The Unremarked Days

A country is, in the end, the kind of people its inhabitants have become in the aggregate. The same patterns that operate in a household and a workplace and a friendship operate at the larger scale, with larger consequences, and with three features that the smaller scales do not have, or do not have to the same degree.

The first is reach. The country is, for most of its members, the largest formation-producing unit whose channels touch them systematically. A household's formation can be corrected by the school. A school's formation can be corrected by the profession or the wider culture. The country's formation, for most members, is not systematically corrected by any larger unit whose reach includes them. Of course, there are religious traditions that cross borders, professional communities that operate at the level of the world, digital cultures that pay no attention to national boundaries. Indeed, these do produce formation, and for some individuals they matter more than the formation of the country they live in. But their reach is thinner, and it is uneven. The country, by contrast, reaches almost everyone inside it, at some depth, across many years.

The second is monopoly, or something close to it. The country holds levers of formation that no smaller unit holds and that no larger unit systematically holds either. Public education, the legal system in which its members transact, the currency they use, the identity documents that determine who belongs, and the media environment insofar as it is regulated or licensed within the country. These produce formation that a member cannot easily escape by exiting any one household or workplace, because the same formation is being produced through many channels at once and reaches them wherever inside the country they go.

The third is duration. The country persists across the generations of its members with a continuity of identity that smaller units mostly do not maintain. Households dissolve. Workplaces reorganise and disappear. Friendships end. Countries mostly do not; they change their leadership, their laws, their conduct, sometimes their borders and even their names, but they persist across generations with an identity that their inhabitants continue to recognise even when the entity has become, by any structural reading, a different kind of place than it was earlier. This persistence means the country accumulates substrate deposits across generations in a way that the smaller units do not, and that what any generation inherits from the country is the accumulation of what all the previous generations' countries deposited, plus whatever the previous generations added or subtracted, minus whatever has decayed in the interval.

These three features together make the country a formation-producing unit of a different character from the household or the workplace, without denying that those units are producing formation of their own, sometimes more intensively than the country produces its. The household in particular is doing formation work of extraordinary depth in the years the country's channels cannot even reach. What the country adds is not depth in that sense but reach, monopoly, and duration — and the three combined mean that what the country becomes is being deposited, in real time, in the children growing up inside it, in ways the children cannot easily correct by exiting any one smaller unit and cannot easily see because the country's formation channels are the water they are swimming in.

It is worth making a note on cases where these three features hold less than the general picture suggests. In countries whose populations are substantially transient — the Gulf states with their large populations of temporary migrant workers, the settler countries whose demographic turnover has historically been high, and the small countries whose members frequently emigrate — the country's formation may reach its transient members less than it reaches its permanent ones. The transient members' formation continues to be produced primarily by their sending countries, with the host country adding a thinner deposit for the duration of their stay. The country's formation of its own citizens, meanwhile, continues to operate with the full force of the three features; the presence of the transient population changes the character of what is being deposited in the citizens but does not remove the deposit. The framework this chapter is about to develop holds in these cases, with the qualification that the reader considering their own country's situation should attend to which population inside it is being formed by which country's channels, and for how long, and to what depth.

By the time the children growing up inside a country are old enough to ask what kind of people they are, the answer has largely been laid down in them by the country that formed them. But by then they themselves are contributors to a process that has largely reproduced a newer version of their country — founded on what they inherited but bent to fit a different time. This chapter is about what happens when the bending has been going in a particular direction and for long enough that the country, without the people inside it having quite noticed, has become a different kind of country than the one its self-account still describes.

First, I want to lay out the four conditions that together constitute what I am going to call, with deliberate plainness, a people losing itself. The conditions will not seem novel anymore, because you have met all of them at smaller scales in earlier chapters. What is new is the scale at which they operate, and the way the scale changes both the visibility of the patterns and the difficulty of addressing them.

The first condition is the one I described in Chapter Six. It is when what is said and what is deeply felt and what is done in the country's public life have parted from one another, and the parting has gone on long enough that those inside the country have largely stopped registering the gap. The country's public statements about itself — in its founding documents, in its self-presentation to the world, in the speeches its leaders give on its high holidays, and in the version of itself it teaches its children in school — continue to describe a place that, in some important measure, no longer exists. The actual conduct of the country, in the matters that the explicit story claims to govern, has diverged. The divergence is often not concealed; it is in plain sight. But the public conversation has settled into a truce in which the explicit story continues to be told, the actual conduct continues to be carried out, and the contradiction between the two has been allowed to become unmentionable. Anyone who insists on mentioning it has been quietly recategorized as a person whose contribution to the conversation is not welcome.

The second condition follows from the first. The voices that would name the parting have been driven from the conversation. The mechanisms by which this is done vary with the country's political arrangements. In a country with formal protections for dissent, the driving-out takes the form of marginalisation rather than imprisonment — the dissenting voice is denied platforms, denied funding, denied promotion, denied the small courtesies that the public conversation extends to its accepted participants. In a country without those protections, the methods are cruder.

But the result is structurally the same. The conversation continues, but the people who would have brought up what most needed to be brought up are no longer in it, and the conversation has become a conversation among those who have agreed, by their continued participation, not to bring up what most needs to be brought up. The remaining conversation can be conducted with great sophistication. It can produce a great deal of intelligent and well-informed argument and can give the appearance, from inside it, of a vigorous public discourse. But the discourse is operating with a particular set of questions excluded, and the exclusion is not visible from inside the discourse, because the people who would have raised the excluded questions are not present to raise them.

The third condition is the one this book has not yet described at country scale, although the materials for it have been present throughout. The channels through which the country produces the formation of its next generation such as its schools, its religious communities, its means of public communication, its civic associations, and its professional bodies have been monopolised, or partially monopolised, by particular interests, and what those channels carry has been bent away from honest formation and toward the production of citizens whose substrate-conditions will reproduce the existing arrangements. The bending is rarely explicit. The schools will still claim to be teaching young people to think for themselves. The media will still claim to be informing the public. The religious communities will still claim to be doing the work of moral formation. The professional bodies will still claim to be cultivating the integrity of their members. But across all of these channels, in many places, the actual operating effect has become the production of citizens whose formation has been shaped in ways that serve the interests of those who control the channels, and the production has gone on for long enough that those produced by it have, in many cases, come to regard their formed dispositions as their own original judgements. The country has been, in the strict sense, manufacturing the kind of person whose presence allows the current arrangements to continue, and the people so manufactured are, in many cases, unaware of having been manufactured.

The fourth condition is the gravest, and it operates by a mechanism that is more straightforward than the abstract language of substrate transformation suggests. I want to name the mechanism in steps, because the steps are visible in any country in which the condition has been operating, and naming them will enable you to watch the operation in real time.

The first step is the identification of an enemy. The country chooses, at some moment in its history, to define itself against another country, another political system, another way of organising human life, that professes something distinctly different than - if not the opposite of - what the country itself professes. The choice is made for reasons the country can articulate and rally around: the enemy is a threat to freedom, or to faith, or to order, or to justice, or to the country's continued existence. The identification is not, in most cases, made dishonestly. The enemy is real, and the threat the enemy poses is real, and the country's account of why the enemy must be opposed is, in its main lines, defensible. The identification is the founding move of the fourth condition, but it is not yet a corruption; it is the precondition for a corruption that will follow if the next steps are taken.

The second step is the decision to fight. The country, having identified the enemy, accepts the obligation to oppose the enemy by whatever means the opposition requires. The decision is made for reasons that the country's public conversation can sustain: out of fear of what the enemy will do if not opposed; out of justice for those the enemy is harming; out of solidarity with those the enemy is threatening; or out of duty to defend what the country has been built to defend. These reasons can be honest. The decision to fight an enemy whose conduct is unjust is not, in itself, a corruption. Many of the most defensible actions any country has ever taken have been decisions to fight enemies whose conduct demanded opposition. The corruption is not in the decision to fight; it is in what the country chooses to do with the decision once it has been made.

The third step is the imitation. The country, having committed to the fight, encounters the enemy's tactics, and finds that the enemy is willing to do things the country would not have considered doing in any other context. The enemy tortures; the enemy lies; the enemy targets civilians; the enemy subverts; the enemy operates without the constraints the country has built up across its own history. This may be as much because the enemy is particularly evil as it is because this is generally what warfare is and demands of warring parties seeking any tactical advantages. The country is then presented with what its leadership will describe as an impossible choice: to refuse to match the enemy's tactics is to risk losing the fight; to match them is to violate what the country professes. The choice is described, by those proposing the matching, as not really a choice at all because the enemy's methods leave the country no choice, the stakes are too high, and the alternative is unthinkable. The language of forced response is the language under which the imitation gets justified. The matching begins, often in small and easily defended forms, with the assurance that it is temporary, exceptional, and narrowly limited. The matching, in practice, expands. Each step makes the next step easier. The constraints the country had built into its own conduct, which had been thought to be foundational, are revealed to be discretionary. Once they have been suspended for the duration of the fight, they prove difficult to restore, because the substrate-conditions that opposed them initially have been damaged by the suspension. The country has chosen, at each step, to do what its earlier self would have refused. The choosing has been described, at each step, as the absence of a choice and the cumulative effect of the choices is that the country has in the end become, in important respects, the kind of country it set out to oppose in the first instance.

The fourth step is the recognition that does not come. The country, having undergone the imitation, does not register that it has itself become what it set out to fight against. The explicit story continues to describe the country as the kind of country it was before the fight began. The defenders of the new conduct understand themselves to be defending what the country has always stood for. The substitution that has occurred — in which the old language continues to be used while the practice has changed — is not visible from inside, because the people inside have been formed by the channels the country was using during the fight, and those channels have been carrying both the old language and the new practice, presenting them as if they were the same thing. The country has become its enemy, and the country does not know it has become its enemy, and the not knowing is what allows the country to continue down the road without the resistance the recognition would have produced.

These four conditions, operating together, are what I mean by a people losing itself. They do not, in themselves, mean that the country is about to collapse. Countries in this condition can persist for a long time. They can continue to function, in many of their daily operations, with a great deal of competence. They can continue to produce art and science and commerce and law.

What they have lost is not their operational capacity. What they have lost is the integrity between their account of themselves and the actual character of what they are doing. The loss of this integrity has consequences that accumulate slowly across decades and that, by the time they have become unmistakable, are extremely difficult to reverse.

I am going to name, now, some cases. I am going to name them at the level of the structural pattern, not at the level of the detailed adjudication that the political conversation around each of them is already conducting. You may disagree with how I describe or analyse them. That is welcome. What I want from you is not your agreement with the way I have read each case, but your willingness to look at the structural patterns the framework is describing, and to ask, with the discipline this book has been asking of you throughout, where in the country that has formed you, the same patterns are operating now.

The United States since the eleventh of September, 2001, is the case in which the four steps of the fourth condition have been most fully visible at country scale within the lifetime of the present reader. The country was attacked. The attack imposed a terrible set of specifics that demanded a response. The country identified the enemy as a particular kind of religious extremism that defined itself against everything the country professed to stand for. The identification was not made dishonestly. The enemy was real, and the threat the enemy posed was real. The country committed to a long fight against this enemy, for reasons that the country's leadership articulated and that the country's public, across both political parties, accepted: the prevention of future attacks, the dismantling of the networks that had produced the attack, and the establishment of conditions under which the attacks would not recur.

What followed, predictably, is the imitation. The country whose founding documents had outlawed cruel and unusual punishment built a system of detention without trial. The country whose legal traditions had explicitly defined certain methods of interrogation as torture authorised those methods at the highest levels of government, employed them across years, and then declined to prosecute the officials who had authorised them. The country whose self-understanding rested on the rule of law, conducted a campaign of remote killings whose legal basis remained contested across the whole period. The country whose constitutional tradition had been built to protect its citizens against the surveillance of their own government built a system of mass surveillance directed at its own citizens. The country that had presented itself to the world as a country of open inquiry, prosecuted with extraordinary energy, the journalists and the whistleblowers who tried to make the parting of saying and doing visible. None of these were, at the time they were undertaken, presented as a fundamental change to the country's character. Each was presented as a necessary response to the enemy's methods, temporary in nature, exceptional in scope, and justified by the stakes. Each was, in fact, a step into what the country had previously identified as the conduct of its enemies.

Across the same two decades, the explicit story of the country continued. The country described itself, in its public language, as a country governed by the rule of law, dedicated to human rights, and distinguished from its adversaries precisely by these commitments. The continuity of the explicit story while the actual conduct diverged was the third condition operating. The voices that named the divergence were marginalised. Some were prosecuted and so the subsequent conversation continued without them. That conversation increasingly took the form of a sophisticated discussion among those who had agreed, by their continued participation, not to raise the questions the marginalised voices had been raising. A generation of young Americans grew into political consciousness inside a country that was, by its conduct, becoming a different country than the one its civic education was still describing to them. The four conditions were operating together. The country has not collapsed. The fact that it has not suffered visibly or materially for making such a bargain makes it harder to identify what it has lost, when it has lost a great deal, and the loss has been deposited, in real time, in the substrate of its media, in its politics, in its economy and culture that is forming the subsequent generations of its citizens.

The State of Israel is a case in which the four conditions have been operating across a longer period than the most visible recent months suggest, and the case rewards being looked at across the longer arc rather than at the moment of its present crisis. The case is also one in which the framework's apparatus has to do honest work about the founding itself, because the substrate-conditions the country has been operating under were laid down at the founding and have been working ever since. I am going to be careful here, and I am going to be direct about why I am being careful: the case is one that, in the current moment, generates intense feeling on every side, and the structural reading the framework requires has to be conducted respectfully and forthrightly, without being captured by those feelings or shying away from them.

The country was founded in 1948 by a movement that had developed across the preceding half-century in response to the long history of European persecution of Jews, which culminated in the systematic murder of six million Jews by the European country that had been, until that point, one of the most civilised states in the world. The founding movement was responding to a real and terrible problem, and the moral force of its case was substantial. The country it sought to establish was, however, established on land that was not empty. The land was Palestine, and Palestine had a people in it, who had been there for many centuries, and whose presence the more careful Zionist thinkers had acknowledged from the beginning of the movement. The phrase that has come down to us (“a land without a people for a people without a land”) was not, by the time of the founding, a phrase that the more honest founders were willing to defend. The land had a people. The founders knew it had a people. The choice to establish the country anyway was the choice to displace, or to subordinate, or to find some accommodation with, a population whose claim to the land was at least as old as any of the claims the founders were making on behalf of the population they were resettling there.

There is a further dimension to the founding that has to be named, because it sits at the heart of what the substrate conditions of the country have been working with ever since. The population the founding movement was resettling in Palestine was, in its great majority, a European population. The Jews of Europe had been formed, across many centuries, by Europe. They had built lives, communities, intellectual and cultural traditions, in the cities and towns and countries of Europe. The crime that was done against them was a European crime, committed by Europeans, against Europeans. The natural form of restitution for that crime was the restoration of those who had survived to the lives they had built in Europe, in conditions under which a reformed Europe would have undertaken the long work of ensuring that the conditions that had produced the persecution were not allowed to reconstitute themselves.

The conversion of a European responsibility into Palestinian displacement was a particular kind of moral substitution, in which Europe paid for its crime against the Jews with land that did not belong to Europe and at the expense of a people Europe had no claim against. This was not the only factor in the founding — the Zionist movement had its own internal arguments for the territorial outcome, and many of its members had concluded, on the basis of long experience, that European restoration was not in fact going to be achieved — but the European substitution was part of what made the founding possible at the moment and in the form in which it occurred. The substrate damage produced by the substitution has been working in three populations ever since: in the Israeli citizens whose state was founded on a displacement that has never been morally resolved; in the Palestinian people who were the population displaced and whose claim has remained unaddressed across nearly eight decades; and in the European countries whose responsibility was substituted for and whose substrate-conditions, in matters of antisemitism and its periodic resurgences, have been allowed to remain unaddressed because the substitution permitted them to be deferred.

The country, having been founded under these conditions, was for the first two decades of its existence operating under a substrate that was, in many respects, capable of producing the kind of citizen who could have lived honestly with the founding and worked, across time, toward a redress of what the founding had done. The early Israeli state had real institutions of public deliberation; it had a vigorous internal political conversation that included voices critical of the founding's terms; it had a labour movement and a religious left and a civil society that could, in principle, have made the country move in the direction of accommodation with the displaced population rather than further entrenchment of the displacement.

The decisive turn was the war of 1967 and its aftermath. The country, having won the war, found itself in occupation of territory containing a Palestinian population that had not been displaced in 1948 but was now under the country's authority. The occupation was at first described, both inside the country and outside it, as temporary — a holding arrangement pending a political settlement that would address the larger conflict. The settlement did not come, and so the occupation persisted. As the occupation persisted, decisions were taken to establish Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, to construct a separate legal regime for the Palestinian population in those territories, and to develop a military and civil administration that became, over time, a permanent feature of the country's life. Cumulatively, those decisions began to lay down substrate-conditions in the country's citizens that the founding had not yet produced. A country can be a country whose founding was wrong but which is in the process of working through what the founding did. A country whose conduct, decade after decade, is to deepen rather than redress what the founding did is a country whose substrate is being shaped, in real time, by the conduct.

The next half-century saw the operation of the four conditions in compressed form. The explicit story of the country continued to describe it as a liberal democracy committed to the dignity of all who fell under its authority. The actual conduct, in the occupied territories and in the country's relations with its Palestinian citizens, diverged from this story by a margin that grew across the decades. The voices within the country that named the divergence — including voices from the country's most honoured intellectual, journalistic, religious, and military traditions — were marginalised. The country's politics moved steadily to the right and the institutions that had once been capable of holding the country to its founding self-account were, one by one, weakened. The country had, by the early decades of the present century, become an occupying power in a long-standing and intensifying form, and the substrate of the country's citizens had been shaped, across two and a half generations, by the conditions of being an occupying power.

The attacks of October 2023 and the months and years that have followed have made what was already there visible to the world with a clarity that the long preceding period had not produced. The conduct of the country in the response — the destruction of civilian infrastructure on a scale that has provoked international legal proceedings of the gravest kind, the displacement and the killing of large numbers of non-combatants, and the conditions whose characterisation in the international community has reached language that the country's founding self-account would not have permitted — is not a sudden departure from what the country had been in response to a brutal provocation. It is the visible expression of what had been laid down across the preceding decades. The fourth step of the fourth condition is operating here with particular force: the country whose founding was, in significant part, a response to the catastrophic conduct of a European state has, in important respects, taken on conduct that some of its own founders would have recognised with horror. The substitution is not exact. No two cases ever are. But the pattern is operating, and the operation is now visible to the world.

The substrate-conditions in which the country has been forming its citizens for some decades are now visible in the responses of its citizens to what is being done in their name. A generation of Israeli children is growing up inside a country that is, by its conduct, becoming something the more honourable strands of its founding tradition would not have recognised, and whose current self-description still describes in the older terms. The recovery of the country, if it is to come, will depend on the same conditions that any recovery has depended on, which is the survival of reservoirs of the older substrate, the willingness of the next generations to do the work of reckoning that the present generation has not done, the rebuilding of the institutions whose corrosion has permitted the present trajectory, and the patient maintenance of a counter-pressure against what would otherwise continue to deepen.

I have laid out the American and Israeli cases at length because each of them shows the framework's apparatus operating clearly on a case the reader is likely to have some familiarity with as I am laying them out right now in the latter half of the 2020s. I want to mention three further cases briefly, not to explore them in depth but to make visible that the framework's claims are general, that the patterns are not confined to two countries, and that the structural reading the chapter is offering is available wherever the conditions are present.

India, under the political movement that has held national power for the last decade, is a case in which the third and fourth conditions have been operating with particular speed. The channels of public formation such as the schools, the press, the religious institutions, and civic culture — have been substantially captured and bent in the direction of producing a particular kind of citizen, formed in the substrate-conditions of a Hindu nationalism that the country's founding had been designed to hold in restraint. The country that had been founded as a constitutional secular democracy on the explicit principle that no religious community would dominate the public life of the new state has, across the last decade, and largely in opposition to its estranged twin that was founded as an Islamic Republic, become a country whose dominant religious community increasingly dominates the public life, and whose substrate-conditions are now producing citizens for whom the founding principle is not the obvious foundation it was treated as in earlier generations. Russia, across the longer arc from the late Soviet collapse through the present, is a case in which the same four conditions have produced a country whose conduct now resembles, in important respects, the conduct of the Soviet state its citizens had once been told they had escaped. Russian citizens have, across the last quarter century, been formed by channels of public communication that have produced the kind of citizen capable of supporting the present trajectory without realising its contradictions with what the country had earlier said it was becoming. The United Kingdom, since the political rupture of the mid-2010s, is a case in which the long substrate-conditions of an imperial past that the country had never fully reckoned with have, under particular political pressures, been reactivated in forms that the country's more confident self-account of recent decades had treated as no longer available. Each of these cases would reward extended treatment by readers familiar with them. I name them here only to indicate that the framework is not the property of any particular country, and that the reader's own country, whichever it is, will reveal the operation of the four conditions to anyone who looks at it with the discipline this book has been asking of you to develop.

I want to come back to the discipline this book has been asking of you throughout, because the temptation in a chapter like this one is to leave the work with the cases I have named and not to do the work with the case that is yours. I am not going to do that work for you. The country that has formed you is a country I do not know in the way you know it. What I can say is that the four conditions, in some form and to some degree, are operating in the country that has formed you, just as it is operating in Sri Lanka, the country that has formed me and I still find most endearing, and in Australia - the country that adopted me as one of its own and the one I am most grateful to.

The parting of saying and doing in the public life of each country will have its own particular character, traceable to that country's particular history and current circumstances. The voices that would name your country's particular parting have been pushed to the margins in your country's particular way. The channels of formation in your country have been monopolised by your country's particular interests. The enemies your country has identified, and the imitation it has undertaken in the course of fighting them, are particular to your country's history. You know the names of the events in your country's recent past that you would have to look at honestly to do this work; I do not. I will not tell you what they are. That work is yours.

What I can say is that the work, if you do it, will be one of the more difficult pieces of work this book asks of you, because it requires that you look honestly at what your country has done in your lifetime and in the lifetimes of those who taught you what to think you know about your country and omitted what you don’t yet know that you don’t know.

The instinct to defend your country against criticism, including against the criticism you would offer to it yourself, is a strong instinct, and a generally good one., because countries depend on their citizens' loyalty for many things that are worth depending on. But the loyalty that is worth giving to a country is not the loyalty that defends the country against being seen for what it is. The loyalty that is worth giving is the loyalty that loves the country enough to insist on it being the kind of country it takes pride in claiming to be. That kind of loyalty will be willing to bear the discomfort of seeing the parting of saying and doing in the country's public life, and will do the small work of helping, in whatever way the citizen can, to bring the doing back into agreement with the saying. The other kind of loyalty — the loyalty that defends the country against the perception of its own conduct — is, in the long run, the loyalty that allows the country to continue down the road it should not have continued down. It is the loyalty of the defenders in Chapter Nine, whose defence of the institution becomes the agent of the institution's corruption. The country needs better loyalty than this from you. It needs the loyalty that is willing to see what it has done.

I want to leave this chapter on a note that is not despairing, because despair is the wrong response to the diagnosis I have just given, and not least because the next chapter is going to take up directly what despair tries to forget. Countries that have lost themselves can find their way back. The finding is hard, and the finding is uncertain, and the finding does not happen quickly and certainly is not guaranteed to last. But it has happened. It is happening now in every country, even as they are inventing new ways to lose themselves. It has happened, on the world-historical scale, recently enough that some of the people who did the work of it are still alive.

The work that helped countries find themselves after being lost then is the work that would do it again now. And that work is being attempted, in various places and at various scales, by people who are doing what each of them can. You may be in a position to do some of it where you are. You may, more likely, be in a position to do the smaller version of the same work, which is to do, in your household, your workplace, your friendships, your civic life, in the institutions you found, and friendships you build. It is the work that, when done by enough people in enough places, accumulates into the larger work of a country finding its way back. The next chapter is about what that finding actually looks like when it has happened, and about what it would require, in your country, for it to happen now.