When I was a freshman in college I had a friend who was taking Psychology 101 whose homework one day was to administer a test, either to himself or someone else, that purported to measure one's religiosity, humanitarianism and patriotism. He thought it would be more interesting to interview me rather than himself, though I could almost have told him what the outcome would be without answering the questions. It came out unusually high in humanitarianism, unusually low in religiosity and right in the middle in patriotism. I was a little surprised that patriotism was so high, since I had seldom given the concept of patriotism much thought, and I knew that I was no chauvinist. Nor was I particularly naive, or no more so than any seventeen-year-old. I intensely disapproved of the United States governments support of tyrants in the name of anti-Communism, and I had already for several years been opposed to our presence in what may still have been Indo-China but which would shortly become Vietnam. I loved the idea of one-world government under which we would all live together in peace, and I was a strong supporter of the United Nations. So, what was I doing with a completely average patriotism score? I still don't know.
This is, more or less, UN Sunday. The anniversary of its founding is October 24, and every year about this time the UU-UN office sends every church a request that a Sunday near that date be dedicated to the celebration of the United Nations. They also send a proposed order of service with hymns and readings and even, I think, a sermon which can be read if one can't think of anything original to say. I never pay any attention to it. If one were to respond to every such request there would be no Sundays left to talk about free religion, theology, what gives life meaning or the traditional holidays of the year. This year, though, I thought I would give it a try, because I have never before been in such internal conflict over questions of nationhood, and where loyalties should lie.
I am often asked where I get my ideas for sermons, and the answer is simply that I preach about what I'm worrying about. That's why I tend to give you all the arguments I've used to myself by which I have come to whatever conclusion I may have reached, not to convince you but to give you the opportunity to show me where you think my thinking may be in error. The only thing as important in our faith as the free pulpit is the free pew, and therefore the dialogue that we can enter to refine each of our beliefs and ideas. However, with these issues, I'm not sure I've even gotten far enough for refinement.
The idea of nation is much younger than human history. There were tribes and there were independent city-states and there were empires, but the idea of independent countries, whose separate existence was accepted and even guaranteed by other nations, was rare. Although the conquest of England by William of Normandy ultimately changed their language and laws and took a lot of pacification, he had a fairly legitimate claim -- or at least one that he could justify -- to its ownership. He also owned a good piece of the real estate that became France, and those claims and counter-claims were the basis for the Hundred Year War. It was not until Joan of Arc forced the concept of France for the French that the idea of an almost sacred separateness of nations began to take hold, lines began to be drawn and defended, and areas of real estate began to become nations. Italy and Germany didn't achieve nationhood until the middle of the nineteenth century, though the areas that they now cover were called by those names. The patria that Virgil wrote that it was sweet and appropriate to die for meant many different things. To him it was Rome, the empire, but what was it to the tribes and towns with Roman garrisons? What was it to a resident of the Persian Empire, the Macedonian Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire, or for that matter the Holy Roman Empire? There were no border guardhouses, no signs in two languages, but there was a sense of place, and most of all a sense of belonging, being a part of some entity worth dying for.
In a sense it almost seems as if the modern world has forced nationhood upon us. Whether that is a good or a bad thing I suspect is up for grabs. The various colonial powers seized areas of real estate, drew lines around them and called them nations when they withdrew, and that's what they tried to become. Sometimes their populations had hereditary hatreds and rivalries and spoke entirely different languages, but they had a national government to try to keep them together and often with membership in the United Nations to clarify their identity as such. Is that a patria for which it is sweet and noble to die? Too often if national governments are weak the response is a chauvinistic tribalism, and the official lines drawn on a world map are meaningless. It happened in what was Yugoslavia; it has happened all over Africa; it is happening now in Iraq. Perhaps the idea of a single nation to which these various tribes are supposed to belong increases the tensions if there isn't some overriding loyalty -- or draconic repression.
Yet I think of the people who lived peacefully side by side in Yugoslavia, worked, socialized, intermarried, who as soon as the government encouraged it began to kill one another without mercy. One of the reasons the Jews in Germany were so passive at the beginning of the holocaust was that they simply could not believe that their neighbors with whom they had lived and worked on cordial terms would turn against them, and that their government would not protect them. They would have died for their country and their country murdered them. It is not as simple as nationalism or tribalism or even one-worldism. The complexities of human relationships and human loyalties would be hard to understand even if they were static. What is it that holds us together or drives us apart with the same emotion of loyalty?
One time a columnist from the New Orleans Times-Picayune came to talk to the church I served there. He was an excellent writer, moderate to liberal on race relations and worked primarily though certainly not exclusively with white people. He told us this story: He and a white photographer were sent to a village in South Africa to do a series for the paper. While the photographer was taking pictures, the father of the family they were interviewing drew the speaker aside and asked him whether you could ever really trust a white man. His answer was that he didn't think so. He knew as well as any of us that white people had risked and even given their lives for the cause of racial justice in this country, and yet he said that he really believed that if it came to an ultimate confrontation all the white people would band together against the blacks. I was horrified that he could believe that, but I look at what has happened in other places among formerly friendly people, and I am not entirely certain that he is wrong. I can even imagine a scenario -- may it be far from us -- in which it could happen.
We have made race the divider in this country of which we are all citizens, and now language is becoming another. Sometimes it has been country of origin, when the Irish or the Italians or the Poles were discriminated against, at least without sanction from the government. Now those differences have been subsumed, but we still have dividers of race and class and language. There is a word, shibboleth, that means anything -- words, values, ideas -- that marks you as belonging to a particular group. In Hebrew it means stream. In the book of Joshua in the Bible it was used as an identifier. You could not necessarily tell a Canaanite from an Israelite by the way they looked, but the Canaanites said sibboleth while the people of Israel pronounced it shibboleth. The wrong pronunciation was a death warrant. Shibboleths can still separate us. Cars parked in a yard leaps to mind as a stereotype and a shibboleth.
I think that when I was very young I envisioned a world order that was based on the values that lifted my heart and translated into patriotism: liberty, equality, and a community of good will. I knew that they did not exist in their ideal form in this country, and for many of us hardly at all, but they were the ideals upon which this country was based, and a platform upon which we could stand for bringing about the necessary changes that would bring them to fruition. I could not imagine that there could be any people who did not, at heart, share those dreams, though they might disagree about the paths to take to get there. The United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights, though in some of its clauses a little over the top, reinforced that belief. After all, all those nations, as they joined together, agreed to that declaration. It was primarily written, I understand, by Eleanor Roosevelt, one of my early heroes. I wish that I could still believe that, but I have been confronted too often with the reality that too many of us cannot think beyond our own safety and our own desires, and our patriotism is too often limited to our own tribe. Even nationalism seems only viable if the nation is limited to one tribe, or at least tribes that share the same shibboleths.
I still admire and support a great deal of the work of the United Nations. UNICEF and the World Health Organization do wonderful work around the world. The World Court and World Bank often do great good. I even mostly support its peacekeeping operations. However, as it is presently constituted I do not think that it would be a healthy route to world government. That it is run by the Security Council, five of whose nations have permanent memberships is patently unjust, but the idea of the General Assembly assuming greater power makes my heart faint within me. Its deliberations seem to me to be tribalism raised to a higher power.
Nevertheless, even though the basic human organization appears to be that of the tribe which must nearly always, it appears, be exclusive and self-protective, I believe that world government will come, if we don't destroy ourselves first. The forces that will make it happen are already in motion. The technology that reduced the world to manageable size, at the same time causing tribes to learn enough about one another to come into conflict, is now erasing national borders. Global corporations and communications are assuming power. The internet is connecting us in ways never before imagined. I suspect that even our language of which we are so protective -- and I more than most because of my love affair with words -- will become homogenized into a worldwide tongue. What will happen to our poetry then? Of course I know; much of it will be translated into the new language, where people who know the old tongues will say that its true flavor cannot be translated, and much of it will die.
All this, I believe, is inevitable, but corporations are not noted for their commitment to human rights or even human survival in regard to the environment, and there is no moral standard for the internet. We need, I suspect, to hold on to our flawed nations for a while longer, promoting cooperation between tribes, and hold on to our deeply flawed United Nations for the good work it does world wide, for the human rights it at least says it believes in, and the cooperation between nations that it at least gives an arena for.
I do not know that it would ever be sweet to die for one's country, but I am sure that it would be appropriate to be willing to die for the values that it at least says that it espouses. It is surely the height of patriotism to try to make it better, to make it live up to its ideals in the very face of fear and greed. It would be even better to be able to say that we can feel that for the whole world, that patria means not just this piece of land, this tribe, this country, but the whole world, a world of beauty, love and justice, where a love of truth and a commitment to freedom are among its highest ideals. Then one might truly say with Virgil, "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."