From Ostentative, via Imperative, to Proposition Nations

Discussions

IP:

"there are also ostensive, imperative, and declarative cultures.

Every historical culture is of course a mix of all three, but it’s clear that, for example, societies whose religion involves a shamanic element are strongly ostensive, since the shaman ecstatically participates in the divine just as the ostensive sign is inextricable from the thing it describes (“man overboard!” is only ever said in the presence of the man fallen overboard).

Likewise, societies with a cultic religion are very strongly imperative, since the heroic cults of say, the early Greek city-states, were almost exhaustively ritualistic, with only a bare minimum of propositional content.

So, what does declarative culture look like? We have here the proposition nation.

We can pinpoint the birth of the proposition nation with relative precision — these cultures were born out of the Axial age. This shift happened in many places, but the paradigmatic shift was from the Indo-Iranian cultic religion, characterized by orthopraxy, lineage, and cyclical history, to the Zoroastrian reforms, characterized by orthodoxy, universalism, and eschatology. No longer was the religion based on exclusive and inherited cultic imperatives, but on truth — and because the truth is the same no matter who apprehends it, religion ceased to be a valid constitutive principle for a distinct people. One was a Zoroastrian as long as one accepted the truth of the prophet’s revelation; no longer did the creed grow out of the folk, but the folk out of the creed. This propositionality, which I have discussed in my article In Praise of Gullibility has been a major current of liberalism and has proven corrosive to ethnic boundaries."

Gans’ thought gives us the tools to put propositionality in its place. As it turns out, both linguistically and culturally, propositionality comes only very late, and stands upon a much deeper foundation, without which it is nothing. While propositional identity is useful, especially for power centralization across ethnic lines, societies that ignore and even reject their foundations are not long for this world. Gans gives us the conceptual framework to articulate why."

(https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/ten-books-required-to-understand-977)