Post-National Professional Elite Formation

Discussion

Alice Maz:

"If the sole means of organizing people and resources to accomplish great ends and spread one's culture and values is the nation-state, then the logic of bellicose nationalism is sound. With the industrial, social, and communications technologies necessary to coordinate on the scale of tens or hundreds of millions, and strict firewalls between populations based on immutable inborn traits, one has no choice but to fight and die for their motherland. That is no longer the world we live in.

The common people lack the stomach for total war and total mobilization, especially as their economic prospects dim, inequality widens, and the nation-state ceases to represent their interests or provide for their weal. Their loyalties will become more local, to the mayors, churches, employers, or personal relationships that tangibly affect their lives and respond to their words or actions.

Regional or global upper classes have long been highly mobile and more connected with each other than with their subject populations. They communicated easily in shared auxiliary languages such as Latin, French, Classical Arabic, Classical Chinese; until the era of nationalism led to language reform and forced assimilation, commoners often couldn't speak to people from nearby regions of their own countries. The elites shared a common cultural vocabulary grounded in their classical canons, works with which their peoples were entirely unfamiliar, and they intermarried routinely, in fact often more routinely than they really should have. Most importantly, they were often fully aligned on the basis of shared class interests. While the titanic struggles of the long 19th were existential in nature, many of the great wars of the medieval period were either jockeying for power within a coherent system, or essentially family disputes.

The only other classes that ever approached this level of mobility and cohesion were merchants and, less commonly, priests. Merchant classes had their own versions of the elite patterns, on much smaller and more pragmatic scales, replacing classical speech with broken pidgin and a shared literary history for common business norms. Priests often found themselves tied to lands or lords, used as temporal rulers and makeshift bureaucrats by various societies due to their education and literacy. The early Catholic Church very quickly recognized their wandering gyrovagues as troublesome and dangerous, and forced the monks into monasteries. Later, university schools served as rotating posts where professors could circulate freely, and they created their own diplomatic and emissary corps out of their holy orders. Occasionally misfit classes of craftsmen, entertainers, and colonists could find the freedom and resources to roam.

The free association, freedom of movement, shared language, and shared culture usually restricted to true elites are now also trivially available to the professional classes. Routine air travel, growing wealth inequality, globalized monoculture, assortive mating, and the internet allow upper middle classes from across the world, including middle-income and outright poor countries, to find each other, discourse, and even frequently meet.

The degree of connection is fully determined by onlineness: most expatriates live in bubbles of home-culture peers, or integrate into host-culture society, making them either long-term tourists or partially assimilated locals. The very online may be much the same if they move overseas, settling in with either or both of these norms depending on their efforts and tastes. But they also belong to a globalized class that can be found in any regional tech hub or major world city across the Americas and Eurasia. And many, if not most, of the people in those cities belonging to this transnational culture will be native to the countries they're located in.

Covid greatly accelerated this human circulation by enabling a wave of people to travel abroad, and many found their ties to their birth countries were not as strong as they thought. Some took a couple years to wander before finding places they wouldn't mind to settle in, at least for awhile. Others still bounce from city to city virtually every month, meeting at conferences, camps, and popup villages, lines crossing and recrossing. It looks rather piddling now, but it did not exist at all 10 years ago. What will it look like after another 20?

Again, this is not the only future. This is an early model of the kind of shape that many futures, shared by many distinct peoples, will take. Humans crave meaning, vision, community, and purpose. Nation-states can no longer fill those needs, so they will find it elsewhere, build it for themselves.

That the nation-state itself might take up this role was once horrifying to people who feared the consequences of nation-feeling plugging the yawning void that had been left by the departure of world religion. Considering the consequences, they were right to fear it. Perhaps one day our descendants will regret the choices we made, seeing clearly in hindsight where it all went wrong. More likely, I think, we are heading into a world that will be in some ways worse, but other ways better.

State power may well no longer be able to regiment and command the masses as one body, but as often as this ability was harnessed for greatness, it was also employed to effect unspeakable calamity. States may not have on-demand access to the sum total of wealth and productive capacity of their societies, and their fiscal health may continue to backslide, but wealth will accumulate in and be deployed from alternate reserves. Communications technologies may destroy the shared reality that enabled vast populations to find common cause, but new realities will be created, and entered into by choice. Elite manpower which was once the jealous possession of national governments, mere human capital to seize and exploit, may circulate throughout the entire world.

And perhaps one day, in retrospect, we will call these messy patchworks and informal alliances, made of upstart individuals looking to have their own place in the sun, "society."

(https://alicemaz.substack.com/p/neomedievalism-and-transnational)