Musings on Love of Land...

I don't buy Crest toothpaste because my mum told me I should. I don't buy Crest toothpaste because the television told me it would turn me into a chick magnet or guy magnet. I don't buy Crest because it was developed at the college I did my bachelor's degree at. I don't use Crest because my dentist has a deal with Proctor and Gamble and gives it away "free" to every patient she treats. In fact, I don't buy Crest toothpaste at all. I prefer to buy toothpaste I have scientifically researched and which meets my criteria for what a quality toothpaste should be and which will thus help me maintain my teeth for the remainder of my life.

Nor do I "love" a geographical place in space containing various individuals and groups of people with varying degrees of a sense of community, a nation, because my dad told me I should. I don't love a nation because the teachers and civic textbooks of my school, mediums of socialisation both, told me I should. I don't love a nation because television, a medium of secondary socialisation and a medium of propaganda, told me I should. In fact, I can't love a nation; I can only scientifically investigate real nations empirically. I can only analyse nations, in other words, economically, politically, culturally, and demographically.

Now don't get me wrong, I realise that I am inscribed within specific cultural aesthetic formations. I, for instance, like mountains. I prefer warmer climes. I prefer smaller communities to larger ones. I prefer places with less modern bureaucratisation, I prefer places where fewer people have been turned into morons by ideological delusions. I prefer places with lower leves of violence. I prefer places with less Californication and Disneyfornication. I prefer places that aren't rotting deindustrialised rustbelts and sprawling suburban megaloplises and which have excellent mass transport.  I prefer places in space that have parliamentary systems. I prefer places with rational, efficient, effective, and humane universal health care systems. I prefer places in space with strong intellectual traditions and excellent colleges and universities. In fact, I prefer college towns in which the economy, politics, and culture are dominated by academic institutions whose mission is to enable its citizens to live the only life worth living, the explored and engaged intellectual life. I prefer college and university towns because they best meet, if imperfectly--nothing is perfect--what I am looking for in a community.

Not all places in space meet or come closer to meeting these criteria. That is why I try, all things being equal which they rarely are, to scientifically research and investigate places I am considering living in before I live in them though, of course, we rarely have a free choice in where we live unless we are Madonna or Mr. "Tesla" Man. You can keep your I like it because I was born here, I like it because my mum or dad told me I should, I like it because my school told me I should, I like it because the television told me I should, I like it because politicians and the government told me I should, or I like it because some flim flam mediocrity like Mr. "Tesla" Man told me I should nationalism. I prefer to be enlightened by reality rather than manipulated by demagogues who play on emotions such as like, dislike, love, hate, fear, and jealousy. My loyalty, in other words, must be earned. You can keep your because we said so unexamined nationalism with its self-satisfied self-righteousness, its simplistic manicheanism, its ethnocentrism, and its blissed out navel gazing. You are welcome to it as long as it doesn't negatively impact my examined life.