I have been blessed with a weak sense of the crowd. It absolutely isn’t absent, just weaker than that which beats in many human hearts. I very much feel the tug of various sorts of connections beyond the barrier of skin and gene. But for me, as an easy example, affiliation with a sporting team barely exists. We lived in Boston when the Red Sox broke the “curse,” and I felt enthusiasm about it. A lot because my spouse enjoyed it so much. But, I never, ever took a moment of it seriously. Just a game.
As to higher stakes identity, on returning to California after so many years away, I find small chauvinisms arising in my heart. I do love California as my natal place, in some ways at least in part because of size I think of it as my country. I love the Bear State flag. These days I am very much enjoying learning about the history of Los Angeles and more specifically Long Beach, good, bad, and indifferent. I think of it as home.
Speaking of home, and of country, I’ve thought long and hard about America, my place in it, what it means, what it doesn’t mean. And, I think because I’ve been blessed with that weak sense of the crowd I have a bit of distance that allows me to reflect with a bit more clarity than might be the case for some patriot hearts.
I am relentlessly naturalistic. And, I feel the only realistic way of looking at things is contextually. As such, it seems to me first and foremost we are herd animals. We need others. Of course, we’re also predators. Our forward looking eyes, and the shape of our teeth speak of some harsh truths written into our hearts. Herein lies a tension.
Most of human history has been a story of how a small group of people control others for their own benefit. Now, a specific joy about America, the United States part of America, is that it was founded in a moment in time when the individual was being held up against the group. Kings and aristocracies were being challenged in favor of the people writ large. Of course it was only partially successful. In our republic for example, we were from the get go an oligarchy with democratic inclinations. But, we also were established with the idea of laws at the heart of it all, where at least in potential everyone has basic rights. Reality for us as human beings is a an existence of tensions. And the founding republic was a mixed bag. No doubt.
Tensions. It’s all about tensions. There is the tension of holding the self together, the part that more or less ends at our skins. It can be hard, actually, ultimately the system fails. We will die. That is you and me. We will die. So, more tensions. Then there is the reality we don’t live by ourselves. And there we start getting the next levels of connection and tension. Family. Friends. Neighborhood. Work. Town or city. State. Nation.
Each is a bundle of tensions, each with agendas that sometimes coincide with my hopes for happiness and some sense of security, and my loves beyond that skin, where the agendas get ever more complex and contradictory. In human evolution we know the nation state is a relatively recent thing. But, as an expression of “us,” of “the people,” its pretty ancient.
For me, as I see it, if the human species hopes to survive for a significantly longer period of time, we will have to outgrow the nation state as the basic unit of governance. Without seeing ourselves in some very real and true ways as human beings together, and all of us creatures of this planet, we’re screwed. Our propensity for violence, or willingness to cheat overcoming our sense of the fair, without coming to that last sense of connection, of binding together within our humanity and our relationship to this planet, we are doomed. There are too many of us. The very ecological balance is in tension. If we don’t get our act together, we’re doomed. Doomed not in the distant future, but up front and ugly.
And, because tension is the deal, a new phenomenon has arisen, the multinational corporation. The multinational is only bound up with nation states for convenience. It has one purpose, to extract profit. And while it supports that lovely human thing creativity, it is ultimately only about profit, and like that cartoon of people in rags sitting around a campfire with the caption reading something like, “Sure we destroyed the world, but for a brief shining moments, the profits were enormous…”
Tensions.
And, that’s where we are today. Nation states offer people some sense of self beyond the skin that is very important to them, to us. And multinationals offer profits. The United Nations has largely failed in its goals of bringing the world together. Small victories here and there, but not much.
We have a straw to grasp after, and that is a reformed sense of the nation, one that sees it as part of a nesting set like Russian dolls. And here’s where the patriotism comes in. Didn’t think I was going there, did you? If we hold it all lightly, we can see within the creation of the republic the possibilities of something worthy. Messy. Sometimes nasty. Filled with promise and betrayal. And. And. The secret of our possibility is the tension between the individual and the communal, the original founding dream.
If we could just get the mix a little more healthy, we not only have a chance to survive, but because of our relative size and economic power we could be the beacon on the hill we’ve long dreamed of. We can be better. We have access to the information that can allow us to see bigger. Our institutions are not so corrupt that we cannot right the ship. And. We do that and we can influence the whole world by example and care.
That’s the America I love. It’s the one that includes Jefferson’s deleted paragraph denouncing slavery, it’s the one that was reframed by Lincoln, it is the one that proclaimed Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. And it is the one that doesn’t forget the failings, sometimes horrific, of these authors of our country.
My America is about the dream of possibility for everyone, where when one fails they are not left behind. Not a melting pot, but a mosaic. Where our differences are celebrated, and our similarities are cherished. Not exactly out of many one, but something close. One and many. Here I am myself. I am a part of a family. I am part of Long Beach and Los Angeles. I am a Californian. I am an American. I am a human being, and a part of the collective that is life on this little planet in a distant corner of a galaxy spinning through the great night. Each part precious and fragile and temporary.
And it is in knowing this that I find the last shred of hope I have for us all.
I find it in that inscription at the base of the statue that greets all who come to New York’s harbor. Emma Lazrus’ hymn of possibility for us all.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
That’s the America I want to celebrate.
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