Tag Archives: ethnicity

I graduated from Northern Valley Regional High School at Old Tappan, or NVRHS at OT, which always reminds me of Professor Peter Schickele’s USND at H — University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. (I’ve been to Hoople. There is no university there. There are cows. But then, there was no valley I ever noticed in Old Tappan.)

In northern New Jersey, our school’s football team played our arch-rival, Hawthorne, and before the big game each year, there would be a pep rally, in which we were inculcated with “school spirit,” and induced to yell, “We’re Number One!” over and over, despite the fact that every fall, Hawthorne trounced us badly. Their players always seemed twice the size of ours and looked more like a farm team for the Chicago Bears.

Yet, we were “the best high school in New Jersey,” a claim that was patently untrue. (We were a perfectly good school; I’m not complaining. But the other schools were also fine.) All over the country (probably the world) schools are making the claim that they are the best and we should all feel proud of our, what? Accomplishments? We were pimply faced kids, let’s face it. I never did understand the school spirit thing.

Why should we claim that our group is better than your group. And this goes for nations, religions and ethnicities as well. I never understood nationalism, the metastasized big brother of school spirit. What evidence do you have that America is the greatest nation in the world? “America is Number One!” Number One in what? School shootings?

My point isn’t that the United States is the root of all misery in the world. My country has done many praiseworthy things in the past 250 years. But so have other countries. I have seen no evidence that we are any better or worse — that Americans are any different at all — from other peoples. Yes, there are cultural differences. Germans, Chinese, French, Paruvians all have national cultural tendencies. But under it all, we have the same genetic construction.

Despite that, nations war, and worse, ethnic groups choose to idealize themselves and demonize their neighbors. And just to make it all just that much sillier, usually these contending ethnicities are almost identical. Ukrainians battle with ethnic Russians. Armenians with Azerbaijanis. Israelis with Palestinians. Croats and Serbs. If one writes the language in Roman letters and the other in Cyrillic, they can claim their languages are totally different, even if they can talk to each other over the phone with no problem.

When I say we are genetically the same, I suppose that also entails the atavistic gene that makes us tribal. This may have been helpful when humans traveled across the landscape in extended family groups and needed to protect themselves from other groups also seeking the limited resources. But now that we have nuclear bombs, this tendency threatens to be fatal. For the whole species.

You can’t really have an “America first” without also having a “screw you” attitude to the rest of the planet. And if we do that, where will we get our bananas and computer chips?

If we wish to think that the United States is better than everywhere else in the world, then why are Danes happier than we are? Why are Cubans healthier? Why are the Swiss better educated? In the most recent rankings, the U.S. is listed as 22 out of 178 countries in economic freedom. Educationally, we rank number 40 in math education, 25 in science and 24 in reading. We are 46th in maternal mortality and 42nd in life expectancy. In standard of living, we are only 13th. In political corruption we ranked 23 out of 198 countries, and that was before the Trump administration. We are only 45th in press freedom. And 21st out of 128 for the rule of law.

Another place we are not No. 1: Many Americans think we pay more in taxes than anyone else, but actually we pay less than any other developed nation, except Mexico — and that counts Mexico as a developed nation.

Oh, we have a few titles: We are Number One in child deaths by firearm. And we have the biggest military budget, spending more than the next 10 countries combined.

Other firsts: The U.S. incarceration rate is 716 per 100,000 population, which is the world’s highest. Even 36 of our states have higher incarceration rates than any country in the world. We’re No. 1 in gun ownership both overall and per capita. We watch more TV than any other nation.

And yes, we are No. 1 in corona virus infections.

Further, more Americans think the U.S. is the greatest country in the world than citizens of any other nation. We’re even No. 1 in smug self-satisfaction.

This is all not an attempt to denigrate my home country. After all, we’re a long way from the bottom of most of these lists. But it is to counsel modesty. It is to say we’re not exceptional; we have good points and bad points. Yes, we had slavery and we had a national plan of ethnic cleansing toward Native Americans, but we also had the Marshall Plan, and a long history of accepting immigrants and refugees (this last has always been in danger from the “America Firsters.” Trumpism is not all that new; we had “Know-Nothings” in the 19th Century.)

As has been pointed out, those who believe America is the best country in the world probably haven’t been anywhere else.

And my main point isn’t to make the case for or against the U.S., but rather to decry the universal tendency for human beings to think what they have, what they do, and what they believe, is better than anyone else has, does or believes, and further, is willing to kill them over it.

We have had what has been called the longest stretch of world peace in the earth’s history, from the end of World War II until now. But that is true only if you don’t count the myriad regional conflicts and minor wars that have been constant. Wikipedia lists more than 75 armed conflicts since 1945 (counting them is a bit inexact — which are separate and which are just phases of continuing conflict). And even this moment, there are wars in some 20 countries, the major ones in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Turkey, Somalia, and Libya, and all through central and northern Africa.

We are Israelis and Palestinians; Sunnis and Shias; Ukrainians and Russians; Azerbaijanis and Armenians; Armenians and Turks; Muslim Kashmiris and Hindu Kashmiris; Tamil and Sinhalese; Tutsis and Hutus; Burmese and Rohingya; Hatfields and McCoys; Republicans and Democrats. Us and Them.

I get it: We are more comfortable around people with the same values and habits. And we may be put off by the folkways of others. We don’t eat a lot of snails in the U.S. But is that a reason to condemn those who enjoy a bit of the old escargot? We worship different gods (or the same by a different name), but that shouldn’t be an excuse for killing them. One religion crosses themselves with three fingers, another with two. Get the scimitar! (My favorite was the Albigensian Crusade, where the besieging general was asked how to tell the heretics from the believers, said, “Kill them all and let God sort them out.”)

I am put in mind of the plea of Oliver Cromwell to the Church of Scotland (“England’s Canada”), “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”

A little humility goes a long way to helping us recognize our commonality. Our essential humanness. But humility is in short supply.

“Knowing this and that better cannot be had, know then why old men should be mad.” Or as my late wife used to say — frequently — “We are all just dumb monkeys.”

Lines in the windblown sand

October 26, 2016

Uncategorized

Leave a comment

Over several years in the 1870s, composer Bedrich Smetana wrote a series of six tone poems for orchestra that he titled Ma Vlast, or “My Country.” Although the patriotism explicit in Smetana’s music is genuine, the fact is Smetana was a citizen of the Habsburg Empire and grew up speaking German. His most popular piece of music is “Vlatva,” a glorification of the river that runs through what is now the Czech Republic, but is almost universally known by its German name, “Die Moldau.”

It is one of the stranger and unremarked oddnesses of history that most of those Nationalist composers of the 19th century had no nation to call home. Dvorak had no Czechoslovakia, Liszt had no Hungary, Edvard Grieg’s Norway was ruled by a Swedish king, and despite all the mazurkas and polonaises that Chopin wrote, there was no Poland on the face of the earth. Even the Germany extolled in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger” was only a gleam in the eye of Otto von Bismarck.

In truth, they were not so much “nationalist” composers as composers of ethnic awareness. Which brings up an important point. What we mean by a “nation” is a fairly recent concoction, and although we tend nowadays to assume that a map divided into colors bounded by border lines is a natural and inevitable reality, history tells us otherwise.

We hear politicians and demagogues harangue us about national sovereignty and the threat of immigrants diluting our national character, and we tend to regard our country — regardless of whether it is the United States, Germany, China or Iraq — as a fixed and permanent “thing” consecrated by history and natural law. But a closer look tells us otherwise. Our idea of a nation-state is rather new in history, and may have been merely a temporary thing. To take it as unchanging and unchangeable is a serious miscalculation.

Going back before reliable history, kingdoms were just areas successfully defended by military leaders who demanded taxes in a kind of protection racket. No one spent much fret over what languages the subjugated people spoke, or what their ethnic descent might be.

Through the Middle Ages, when we speak of Henry V at Agincourt what we are talking about is real estate. Henry ruled land, not people. He owned most of the British Isle and a good chunk of the Continent. The people living on his land owed him taxes and fealty — meaning a term in the army when needed. There was no legal construct known as England or France or Germany, but feudal cross-relations and family ties securing deeds of title to chunks of real estate. The idea of a nation as we know it didn’t exist.

It wasn’t until 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia that the concept of the nation-state emerged, and we developed a sense that France exists whether or not a Bourbon sat on the throne, and that national borders were somehow permanentized — although, of course, they weren’t. Wars — now between nations instead of between kings — kept those boundary lines in flux.

Later ideas gave us different concept of nationhood, often in conflict with the Westphalian ideal. Ethnicity gave many people a different sense of identity, even though ethnicity itself is a slippery thing, and can swell and shrink through time, including and excluding various groups and subgroups. Are you European? Are you Polish? Are you a Slav or a German?

Ethnicity sometimes falters in face of language identity. We talk of “Russian speakers” in Ukraine. Are they Ukrainian or Russian? Certainly they are Slavs. Where do we draw the line?

The historical result of all these shifting ambiguities can be seen in the unstable borders seen on maps. Let’s take Poland as an example. If we think of the country as it exists currently, stuck between Germany and Ukraine, we might assume this was somehow the true and ultimately proper place for Poland. But the country has rolled around the map of Europe like a bead of mercury on a plate. At times it reached the Black Sea, at times it vanished from the face of the earth. You can see this in a clever You Tube video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66y49BnxLfQ

Poland pre-war outlined in blue; postwar outlined in red.

At times Poland expanded, at times, joined with the kingdom of Lithuania, after it was split into pieces and annexed by Prussia, Russia and Austria in 1795 it ceased to exist as a nation, until it was reconstituted in 1918 at the end of the First World War. It was invaded in 1939 by both Germany and the Soviet Union and essentially disappeared again. After World War II, because Stalin refused to give back his half, the entire country lifted up its skirts and moved some 200 miles to the west, where it set itself down again and became the Poland we have now — although that is no guarantee that it won’t move again sometime in the future. The eastern half of Poland became part of the Soviet Union until it split off and became Ukraine, while the eastern third of Germany, having lost the war, turned into the western half of Poland and millions of German-speaking inhabitants were politely asked to relocate in East Germany — which later reunited with West Germany to be the Germany we have today.

You might consider Yugoslavia, which is now several different sovereign nations, or the “sovereignty” of Czechoslovakia, which finally gave Smetana and Dvorak their own nation, only to dissolve into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

These constantly unsteady borders should not be seen as anomalies, but rather the norm. You can find another entertaining video displaying the bubbling ferment of national border from roughly AD 1100 to now at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iha3OS8ShYs

(It should be noted that the dates in the animation are not terribly accurate, and should be taken as a general indication of the era demonstrated by the time-lapse maps rather than a precise year-by-year definition.)

We have talked primarily about Europe, but the same sense of unstable borders and the comings and goings of nations can be seen worldwide. Another video worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6Wu0Q7x5D0

So when some knucklehead politician tells you that the U.S. should defend its “natural” borders, consider the phantom nature of nationhood and its outlines. The United States itself began as a group of 13 separate nation-states joining together for the common good and soon spread outward and westward, eating up other nations, evicting other peoples and other national authorities, stealing most of northern Mexico and reconstituting that nation’s “natural” borders.

All across the world, there are people corralled inside those lines screaming to get out: Basques and Catalans in Spain, Kurds in Iraq and Turkey, Chechens in the Russian Federation, Russians in Ukraine, Scots from Great Britain, Quebecois from Canada, Tamils in Sri Lanka, the Flemish and Walloons in Belgium, Uighurs in China. Driving around southern France and the Camargue, you will come across angry graffiti demanding Occitan separatism

Nationhood is a dynamic; it is not permanent. Russia is altering the map around the Black Sea and globalization is destabilizing the Westphalian arrangement. Corporations are now transnational, the European Union is subverting ancient sovereignties (with considerable pushback from rising nationalisms) and the post-World War I national borders in the Middle East seem ever more tenuous and artificial. Can the Kurds create their own ethnic state? Can Shia and Sunni ever coexist in a multi-sectarian state?

Instead of assuming that the world cannot change and the Rand-McNally maps we grew up with are the way things should be from now into posterity, we should recognize nations as transient entities momentarily agreed to by whoever is powerful enough to maintain a stalemate.

Stuart on patriotism

April 24, 2015

Uncategorized

1 Comment

“Pro patria mori,” said Stuart.

“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. I’m not sure I ever understood that. I remember traveling through France and in every town, usually near the oldest church, there would be a monument with the names of those who died in the First World War, and always the phrase, ‘pour la gloire de la patrie.’ And I always wondered what those named on the stone would now think of that phrase. Was the gloire de la patrie worth the pain and loss? The lives truncated, the families not earned, the whole sacrifice really just a preparation for the next guerre, the next round of destruction. Stultum est pro patria mori.”

“Is it the war you despise?” I asked, “or is it the patriotism?”

“No question, the patriotism. War will always be with us; I have little hope for humankind’s redemption. I can see no way ending the habit of the strong using brute force to coerce the weaker. But patriotism is something I cannot fathom.”

“Well, we both came of age during the Vietnam war, and I think that must color what we feel, both the anti-war and anti-patriotism. I certainly felt jerked around during those years by the constant appeal to a cheap patriotism…”

“Yes, ‘Get a haircut’ was the summum bonum of love for country…”

“You’re feeling very Latin this morning.”

“Perhaps because the Romans seem to have invented the concept. Not so much love of country, but rather a jingoistic sense of ‘Hooray for our side,’ that ‘We’re Number One.’ That we should root for the nation simply because we were born here, or decided to move here. ‘My country right or wrong.’ That always seemed to be a thoughtless idea.”

“An idea rather more of team spirit, like in high school, rather than love of country.”

“Exactly. That reminds me of how I felt when we were required to attend those pep rallies. Why am I supposed to believe my school is better than the other guy’s, or that I owe some sort of allegiance to my school rather than the school in the next town over, which was basically the identical thing, with the identical pep rally but for their team. Didn’t add up.

“There has to be a reason to assent to this tribalism, and I can seldom see it. One nation, like one high school, can be better at some things and less good at others. But school spirit or rabid patriotism demands you believe your side is always better, always right, always worthy.

“So, when I hear politicians say, ‘You don’t want to be like France, do you?’ I say, well, yes, I would love it if we were more like France. Or Norway, or a dozen other places where the standard of living is higher than in the U.S., with better health care, safer streets and happier populations. Why am I supposed to believe that the U.S. is the greatest country on earth, when we rank so low in so many categories. Pretty much the only place we are Number One is in having the biggest military.”

“I see, you hate America.” I was teasing, of course.

“No, but I see a big difference between patriotism and love of country. They are not the same thing.

“I can easily see loving the place you were born; not because you were born there, but because it is the landscape and people you know, that you grew up with. You know the very weeds beside the road. It doesn’t mean you believe it is necessarily better than anyplace else, but because you simply love it.”

“The way you can argue with your spouse, or glance at pretty young women, but it in no way changes the fact you love your wife.”

“Yes, very much like marriage. You don’t have to believe your wife can write better than Virginia Woolf, or play piano better than Valentina Lisitsa or conduct foreign affairs better than Madeleine Albright. You don’t have to believe your wife has no flaws. You may, in fact, love her because of her flaws. It is the same with your love of country.”

“Lately, the right-wing has been upping the rhetoric on so-called American exceptionalism. They want to change the way history is taught in schools, emphasizing the special mission they see for America in the world. They complain that President Obama doesn’t love America enough. It all sounds so high-school, so puerile. After all, every country believes in its own exceptionalism. Is there any nation with more faith in its specialness than France? And Putin’s whole shtick in Russia is reasserting its special place in history. It’s like the Special Olympics: We’re all exceptional. China has its thousands of years history, Tanzania has its cradle of humanity, Great Britain has its never-setting sun, Greece — little Greece, wallowing in economic quicksand — is the birthplace of democracy. American exceptionalism is hardly exceptional.

“And these yahoo Republicans complain if we mention slavery, or the Indian wars or Jim Crow. If you love your country, it has to be warts and all; it cannot be a whitewash job.”

“Ah, but it winds up that way, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, if your love of country is summed up by flag waving.”

“But, isn’t there a problem with that formulation …”

“Probably many…”

“…in that you can love and have that kind of familiarity with a chunk of land and people — say, northern New Jersey, where I was born — but that Iowa or Utah remain as foreign as Northumberland or Brittany? In other words, what is the geographical extent of this love of country?”

“Robert E. Lee talked about his love of country. It led him to general an army in revolt against the Union; his love extended to Virginia. He didn’t even have much feeling for Alabama or Texas. His patriotism was reserved for his home state. And I expect it was focused primarily in the northern part of the state. One wonders what he would have made of Wise or Norfolk. It isn’t imbecilic “Hooray for our side,” but a deep reverence for the land. But it is the land whose dirt you know between your knuckles when you squeeze it in spring to decide if it’s time to plant.”

“So, you are saying love of country and patriotism are two separate impulses.”

“Of course. And by extension, we have to remember that what we call a country, a nation, is a fairly recent invention. Treaty of Westphalia and all that. Before that, nationhood was defined primarily by ethnicity, unless it was co-opted by conquest and you had to pay your taxes to a foreign invader. Borders were whatever you could defend and were constantly shifting.”

“There was a neat internet animation that showed the shifting borders of Europe from Medieval times to the present; looked like squirming worms on the map. Whole countries appeared, disappeared and reappeared in another location. Poland, especially rolls around the map like mercury on a dinnerplate.”

“And so, your patriotism is a fugitive thing, dependent on the vagaries of time. But this only brings up another dragon to slay. The modern notion of nationhood is defined by lines on the world map: Here is France, here is Indonesia. But all across the world, there are people corralled inside those lines screaming to get out: Basques and Catalans in Spain, Kurds in Iraq and Turkey, Chechens in the Russian Federation, Russians in Ukraine, Scots from Great Britain, Quebecois from Canada, Tamils in Sri Lanka, the Flemish and Walloons in Belgium, Uighurs in China …”

“Driving around southern France and the Camargue, I kept coming across angry graffiti demanding Occitan separatism.”

“… It is everywhere, it seems. Northern California wants to split from Southern California. So, in all this, where does your patriotic duty lie? Are you a Jerseyite, a Northerner, and Easterner, a Tri-Stater, a Yankee, an American, and English speaker, a Norwegian-descent immigrant, a world citizen, what?”

“You can be all those things, can’t you? Can’t you like Jersey pizza and Chicago pizza, too?”

“And what happens when one allegiance conflicts with another? That is certainly what many Southerners faced in 1861. Heck, many still face it. How many times have you heard the extreme right say, ‘I love my country but I hate my government’? Is your love of country based on the dirt you stand on or the government you pay taxes to? Is it all amber waves of grain and purple mountains majesty? Because, you know Russia has those, too.”

Russian wheat

“You have made a dichotomy, but really, I see a three-way split. One can feel allegiance to the nation, as defined by arbitrary borders, or to the land you grew up in and know like the breath you breathe, or, thirdly, to the people you know and feel comfortable with. And this third may be the most human, and the most dangerous. When the national borders break down and you swear upon the sword of ethnicity, you get the former Yugoslavia, or the genocide in Rwanda.”

“All of which is why I find the very notion of patriotism toxic,” Stuart said. “A curse on both your houses.”

“Or all three.”

—Richard Nilsen

Archive

Tag Archives: ethnicity

I am old, I am mad

Lines in the windblown sand

Stuart on patriotism