Anderson begins this lecture by asking the question – where does the Goodness of the Nation come from? He lays the ground work for this question by outlining the largely unexplained emotional power of nationalism and the Nation, which draws people into an imagined community despite differences along lines of race, class and gender and despite the fact that nations “have plenty of black pages in their history”.
Anderson goes on to identify three sites that he believes are worthy of inspection when it comes to understanding the Goodness of Nations.
The first of these sites is the Future, or as Anderson likes to calls it the Future Perfect. He points out that nationalism is the first form of political organisation to have its sights firmly set on the future as an ideal, utopian space. Following a famous lecture given by Max Weber to the German public of 110 years ago, Anderson goes on to identify how the future imposes obligations on the living citizens of the Nation through the uncounted millions of people yet to be born into the body of the Nation. It is for the unborn (the future) that we have obligations in the present to ensure that we leave behind a ‘good’ legacy for generations to come.
The second source of the goodness of the Nation according to Anderson is the body of the dead. Anderson points to the way in which the Nation rummages through the archive in order to extract worthy ancestors that will come to represent the Nation’s heroes. He identifies national monuments and war memorials as largely anonymous spaces that exclude any specific details about those who died in the service of the Nation. To die for the Nation, says Anderson, is to have your moral slate wiped clean.
The third source of the Nations goodness identified by Anderson is in the body of the living, specifically in the collective of the Nations children who he views as the avant-garde of the unborn. Children, says Anderson, are largely excluded from the body politic and are only considered adults once they obtain citizenship at the age of 18, 19, 20 or 21. This phenomenon ensures that the Nation’s children are exempt from political blame. By not allowing the children to vote, the Nation protects them from what mostly amounts to the moral squalor of politics.
Finally, Anderson turns to the Adult citizenry in an attempt to identify other sources of the Nation’s Goodness. He draws the chapter to a close on a largely ambiguous point, neither dismissive nor obviously supportive of this Goodness, implying that as fraternal members of a common body our existence and our survival, whether we like it or not, depends upon the continued survival of the Nation.
