The violence that continues to plague our nation has caused me great distress and anxiety. It has been a year since George Floyd was murdered. Black lives continue to be violently ended with little or no consequences to the perpetrators. There is a wave of audacious attacks on the Asian population for very obscure reasons and no justification. The road rage killings without any tangible reason are taking the lives of children like the recent 6 year old boy who died in his mother’s arms from a gunshot wound from a passing car on the highway. At this moment, there is no motive that anyone can even imagine.
I came across an interesting article titled, “The Spiritual Challenge of Multiculturalism” by Damon Linker, a senior correspondent for The Week whose research was based on a German philosopher of the 18th century, Johann Gottfried Herder, who according to Linker “provides surprising insight” into this theme which is related to this current wave of non-acceptance and violence.
When I was in eighth grade we had a very interesting civic class where the teacher spoke of our immigration background as a nation and how these various cultures came to the U.S. because of the persecution that they suffered in their home countries. The term “for the common good” was the reason that the federal government existed. And we had the documents to prove that: the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution; the Bill of Rights; Lincoln’s Gettysburg and Second Inaugural Addresses; the National Anthem and Pledge of Allegiance; Emma Lazarus’ poem inscribed at the Statue of Liberty, describing a nation that welcomes the huddled masses of all faiths who yearn to breathe free. According to our civic book the government existed to protect the freedom of all peoples. Yet, the protection of the freedom and rights of all the American people and those who are seeking freedom hasn’t happened for many years.
Linker writes this about Herder: “… one of the greatest political achievements of the Enlightenment was the founding of liberal republicanism of the United States, which began by limiting full political rights to property-owning white men but gradually expanded the boundaries of the political community to include white men of more modest means, immigrants from an enormous range of countries, former slaves, women, and other groups. The eventual result was a thriving multicultural polity teeming with citizens from a multitude of races, religions, and regions of the world.”
As a philosopher Herder was disturbed by the failure of the nations “to acknowledge and encourage cultural diversity”.
Linker continues: “Long before the founding of the social sciences, Herder advocated looking at societies from the perspective of an anthropologist alive to human differences. Each culture and community is, he wrote, a ‘form of life’ with its own ‘center of happiness within itself,’ as well as possessing its own form of excellence that should be recognized, preserved, and encouraged to thrive”.
I am impressed with the clarity of Linker’s writing in relation to a possible source of the violence in our country today, that I wish to quote him extensively here:
“On the contrary, he [Herder] insisted that just as each society as a whole is comprised of many cultural parts, so the world is itself a whole comprised of many national parts, with each country and its distinctive past and present making a unique contribution to the larger whole of ‘humanity.’ Going even further, Herder maintained that this larger, global, humanitarian whole needed to be conceived in theological terms.
“The reason Herder insisted on supplementing his multicultural theory of society with a theological account of humanity is significant. Multiculturalism, he believed, is intellectually and morally unstable without such a theological foundation to keep it from degrading in one of two destructive directions.
“A multicultural society’s first vulnerability arises from its members having to live with every group being given equal status. Cultures and communities tend to persist and thrive, after all, by presuming their own excellence. The multicultural outlook both affirms such presumptions and cuts against them by affirming them equally for every culture. This places them on the same level, reducing (in Herder’s language) each person to ‘an insect perched on a clod of earth’ and each culture to a lifeless artifact dutifully displayed in a museum of relics. This experience of reduction in cultural status, distinction, and vitality easily develops into despair.
“Multiculturalism’s second vulnerability moves in the opposite direction, producing individuals and groups that reject the presumption of equal cultural status in favor of outright chauvinism, suspicion, and rank hostility to outsiders, as each person affirms the superiority of her own community, group, or country over the others, ‘as if their anthill were the universe. ‘When this happens, we see a rise in cultures attempting to impose themselves on others, the outbreak of civil unrest between antagonistic groups in culturally diverse societies, and wars breaking out among nations that find themselves on opposite sides of civilizational chasms.
“As far as Herder was concerned, the only way to avoid these fates was for modern, enlightened human beings to cultivate what he called a new ‘religion of humanity.’ This religion would treat each and every culture in human history, in the past and in the present, with respect, as contributing to the realization of peace, love, and mutual sympathy. The world that Herder advocates would be one in which Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and secular men and women within nations throughout the world simultaneously affirm their own religious (or nonreligious) standpoints while also loving, respecting, and sympathizing with those of the others, viewing them all as worthwhile contributions to the divine unfolding of humanitarianism in the world over time.
“Yet America’s civil religion is under strain today…”
Linker proceeds to explain the right and left beliefs that are pulling the people from side to side because we have not embraced the religion of humanity. A modern writer has warned us of these challenges and has written a document that is challenging, insightful and livable: Pope Francis’ Fratelli Tutti about the Human Family. Number 92 reads: “The spiritual stature of a person’s life is measured by love, which in the end remains ‘the criterion for the definitive decision about a human life’s worth or lack thereof’. Yet some believers think that it consists in the imposition of their own ideologies upon everyone else, or in a violent defense of the truth, or in impressive demonstrations of strength. All of us, as believers, need to recognize that love takes first place: love must never be put at risk, and the greatest danger lies in failing to love (cf. 1Cor. 13:1-3).
Our nation needs a deep change from hate to love. We all are God’s children. Let us pray especially as we approach Memorial weekend, for those who willingly gave their lives for an ideal, because we, as the world’s nations, were unable to love enough to settle our differences.
Now we invite your thoughts. Please share in the comments section below. And while you’re here, continue on a virtual mission by reading more of our stories and reflections as we discover together how “We are Mission”.
We are Mission! 