"Must World-mindedness Destroy National Identity?" by Robert Couteau.
Winner of the 1985 North American Essay Award,
an annual competition sponsored by the American Humanist Association.
Published in
The Humanist. March/April 1986.
All text © Copyright 2005 Rob Couteau
(Amherst, NY: American Humanist Association.)
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This essay was selected as the winner of the 1985 North American Essay Award, an annual competition sponsored by the American Humanist Association. The theme of the competition was: “Must World-mindedness Destroy National Identity? Are these seeming opposites more mutually dependent than mutually exclusive?”
Must World-mindedness Destroy National Identity?
At first glance, world-mindedness and national identity appear to be opposing attitudes. For some, becoming world-minded implies abandoning one’s national heritage to make room for a broader view: one more inclusive of a common human heritage. It is assumed that a truly comprehensive vision of culture would invalidate that special rapport one feels when immersed in one’s native soil. World-mindedness suggests a diminution of the one so that the values of the many may be experienced. It implies a lessening of emotive valence directed toward one group, in favor of a wider distribution of cultural appreciation. Yet this more evenly distributed appreciation engenders a fear of cultural homogenization: of the darker aspects of the infamous melting pot, with its notion of a perfect–yet stagnant–cultural sameness.
Such fears may arise simply from a miscomprehension of world-mindedness: from a distorted notion of what it really is. If so, we must examine these fears and the ideas they spawn, for they are widespread and point to an unresolved need to stand the two views in a new relationship to each other.
Let’s suppose they are not antithetical and that they contain a new third possibility: one that will become a ruling value for some future generation. If so, then what is problematic is not the inherent relationship between them; instead, the problem arises from the limits of our thinking. Since we have yet to arrive at a moment when this third possibility is actualized, we may become trapped by our antiquated definitions of world-mindedness and national identity.
Let us begin by examining national identity–that essential element from which world-mindedness is born. National identity, if it is anything, is surely the fantasy spun by the soil of a place that transforms the collective psyche of a people. For they are the ones who live out the spirit of the earth’s passage through time. From this soil is born a unique group of images, impulses, and flavors that, like the wine of a certain year and district, impart a spirit to those who imbibe it. This distinct spirit causes us to weave the colors of a flag, to discern the heroes of a tribe, to select the ruling values of a nation. From it, we adapt a melody that is transformed into language; a gait that is born of a certain geography and is distilled into etiquette; an art that mimics the mystery surrounding it. From all this and more, a collective psyche engenders what we call a “national identity.”
However provincial a people may be, their unique national qualities are dependent upon one thing: the foreign, separate, and contradictory aspect of all the other national psyches extending beyond a nation’s border. The Archimedean point at which a nation may be viewed with a proper perspective is always the borderland of an alien people, with their differing culture, strange psychology, and unfamiliar soil.
Without this relationship to the “other,” we remain, either as individual or as nation, fixed and limited by our own subjectivity. Contrast is an essential aspect of perception and, therefore, of consciousness. Without contrast, the stultifying entropy of sameness now threatens the growth of the individual (and the sum of individuals composing the nation). For national identity is not a static thing; it may survive for centuries in isolation, but at some point its vitality depends on the influx of a new content if it is not to become stagnant and perish.
The sum of this “otherness” may be imagined as a “world-mind.” If we consider the historical impact of the world-mind–and consider that the world-mind is none other than the sum total of all national identities–we are forced to conclude that the world-mind is linked to the cultural achievements of all nations. Therefore, we arrive at a precipice wherein the world-mind and the national-mind create a crossroads. It is here that we may imagine the possibility of their synthesis. Here, contrast (which we isolated as a necessary for consciousness) leads to the realization of cultural interrelatedness.
Thus, we retain those qualities unique to our national identity while remaining receptive to a worldly perspective. In fact, were we to abandon our national identity, we would have no means of integrating all that is foreign to us; we could no longer utilize the essential process of contrast with which to perceive and integrate the vitalizing worldly spirit. In jettisoning our experience of the national-mind, we would guarantee that no consciousness of world-mindedness will ever be enacted, for only a national identity leads to the appreciation of other identities.
World-mindedness is not a horizontal, homogenizing experience; it is not a superficial journey over a broad swath of culture forms. Rather, it is a vertical experience, whereby the deeper and more resonant one’s singular cultural experience the greater the resonance and depth of one’s experience of all cultures. But world-mindedness is more than a collection of cultural data or an accumulation of sociological statistics. Instead, it is a lived consciousness: one that tests the limit to which any national soul may extend. Yet one need not travel to every city on the globe to comprehend world-mindedness; one need only commune with one’s native soul and extend that principle of union elsewhere, toward one’s neighboring village, city, or nation.
The experience of world-mindedness is a humbling one. It demolishes all claims of national superiority and helps us to realize that grandiose notions such as “superiority” are never true manifestations of a national soul. Instead, they are aberrations: a momentary misreading of an earth that supports the scattered soul of all mankind. Just as a body must resist the cancer that promotes the growth of one group of cells to the detriment of another group, national superiority is a threat to our global soil and, thus, a threat to all forms of national identity.
World-mindedness recognizes the diastole and systole of the world body. It exalts in the euphoria enjoyed by a particular nation bearing its greatest fruit and basking in its fecundity. It also acknowledges the fate of another nation withering and rotting, its efforts spent, its soil barren and sterile, its air dry and inhospitable to new images and ideas. Therefore, national identity comprises the creation as well as the dissolution of the creative fabric. The movements of a nation are thus wedded to the rhythms of the world. In recognizing such national rhythms, world-mindedness provides an ennobling influence. It demands an appraisal of the triumphs and the sorrows wrought by the collective spirit that moves through the body of a nation: the “spirit of the forms” that transforms a people and that reflects the spiritually equalizing factor of the human soul.
“Robert Couteau won first place in the Fourth Annual North American Essay Contest for this essay. A twenty-nine-year-old resident of Manhattan, New York, Couteau works as the assistant program director of an agency offering housing and advocacy for expsychiatric patients.”
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