"Rally round the fag, men!"

Waiting for PhD confirmation. Can't sleep, must War. 750 words exactly.

****

Within any academic field, there are always a myriad of ends and pursuits, convection currents of thought which branch off in different directions. Some of them are truly excellent, based on solid evidence and exciting discoveries. Some are stagnant backwaters of stupidity, neuroses left over in the heads of academics who for one reason or another refuse to die and let their ideas go with them.

But best of all, some of them are strange. They straddle boundaries, refuse easy identification and run around jabbing sharpened sticks into everyone else demanding attention. These are the ones that either (uncommonly) bear heavy fruit or (usually) fail spectacularly but in an interesting kind of way.

Evolutionary psychology is one of these. Maddening, arrogant, and ridiculously unscientific, but also curious and provocative. Useless but with great explanative power. Often hated and fascinating. It's not far-fetched, it's not stupid, it's not Deleuze-incomprehensible or pomo-crazy. It simply asserts that many human actions and institutions may have an evolutionary basis, and attempts to match them up. It allows curious behaviours to be explained by showing how the instinctual basis to them might have survival value.

Of course, this is about as scientific as crystal power and chakra balancing. Evo psych 'facts' can only ever be peripherally supported and never confirmed - they all concern quantifying impulse, for Cunt's sake. But goddamn it to screaming bloody hell if it isn't a fun basis for the construction of collective behaviours. Certainly it has a lot more utility than many areas of traditional psychoanalysis, and it has a lot of fine authors who use its precepts. If only they wouldn't insist on calling it science...

(As is often the case with these things, the problem could be largely resolved with a simple categorisation. If they called it evolutionary sociopsychology, the pissing match about whether or not it constitutes science would stop. We could admit that it is just a big, meandering thought experiment and get on with enjoying it. But as per usual, I digress...)

So, let's meander with it... What is nationalism, Mr. Evolutionary Psychologist?

...Dr. C is twitching inside of me. My fingers are barely resisting the temptation to blast the whole exercise as a well-painted exercise in collective stupidity, an ersatz religion enacted by morons and manipulated by the cynical, and to use the words 'fuck', 'cunt' and 'bastard' in 8-to-a-loaf-sized slices...

But I must admit this must go further than simply swearing at proles.

Nationalism feels like tribalism grown massive. A bizarrely innate need to identify around a standard against a common enemy, to protect an internal system, to hackle up against an infidel, an outsider. To set the Minutemen on patrol around our local gene pool. The way we enact it today is a petty toy dirigible of the real thing, of course...

But have you ever felt the brutal coursing of what it might do if let loose?

At some gloriously petty occasion, a rugby match, view of a press conference or speech or news report, some encounter with a foreigner... something inconsequential where you suddenly feel the wet pressing weight of the cultural baggage that the world has thrown against you?

Suddenly you are every convict ever thrown callously to a burning hellhole by whoreson Redcoats (sorry, Cumboy), or some righteously indignant member of the only sane white race left on the planet with no choice but to hate the abominably arrogant and moronic members of the craziest (sorry, Dick), or a proud upright citizen of the only Australian state where sheep aren't frequently sodomised before teatime (sorry, Nixon). Then when the liquor wears off and your head snaps back into its socket, you think "Dear sweet Zombie Jesus... so THAT'S how you oppress the planet."

Imagine what that feeling might do to the truly ignorant. Imagine that corrosive wellspring of power turned into empires, before such constructs as human rights, decency, static national borders, private property and dignity started to do their rounds.

Sport is meaningless, the act of sport itself does nothing. It is a mere codification of the natural human desire for conflict and the establishment of hierarchy, and in most forms it is as boring as a glass of water. The realisation that it may provoke any real feelings at all is the realisation that we are a cigarette-leaf's thickness above our clubbin' and rapin' ancestors and that some impulse we have to punch the bloody English will never, ever die.

Fuck knows it should.

But it won't.