Foundations of the Right IV: Difference

What Makes Nationalism Nationalist

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When I was a child, I was lucky enough to have travelled the world. My family and I lived abroad and after a few years, when it was time to return home, we visited many European countries, some in the Middle East, and some even in East Asia. Seeing all these different peoples, places, and folkways gave me a real appreciation for the different peoples of the world. I can still remember the exotic spice wafting through the grocery store near where we lived, the crescent moon above the Turkish bazaar, the cheerful claustrophobia of a Swiss alleyway.

So when I became politically awakened to the dangers of liberalism, to how it threatens to flatten and dissolve all human difference, it repulsed me. Here was something ugly, like a locust eating everything beautiful and good in the world before moving on and leaving behind a kind of hollowed out, grey husk. Does this mean I love diversity? Maybe it does. Very well. I love diversity.

A few years ago, a BBC journalist named David Goodhart came up with a useful human typology: the somewheres vs. the anywheres.¹ Somewheres are people who are rooted to a particular place, tradition, and folk. They have ascribed identities: who they are at bottom is inherited—they are “thrown” into the world and their thrownness is a source of joy and meaning for them. Anywheres are the opposite. These people are not rooted to anything. They can be who they are no matter where they hang their hat, no matter who their neighbours are. They have achieved identities: who they are is not given to them, they quite literally have to “find themselves” by going on a journey. Goodhart’s original context was Brexiteers vs. Remainers, but it has everlasting political significance. You can see the somewheres and the anywheres going head to head in any culture, especially when that culture is going down.

Goodhart’s somewheres are quite obviously conservatives and traditionalists. And while they tend to prefer monocultures, those monocultures themselves only have meaning in that they stand apart from each other. Nationalism is not racism or a love of the same. Nationalism is a love of difference. But difference is much more than just a preference for your own food, music, or culture. Difference is also a metaphysic. Difference is at the foundation of what it is to be a thing at all.

Existence is something weighty and ponderous, a mystery to us. But it need not be—the very etymology of the world existence contains the kernel of its meaning. Let us unpack this mysterious concept.

Existence comes from the Latin term exsto, “to stand out”. For a thing to exist at all is for it to stand forth and apart from some background. Think about it—can you name something that exists, and yet is no different than any other thing that exists? The very idea is madness. A thing exists only insofar as it differs from something else. So much for the Latin term, what about the good old fashioned Germanic term? What about the word being? That word can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European *bʰúHt, meaning “to become, grow, appear”.² The notion of Being (with a capital-B) is grounded in Becoming, in process and flux, which themselves depend upon difference. A thing only is, insofar as it first is not, and then becomes. Difference is at the heart of our oldest, native understanding of being, right at the very foundation of the words themselves. To be is to stand apart from something else, to come from something else.

This is what has been called differential ontology. Even in the history of philosophy, it predates Plato and Aristotle, who spent quite a bit of time trying to address it. To be precise, differential ontology says that difference is not just a relation between things, but the very ground and constituent element in their existence. Differential ontology can be put quite simply: to be is to be other than. It is the idea that to be a thing at all, you have to be different from every other thing. This is so obvious it’s almost a tautology, but it has some far-reaching consequences.