Us and Them

Recently, Bernie Sanders said: “In other words, one of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics. I think it’s a step forward in America if you have an African-American CEO of some major corporation. But you know what, if that guy is going to be shipping jobs out of this country, and exploiting his workers, it doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot whether he’s black or white or Latino.”

 Let’s take a deeper look at this subject.

There are two kinds of political movements: those that emphasize the differences between human beings, and those that emphasize the similarities.  The best recent examples are nationalism and socialism, respectively.

In Buddhism and Hinduism there is the concept of ahimsa or “non-harming.”  To live a good life, we must take care to minimize harm to others—and ourselves. We see this idea also in the Hippocratic Oath, which states, “first, do no harm.”

If we compare political movements or systems to the practice of ahimsa, we see that most political ideologies result in human suffering, but some far more than others. There can be no question that nationalism has resulted in more human suffering than any other ideology in modern times and perhaps ever. The other culprits—monarchical-aristocratic systems, theocratic systems, Enlightenment liberalism and communism —have all led to significant conflict and suffering, but nationalism was mostly responsible for World Wars I and II, and those were by far the most destructive wars of the twentieth century.

War and genocide usually require some strong differentiating ideology, because we rarely kill those whom we feel are similar to ourselves. We seldom kill our kinfolk or our friends, except in truly disordered environments. Besides nationalism, there are also differentiating ideologies based on religion, race and class.

Despite its generally destructive record, nationalism has its uses. Ireland would never have become a nation without a concerted effort to emphasize its cultural uniqueness, led by Lady Gregory, Synge and Yeats. The cultural treasures of Ireland would have been lost in the conformity of Victorian Britain and its empire. America would never have hardened into a political whole without emphasizing the uniqueness of our experience, our institutions, and our ideals. You spend a few hours reading or listening to stories about Washington or Daniel Morgan or Abraham Lincoln and suddenly you realize—what we have is different.

Now, I’m aware that the preceding paragraphs are only a simple model, and that someone who has studied political movements professionally understands all this in much more depth. However, I believe this model illustrates a vital point: that our perspective on the big question of “Us and Them” is critically important.

If we apply this simple model to modern America, we see immediately that “identity politics” are rooted in, or modeled upon, nationalism. The Black Nationalism of the sixties and seventies was just that, and other identity movements certainly contain nationalistic elements. In feminist narratives, we often see a dominant group and a subordinate group with many admirable qualities, just as in most nationalist mythologies.

And these identity movements, entirely or partly nationalistic, also have their uses.  As one of my friends said, “women’s studies can shed light on the specifics of oppression,” and this is quite true for some other identity movements as well. Unrestrained police violence affects all ethnic groups in America, but Black Lives Matter worked as a message because it was specific.  It focused on the worst case, the effect of police violence on African-Americans. This may have appeared to de-emphasize the suffering of other groups, but it made a clear point that broke through public consciousness.

And there is a certain clarity and comfort from having an identity in such an impersonal society. People cherish their identities; they feel grounded in them. If there are distinctive foods associated with an identity, these foods make people feel more human; if music is part of an identity, then the sound of that music suddenly breaking the silence brings us joy.

Long ago, I was traveling through Germany and rented a barren room for the night in a small, silent town. All alone and unable to sleep, I opened a window, and just as I did I heard in the distance a fragment of a song I knew well: Moon in all your splendor know only my heart. People everywhere can call upon the moon to heal their sorrow, but there’s only one place where they use that song to do so, and that’s the place where I was born. Every cell in my body heard that song at that moment.

However, as meaningful as our identities are, there is a much more ancient and powerful claim on our loyalty, something with a nearly infinite capacity to renew and heal us utterly. And that is the realization that all human beings are brothers and sisters; that every child is your own child; that every old man is your father and every old woman is your mother.

And in modern times, there are only a few voices to present that vision—socialism, Buddhism, and perhaps a few others.

So, my view of socialism versus identity politics is that socialism must be the main message, because only socialism can heal our society from the ground up.  But of course identity politics can play a useful secondary role, helping to “shed light on the specifics of oppression.”

 

(The song was “San Antonio Rose”).