The Power of Media
The role of the media in shaping the way a community can be imagined is forwarded through metaphor via the history of the French Revolution. The author reveals the way that the reality of the act of revolution was transformed into the concept of the Revolution:
Like a vast shapeless rock worn to a rounded boulder by countless drops of water, the experience was shaped by millions of printed words into a ‘concept’ on the printed page, and, in due course, into a model.
Nationalism
Nationalist sentiment does not just spring up overnight. It is the end result of a conglomeration of various aspects of history all coming together at once in a way that looks like something else at the time.
It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny.
Imagined Religious Worlds
The communities that are imagined often fall under the direction of religious guidance. The bad for those who operate under these illusory conditions is that the whole world isn’t necessary populated by the faithful:
The Pope is the chief of the Christians; he is an ancient idol, worshipped now from habit. Once he was formidable even to princes, for he would depose them as easily as our magnificent sultans depose the kings of Iremetia or Georgia.
Darkness
The darkness almost always arrives in 20th century fiction. Less comprehensive, but close to omnipresent in its own right is this metaphor to be found even in non-fiction. It just works so well in so many ways:
The century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought with it its own modern darkness. With the ebbing of religious belief, the suffering which belief in part composed did not disappear. Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more arbitrary.
Pathological Nationalism
The author rightly points out that no greater thinkers have ever been developed out of putting their mind to explaining the genius and necessity of nationalism in the way that other famous “isms” have produce famous names. In fact, even those who do support the basic concepts of nationalism find themselves put in positions of having to use metaphor to describe its central lack of soundness:
“`Nationalism’ is the pathology of modern developmental history, as inescapable as `neurosis’ in the individual, with much the same essential ambiguity attaching to it, a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia, rooted in the dilemmas of helplessness thrust upon most of the world (the equivalent of infantilism for societies) and largely incurable.”
