Transcending Nationalism through Global-Local Existential Awakening

A Sketch of the Movement from Separation to Unification

When I was twenty years old and would soon graduate from Oklahoma State University, I wrote the following essay in May 1966, the earliest in my 2021 book Society, Spirit, Self: Essays on the One Dance. It was my term essay for a political science class taught by Dr. Bertil L. Hanson who gave my paper an “A” and wrote: “This is very fine. Coming from an undergraduate, it is extraordinary. The argument that nationalism and national sovereignty are harmful is commonplace. The suggestion that the solution may be found in an existential, religious reawakening is exceptional. . . This kind of essay is hard to write.” Reading this essay now, I detect inklings of the trajectory of this young man’s life which took him around the world serving villages, slums, cities, and nations with the ICA and the UN. I am still part of the movement from separation to unification. With the challenges of climate change, fascism, artificial general intelligence, globalized technology, cyber warfare, genetic experimentation, and the specter of nuclear holocaust, it is even more urgent to transcend nationalism and create a global-local world that cares for people and planet. May the movement of movements realize an ecological-compassionate civilization through mindfulness practice and activism.

The simplest statement of the paramount problem in the world of nations is that nations do not act as though there is that which is wholly other, and which ultimately generates the trajectory of history. Or in other words, nations do not make foreign policy based on a belief in ultimate reality, final mystery, or God. Regardless of the faith of a given citizenry in the goodness of life (as Paul Tillich writes) and the God of history (as Dietrich Bonhoeffer discusses), each nation makes foreign policy as though it were God. Each nation believes only in itself. Each nation believes that it alone can save humankind or at least that its own people deserve more than any other nation to live and to prosper.

Nationalism as the predominant world religion places the burden of history on each ideological position that an individual nation assumes. Each nation has a body of presuppositions about humanity's place in the universe, its needs, and its goals; and each has a divine scheme for the attainment of these. What this does not consider is the larger scheme of things (the process of history) which is not in the control of any one nation, ideology, or culture. There are natural, external phenomena, worldwide problems related to shortages of food, energy, shelter, and medicine, population expansion, the dangerous effects of radiation fallout on the precious genetic code of humans, education, the effects of technology on humans and our environment, and the whole past and the whole future which no nation can realistically suppose to be able to comprehend alone.

In other words, the world has problems as a unit, and those divisions which result in separate attempts at solution are in disregard of this. The awesome complexity of the inter-relatedness of each nation's attempts to survive and prevail economically, politically, and culturally are more than obvious.

A foreign policy based on an appeal to an absolute truth held by an individual nation is in disregard of the larger scope of history. That is to say that if a nation operates in the world with a foreign policy based on the economic, political, and cultural preferences of its people with concern for the rest of the world only where its own interests are inter-related with those of other nations, then it is not being responsible to the greater evolution of being. Here, it is suggested that a nation should be willing to sacrifice itself for humankind when a real opportunity presents itself.

This is the second point on which the problem of contemporary absolute nationalism is based: people not only do not believe in final mystery or God, but they also do not understand history or the evolutionary process of being (Teilhard de Chardin.) This unawareness stems from others such as: the lack of a sense of the urgency over the problems resulting from people's inexorable separation from other people, as well as from ultimate reality or God (Paul Tillich.)

Nations do not operate with sensitivity to the givenness of humanity's existence, and with an awareness of the basic pervading facts of life, such as: the death of the individual; the necessary subjectivity of decisions; the relativity of varying modes of being; man’s sense of separateness from all of creation; the necessity of institutions and structures to sustain human life; the fundamental and ultimate goodness of the historical process; the necessity of change, variance, tension, destruction, and re-creation; and the necessity of community to sustain and perpetuate human life. Without such an awareness, nations will continue to operate on the illusory assumptions that they individually are the embodiment of truth and that their people above all others should live and prosper. This then is the problem of nationalism and ideological absolutism.

Beyond the separateness of the human condition as described by Tillich, we have unique manifestations of contemporary splits: 1) the Eastern tradition versus the Western tradition; 2) the “have nations” versus the “have not nations;” 3) idea versus being as elaborated by Erich Heller; 4) language versus idea; and 5) being versus language.

The resulting tension of the above is manifested in such phenomena as the threat of a worldwide nuclear holocaust and the cultural revolution taking place within American society as analyzed by Kenneth Boulding and Gabriel Vahanian.

The people of the world will be brought together as they become more concerned about their commonality than their separateness. Here the problem can be broken down into the theological, philosophical, sociological, psychological, and linguistic.

Movement toward unification must come within each of these while the people of the world become more aware of the world's problems and as they become increasingly fearful of the awesome possibilities for destruction of civilization and man's genetic structure that nuclear war poses.

At the same time, the unifying forces of technology including travel, cultural exchange, communication, the modern city, and secularization as elaborated by Harvey Cox, and the technical union of mankind for the conquest of space will work to create a common myth as elaborated by Etienne Gilson, and Nicholas Berdyaev, which will be the context in which the world's people will move and communicate. From this common myth will develop common symbols, common style, and common goals. Diversity will still exist, but it will be justified, functional diversity as in divisions of labor, discipline, and concern, rather than variations which consist of separate units which each attempt to either “live and let live” or impose its solutions upon the rest of the world. Each cultural group would contribute its wisdom and tradition to the world community so that all might be more enriched.

Therefore, it is seen that the problem of an artificially divided humanity and the sad consequences of separation can be approached only on multiple levels, that is, as the concrete, spatiotemporal problem it is. We must begin by accepting the separation that exists today so that we may understand it and therefore understand with how it can be dealt. We then must begin forging out models for a new world order which will be based on humanity's oneness and the world as a unit. This then is done by being responsible to the whole of the past and the whole of the future and the whole of being. The model will be created by a community of men and women who come together because of this common task. H. Richard Niebuhr among others would call this community the church. These people must approach the problem of forging out a model and bringing it into being on three levels: the individual, the community, and the universal.

All the theoretical and practical disciplines must be employed with a self-corrective pragmatic method. All the existing structures of society and government must be respected for what they are while being utilized and changed into what they can be.

It is seen that the problem of people's lack of communication is grounded in numerous other problems. And, since it is, it is not a political much less a linguistic problem alone. The resolution of this problem will not be found at the empirical end of history when being reaches a static state of having arrived. Humanity will always be amid a seemingly insoluble complex of problems. What we must begin to do is experiment with the means of bringing about a more unified humankind.

If the leaders and citizens of the contemporary nation-states were to study seriously the works of Teilhard de Chardin including The Phenomenon of Man, and The Future of Man, they would be able to see clearly the possibilities for the evolution of consciousness and would then have the opportunity of choosing to take part in this struggle.

Other works that should be studied include those of Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be, and Love, Power, and Justice; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, and Beyond Good and Evil; the works of Soren Kierkegaard including Fear and Trembling, and Sickness unto Death; the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer including Ethics, and The Cost of Discipleship; the works of Gabriel Vahanian including The Death of God, and Wait without Idols; Simone Veil including her Notebooks; and Nicholas Berdyaev’s The End of Our Time.

In this way, the intellectual and spiritual grappling with the problem of separation of these writers could be transferred to the arena of national and global politics so that the painful, uncertain struggle of humanity's evolving faith in our own goodness as well as the goodness of history itself may continue.