Today comes an incredibly potent lesson. Even learning the word “intersubjective” gives an immense amount of power.
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IS AN APPLE A THING? IS A DOLLAR? IS A FLAG? IS A COUNTRY?
Here it is, then –
Is an apple an objective thing?
Yes, sure. There’s different types of apples, different colors of them, different apples might be more or less sweet, larger or smaller, but an apple is basically an apple.
It’s an objective sort of thing.
The language around it, it maps to an objective thing.
In Spanish, an apple is a “manzana” and it’s still an apple. In Japanese, it’s”林檎”.
Same thing.
An apple.
On the far other side of equation is a “favorite color” – by nature, subjective.
Saying “favorite color” – in any language – calls up a different color for each person who hears the term.
(Much ado about nothing, but mine was green when I was a boy, was purple when I was a young man, and is now white – given that white light encompasses all other colors. Gold is my second favorite.)
Okay.
So an apple is a pretty objective thing and a “favorite color” is a subjective thing.
Easy enough.
Now, a harder question – is a U.S. Dollar an objective or subjective thing?
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… BY MUTUAL AGREEMENT…
“It’s objective. Look, it’s green. George Washington’s portrait is on the front of it. It’s made out of paper.”
Fine, I’ll grant you all that – but the most important and interesting thing about a U.S. Dollar is that you can spend it as money. Is that objective?
Careful, now.
If you say “yes,” I’m going to follow up and ask why Continental Dollars (“not worth a continental”) and Confederate Dollars and Soviet Rubles can’t be accepted as money.
“Well, because no one accepts them as money.”
True.
Statistically speaking, sooner or later in the next 1000 years, U.S. Dollars won’t be money any more; they’ll just be scraps of paper and historical artifacts.
The piece of paper in your wallet is objectively there, sure, but the fact that it’s worth anything is only driven by other people being willing to give you something for it.
Okay, how about a flag? Is a flag objective or subjective?
Again, we can lay out the objective specs of a flag – 13 stripes, red and white alternating, blue field in the corner, 50 white stars, American flag.
“American flag” can objectively point at a certain pattern of colors and shapes.
But how about the meaning of that flag?
Is it completely subjective?
Well, no. You can like America or dislike America, but in Seattle and London and Havana and Baghdad and Moscow, they all pretty much recognize that that’s the American flag.
And, yet. Swastika – really bad, Nazi Germany, right?
It’s consistently shocking to American travelers to South and Southeast Asia to see swastikas casually built into all sort of things. (It shocked me when I first saw it along the outer walls of a temple in Saigon, Vietnam.)
Turns out, the Nazis co-opted a semi-sacred image from the East; it had originated from Hinduism and been adopted by Buddhists and other Eastern faiths for many centuries before Hitler was born.
If the Nazis had been snuffed out earlier and were just a historical curiosity, the swastika probably would have reverted to being an Asian symbol instead of a symbol of hate and aggression.
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AND COUNTRIES?
You get where we’re going.
If everyone agrees on a border, and if trying to cross the border without permission gets you shot, then the border is real. Sure, it’s real.
Surely too, there’s objective borders, like the Pacific Ocean.
But the borders merely arbitrarily drawn nonetheless aren't subjective in most cases; we all pretty much know where the border is. There’s a few arguments in a few places, but by and large, most of the important borders of modern countries are settled.
Borders are surely real – just as real as an apple – but they aren’t objective; like an apple, nor are they subjective like a favorite color.
***
ENTER: THE INTERSUBJECTIVE
Bryan Hernandez, a terrific deep-thinking man with a strong interest in philosophy, taught me this word a couple years ago. I dare say it was the most useful single word I ever learned.
Wikipedia –
“In its weakest sense, intersubjectivity refers to agreement. There is intersubjectivity between people if they agree on a given set of meanings or a definition of the situation. Similarly, Thomas Scheff defines intersubjectivity as "the sharing of subjective states by two or more individuals."”
Intersubjective stuff acts a heck of a lot like objective stuff… until it doesn’t.
The intersubjective is true by mutual agreement.
A U.S. Dollar is worth something for a lot of reasons, but a foundation of all of it is that people want U.S. Dollars.
Yes, you can invoke legal tender laws, public and private debt, the Federal Reserve managing the money supply, the stock market, money being a unit of account and medium of exchange, taxation being mandatorily paid in dollars (and pretty much never in-kind these days), foreign exchange, inflation, the historical precedents under Bretton Woods and the Gold Standard before the Nixon Shock…
… yeah, you could invoke all of that – and certainly, that stuff matters too – but if people didn’t agree to use dollars and didn’t want to use dollars, none of that stuff would matter, and the dollar would collapse in its current form.
(Statistically, actually, all currencies collapse eventually down to their commodity value, but that’s beyond the scope of what we’re talking about today.)
Now, before we go any further, I want to make one thing extremely clear –
I’m being descriptive here, not prescriptive. I’m doing my best to be neutral towards intersubjective stuff. I don’t have any political positions here. Please spare me from political emails about the good or evil of the federal reserve system, fiat currency, etc. (Actually, I’ll say – just to clear it up – that I’m largely in favor of the current system, though I could also potentially imagine there being a better one as technology develops.) So… this isn’t at all a political piece, but rather is trying to show the cracks around the edges of reality that most people are unaware of.
And with that said – this is, indeed, one of the most important things in life.
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KEMAL’S TURKIFICATION
The Ottoman Empire, as we said earlier, was a loose collection of peoples ruled by one family that considered themselves something different and apart from the people.
Frankly, this is somewhat hard to explain to modern readers. I still find it hard to both understand and explain, because there is almost nothing comparable to it in the current day.
Perhaps one of the few comparisons that would resonate, where the image hasn’t been forgotten or totally renounced, it that of the Japanese samurai and Japanese peasants.
The samurai – the upright ones, anyways – understood the peasants to be the soil that the samurai tree was planted in. The peasants always had to be nurtured and taken care of. If you abused the soil, the tree would die.
But they weren’t the same thing.
Before Japan was unified in the Sengoku Civil Wars, individual Japanese might have had a few distinct set of loyalties.
To their close family.
To their clan.
To others of their rank and designation.
Maybe to the land they’re from.
Maybe to the Emperor.
Similarly to how people these days in the United States typically do not feel any affinity or allegiance to their county, but might to their state, city, or country, in feudal times, the allegiances and ident
ity would be cut up differently.
Under the Ottoman millet system, people of different religions and backgrounds had different courts and laws to follow, even when living in the same area. Thus, there might be Sharia, Canon Law, and Halahka courts in the same city for Muslims, Christians, and Jews respectively.
The language you spoke didn’t matter; Muslims were under the jurisdiction of the Muslim Sharia court, the Caliph being the final authority of it.
There was not a concept of “citizenship” or even non-citizenship… you just lived in lands governed by whoever governed the lands, and it wasn’t particularly a big deal. Similarly to how Americans typically feel about their county. You town might be significant, your state might be significant, but no one really identifies with what county they come from.
Of course, the flame of nationalism was gradually ignited… Napoleon played a huge part of that, of course, and then the unifications of Germany and Italy were significant, and finally, the First World War was the height of nationalism.
Meanwhile, governments with mixed legal systems in one location, where the courts were segmented by religion or race... these just tended to underperform governments with a more unified geographic-based judiciary.
And this is the problem at Kemal inherited. In Istanbul alone, there were all sorts of mixes of Balkan people, Turkic people, Arabs, Persians, and many others.
Even the Ottoman ruling family was mixed blood – the concept of ethnicity or ethnic purity or ethnic nationalism was just not very important to the Ottomans.
Kemal saw fighting continually breaking out across the world along ethnic lines, and he foresaw that if he didn’t build a single “Turkish” identity, then people would get divided based on allegiance to their past ethnic homelands, and there would be constant strife.
So he led a “Turkificaiton” of the people.
Everyone had to learn Turkish.
They created a Turkish alphabet.
They translated all books and laws into Turkish.
To register your name with the government, you had to translate it into Turkish.
From Wikipedia,
“Names ending with “yan, of, ef , viç, is, dis , poulos, aki, zade, shvili, madumu, veled, bin” (names that denote Armenian, Russian, Greek, Albanian, Arabic, Georgian, Kurdish, and other origins) could not be registered, they had to be replaced by “-oğlu.”
To me, that’s fascinating. Is it so important to standardize surnames to build a national culture?
But you think about it, and – yes, of course it is.
I recognized “-shvili” right away as Georgian; my friend Stepan Parunashvili was born in the former USSR before his family immigrated to Canada.
“-shvili” means “child of…” – so at some point, one of Stepan’s ancestors had a first name or Paru or Parun, and his child was named Parunashvili
Similarly to how “ferrari” means blacksmith in Italian, but not all modern “Ferraris” are blacksmiths, eventually people kept one surname and stopped changing it based on each parental generation.
In Turkey, any “shvili” would have to convert to the Turkish “-oğlu”… an Istanbul Parunashvili might have become Paroğlu, or similar.
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THE EMERGENCE OF TURKISHNESS
The law was scaled back about 10 years ago with Turkey bidding to join the European Union, but for a number of decades it was illegal to “insult Turkishness.”
This always struck foreigners as somewhat odd, and sometimes there were jokes about it – but if you know the history, it makes perfect sense.
The whole concept of “Turkishness” was a somewhat fragile one. There were Turks who were ethnically Arab, ethnically East Asian, ethnically Stepppe-Turkic, Balkan-Caucasian, Slavic, Hellenic, and many more things.
The whole concept of Turkishness was incredibly fragile when it was introduced – even a few charismatic people who mocked and defied Turkificaiton might just have been able to break the whole system down… and, it’s quite likely modern Turkey doesn’t survive if that happens. Kemal was trying to introduce a brand-new and entirely revolutionary intersubjective truth about a whole mass of people.
As it was, Mustafa Kemal basically created the concept of a Turkish ethnicity, dissolving otherwise competing allegiances to pre-Turkish bloodlines and amalgamating them into just being Turkish and loving the Republic of Turkey.
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THE UPSIDE OF CREATING A NEW BLOODLINE FROM SCRATCH…
… is that Kemal had a totally blank slate to define Turkish more-or-less however he wanted.
You can read the speech I quoted from at the start of this piece –
http://www.tur.freeservers.com/whats_new_3.html
It starts to take on a new meaning.
“The Turkish Nation!” is how it opens.
Note well, there had been no Turkish Nation until they rose up in the Turkish War of Independence… the whole concept of a Turkish Nation was less than 15 years old.
Then note –
“My citizens,
We have accomplished many and great tasks in a short time. The greatest of these is the Turkish Republic, the basis of which is the Turkish valiancy and the great Turkish culture.”
Note both “my citizens” – a very new conception that would never have been heard 10-15 years previous – and then emphasizing Turkish valiancy and the great Turkish culture.
It is, you know, a remarkable achievement what Kemal did.
If you read the whole speech with a critical eye and the historical background, you can learn a lot from it that’s non-obvious.
Here, let’s do one last paragraph on it –
“We owe this achievement to the cooperative progress of the Turkish nation and its valuable army. However, we can never consider what we have achieved to be sufficient, because we must, and are determined to, accomplish even more and greater tasks. We shall raise our country to the level of the most prosperous and civilised nations of the world. We shall endow our nation with the broadest means and sources of welfare. We shall raise our national culture above the contemporary level of civilisation.”
Note strongly, “the Turkish nation and its valuable army.” This is Kemal saying that army belongs to the people – not to the government or current ruler. It’s subtle, but important. Kemal’s conception of the people’s will is slightly different than George Washington’s and doesn’t have the same deference to civilian command… but note that even with all the coups that have happened in modern Turkey, all of the Generals involved eventually relinquished command instead of trying to install themselves and their family as a perpetual Caliph, dictator, or monarch. This is not at all obvious or guaranteed behavior.
Also note how “We shall raise our country to the level of the most prosperous and civilized nations of the world” implies that Turkey isn’t current one of the most civilized nations in the world at the time of the speech.
I think that’s incredibly remarkable, and this constant emphasis on hard work, valiancy, and setting ever higher marks in the arts, sciences, industry, and human development accounts for much of Turkey’s successes in a region where failure and devastation has been the norm since the British and French so wantonly cut up the Middle East’s borders in the aftermath of the Great War.
If you read closely, you can see Kemal constantly building and reinforcing new intersubjective truths, building a grounded foundation of the Republic of Turkey as he went.
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INTERSUBJECTIVITY – ONE CAUTION AND THREE TAKEAWAYS
The first caution is this –
Just because intersubjectivity is by agreement doesn’t mean that mere discussion and thinking can get things done by themselves. This is the common idealist trap, which often leads to downgoing and destruction.
At the end of the day, intersubjective agreement is typically built – in the final reckoning – on somewhat objective facts. Kemal armed and equipped his soldiers with rifles and artillery and boots and vehicles
, and forcibly drove the occupying forces out of Turkey.
Treaties are intersubjective, of course, but you get the treaty you want by having the weapons and economy you need to dictate that you get fair terms. (In the short run, you might get a magnanimous ally with guns and wealth to defend you; in the long run, historically, those have been unreliable and impermanent.)
Again, the intersubjective is critically valuable, but you cannot rely on it solely.
MACHINA Page 29