From Nationalism to Globalism

"Maybe nationalism is not the answer any more . . . but one world, beyond the threat of challenge of national interest."

-Dana McLean Greeley

That’s right: our government--the government of the United States of America--is refusing to denounce torture.

Senator McCain, who is a Republican, knows about torture first hand: he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for seven years.

Patrick Henry, one of the framers of the United States constitution, once said that torture had been left behind in the Old World for good cause, and if permitted here we would be "lost and undone."

The current Administration’s disregard for the rule of international law is part and parcel of a general trend of disengagement or distance with international bodies and accords such as the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, the United Nations, and Kyoto Protocol.

It is also a symptom, I believe, of an increased sense of what theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called "a deep layer of messianic consciousness in the mind of America." This is the idea that America is specially blessed by God and therefore must be innocent and infallible. As Arthur Schlesinger, JR, has written, "9/11 has revived the myth of our national innocence." This revival of American Exceptionalism, as it is sometimes called, has led to the current unilateral, go-it-alone attitude of our government, best exemplified in the military doctrine of "pre-emption" and in the possibly misguided war in Iraq. Americans, so says the myth, can do no wrong.

Niebuhr, a great 20th century American Protestant theologian whose voice has been almost entirely drowned out in recent years by the cacophony of conservative evangelical Christianity, was a great dis-believer in American Exceptionalism and, as Schlesinger writes in a recent reappraisal of Niebuhr ["Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr"], "a critic of national innocence, which he regarded as a delusion. After all," he continues,

whites coming to these shores were reared in the Calvinist doctrine of sinful humanity, and they killed red men, enslaved black men and later on imported yellow men for peon labor--not much of a background for national innocence. ‘Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem,’ Niebuhr wrote, ‘are insufferable in their human contacts.’

Nationalism and the myth of American Exceptionalism has reasserted itself big time in the four years since September 11, 2001, as exemplified in the proliferation of American flags and "God Bless America" bumper stickers. The unstated and uncritical subtext, I’m afraid, is one we became familiar with during the Vietnam War: "my country right or wrong."

Reinhold Niebuhr, whose life spanned the years from 1892 to 1971, lived and wrote through two world wars and a Cold War. He had plenty of opportunity to observe human behavior at its worst. He just couldn’t believe that we Americans are as good as we think we are. In his books, as Schlesinger writes,

. . . Niebuhr emphasized the mixed and ambivalent character of human nature--creative impulses matched by destructive impulses, regard for others overruled by excessive self-regard, the will to power, the individ- ual under constant temptation to play God to history. This is what was known in the ancient vocabulary of Christianity as the doctrine of original sin. Niebuhr summed up his political argument in a single powerful sentence: ‘Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination for injustice makes democracy necessary.’

Has anyone read the prophets lately? These were folks who attacked the myths of national innocence of their day, who railed against greed and excessive wealth and power, against injustice toward the poor and dispossessed, against idolatry and hypocrisy.

Niebuhr, too, was a prophet. He spoke out against the kind of absolutism, religious and political, which currently spews from the pulpits of America. Against it, Schlesinger writes, Niebuhr insisted on what he called the " ‘relativity of all human perspectives,’ as well as on the sinfulness of those who claimed divine sanction for their opinions.

He declared himself ‘in broad agreement with the relativist position in the matter of freedom, as upon every other social and political right or principle.’ In pointing out the dangers of what Justice Robert H. Jackson called ‘compulsory godliness,’ Niebuhr argued that ‘religion is so fre- quently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.’ Religion, he warned, could be a source of error as well as wisdom and light. Its role should be to inculcate, not a sense of in- fallibility, but a sense of humility. Indeed, he said, ‘the worst corruption is a corrupt religion.’

If we want evidence of the disastrous consequences of unfettered nationalism, we need look no further back than the 1991-1995 Bosnian war in the former Yugoslavia, which cost over 200,000 lives and saw the worst war crimes committed since World War II. Fueled by myths of national innocence, humiliation, and pride promulgated by power hungry despots, people who had lived in relative harmony for forty-five years under a slogan of "unity and brotherhood" took to killing and torturing and raping each other for over three years.

Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic has written of this recent disaster that

The urge of overcome national divisions was revealed in a census held in 1981 in which some 1.2 million people declared themselves to be ‘Yugoslavs.’ This group was the sixth largest ‘nation’ in Yugoslavia at that time and consisted mostly of people of the postwar generation, many of them urban professionals and from mixed marriages. This might have been the beginning of a Yugoslav melting pot, except that it did not work. We did not all become Yugoslavs.

In my travels to Eastern Europe over the last five years, I have had an opportunity to observe first hand the corrosive effects of chauvinistic nationalism both in its historical consequences and in its present effects. No one is innocent when it comes to the manipulation of national mythology. One has to believe that the exploitation of national, ethnic, and racial characteristics is not now and never has been a realistic solution to our growing problems as a human race on our shrinking planet. This becomes truer as the world’s population continues to grow and as international borders become more and more permeable.

Worst of all is to see God invoked as what Niebuhr called "the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire."

There are those who say that the only hope for our world is in the sudden occurrence of some external threat to our entire globe. It is sad, indeed, that we human beings may need such a crisis in order to finally unite. Meanwhile, we have experienced in recent months a perhaps unprecedented number of natural and manmade disasters, with tremendous loss of life: earthquakes and tsunamis, hurricanes and floods, famines and wars. Will the universal threat posed by worldwide environmental degradation and global warming finally be the catalyst which brings us together? Or will it take a recognition of the universal threat posed by religious fanaticism and fundamentalism? It would be sad if it were so.

Call me naive, but I believe that the only hope for our planet is that we will see a decline in the spirit of nationalism and a rise in the spirit of globalism. As Dana McLean Greeley, a former President of the Unitarian Universalist Association once wrote, "Maybe nationalism is not the answer any more either, but one world, beyond threat or challenge of national interest." I share his dream of one world, though it is much more my hope than my certainty.

Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that to be effective in the world, Americans would need "a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us" and "a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy’s demonry and our vanities."

In the face of the towering arrogance and lack of humility emanating from the seats of power and the lips of religious fanatics, let us recommit ourselves to our Unitarian Universalist sixth principle, the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all. Let us hold our leaders accountable to internationally recognized standards of conduct such as the restriction on the use of torture. Let us wake up, finally, to the reality that we are finally no better and no worse than anyone else. We may be luckier, but we are certainly not more innocent. God does not bless us more than anyone else. The path to Exceptionalism leads through our actions here on earth, nor through some imagined divine sanction or manifest destiny.

The poet Mary Oliver has written, "I walk in the world to love it." Let this be our purpose, too, on this day and in the days still to come. The world desperately needs our love. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

Readings: Amos 6: 1-8, Micah 4: 1-4, from Vaclav Havel:

Our world, humanity, and our civilization find themselves at perhaps the most important crossroads of their history now. We have a greater chance than ever before in recent times to understand our situation and the ambivalence of the direction we are headed in, and to decide in favor of the way of reason, peace, and justice, not for the way that leads to our own destruction.

I am saying only this: to set out on the path of reason, peace, and justice means a lot of hard work, self-denial, patience, knowledge, a calm overview, a willingess to risk misunderstanding. At the same time it means that everyone ought to be able to judge his or her own capacity and act accordingly, expecting one’s strength will grow with the new tasks one sets oneself or that it will run out.

In other words there is no more relying on fairy tales and fairy tale heroes. There is no more relying on the accidents of history that lift poets onto places where empires and military alliances are brought down. The warning voices of poets must be carefully listened to and taken very seriously, perhaps even more seriously than the voices of bankers or stock brokers. But at the same time, we cannot expect that the world--in the hands of poets--will suddenly be transformed into a poem.