective of humans with shared interests, shared characteristics, and most of all a shared fate. But unlike with the more organic and natural groupings of humans (the family, the band, the tribe), the Nation is an imposed, artificial form that must be continuously maintained and cultivated by rituals, narration, and symbols. Thus flags, and national holidays; thus also borders, and propaganda.
The Nation is an imagined community, meaning that it exists only as an idea in our heads. Ideas, however, have profound and often terrible power over the lives of humans, compelling us—as Benedict Anderson states—to be “willing to die” for those ideas. We might be more than willing to risk our life for a lover, a family member, or a friend, but the Nation demands we treat members of its imagined community—people we may never meet and who do not care for us—just as we would those we love.
In the most famous poem by Wilfred Owens, one of the aptly-named “war poets” from last century, the bitter result of such imagined communities is revealed as horrid death:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, “sweet and fitting it is to die for your country,” comes from an ancient Roman poem by Horace, in which the poet urges the young to become strong and fierce fighters specifically to avoid the potential of war. Later, the phrase became a popular epitaph on tombstones for fallen soldiers, and then last century a rallying cry for the nationalistic fury which equally gripped all sides of the first world war.
In fact, it’s precisely in that war that the Nation truly manifested itself in the minds of humans. The Nation was born in the wake of the collapse of older feudal relations and crumbling monarchies in Europe. Seeking a new ideological framework to justify the sovereignty of individual rulers over the land and people they claimed as their own, the peculiar theories of the even more peculiar French demonologist Jean Bodin1 became the ruling ideology.
As with many other modern ideological frameworks—including race—it can be difficult for us to understand precisely what came before their formation. This is not just because such concepts have now taken on an appearance of natural existence, but also because this very way of identifying with larger categories is itself a new way of thinking. Before race, for example, humans did not classify themselves and others into distinct and separate categories, but rather according to local affinities. The people in your village were all part of one group specifically because they were the people you saw. The people in nearby villages were different, but not because they were a different kind of people but rather because they lived in a different village. The farther out you went from your own village, the more different the people became.
In other words, the question of difference was actually a question of physical and spatial relation, rather than an imposed ideological classification. Stories of distant peoples in distant lands told by priests, merchants, or travelers had the quality of myth because the lands where such people dwelt were distant and therefore mythic.
Even for ancient Romans it was this way, which means that the “patria” Horace exhorts his listeners to die for was literally the land upon which they lived, not an imagined Nation. Patria, of course, is the root of the English word Patriotism, derived from a Greek term (patriotes) which ironically meant something quite the opposite of the extreme love of the Nation we now describe as patriotic. For the Greeks, barbarians who had no sense of civil identity (being part of the polis, the city-state) were patriotes, meaning they only had ancestry and land in common. Patriotes were contrasted with the politai, those within the Greek city-states who had had a larger (and imagined) sense of community with each other.
In the Nation, both the idea of the politai and the patriotes fused together. The Nation became the shared ancestor and the shared land, so that each member of the polity (the citizens) had a duty to defend, to love, and to be proud of a wholly-imaginary thing of which they were a part.
In our days, we tend to think of patriotism and its synonym, nationalism, as a reactionary tendency, a kind of blind love for the Nation which infects only ignorant people. Thus we label far-right political groups as “nationalist” and shrink at mentions of “patriotic duty,” yet we miss a much deeper obsession with the Nation by limiting our critiques there.
That obsession can be seen particularly in the display of virtual and real Ukrainian flags in response to Russia’s invasion. Posting the blue and yellow banner on a Twitter profile or hanging its image in a shop window of course does little to stop the physical conflict, but in the impulsive obsession with “showing support” we can detect something much larger and ultimately very destructive.
Individual nations need rituals to continue, but also so does the concept of Nation itself. Like applauding Tinkerbell’s fading and frail existence to resurrect her, we are trying to clap the occult concept of national sovereignty back to life. We engage in these rituals now to help Ukraine survive as a nation because the Nation—threatened from both above and from below—is dying as a concept.
From above, the Nation is threatened by global capital and international governance. Few capitalists act anymore as members of the imagined community of Nation, but rather ascended masters whose factories and investments alight upon the earth wherever labor is cheapest and worker protections weakest. International trade agreements—such as the one which formed the World Trade Organization—ensure no nation can ever resist economic pressure.
From below, the Nation is threatened by what has always threatened it—our human relationships, our human families, our human loves—as well as accelerating political divides. Progressive and conservative social movements have both in their reactions to each other deeply undermined the foundation of nations as imagined communities so much that it’s almost humorous to imagine individuals on one side or another being willing to die for each other. The “deep, horizontal comradeship” that Benedict Anderson described as necessary for the Nation’s existence would seem likely just as profane to a social justice activist in the United States as it would to a Christian parent fighting with a local school board about Critical Race Theory.
From above and from below, the Nation is faltering, and Ukraine seems to have become both its rallying cry and perhaps its last stand.
What might replace the Nation, though? Its only historical alternatives have been the small band or tribe and the Empire, both of which have co-existed with each other in surprising ways. For all their horrors, Empires have nevertheless tended to let tribes get on on their own. Even in the American colonial period, for example, before anyone got it into their heads to build Nations on the lands they were exploiting, no effort to assimilate the indigenous peoples into a vast imagined political community occurred except through religious conversion. Likewise, the many Empires in Europe never demanded collective faith in their righteousness from the people over whom they ruled, just obedience.
None of that is to favor Empires, however, only to predict that Empire may become the global inheritor of the world after the nightmare of Nation has finally passed. Already, capitalists act like little Emperors and international governance instruments like councillors in their courts. Internet technology and new financial regimes certainly also seem positioned at the ready as architectural tools for imperial rule, so Empire seems inevitable.
There’s still always the tribe, though, and of course that’s what I’d prefer. The problem for us moderns—and especially for true believers in the Nation and Liberal Democracy—is that we cannot have global capitalism and industrial production and still keep our societies small. Both require constant growth, more and more markets with more and more buyers, more labor and resources, until eventually we will all arrive at the place from which we’re now starting: a world collapsing and dying from our relentless expansion.
It seems a price few would be willing to pay, trading in our modern lifestyles for less authoritarianism and fewer world wars. We might have smaller societies where we know most of the people who are part of it, but then have no more Facebook friends because there’s no more Facebook.
Of course there would still be wars, as there have always been. Bands and tribes come into conflict with other bands and other tribes, sending their men into battle against each other. Empires do this too, as do Nations, because they are full of humans. Regardless, there is a very real difference between fighting for your family, your friends, and your community on the one hand and fighting on behalf of a distant Emperor or the imagined community of a Nation on the other.
The difference is not merely scale and abstraction, but rather in the vastly unequal relationships between those who declare wars and those who fight them. An elder or a trusted village leader at least knows the men he or she urges into battle for defense of the people, men who in turn might challenge that leader if the cause seems unjust. The leaders of nations, peppering their speeches with fictions of democracy and the “will of the people,” are instead free to declare war as they see fit for reasons only they need decide.
Which brings us back to the matter of Ukraine. Of course, Ukraine did not start the war, and of course nothing justifies the invasion of one nation by another nation. But again, we are here trapped in the language and occult power of the Nation. Soon after the invasion, all men between 18 and 60 years of age were forbidden from leaving by the Ukraine government, taking away from them their choice whether or not to pro patria mori. Of course, most nations (including both Ukraine and Russia) have some form of military conscription, a political tool they learned from Empire and Feudal lords.
It may be sweet and fitting to die for one’s country, but regardless men must be forced to do so.
And anyway, when is a war over? An immediate surrender by Zelenskyy likely would have saved innumerable lives, almost as many if Putin had never decided Russian soldiers should invade. In such a case, the patria in its oldest sense would have survived intact without anyone needing to die, but Ukraine’s national sovereignty—and indeed the occult and utterly useless concept of National Sovereignty itself—may have perished. It is for this reason so many in so many other nations wave Ukraine’s flag, because we know the Nation itself is dying, and we have sadly forgotten what else has always been possible.
Rhyd Wildermuth
Rhyd is a druid, theorist, and author living in the Ardennes. He writes primarily at From The Forests of Arduinna, and his most recent book is called Being Pagan.
NOTES
1. Yes, you read that correctly. Jean Bodin, whose late 16th century work Les Six livres de la République forms the basis of our concept of the Nation, otherwise devoted the majority of his studies to demons and sorcery.