Individual freedom and a rationally autonomous determination of destiny — relabeled by Marcuse as “democratic unfreedom” — amounted for Weber to a titanic tension between the moral/spiritual order and the world of matter and materialism, between the morality of taking care of the self and the morality of self-gratification. The premium of life-value is now external rather than internal. It assigns supreme importance to discipline, efficiency, and work, three of the many lessons that the state came to inculcate, as second nature, in its citizens. Work for the sake of work, just as capitalism’s money is made for the sake of garnering wealth, just as the state exists for its own sake and perpetuates itself for the sake of perpetuating itself. Weber saw in modernity’s claim of progress a concept that amounts to the “production and accumulation of wealth and the mastery of nature… as well as the idea of emancipating the rational subject.” But the price of progress was what he called “disenchantment,” a deep sense of loss, the loss of the sacred, of a state of wholeness, of the spiritual anchoring of the self in the world, in nature, and in what I have called a moral cosmology.
It is precisely this disenchantment that compelled Adorno and others to speak of the emotional impoverishment of the modern subject, of the standardization and automation of his psychology. The modern subject is isolated and fragmented, having fallen prey to a “culture industry” that has shaped for him and her a new type of identity. “Sequestered from key types of experience,” the “self is energized against a backdrop of moral impoverishment” and “under conditions of substantial moral deprivation.” The divisions of the inner self has resulted in a narcissistic individual whose frame of reference and meaning derives from the impersonal, from the ideal power types (represented in nationalism, fascism, Nazism, etc.) that delude him into a sense of containment. In these power types the narcissistic ego finds refuge, stability, and even contentment. “Modern capitalist society not only elevates narcissism to prominence, it elicits and reinforces narcissistic traits in everyone.”
But Adorno problematizes this downward turn as a “curative,” in the sense that the nation and its meaning become the antidote to the fragmentation of the modern subject and to the Weberian sense of loss and disenchantment. Taking over the past and the future and creating a universal historiography of its own, the nation becomes a natural ontology that retains not only values that displace and replace all values but also, as we have seen, a historical transcendence, a metaphysic. Nationalism thus developed as a necessary and integral component of the state phenomenon because it served as a curative against the malaise of state effects: the destruction and reengineering of the social order, the subject’s fragmentation, general instability, fragility, narcissism, etc. The metaphysical dimensions of nationalism and its psychological investment in the social order create for the subject not only a frame of reference but a world of meaning that replaces the world now lost. This is why there cannot be a state without a nation, and this is why the modern state must always be a nation-state, because without nationalism the state would have as much chance to survive as a cancer patient has the chance of surviving without treatment. But as with any modern treatment, the cure has side effects. In the case of nationalism, these have been so grave that it is impossible not to conclude that the genocides and atrocities of the twentieth century (and the present one) are the direct product of the phenomenon of the nation-state. As a dialectic of modernity, nationalism is
“the pay-off for a disenchanted world, the mythic, naturalised, non-rational fantasy produced by the demythologising, “rational” development of the state. … It comes to stand in for a guiding force of social and individual life. This in turn leads to identification with the nation and its figureheads as the grounding for subjectivity. Nationalism offers autonomy (self-determination) and particularity in the form of subjugation to a universal. It is an instituting moment for the self, society and the state…. Humanity no longer worships gods but rather itself as the transcendental nation. We become nationalised narcissists.“
[The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament by Wael Hallaq, p. 108-110]
