https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=MBbeQWoV2Q4
Along comes the Protestant Reformation. The result of the Reformation, and it has to be remembered, that the Reformation took place in Germany. It’s primarily, in its beginning, it’s primarily a German religious movement. Obviously, it goes to France, and Switzerland, and England, other places. But originally, it’s primarily a German religious movement. Except that, the Reformation didn’t take place in Germany, because Germany did not exist. Germany is a made-up country. Fake news, everybody. No, Germany’s a made-up country, right? If you look at a medieval map, there’s no Germany on that map. Nobody who lived in the place that we call Germany now would have called themselves Germans. Actually, they still don’t call themselves Germans. But a really fun game is actually, what’s the name of German in other languages? And what do you guys call it in French? Allemands. Yeah, right. Because the Allemagne region, right? Right. So, yeah, nobody who lived there called themselves Germans. But Germany is a modern construct. But the way that it was built, the story sort of begins in the Protestant Reformation. I don’t have a ton of time to go into this, but let’s say that as a result of the Protestant Reformation, we got something called the Thirty Years’ War in Western Europe, which is one of the bloodiest periods in Western Europe. Actually, not the Middle Ages, right? But this is now in the modern period. Thirty Years’ War, incredibly bloody struggle between Roman Catholics and Protestants over basically a very small slice of Western Europe. And the end result of the Thirty Years’ War is something called the Treaty of Westphalia. And one of the things that comes about as a result of that treaty is that they decide, okay, your religion will be determined simply by whatever principality you live in. So if you live in this little province, and some of these are quite small, basically the size of what in Texas would be a county. I don’t know, do you guys call them parishes? Do you guys call them parishes or counties? Or what’s the unit in Canada beyond the city? Yeah, we do have something like that. I forget what they’re called. Yeah, we have county, yeah. Yeah, yeah, county, yeah, yeah. So, but basically these are very small principalities. And your religion, if you live there, would just be whatever the official, whatever the religion of. And so what happened was that instead of the, the identity conferred by the Christian story being kind of at the very outside level, is that it collapsed down actually several levels into the hierarchy. And so it goes from being, here’s a universalizing story of Passion Week in Pascha, right, of Rome and Greece, of the Trojan War, and, you know, St. John the Baptist, right? All these things like, this is our universalizing story that kind of is the container that holds everything together. And now that collapses, actually several rungs down the ladder, right? To now, it’s actually secondary to your political identity. Now, once you kind of understand when that happened and how that happened, you can then understand how it’s actually a pretty short trip to go from there to now my religious identity or my spiritual identity or whatever is something that I confer upon myself now. Personal, personal. Yeah, but also like, but isn’t that also like political identity also has collapsed down to that level now? So you can freely associate with whatever political party you want, at least in some parts of the world. But, you know, talking to the United States, you can freely associate with whatever political party you want. And everything about your identity has collapsed down to the level of the self. Of the self. So when all of this is going on though, and before it kind of gets all the way down to that level, in the primarily in 18th and 19th century Europe, you have the emerging of what is sometimes called the search for the national epic. Yeah. So why do we need the national epic? Because we’re not part of an empire anymore, Holy Roman or otherwise, we’re not part of an empire anymore. And we’re not part of, and we’re not even part of the same religion anymore. Right? And listen, nowadays, Protestants, Roman Catholics, Orthodox, like we can go out together and we can have a beer and we can talk about our differences and all these different things. Nobody stabs anybody. And that’s great. I love that. Don’t get me wrong. But if you think for a moment that somebody, you know, in the 30 years war believed that, oh, the Roman Catholic over there and me, we’re the same religion basically. And we’re just quibbling over a few small differences. Like this is not how people thought. Yeah. Yeah. They weren’t killing each other over small differences, let’s say. So anyway, so you’re not held together by the same religion anymore. And you’re not held together by the same, and you’re not even held together by like the, the sort of like the imperial story. Right? And so now what we need to do is to try to find some other narrative that can collect and hold our identity together. And this is the, this is why there’s the search for the national epic. So something a lot of people don’t know, you’re of course aware of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, the Brothers Grimm, right? And they’re famous for a bunch of fairy tales, which they did not write. They’re, the fairy tales that we know as like the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, they were edited mainly by Wilhelm, but they didn’t write those stories. Yeah. What they did was they went around collecting all the oldest stories, like the children’s stories, is what they would have called them. But they went around just collecting all the old wives’ stories and all the old children’s stories and things like this from these tiny little idiosyncratic, you know, valleys in different places in what is now Germany. And they’re collecting these stories because the oldest stories preserve the oldest words. And Jakob Grimm is a philologist. He’s interested in really old words. And so his two great works that he composed were the largest and most comprehensive dictionary of the German language, which has ever been created. And then also the, an accompanying volume, sometimes it’s called Teutonic mythology or German mythology or something like that. It’s got its own name in German, which I won’t try to pronounce here since we’re on the internet. But anyway, you’ve got these two massive volumes. One is this is the German language and the other is this is German mythology. And they’re both fascinating works. His Teutonic mythology is, let’s say has a lot of problems from the perspective of modern scholarship, because once again, there were a bunch of gaps and he just tried to fill the gaps in by guesswork essentially. And then, but the fairy tales were, basically he was sending his grad students out because grad students are the mindless minions of the academic world. So he would send his grad students out to basically collect these stories. And then later they edited them together in a volume. And that turned out to be much more popular and let’s say more enduring than the other two works. But what a lot of people don’t know is that following the German revolution, sometimes it’s called the March revolution, when the National Assembly of the German people, it’s like the first German parliament came together. Jakob Grimm had a seat. It was just a seat in the parliament, but it was like a special chair. Oh, really? And he had a vote and everything else and he got disenchanted with politics. It didn’t really last. But the reason that they gave him this spot in the very first German parliament ever was because he was the great German philologist. He was the great German, you could say storyteller in that he was telling, by collecting all these old stories and trying to package them and arrange them, what he’s actually doing is creating an identity that is German, an identity that’s based in, that’s based in the language that you speak and who your ancestors were more than it is in what your religion is or where you live or those other things. And so one of the great questions of the time was, well, as the German state is being founded and there’s lots of like little revolutions and different governing bodies and all these different things, it’s difficult to track, even if you have it all laid out in front of you. But basically one of the big questions that they’re trying to answer is, what does it actually mean to be German? It’s not a religious question anymore. So like, what does it mean to be German? And obviously, eventually attempts to answer that question are gonna develop in some really kind of unhealthy ways. Yeah. In more nationalistic ways, the way that we understand them now. Whereas in the ancient world, like if there had been some kind of German identity, let’s say in France, there was definitely more of a, let’s say a basic French identity, even though all the regions still, there was still that issue where all the region, and like your French identity was basically that, you’re somehow related to the King of France. That’s where your French identity comes from. You owe allegiance to the King, but then you probably don’t speak French. You don’t speak the same French that the King of France does. You speak some other local dialect or whatever, and you don’t see that this allegiance to the King of France as this totalizing thing, right? As this thing that it’s like, I am French in the way even that the French would understand that today. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing about nationalism as opposed to, let’s say the older mode, is that your national identity is now much more totalizing to the point that it has the ability to actually obliterate the things beneath it. I mean, obviously- Well, the French is a good example. When Napoleon took over, he basically imposed Parisian French on the rest of France, right, to make it one language. He basically imposed an education system onto all the different regions, and those that, and you can see that all, like during the revolution, you can see that happening. It’s wild. The local places that resist the revolution, they get slaughtered, and people just get slaughtered because there’s this one thing, nation, right? That’s where even the idea is kind of born, right? This idea of a citizen of a nation. The way that we understand it now. Yeah, and it’s a sort of a weird extension, you could say, of like the really old classical idea of the city-state, but now imposed across many cities and over a very large geographic area until you get to these places where you have the situation today where modern nation-states are so impossibly large. I mean, this is part of why I keep demurring on like, what are we gonna do? Like, what’s the symbolism of America video, right? Part of it is that, like, which America? Yeah. Well, don’t you think that one of the reasons for the success of America has been that it had been, at least for a while, had been able to kind of recast that multiplicity, right? A sense in which there were local traditions, local places. You know, people in different regions just have different ways of living, and we kind of don’t feel like the centralized authority has the right or the capacity to impose ways of being, ways of thinking on the people in the local areas. Yes, there, yes. There is a, I think that was part of a lot of the early genius of the American project, and the two things that really challenged it and maybe broke it, although we’ll see, we’re still, I mean, we’re a brand new country, so we’ll see, but one is the creation of the interstate highway system. You know, the ability, you know, which is very importantly, it’s like, now it’s the artery, right? The arterial system that connects the country, but very importantly, like, it’s owned and paid for by the centralized power, the federal government, right? But then also, and also along with that, you know, kind of developing, as well as the, there’s something in our constitution called the Interstate Commerce Clause, which basically gives the federal government authority to regulate anything that might possibly touch interstate commerce, and I don’t wanna get like too much into like American constitutional stuff in politics, but you could just say that the kind of, the brilliance of the great localized, you know, being able to recast that locality, like you just said, that started to break down when those two things, and obviously airplanes have made things worse. So, I think that’s a good way to put it. I think that’s a good way to put it. I think that’s a good way to put it. I think that’s a good way to put it. I think that’s a good way to put it. I think that’s a good way to put it. I think that’s a good way to put it. I think that’s a good way to put it. I think that’s a good way to put it. I think that’s a good way to put it. I think that’s a good way to put it. I think that’s a good way to put it. I think that’s a good way to put it. I think that’s a good way to put it. I think that’s a good way to put it. I think that’s a good way to put it.