One of the most profound issues of contemporary society that has not been well-examined is the contemporary passion for endonyms. People are obsessed with the names that they call themselves, and disinclined to see any legitimacy or validity or use in the names that they are called by other people. This particular tendency is a dangerous one, and the fact that it is largely unexamined despite its drastically negative effects on truth and communication is evidence of a profound problem at the heart of what it means to be a contemporary, and in particular about the strangely longstanding problems that have been at root of what is often celebrated as a facet of post-modernism, but which is itself a throwback to pre-modern primitivism in a particularly vengeful and hostile manner, a reminder of the way that civilization and community are threatened by the solipsism inherent in wanting to be called by our own names for ourselves, and being unwilling to accept the insight and wisdom of those who are outside of ourselves.

One of the characteristics of understanding premodern societies is their relentless tendency to give themselves endonyms that mean “true human” and to give other peoples exonyms that point to something ridiculous or shameful in the identity of outsiders. This suggests that, fundamentally, there is injustice in the human heart at the deepest level. This injustice can be noted by a look at the endonyms referred to by the various Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe. One is staggered by the similarities of Russian, Russyn, and Belorussian, on the one hand, as well as by Serb and Sorb, Slovene and Slovak, and the like. Strangely, the name that the Croats chose for themselves is a reference to a river in Iran, but no one has figured out how it was that the Slavic peoples are to be connected to the Iranians, even though Balto-Slavic and Indo-Aryan are two notable branches of the larger Indo-European language family. When people think of Slavs, though, the obvious connection is to the slave trade, given that our word for slaves comes from the ubiquity of slaves sold from among these peoples in the cosmopolitan slave markets of cities like Constantinople and Baghdad. While our contemporary generation sees slavery as primarily an injustice against the black peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa, the word slave itself is a historical reminder of an endonym relating to genuine humanity being turned into a very negation of humanity on viewing human beings as movable chattel property. The irony is deeply poignant.

The use of endonyms as a way of asserting our own true and genuine humanity while using exonyms to assault the humanity of others suggests that the struggle for justice is far deeper than most people, especially contemporaries, acknowledge. Justice is treating others as they deserve, but if we believe we are the only genuine people and that everyone else is not, what we think others deserve will be fundamentally with at odds as to their own fierce attachment to their own view that they are true humans and that we are not. Neither we nor others will see both ourselves and others as genuine humans unless they can judge themselves and others as sharing a kindred nature that goes outside of the ingroups that human beings have been associated with from time immemorial. Ultimately, in order for humanity to no longer be a battle between us and them, there has to be some sort of cultural amalgamation by which they become us, or in which we become someone else through various linguistic and/or cultural and/or religious ways. 

This process has generally been viewed as a negative one from those who celebrate the diversity of humanity. Yet the battle between those who desire to acculturate minorities in order to create a unitary state and restive minority peoples who have just as resolutely sought their autonomy or even their independence from such oppressive central domination has long been a key aspect in the internal conflicts inherent in many nations. Classical nation-states like France and Spain, for example, have long hidden the diversity that is within them. Even nations that are at least fundamentally based on ethnic origins, like Somalia, have often fallen apart spectacularly because of an inability to overcome regional and clan-based antagonisms which have alienated some regions and some clans because they have not shared in power to a sufficient degree for them to accept the legitimacy of a larger state, and because a substantial part of their people remains under the rule of neighboring Ethiopia, thus creating a permanent tension between the fragmented reality of the Somali state and its irredentist aims to include all areas inhabited by Somalians, including perhaps Minneapolis and other communities in Minnesota.

How are we to simultaneously celebrate unity and diversity? The desire to unify people leads, at its worst, to a sense of uniformity where any deviance from the accepted orthodoxy and orthopraxy of those in power is viewed as reason to exile, jail, or exterminate such traitors. Many people in the contemporary age, rightly seeing themselves as deviant and hence in danger from such treatment at the hands of others (though less aware of their own equally misguided uniformity of political identity, and its harm when enforced by coercive central authority), have celebrated the minority, not realizing that diversity is often a prelude to shattering civil war and balkanization, by which people seek to create turf wherein their own kind is in a state of permanent and genocidal hostility against people who outsiders do not seem to see as being all that different. This is, famously, how we have decades-long struggles over the nomenclature of the Republic of Northern Macedonia (which itself is considered to be Bulgarian by San Stefano maximalists), or how we get such different “languages” as Croat, Bosniak, Serbian, and Montenegrin, each of them the foundation of a nationalism that has been frequently and recently pitted against all others in a fight for supremacy and survival. Both those who desire unity and those who desire diversity are seen by the other as being a threat to the well-being and human dignity and even the survival of those who oppose, and whether we support the maintenance and celebration of regional autonomy depends in large part on how confident we are (or not) in being part of a governing majority or not. When deep injustice and imperatives of survival and dominance are at the core of an issue, it is easy to see how things can get very dangerous, very quickly. Perhaps we do not wish to talk about the subject too closely is because we recognize its danger, and wish to avoid the pitfalls of provoking people too close to the heart of who they think they are, but who we cannot call them.