Taken from an essay by Dr. Michael Vlahos, Professor at Johns Hopkins University, entitled “America: Imagined Community, Imagined Kinship.”
The focus of his essay is to develop the concept of “kinship as a key dimension in modern state relations….” More interesting to me is the underlying idea of imagined kinship as opposed to actual kinship. (In all cases, emphasis added.)
Kinship drives culture, and cultural rules shape society.
This is quite easy for most to understand and accept, I hope.
The nation most dependent on invented kinship as the basis of its politics is the United States…
Who does the inventing? Isn’t that the question? And the answer is…
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Imagined kinship is the foundation of national community…. Imagined community also makes the state the trusted manager of this process…
There you have it.
Nations remain together, and belong together, because people believe, at some level, that they are a clan, a tribe, a family.
This belief is certainly being challenged today both in the United States and between the states of Europe.
But if the nation, however amazing and wondrous, is simply a collective human artifact, then the nation-state is a construct within a construct. The state, arguably, is even more dependent on conscious collective loyalty than is the nation, its mother.
Hence, explaining the need for the state to perpetuate myths.
This judgment has been proven throughout modernity—the epoch of the nation-state. Nations since 1789 have overturned state regimes and their establishments by the hundreds. Hence, it is understandable, even necessary, that the state accomplish three things to ensure its perpetuity.
Tell me if this sounds familiar…
First, it must cement the…