We're growing more and more interconnected on our little planet; supposedly we are increasingly aware of the number of other people that make up humanity. Their disasters and diseases are on our television, their culture pops up in our fashion or video games, their opinions appear across the internet, their money and debt intermingles with our own like great tides washing back and forth across the surface of the Earth, and their fates, we learn; their fates are tied to ours.
Every action that we take on this little planet has a significant ripple effect, be it conservation of resources, or a donation to a world food program, or becoming a politician who one day decides whether we go to war... or not. Little things; the food we buy, the people we talk to, the way we enrich our own lives with knowledge-- these things matter to the little girl in Kyrgyzstan or Brunei or Lesotho more than she'll ever know; and her actions matter to you too.
And yet in our increasingly connected world, our national boundaries seem more striking than ever, standing out on maps and cutting us all to pieces. The stronger these boundaries, the more we seem to forget that they are no more than human creations; the real Earth has no lines, but many wrinkles. Nation lines are no different in principle than the lines connecting constellations. How can we seem to forget that all of us pursue the same things, to eat, breathe, strive, seek happiness; survive. When I look up at the sky, I see stars. The false divisions of nationality make me sick. We're all doing what we think is best; none of us is evil, and we're all a little confused. And we're all trying to make the best of it, whatever it is, while we have it, because we're all at least a little afraid of death, too. Our needs don't need to come at the expense of other people's needs, and most of the time they don't. Most of the time we've found a way to live in relative harmony, despite divisions of religion, race, and class. And most of us seem to think that's the best way to do it.
Our nation's 'ideology' may be diametrically opposed to another nation's 'ideology', but the very idea of a nation is the figment. China and Russia have the same diversity of views that the United States has-- we may grow up with different traditions, but we as people control how we apply those traditions to our lives. The people of any given country are never the enemy of another people of another given country. You think most people have the time to hate people they don't even know?
But just as most of us can't help but recognize "Orion's Belt", the nation state is a part of our social consciousness, and thus it is a part of our world. We are all a part of a nation; a group of people, whether or not we like it.
And still nation states allow us to group people into ideologies that often don't even represent those people, and nationalism makes us think that our nation's survival depends on defining itself against every other nation, and dominating the others if possible
So it seems as though the nation state seems to be quickly outgrowing its usefulness as a grouping mechanism of humanity. First we had hunter-gatherer groups; clans and tribes. Then we had agricultural societies and city-states loosely unified by Empires and Monarchs. And now we have the nation state. As the world shrinks, perhaps we need a new, larger imagined grouping mechanism that helps us view ourselves as the "planet collective" alongside the rest of the organisms of the Earth...
I'd like you to take a second and watch this video. It is the reason for this blog post. It is a symptom of the reason why people seem to forget everyone's common humanity. Seriously, watch it. Why doesn't this kind of hyper-nationalist sentiment terrify all of us who desire peace and prosperity on this world?
The part I mind the most is at the end. When the entire class laughs at the United States. The suggestion of course is that the Chinese people as a whole hate the US or would mock the US. Not the Chinese government, but the everyday students in China. You, as a US citizen are mocked by people you don't even know and these people are trying to 'own' you.
If people of all nations can't get past this kind of petty divisiveness that ignores our common humanity and our common interests as humans, we will never be able to live in peace with one another. Because we will forever live in fear of differences that, for the most part do not exist. Because those differences are embodied by the ideals of the nation state. Which also does not exist. ...But individual people DO exist. We never go to war with a nation, we go to war with a nation's people. We never trade with a nation, we trade with a nation's people. Barack Obama may have a nice 'title', the weight of his 'office', and the strength of 'representation', but when he shakes hands with Indonesian President Yudhoyono, it is person to person, human to human.
No one is, or must be, opposed to anyone, simply by what nation in which they happen to have been born. We all have the same struggles, and we must cooperate as a world to stand up to them together.
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Actually, they laugh because the US now "works for us." More than anything, that is what reveals the orientation of the sponsoring organization, Citizens Against Government Waste. It is a plutocratic orientation, one that sees working for someone else as humiliation. Within that orientation, the goal of globalism is to make sure that other countries work for you -- har har har. It's particularly important that those Others look differently than you do, so that you can make them sub-human.
ReplyDeleteI'm not certain about a "planet collective." There is part of me that thinks the unit of identification needs to go back to being smaller again -- tribes. Daniel Quinn's "Beyond Civilization" seems interesting, as is "Human Scale" by Kirkpatrick Sale.