Cosmopolotan Patriotism

One of my projects in the last few weeks has been to read the Middle East and Islamic World Reader edited by Marvin Getterman and Stuart Shaar. It would be IMPOSSIBLE to discuss each and every primary source in this anthology (Just the question guide I created yesterday was seven pages). I could, I suppose make a brilliant attempt to solve the various conflicts in the Middle East myself. One idea I had was to take all the people who feel like they have been deprived of hearth and home in some Middle Eastern War in the last 2000 years and let them put up a homestead somewhere in the Green Mountain National Forest. Not that I have anything against the Green Mountain National Forest but ... if it can save the world a bloody nuke job, I am willing to make a sacrifice. I would love to have them solve their problems by themselves but, as Catbert says "It would be nice to eat candy and poop emeralds". It just seems like the Middle East cannot seem to escape its tribalism (can any of us?) Whether it expresses itself in religious forms, national forms, ethnic forms, or economic forms there is this fierce identification with tribe that assumes a limited supply of whatever it takes to survive and a commitment to solidarity.

One excerpt from a speech by Richard Falk comes to mind:

“America badly needs another kind of patriotism, what I will call cosmopolitan or worldly patriotism, a sense of country that blurs the boundaries between the self and others and that is aware that in an era of globalization, all of us have multiple identities based on nationality, race, religion, gender, age, and professional and vocational activities.  The physical boundaries of the state never were, and are less and less the source of meaning for our collective selves.  To adapt to a world of the Internet in the global market and media, we need to soften the exclusivity of our tribal attachments to a single national narrative.  We need to adjust to increasingly post-sovereignty world that is richly diverse and grossly uneven in wealth and influence, and we need to address the injustice is that this unevenness of wealth and power has produced over the centuries, and recognized the dangers of these widening disparities between rich and poor.  We cannot dispense with patriotism in such an emergent world, but what is needed are collective attachments that are not tightly tied to an outmoded and myopic national ethos.”

Richard A. Falk, “patriotism and dissent after 911, The Frederick Ewen Memorial Lecture, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, November 7, 2001. Found in the Middle East and Islamic World rRader, edited by Marvin Gettleman and Stuart Schaar.

My question is ... "WHY?" Why do we "need" to change the way we identify ourselves? Why do we need to "soften the exclusivity" of our various tribes? Why do we need to address the injustice that we regard as injustice only when we change the way we think about tribes? The following comes from something H.G. Wells wrote in the early part of WWI:

“Mars [the god of war] will sit like a giant above all human affairs for the next two decades, and thespeech of Mars is blunt and plain. He will say to us all:

‘Get your houses in order. If you squabble among yourselves, waste time, litigate, muddle, snatch profits and shirk obligations, I will certainly come down upon you again. I have taken all your men between eighteen and fifty, and killed and maimed such as I pleased; millions of them. I have wasted your substance contemptuously. Now, mark you, you have multitudes of male children between the ages of nine and nineteen running about among you. Delightful and beloved boys. And behind them come millions of delightful babies. Of these I have scarcely smashed and starved a paltry hundred thousand perhaps my way.

‘But go on muddling, each for himself and his parish and his family and none for all the world, go on in the old way, stick to your “rights”, stick to your “claims” each one of you, make no concessions and no sacrifices, obstruct the fresh harvest of live I have spared, all those millions that are now sweet children and dear little boys and youths, and I will squeeze it into red pulp in my hands. I will mix it with the mud of trenches and feast on it before your eyes, even more damnable than I have done with your grown-up sons and young men. And I have taken most of your superfluities already; next time I will take your barest necessities.” -  H.G. Wells, What Is Coming

But Americans by and large avoided that whole experience. We sent soldiers to Europe but its been sometime sinse we lived with War on our own turf. Maybe that is why we are still fans of it as a solution to global problems? And maybe that is why we are slow to move away from the sort of patriotic tribalism that has seeminly served us well.

Question for Comment: Do you find yourself agreeing with H.G. Wells and Richard Falk? Even if it means a reduction in the privileges that you enjoy as a member of a successful "tribe" in the world stage? Or is there something greater to be gained by thinking of ourselves as part of a human family?