What are the giveaways that tell you you're in another country? What is national identity?

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Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing national identity. I'll start off, I just want to talk about when I lived in Ireland which is about 18 years ago now and I'd lived in a number of countries before then, moved to Dublin and I spent about three months trying to figure out in what sense I was in a different country because there were so many similarities. First off, language, second architecture, third sort of institutions around me, sort of I know even legal institutions and just the way the buses worked and other things like TV. They all watch, in Ireland they watch pretty much the same TV and have the same TV favourite programs we have in the UK and you name it, any number of things just seem to be the same. Everyone kind of looks more or less the same, a few more ginger people around but everyone more or less looks the same. And then if you look at the differences, there would be things like accent. Well, that could be the same if you're in Cardiff or Edinburgh. If you look at sort of, you know, I don't know, not liking the English, again, you could be in Wales or Scotland.

I think the Welsh and the Scots are much more anti-English than the Irish. You can

speculate as to why that is. Yeah. And so anyway, I just, I spent a long time, and even if you could say, well, you know, Scotland and Wales are also different countries to England, nonetheless, they're still part of the UK, whereas this was a country that was, you know, very different as, you know, as different as France would be politically. And it took me a long time to figure it out in what sense was I a different country, but I got there in the end, okay. And what I figured, what I realised was here's the difference and this is how I managed to settle it in my mind, that everything in England that is red in Ireland is green. Yeah. So that's the difference. Basically colour, colour coordination. Yeah. And by which I'm talking about, because countries often have a default colour they default to. And so in England, it tends to be red. So think mailboxes, think post, I guess it's the same thing, but post offices, but think buses. Any number of things just pops up as red. Whereas in Ireland, the buses are green, post office is green, other stuff is green. Yeah. So that so there you go. That's the sort of news is in folks. That is the difference between Ireland and England. Yeah. Green versus red. Yeah. Scotland is

blue, of course. Scotland's blue. Yeah. Yeah. So so no, I think there's I think you've nailed it. I mean, I think it is difficult because a friend of mine is Norwegian and Norway had a very long history of, you know, being being part of either the Danish or the Swedish, you know, empire. And then I think they got their independence at some point in the 19th century, possibly early in the 20th century. I'm afraid I can't quite remember. And if you try and look into what makes someone Norwegian, it's really hard because they will claim that they have a separate language. But Norwegians can understand Swedes and vice versa. Now that that I'm sorry. I know what a different language is. And if you can understand what someone's saying, you're speaking the same language. And, you know, it's more akin to a different accent. It's more like talking to a Scottish person. Now, we don't think Scottish people are not British. We think that there is still some something called Britishness, which makes you the same. So, you know, I try and get from what how do you know you're Norwegian? How do you know that's different from being Swedish? How do you know you're not just part of Sweden? And there really isn't a kind of single concrete factor you can point to, other than they believe themselves not to be. That's it. And I think, you know, what makes Irish people different from different from the English in a way that Liverpudlians aren't, they believe they are. Now, is it as simple as that? I don't know. But I suppose, you know, when we think about the modern era, the modern concept of nationalism, which most people say is a sort of 19th century phenomenon, it's really associated with the idea that, okay, not only are we different, but that difference is politically meaningful. And therefore, we ought to have a separate government. That's essentially sort of modern nationalism says, we need to have a separate government, whether, you know, whether it's an entirely separate political state or, you know, just separate parliament or have some kind of autonomy. You know, that's that's essentially the defining characteristic of a sort of modern day nationalist movement is we don't want the same government as these other guys.

So we're starting to get into territory of, you know, the difference between a nation and a state and that side of things and potentially going down. I think one of the things we want to talk about is, has there been a rise in nationalism? But before we come on to that, I just want to hear from Peter on what we've discussed so far. If there's anything you'd like to add to the pot on that.

Yeah, well, I mean, I'm digging into the detail of why you have a national, what makes an individual have a national identity. I mean, I wonder if it can be, if it's the same thing as just familiarity, if it's just sort of driven by preference. So you obviously have a natural preference to those languages that you can speak. And you probably have a, you may have a preference towards dialects that you can understand more readily within the language. And, but familiarity, you know, when you're looking for a postbox. Now, I would look for a red thing because I know postboxes are red in England. I have struggled in the past to find postboxes in Germany because it took me a little while when I first went there to work out that they were yellow. So, and that sort of disquieting.

Who colours things yellow? It's such a wishy-washy European thing, isn't it, to have yellow

postboxes. What kind of colour is yellow? Well, it's gold. It's gold from their flag. So I think, is it the same thing as just being familiar with something in which case exposure to other cultures would mean that you would begin to dilute your own national identity? I don't know, Fraser, did you, when you lived all around the world, did you feel your nationalistic British diluting in a sense?

Probably the opposite, to be honest. It just got me sort of moaning.

Made you realise how right we are to have red postboxes and how much better the English language is than those other languages.

Well, it made me more think, I got quite obsessed about queuing, to be honest. But no, did I feel diluted? No. So answering seriously, yeah, perhaps I diluted it a little bit. I sort of, I do feel a bit more of a global citizen, you know, I've seen other cultures and countries and I've lived in those places.

This is why I don't think familiarity is necessarily, I mean, the culture that we are obviously most familiar with outside the UK is the US, right? But I don't think, so we can absolutely, totally go to the US and instantly fit in because we've seen it on the telly and we know, and the US is very like it looks on the telly, right? I mean, you go to New York, it's like a New York themed theme park. It's exactly like the New York on the telly and you can fit in immediately and you know how to go and get a coffee and you know what the food's like and you know what the people are like. It's really very, very easy to fit in the US. Does that mean we, you know, are in danger of thinking that we are in some sense the same country? No. I mean, there's no, you know, the familiarity does not cause us to believe that we are, have the same nationality or maybe in some other sense it does. I don't know. Because you could, I mean, I think the thing is that if you look at identity, there are certain kinds of things like, you know, being interested in board games or music or, you know, certain kinds of shared activities where you can certainly say that's part of your identity and you can associate with other people who do those things and feel like you are a sort of coherent group in some way. But then there are other types of identity which are more like the political types of identity, which have a nested qualities, you know? So I feel part of North London and then I feel part of London and then I'd say, you know, Southern, definitely Southeast UK and then sort of English, then British, then European. And then, you know, perhaps before even you get to European, there's sort of Northern European, you know, Prostant zone, you know, the Reformation zone. Whiskey drinking rather than wine. Exactly. Beer rather than wine. And, you know, and then you zoom out, but actually the Anglophone world. So, you know, we certainly feel akin to countries like India and, you know, sort of South Africa and Australia and we've got an affinity to those countries before we get to, well, the world. Now, as it happens, I don't feel particularly more or less any of those things, right? All of those things. But as it happens, at some point you get to a sort of political entity. So you get to, it turns out that it's the UK is where we draw a political boundary. We say we have a government whose power extends there geographically. You know, we have little things like London Assembly and things, but we don't really consider that. Ultimately, it boils down to where can your army go without offending anyone? You know, it seems to be that's the defining characteristic of that's a state, you know, for the last few hundred years, that's what a state is. And I don't know if that's, maybe that's just a historical or technological accident. You know, that's where we happen to have drawn a meaningful boundary. But is it, does it matter? You know, I mean, in a different world, could we have London being a separate state, you know, and England being a separate state?

Well, this, yeah, I mean, this goes back to the organizing principle of international relations essentially, which is, you know, how if you're not going to have an anarchic system, you've kind of got to have states. But, sorry, we do have an anarchic system and so therefore we must have states.

Yeah, so this is the sort of Westphalian system, which essentially what I'm saying is it's probably a fudge. There is nothing particularly meaningful about that level. It just so happens that it works okay. You know, we've got 200 or 250 or whatever countries in the UN, not two and a half thousand and not 20 or two. We've got, it's about right, you know, it's kind of what we're saying. But it could have, you know, there's no, it doesn't correspond to anything more or less meaningful than the higher or lower levels. I mean, or maybe I'm wrong. That's how I feel about it.

Peter? Yeah, picking up, I think the, picking up something Nick just said, I think that the state, the states as we have them as they're laid out is obviously a product of history. But I wonder if maybe this concept of the state is a sort of anomaly in the sort of the human evolution, human development, development of the planet. There's been, come about due to a number of constraints, i.e. in terms of cost of communicating and the cost of moving things around in terms of trade. But also because of the rapid uptick in the last 10,000 years or so of interconnectedness between groups of people and the overall density of the population. The need to draw lines and say, well, you guys over there, you do one thing and we'll do this other thing over here and we'll come to some agreement that means we're not in constant conflict with each other. Sort of brought about this idea of a state. And where you get the nation state is where the sort of, some sort of identity, either language or race or something maps on very well to that state boundary. I wonder if, as we develop more interconnectedness and more globalisation, maybe this will sort of even out at some point and we'll devolve more into smaller groups of people again.

Yeah. And I think that can fit quite nicely into the idea that the state is a technological phenomenon about what you can control. That, you know, 200 years ago, you simply, the cost of administrating a massive empire, a massive centralised empire was just sort of, you know, quite high. You had to be very powerful to do that. Now those costs are much lower and you could say, well, it's easy. It's just easier to have a bigger state now. It's easier to have things like the EU. And perhaps, you know, in future we ought to see, you know, grouping together because, you know, economies of scale are such that it's more economically advantageous. Now if you take things like language, obviously that ties into that. It's much easier to administrate a monoglot block than it is to administrate a country with several languages because then you're going to need to have, you know, your institutions are all going to need to operate in multiple languages. It's just more expensive. So it's just easier. You can have a bigger area if everyone speaks the same language. So it kind of suggests that actually, yes, where we happen to draw our boundaries is a technological thing. And that if, you know, but yeah, I mean, so the thing is that when you have an increase in communications technology and even, you know, imagine things like having automated translation, which seems like it's a, you know, it's a bit of a, seems like a bit of a trivial thing to raise here, but that might make a huge difference. You know, it suddenly makes it much easier to have multiple languages.

Yeah. But I wonder if, if, if this sort of the, the information technologies will allow the, the, the, those services provided by the, just provided by the state to sort of fragment. So rather than, you know, having, getting your bins that have to be collected by the local council because they're the people who are coordinated geographically, you can, you can, you can organize things. So I subscribe to a bin service that services me and a few people on my street, but loads of people in Edinburgh and, and Moscow and New York. And, and every, everything that the state provides is provided as a service, either as a commercial service or a sort of cooperative service. And so the, so the idea of sort of sovereignty and states, if everything evaporates apart from the only thing that's left is physical

security. Right. So this is, I mean, I think this is a very plausible outcome and people tend to assume states are more fundamental than they are. We don't tend to think of them as a technological solution to a certain economic problem, which they are, right. Which is this issue of externalities. The problem that, you know, we have to have collective rules for things from very simple things like which side of the road do we drive on, where we all have to pick the same side of the road, you know, we've got to have a rule for that. Through to things like, you know, who, your defence. So who pays for defence? Now the problem is, you know, it's no good because of the way that defence works. It has an area of effect. It's no good, my next door neighbour, you know, deciding they want to have, you know, a high tech air defence system and me not wanting that. Right. We all have to have the same because one protects everyone, which is why we have to have taxes. We have to, because you can't have a subscription based, you know, it's too expensive. You can't. I mean, you can't for some things like street lighting. You can't have subscription based street lighting. You know, these things affect an entire area. Now, technological improvements may gradually remove the space of those things. And to the extent that you could imagine, actually, what if I had a transponder that lit up my bit of the street wherever I went?

If everyone wore night vision goggles. Right. Everyone had like Google Glass. But if you

imagine smart autonomous weapons. Now I'm just asking you a question. If you had smart weapon, because autonomous weapons are more effective, it's better to kill one person that you want to kill than it is to blow up a whole house. You know, actually, maybe you can have subscription based defence. Maybe, you know, you can fight wars as collective private entities.

Yeah, as sort of cyber warfare becomes more and more of a thing. Maybe you could select exact individuals who you want to make economically unviable by deleting their identities and stealing all their money from the bank accounts while leaving other, their adjacent, but physically adjacent people completely untouched because they are supporting some others.

But also, I mean, one of the sort of, maybe this is a potential conflict or maybe it's the opposite, which is, let's say we decide that we don't like the company who does the bin services in Moscow, Chad, some San Francisco and London. And we want to attack their headquarters. And how does that work in terms of defence and the organising of that? So is there a potential conflict there? Or actually, does that fit nicely into this more compartmentalised?

I think that would work really well. I can see how I can imagine that happening. So let's say we are, we think that we really like the recycling company that we are all subscribed to. And we don't like the fact that there is this cheaper option, which is not as environmentally friendly. So we decide to go to war with them. So the company, we collectively as a group, the company, you know, the company says, right, we're going to get a load of, if you sign up to this Kickstarter, once we've got 100 million pounds, we're going to invest that in a load of, of, you know, of drones, of drones that with we're armed with, you know, with explosives, small, small explosive shaped charges. And, and we're going to swarm the swarm their headquarters and kill everyone in it. It will work quite well. I can see that being a completely viable way of approaching the issue. And it would be of a slightly bigger issues than the future of the planet. You know, so I, so I, I, I, I can see that totally happening.

I like this. I'm up for it. What's the web page? I'll, you know, I'll go and find it on

Kickstarter. Yeah. No, but, but so I mean, you know, that's, that sounds extreme, but it's not, it's actually exactly, exactly what we have now. I mean, we, but it's more technologically enabled. I mean, countries have gone to war against sillier things than

that. It brings to mind an episode, I think from the original Star Trek series where there was a, there's a rate, a planet of people and they're two opposing political ideals or races on this planet. And they've been having a, they've had been raging a war for thousands of years and millions and millions of deaths. And they've, they've sort of, they've, they've processized the, the, the way of the death happens. So they, they plan, but don't execute attacks. So they'll say, we've bombed this city and we estimate that a hundred thousand people died. And then there's an agreement between the two, the two opposing nations that a hundred, a hundred thousand people are selected by the local government and then are exterminated by the local government. Just cheaper that way. That's cheaper that way. Cause then you're not, you're not, you're not damaging any infrastructure. You're just sort of deleting people. Yeah. I mean, I mean, in real life

that wouldn't work because people wouldn't have an incentive to carry it out once it occurred. But I have heard about, I think there are Native American nations and things where they used to fight wars like that, where they, once they'd hit each other with a, with the stick, they would effectively be out of the fight. And you know, that's that, it was a sort of ritualized warfare that was just considered to be cheaper than real

warfare. Brilliant. I think one of the things originally I wanted to discuss was talk about potential rise in nationalism. But yeah, this has really gone in a different direction. Yeah, but I think we've gone in a more fruitful direction. But I'd like to finish off if I may, with an anecdote. And I'd like to bring it back to this question that initially you talked about national identities at the beginning. And I was relating that story I said about, you know, how did I know I was in Ireland? I was relating that to a friend of mine whose name is Andres Taxir. Okay. And a friend of the podcast, a friend of ours, as they might say, in kind of mafia circles. And anyway, I was relating this to him. He's Argentinian. And he was going, ah, and he told me a story right back at me, which was this, it was an observation. So he was in London, I can't remember if I told you this before, but he was in London during a Rugby World Cup. And he happened to be in a pub in in South West London. And it was England versus France, because it's South West London, quite a posh area. There were loads of French in the pub as well. So he had loads of England supporters, he had loads of French supporters. And what he told me, and so I guess the point here is his observation of English identity, and observation of French identity, is that at one point during the game, very close game, France went ahead. And suddenly all the French started singing the Marseillaise. Okay, beautiful moment. And the English were more or less silent, looking at them resentful. And then later on in the game, the English went, England went back ahead, and indeed went on to win the game. And so, but he was saying that when England went ahead, all the English suddenly stood up, turned around, looked at the French and just went, fuck off! Just screaming and swearing at the French. And that was his moment of going, ah, that's what the English are like. That's what the French are like. And that's one of the reasons

that I've always felt more European than I have English. But I feel more London than I do European. So I don't have a...

So you'd be singing. So you'd be, okay.

I would not be in a pub watching sports in the first place.

There we go. So we'll finish there. Yeah, I found that very interesting. So I'm Frase McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. And until next time, goodbye!