UnMind 26. CitiZenship Quartet 2: Nationalism

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26 eastersunday.jpg — The United States
One “nation of immigrants” —
Sea to roiling sea

Or, one might say, border to imaginary border. It goes without saying, and so I shall say it, that there is no actual or natural border between the contiguous United States and Canada, let alone Mexico, where the agreed-upon boundary is much smaller. Of course, the east and west coasts provide a more substantial shift, from terra firma to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, which geological conditions have been credited with contributing to our national stability over the past quarter of a millennium. For our enemies to get at us, before, during and after the colonial period, in which conquest was highly dependent upon “ruling the seas,” any antagonists from Europe or Asia would first have to survive the difficult voyage across the eastern or western “ponds.” Santa Anna may be the exception that proved the rule.

Like many things in the “lexicon,” defined in linguistics as “the complete set of meaningful units in a language” — and here we are examining the meaning of meaning itself — a nation and its boundaries exist only in the mind of its beholders, i.e. the founding fathers and their descendants. Subject to incursion and invasion, boundaries of nations have historically moved with greater frequency and range than meandering rivers do, which from above behave like writhing sidewinder snakes, over time, in spite of our attempts to constrain them with levees, dams, and such-like. Consider how quickly the world map, e.g. the iconic globe of your grandparents, becomes outdated, over and over again.

Many or most rationales for ongoing, ancient and modern disagreements and frictions between nations — and resultant armed conflicts — come down to territorial disputes, the Middle East being the perennial poster boy for the syndrome. So it is clear that even the leaders of said nations secretly see “sovereign boundaries” for what they really are: fictions invented by said leaders to support their own, usually self-absorbed, geopolitical and financial interests.

The good old US of A is said to have been founded on a different premise than the nations that comprise the European Union, including the relatively tiny island country of England. The latter are said to have set up their boundaries, with attendant checkpoints, walls, gates, and armed sentinels, in order to keep others, “foreigners,” out. Whereas the United States were supposedly founded as a nation of immigrants, touting Lady Liberty as the statuesque symbol of a warmly welcoming attitude. The east coast’s early occupation, and eventual westerly extension from sea to shining sea, however, required displacement of the indigenous natives. Whose members, incidentally, comprised several inchoate tribal nations, but without the embellishments of modern-day states, now confined to reservations designated by their landlords, though still honored with that appellation.

Not to forget that in colonial times, the British assumed that what we now regard as the dominant nation of the North American continent, was merely one of many territories of their burgeoning empire. After the revolution, when the initial Congress had established our founding documents, Benjamin Franklin was asked, What kind of government did we have? He is said to have said, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

This famous expression has been quoted extensively on the news lately, as we have just witnessed the most recent and blatant challenge to the sovereignty of the US since the war of 1812, when the Brits attempted a do-over, which ultimately failed, even after burning the White House to the ground. Now we witness homegrown Tories who want to subjugate the polity to their will.

It is necessary but insufficient to say that, as we often say, the map is not the territory. But we must perforce embrace the reality that the current map is in no way permanent. Climate change continuously and directly threatens the existing coastlines of all nations, and indirectly those that are landlocked. Unless, that is, we are prepared to build walls not between nations, but between dry land and ocean, like the dykes of the Netherlands.

Man’s earnest intentions, and resultant inventions, in attempting to control the perceived chaos of the world, are subject to the same marks of Buddhism’s dukkha as anything else – imperfection, impermanence, and insubstantiality. The current state of deteriorating infrastructures of many world capitals are stark evidence of this inconvenient truth.

So also, all the happy talk of striving to achieve a “more perfect union,” however well-intended, seems to fly in the face of Zen’s description of reality, that all is inherently imperfect. Though, of course, one might argue that we can be about the process of perfecting — achieving higher and higher approximations to perfection — with each new attempt. Matsuoka Roshi spoke of zazen in this way, encouraging us to always aim at the perfect posture, never imagining that we had achieved it. A bit like Master Dogen’s poetic construction regarding Zen’s attitude in Zazenshin, “making effort without aiming at it.”

And this trope, itself, suffers from the variability of the meaning of “perfect” as applied to the union, interpreted by those holding conflicting world views. What is perfect for one faction may be perfectly awful for another. It is ironic that, as a comedian recently pointed out, we are forced to fall back on promoting “unity” in a governmental system, one which is intentionally designed to function on the basis of natural disunity — the vigorous give-and-take of conflicting private interests, negotiating and arriving at public compromise — which is in no way synonymous with unity.

As individuals who are pursuing the practice, and hopefully penetrating to the underlying premise of Zen, we would do well to regard these man-made realities in the same light that we shed on our understanding of natural phenomena — the light of nonduality. All beings, including corporate beings, exist in a relative way, but not in any absolute sense.

It helps to keep in mind, that as Master Dogen reminds us in the same brief poem, “manifestation (of the essential buddha-dharma) that is by nature verification (self-evident) never has distinction between absolute and relative.” Even the most fundamental of dual dyads form a complementarity, mutually-defining aspects of a greater whole. How much more so then must be those linguistics inventions of humankind, such as nationalism.