A movement for World Citizenship does exist, and practically every country in the world, including the U.S., has granted visas to the holders of its passport. For those interested in the history of this movement, there is an informative website:
My plan tonight is to place my reflections on a personal level, more within the contexts of our series on identity.
Institutions like The League of Nations and now the United Nations have striven to address the conflicts that have been a constant since there was life on this planet. These efforts sought to create institutional foundations for international understanding and, it is hoped, a more peaceful world. World citizenship is yet another approach to protect and support people who wish to exercise individual choice with regard to their national identity.
The word “choice” is critical here. How do we come to feel so strongly about a particular identity in the first place? Quite simply, we are raised and later trained to absorb the values of a particular community. We grow up speaking a particular language. Our families belong to a particular religious affiliation. We grow up among people who have similar physical characteristics: hot climates produce dark-skinned people; cold climates produce fair-skinned people. And then there is everyone in between. Geographically we may be mountain people or coastal people or inhabitants of prairie lands or jungles. This will be conducive to the development of different lifestyles. Mountain people may stay in their inaccessible fastnesses; coastal people may cross the waters and develop commerce; prairie people may develop agriculture if the land is good; if it is poor, they may grow cattle and become nomads. I don’t know much about what jungle people do – but we do know that we all came out of Africa.
In short, to stick to generalities for a bit, people grow up differently and they build their local communities on the similarities they are familiar with. They build distinct civilizations on their common lifestyles and belief systems – but there’s the rub, other people, because of their local circumstances, develop different lifestyles and belief systems. As a result, they tend to call each other barbarians. Then there is the little matter that everyone, going back to the animal kingdom, is territorial, and this justifies using cultural differences to assert superiority, invade, conquer, and enslave.
But of course you and I sitting here trying to promote Tikkun have never conquered or invaded or enslaved anyone. We just let our betters do this for us whether we get to vote for them or not.
So back to the question of choice. We don’t have too many options early on, except to absorb our parents’ ways. My Russian Babushka told me that I was Russian, and I believed her. Never mind that I was born in Yugoslavia and lived in Germany for five years, and we were now living in Morocco. The year was 1956, I was eighteen-year-old, and heard that the “Russians” had invaded Hungary. Wait a minute, here I was, a Russian in Morocco, and there they were, Russians invading Hungary. There was something quite wrong with this picture. I sort of felt split up from myself.
Let me give you another example. I was 3 years old, the year was 1941, when the Germans bombed Belgrade. Actually, they bombed the apartment building we lived in, but those bombs were primitive as bombs go, and we survived hiding out in the cellar. Many years later, the year is 1999, Belgrade was bombed again, this time by NATO. When I heard the news, the split occurred again: Here I was, an American citizen for many years, and here I was – the three-year old being bombed. I felt I was bombing myself.
Let’s take religion. As a Russian, I was raised Russian Orthodox, the Byzantine form of Christianity. Babushka taught me all the prayers, and I know them to this day. The Services were mysterious and the chants were out of this world. Many years later, it was 2006 I believe, Rick and I visited what had once again become St. Petersburg. We walked into the Cathedral of Kazan, a liturgy was in progress, and the chants swept me up and I was back with my Babushka and the unforgettable make-do Services she took me to in the barracks of our Displaced Persons camps.
I bought a candle and started looking for an icon to dedicate it to. For those of you who may not be familiar with the Russian Orthodox setting, there are no pews and people wonder around, even during the Service, to pray and light a candle before a favorite saint. I looked around, and noticed a very large “icon” which was sort of modern looking, and the face of the “saint” was sort of familiar. It took me a couple of minutes to realize that the “icon” was a portrait of Nicholas II, now evidently canonized into sainthood. Hold everything! Well yes, the Bolsheviks did assassinate him and his family – but then he too had ordered, among other diversions, the massacre of Bloody Sunday. A peaceful procession of petitioners led by a priest was raided by a Cossack regiment and hundreds or maybe thousands were murdered. So that’s what it takes to become a saint? I walked out and never lit my candle.
You too may have experienced such splits, or moments of critical awareness when some sort of mind change occurred. You thought that things were one way, and then you see them another way: you realize that you have choices. And this built-in sense of the way it is does not only come from our dear and well-intentioned parents. I will not even go into the obvious opportunities for propaganda our highly developed media practice. It’s everywhere, it’s in the air we breathe.
One last personal example. We were in the early 80ies, the arms race between the Soviet Union and the U.S. was verging on nuclear catastrophe. My parents had divorced, and my dad came to live with us in New York. He spoke English with a heavy Russian accent. My son Alex was hanging out with a bunch of neighborhood boys. I happened to look out the window one day, and there was my father in front of the house, and there were Alex’s friends, and they had turned the water hose on him.
O.K., so I had started this talk on the theme that people did not tend to be tolerant of other people’s differences, and that they used those differences as an alibi to conquer and enslave neighbors who happened to be weaker at that particular moment in history. One way smaller communities dealt with this was to organize themselves into stronger entities, like principalities and kingdoms and nations. A gradual movement developed when communities were not primarily based on religion or even language, but on a set of laws. For this the 18th century was named “the age of enlightenment.”
But people’s attachment to old traditions and belief systems is hard to budge. We all know, as President Reagan told us, that the government is the problem rather than the solution. Some regional claims, however, can be readily justified. Empires have conquered in the name of Pax Romana, the white man’s burden, the mission to civilize, the liberation of the masses, the furthering of democracy… you name it. This is not likely to gain the people’s hearts and minds when they are annihilated or enslaved in the process.
I have not mentioned the role of class in all these factors. The elites never had a problem with crossing established identity boundaries. Kings and princes intermarried readily across them in the name of diplomatic expediency. And now the multinationals have no compunction outsourcing their investments to the territories of former foes. With their transatlantic and transpacific treaties, they are forming alliances that supersede the power of mere states.
Perhaps it is no longer utopian to think of our tiny planet as one world – a world that can be organized into an encompassing community with a system of international laws, rather than the primitive might of empires or the irrational belief systems long since discredited by science. Why must patriotism be so narrow? Why can’t we adopt the best that each civilization has to offer, and recognize those attachments that no longer sustain us? I still cherish the memory of my dear Babushka, but I don’t think that I will be unfaithful to the values of respect and kindness she taught me if I don’t cook the way she did, or even pray the way she did.
And now the need to put aside our differences is more urgent than ever. Change is hard, and we are not willing to change unless we absolutely have to. And now we absolutely have to because we are actually destroying our planet with our reckless ways. It becomes ever more evident that now is the time to wake up and realize that we do have the power to make choices. Change is a constant in human life. But can we change fast enough to save ourselves?
Rise and Shine: Galina DeRoeck's Website 