Thermodynamics vs. Nationalism
Each culture and nation has a right to its rich history, a right to be proud of its accomplishments, and a right to preserve those things worth preserving. I personally have always harbored a lot of pride in the United States, going back to my childhood in the 60’s. Founding a nation. The Constitution. Building a railroad across the country. Overcoming slavery. Defeating Hitler. Landing on the Moon. Inventing Blues, Jazz and Rock. Making cool movies. Inventing TV, phones, phonos and electric guitars. Curing diseases. Building skyscrapers. We were always powerful, blessed with great land and waters and great people. We seemed to care about others so in the back of my mind, we were Superman. I had a benign sort of Nationalism because I was taught that a more virulent form led to some pretty awful things before I was born such as two World Wars and a Holocaust.
As I grew, I learned more about the flip side, things I wasn’t proud of such as assassinations of great leaders, civil unrest, injustice, ill-gotten spoils, unjust wars, misogyny, sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia and violence that permeated our culture. This dichotomy has had the effect of compartmentalizing my nationalistic emotions into two boxes: The ideal America and the actualized America. So when I see folks kneeling at football games, I 100% get where they are coming from. We just haven’t realized our ideals, certainly not for all people. We are imperfect and some imperfections require being called out as Wrong and Abnormal and Not Acceptable so we can see them and correct them. So now I have Tempered Benign Nationalism which means I stand for our ideals, as I see them, am proud of our positive achievements but am sober about our shortcomings and frankly, disappointed at what we’ve become: a shallow, materialistic, undereducated and violent country, filled with guns, addicts of all types, strip mall franchises for miles, energy wasters, polluters to the world, imperialistic bullies. Sort of ugly, unfortunately.
What is a nation? A chunk of land on a planet with proscribed invisible (virtual) borders within which one set of laws and culture applies and on the other side, another. By default, our current nations, no matter how great, co-exist on a Planet in space, in our case, Earth. We all know our planet predates all nations by about 4 billion years. Nation states have only even existed for the last several thousand out of those 4 billion years, the oldest ones being China, India and Egypt. Sure there are many older settlements and cultures such as the Australian Aboriginals which go back 40,000 years of contiguous culture and storytelling. And many great cultures have arisen, creating their own languages, having certain physical characteristics, foods, medicines and mores passed down through millennia. And from these, nations have formed, usually if not entirely via conquest and warring. In fact, you don’t really have a nation until you can kill or beat back others that may want your land for their own nation. If you’ve ever seen one of those cool animations that show how borders and nations or entire Empires have changed over the centuries, you know how chaotic and random the process of deciding on exact borders are and it took a long time to get to this period of relative stability we are in. And thankfully, most of these modern borders are based on civility and respect and not military might. We’ve seen how even a minor appropriation by force of another’s land such as in the case of Russia annexing Crimea from Ukraine led to pariah status for Russia, though repercussions have been relatively minor. But if instead, they tried that with Germany or the US, the result would have been disastrous.
Basically, Earth Map 1.0 is complete. The borders are somewhat set. The nations are set and the borders are what they are and now the populations within those borders must obey two sets of laws: The laws of their nation and the laws of physics which they’ve always had to obey no matter what, since the dawn of time. Any astronaut will tell you, none of these national borders are visible from space, only the lights of towns and cities can be seen on the night side of the Earth and the Great Wall of China appears in the day. It is only because of our understanding of physics that we evolved to see this picture of our planet. Our science and engineering got us to space so we could clearly view our small world in crystal clarity at this moment of time when the Earth was filled up with its virtual nations and the nations were even subdivided and filled in with states and provinces and counties and districts and cities.
When two initially isolated systems in separate but nearby regions of space, each in thermodynamic equilibrium with itself but not necessarily with each other, are then allowed to interact, they will eventually reach a mutual thermodynamic equilibrium. The sum of the entropies of the initially isolated systems is less than or equal to the total entropy of the final combination. Equality occurs just when the two original systems have all their respective intensive variables (temperature, pressure) equal; then the final system also has the same values.—2nd Law of Thermodynamics
Thermodynamics is a set of properties of any System that has moving “parts” and is generally, as the name implies, a measure of thermal temperature, entropy and pressure. While it was first developed to study how physical materials interacted such as gases or liquids, made up of molecules bouncing around, it is clear to me that the same basic principles apply to people bouncing around in adjoining nations. Since all nations are bordering other nations, one can make a case that all nations are in fact connected one way or another. Even in cases such as Australia or Japan, island types surrounded by ocean, they cannot escape the connections via planes and boats. These continuously bring thousands and millions of exchanges of materials and people over time. Even more astounding is the way we are all connected though telecommunications and the Internet—the ultimate vitual connector.
Within a country one can see these dynamics played out even more dramatically as people freely move about. They move from town to town and state to state to the point where it is rare not to see families spread out across the four corners of the country. In my own family, each of my siblings lives in a different state: NJ, CA, TX, MO and OR! We bounced around quite a lot on the way to those destinations too. Thus we see neighborhoods transform, cities and demographics change at a rapid pace. Thermodynamics at work!
No matter how isolated or nationalistic your nation, you can never escape Thermodynamics. In physical materials, when they are heated up or pressure is applied, agitation of the molecules increases and they bounce around more wildly (entropy increases) and unless completely bottled up, will spill into neighboring systems where eventually equilibrium will be reached, whether we like it or not. As we all know, it’s a lot easier to create a sealed container than it is to create a sealed nation. So when neighboring countries “heat up” though social unrest, crime, warfare, famine, climate change or for whatever reason, the people will not stay still. In fact, unlike molecules, people have free will and will exert that in order to survive—increasing entropy.
Even when not agitated, people will decide to move and thus we experience immigration of three types: The slow, regulated form (immigrants) and the frenetic panicked form (refugees) and the barbaric forced migration of enslavement (enslaved) agitated by commercial greed. This has been going on since the dawn of humanity and is literally how we managed to populate the entire globe. And there is no turning back.
All natural processes are irreversible. Reversible processes are a useful and convenient theoretical fiction, but do not occur in nature.
We can liken the new populist fashion to promote “nationalism” and border enforcement around the world to a futile attempt to bottle up nations and to thwart the unthwartable thermodynamic system. We see right here in the United States an effort to even build a physical wall as though the nation were itself a bottle. It’s not. Only if you could build an impenetrable dome over your nation with highly governed portals could you begin to control the dynamics at hand—The Biodynamics, the Germodynamics, the Anthrodynamics, whatever you want to call it, could you maybe get somewhere. That’s preposterous and would lead to the death of the nation, cut off from the atmospheric flows and migrations. A huge waste of resources in a futile cause. Save that for the Moon or Mars.
The US has been a great beneficiary of immigration and Anthrodynamics. Agitations in Europe led to mass migrations and populated our country with hearty, motivated folks who have built much of what we have, often with the irreplacable power and practcal help of sacrificial African unpaid labor. Indeed, our horrific, inhuman period of slavery produced great wealth and a new, more interesting and vibrant culture, at the expense of great suffering. Likewise, in the venerable, antique nations of Europe, where western languages were birthed and very distinct cultures were evolved, we see Anthrodynamics encroaching, mixing it up, stirring the pot, bringing new influences and traditions and applying pressure on the Systems that were in place. Even somewhere like Sweden, used to a very uniform and staid traditional culture, with their tall, blue-eyed Viking heritage, has had a tremendous influx of immigrants and must adjust to the realities of physics in a closed system, ie. The Earth. It’s not easy and this in turn creates more agitation within Sweden and many nations which in turn produces new dynamics, new synthesized cultures and new immigrants to other areas as well. The beat goes on.
That’s right, we DO live in a bottle (Earth) and that bottle is surrounded by an incomprehensibly vast vacuum. So according to the laws of Thermodynamics, that Closed System WILL attempt to reach equilibrium whereby all the parts will mix and collide and mix and collide for thousands of years. You can see where I’m going by now. Stop resisting and enjoy the life and physics you are given. Improve the life you are given. Improve it for yourselves and improve it for others too because we are literally all in this bottle together, whether we like it or not. Make the most of it.
In the battle of Thermodynamics vs. Nations, Thermodynamics will ALWAYS win because it follows the immutable Laws of Nature. Nature always finds a way. That’s why a tree can sprout up in the middle of a sidewalk. Life can’t be stopped by a wall, let alone a virtual, imaginary border. But that doesn’t mean we have to lose our identities or the great things our cultures have produced. It means we have to embrace the changes and evolve to incorporate the things we like, together. Why do you think there is a Chipotle or Taco Bell in every town? It’s because we like Mexican food, even in its commercialized form. Food leads the way in cultural mixing and it’s hard to go anywhere that you can’t get pizza, tacos, humus, sushi, Chinese food, etc. because we like all that stuff other folks invented far away. We like LOT’s of things other folks invented and make so we may as well like the folks themselves while we are at it.
So instead of worrying about how you are going to preserve your national identity on a closed planet that sees no real boundaries, shares an atmosphere and oceans, worry about how you are going to adjust to enjoy life and share the bounty and preserve it for future generations. Think of ways to incorporate cultural differences into a greater culture, largly like we’ve already done in the United States. Take the things you like, protect the treasures of History, revere the past achievements but know there are greater achievements to be had, new things to be invented, new ways of looking at things. We can learn from each other and make each other better in the process. Anthrodynamics itself will change as we genetically tinker around and find faster ways to travel, so be prepared for a lot of changes and let’s all work together to make living in the bottle enjoyable—as it was meant to be.
