Fighting Fictions

I listened to a recorded interview of a group of Iraqi female refugees from the territories formerly ruled by ISIS. A twelve-year old girl among them railed against the western female reporter for the abomination of not having her body fully covered from head to toe. The child said that those who failed to accept Islam deserved whatever punishment, torture or painful death they received, and that this justice would be served up once ISIS had regained its ascendency. Among the just punishments she looked forward to witnessing: molten metal poured into the ears of those who listened to music.

Torture for listening to music? This, the will of God? Is there no evil under the sun that someone will not attribute to God, that they won’t indulge in in the name of Goodness? What sort of creatures are we humans, that there is nothing we can’t be convinced is from God?

Hearing such views brings me close to despair. If such thinking is possible, what hope is there for humankind? But I have to bring myself back from that horrified reaction, so I do what I often try to do. Assuming that this young child is similar to the child I was, and that, like I was, she is being raised among ordinary human beings, who react both thoughtfully and emotionally to their experience and environment, what could bring about such thinking? In other words, what is it in this child’s experience that might have generated such thoughts in me were I similarly exposed.

https://www.npr.org/2019/04/19/714652629/we-pray-for-the-caliphate-to-return-isis-families-crowd-into-syrian-camps

What comes to my mind first is the bombing: month upon month upon year of bombing. Bombing that took countless lives and destroyed entire cities, and all the resulting death and destruction. What must it be like to come of age in a war zone, under siege and unable to defend whom and what one loves? That alone, I imagine, could cause me to hate, to hate whatever ‘other’ was sending those bombs. I think of the other things this child said, about the peace and plenty she enjoyed during the five years she lived in ISIS controlled territory. She said there was food and water for everyone, that the necessities of life were shared, and that people treated one another as equals. Now, she has none of that.

I didn’t hear much else, but I can imagine more. I consider what view this child and her family might have of the west, of the US and Canada and the European countries who are united in their desire to drive out ISIS. I imagine that among the glimpses of our world offered up by the media, and by Hollywood, wealth and consumption are among the things that stand out. Those things and a hedonistic, laissez-faire morality that can be shocking even to we who live in its midst – as I imagine it must seem to one raised to adhere strictly to fundamentalist Islamic teachings. The obesity, the over-consumption (I’m an obese, over-consumer myself, so not merely pointing a finger), the cultural images that are bursting with obscenity, graphic violence, and hate, and the luxury to focus our attention on trifles and indulgences, rather than necessities … that must all show, musn’t it? It’s easy to see how all of this could easily be made to seem evil, particularly if you’ve lived in depravation, particularly if you’re the recipient of particular teachings that call for modesty, the suppression on sensual appetites and tradition.

Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens, hypothesizes that the fundamental distinction that elevated Sapiens above other species of Homo is our ability to create and to believe in Fictions. He says that it is the ability to share concepts and abstractions such as: religion, nationhood, money, human rights, etc. that gave us the ability to organize in previously impossible aggregations, and to order our world in ways those other hominid species couldn’t have imagined. To offer concretes examples, it is the ability to accept the shared fiction represented by colored lights and painted white lines on asphalt, to the point where we can travel half a world away, to a place we know nothing of the people, the customs or language, and yet hurtle down a highway in a metal machine at impossible speeds, and fully trust that we are in no danger from the similar vehicles, operated by strangers, that are hurlting directly at us. Or the ability to hand over objects of immense importance to us, to more strangers, in exchange for flimsy pieces of colored paper that have no inherent value whatsoever. It is the ability to completely believe in Gods, in galaxies, in dna, and in the ‘right’ to free speech, with no personal evidence of any of it. Not only that: these beliefs often survive a great deal of personal evidence and experience that refutes them. Haven’t we all experienced enough personal or professional consequences to the things we say, to recognize that freedom of speech is essentially a fiction, rather than a natural, human right?

As a child myself, I was definitely given to moralistic, good vs bad thinking. Weren’t we all? Being Black, and growing up in the US in the 50’s and 60’s, much of what I was taught, at home and community, is that White folks were bad, and never to be trusted.  While the messages from the broader society constantly taught, showed, implied, in ways bold and subtle, exactly the opposite. During my very righteous teens, much of my thinking was about how to escape the ‘brainwashing’ of the broader society so that when the revolution came, I’d be ready and able to kill White folks. I’m not joking here. In my high school years, at a very elite, establishment prep school in New England, my fellow Black students and I had very serious discussions about whether we’d be able to turn against our White classmates when things went down.  We all struggle, in one form or another, with ‘what to believe’. But I’m sure that growing up with a great deal of ‘message dissonance’ is what allows me now to shift my viewpoint toward that of ‘the other’.

So it seems to me that a very necessary next step to human evolution – if we are to survive – will be an increased ability to see through our own cherished fictions, in order to be able at least to understand the fictions of others. Historically, it seems that this is the only way that “Peace” eventually comes about. Somehow – and inexplicably, it sometimes seems to me – most Vietnamese have overcome the fear and hatred of Americans that I can’t imagine they didn’t experience, to the point that countless visiting US serviceman speak of being welcomed there. A great many South Africans have apparently overcome their previously cherished fictions about one another, to the point that White and Black coexist and progress together. It was recently documented how – 25 years after the Rwandan genocide – people live side-by-side with those who murdered their family members during the bloodbath.

But elsewhere, destructive fictions are stubbornly clung to, or are resurrected to fuel new dissatisfactions. And so Nazism is on the rise. And the religious, Confederate right in America reasserts itself, against Blacks and Jews and Gays, and those who make certain medical choices about their own bodies. And in an overcrowded detention center in Iraq, a twelve-year old girl wants molten metal poured into the ears of those who would dare listen to music.

GOAT Country

One night recently, while driving through upstate New York, I listened to an AM radio dialogue in which the participants attempted to assert that democrats were, by definition un-American because they fought for things such as gun registration and more forgiving immigration and refugee screening protocols. The host of the show insisted that the proposals and platforms favored by Democrats were against the constitution and the values it espouses. From this he inferred that Democrats didn’t really like America and that they secretly yearned for America’s downfall.

I wanted to shout at the radio. But what would that accomplish? Even if I could get this particular radio show host one-on-one, and refute his reasoning, challenge his facts, would it put a dent in the kind of thinking that encourages and hardens the current political divide? I’m an African-American who has lived in Canada for a quarter century. About a dozen years ago, I became a Canadian citizen, so enjoy dual citizenship. It’s very interesting to me how Canadians too exhibit their own brand of nationalism. But while love of country is as much a part of being Canadian as is it of being American, it isn’t expressed here in terms of competitive superiority. And pride of county here is rarely expressed in term designed to define others out. To the contrary, Canada explicitly touts its immigrant origins and celebrates is multiculturalism as a source of strength and pride. In a way, being Canadian is about being a citizen of the world, just as, increasingly, being American – as defined by some – seems to be about renouncing the world.

What disturbs me most is the argument that certain stances are anti-American merely because they challenge an aspect of American life, politics or culture, and make arguments that alternatives would be better. That they refute the baseless claim that America is the GOAT – the Greatest of ALL TIME. It’s a gutless, distorted and manipulative way to argue politics, because it seeks to invalidate an opponent’s very right to have an independent thought. It falls in line with that “Love it or Leave it” rationale, which suggests that the price of citizenship is to give up all right to criticize.

But, of course, democrats and progressives love our country. We love our parents, too. And our kids, the town we were raised in, and the schools is which we learned, grew up and developed our first friendships. If asked, we might respond that they were each the very best possible, the best ever, that no one has ever had it so good. But would we actually believe that? Believe it as an absolute, irrefutable reality? Would we condemn siblings, classmates, fellow hometowners, who had different experiences and therefore different judgements about family, school or hometown?

No. Most of us will understand that, as much as we love our parents, there were not perfect. We are capable of recognizing and even pointing out their faults, while still asserting that we’d never give them up for any other. With our kids, we will go even further, recognizing that it is a duty to actively find fault, so as to correct and improve. It doesn’t prevent us from claiming them as irrefutably our own, never to be disowned nor denied.

We should be able to understand that we ourselves are part of that which we criticize, not separate from it and judging from some unaffected place. And hopefully, we can also know acceptance is part of this process of fault-finding and improving. Because only when we’ve accepted the wrongs, and know them in their detail and specificity, can we do what’s necessary to overcome them, and to counteract the damage they have caused.

So why are we Americans so stupid and rigid about how we express love of country? Why must every leader proclaim that America is the greatest country on Earth, when it is so clear that, in so many respects, we are not the country we aspire to be, and that we fall so short of our ideals?
(https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-american-economy-is-rigged/)

Our citizens are not the healthiest, nor the best educated, though we’d like them to be. Our cities are not the cleanest, safest nor the best managed, though we’d like that to be the case. Way too many of our citizens are in jail, and way too many others are stuck in poverty. We consume and waste vastly more of the world’s resources than is defensible by any rationale, and we struggle even to be aware of this because it challenges the very basis of our economy and our foreign policy. There is so much about the United States that belies any rating resembling ‘greatest’, yet we cling to this label as to a life raft.

Personally, I think it’s a sad and debilitating aspect of America’s role in the world, that we are so locked into proclaiming ours as “the Greatest Nation on Earth”. And that we are so quick to become viciously defensive when one of our own suggests that other countries have us beat on one criteria or another, and that we might learn from them.  I see this as a fault of Republicans and others on the right, who try to claim love of country as something of theirs alone, and as a filter to determine whose blood runs red, white & blue enough. But it’s also a fault of some Democrats and others on the left, who shy away from patriotic identifiers as interchangeable with the kind of nationalism that is little more than blind chauvinism.

But love of country need not mean that one sees no fault, that one holds one’s own as inherently better than others. Rather, it should be a marker of commitment to do the hard work necessary to raise us ever closer to the level of the ideals we claim, but never have and never can fully reach – such being the nature of life and reality.

GOAT debates are pointless, though entertaining and potentially edifying. But they’re best confined
to the realms of sports and entertainment, where they are an eternal staple. Was Muhammed Ali a greater fighter than Joe Louis or Sugar Ray Robinson? Who can say. It’ll never be answered definitively. But at least those who engage in such debates bother to come armed with records and statistics. Anyone who showed up to such a debate and proclaimed that their hero was the best merely because he hailed from their home town would be ignored or dismissed or ridiculed. And rightly so.