5/28

I found Singer’s definition and assessment of national identity problematic and his suggestion of “considering ourselves as members of an imagined community of the world (171),” rather than members of individual nation states somewhat blind. Not to be too harsh…

In quoting Sedwick as an introduction to the “preference for our own” concept, I found myself, as he expected, thrown by the suggestion that we should be “bound to show kindness… to those of our own race more than to black or yellow men (153).” Before finishing the quote, I already began explaining to him that an American is an American; we all hold some generally similar set of beliefs, live under the same system of justice, enjoy the same freedoms, pay taxes to the same government, have the same power to change what we see fit, laugh at many of the same jokes on SNL and sing the same national anthem (although it ends differently in different places… “play ball” or “gentlemen, start your engines”). Though I quickly found that Singer addressed many of these counter-arguments in the pages that followed, the idea that “rejecting the notion of giving preference to members of our own race [makes it] difficult to defend the intuition that we should favor our fellow citizens, in the sense I which citizenship is seen as a kind of extended kinship, because all citizens are of the same ethnicity or race (168).”

I can tell you that, while watching the World Trade Center fall, I did not feel any less horror for my fellow Americans of color than I felt for those of my own race. But I can also tell you that the reason that I did not feel compassion toward the high-jackers was not because they were not American or because my nationality made me somehow better or more valuable than them. At the risk of sounding like a naive Southerner, “neighborly” compassion is not totally dead (and, often, still very important)… in many ways, 9/11 showed me that. My 13 year old Alabama self would probably have never known just how strongly I was tied to so many New Yorkers that I had never met simply because we share a few basic identities. Therefore, I am reluctant to ask anyone to surrender their own national identity because I, at some instinctive level that I cannot wholly describe, would not sever ties with my own.

At this point, humanity’s absolute willingness and ability to unite under one imagined community with “allegiance to a common set of ideals and values” is almost zero. In particular, I have two examples in mind:
1. What sort of compromise could be made between the jihadist and liberal democracy advocating the type of freedom of religion that we enjoy in the United States today?
2. How would India, a much more expansive population than jihadists, feel about the type of freedom of expression laws that permit certain types of pornography?

While the need of the wealthy to recognize the needs of the devastatingly poor and capture their individual ability to help correct the problem is undeniable, doing so through a one-world identity is likely to create more problems than Singer is ready to admit. It will take time and widespread education and increased awareness, both of which we are capable of. Exposure to the problem can only help solve it. Who knows… maybe (I stress maybe) our sense of national identity will eventually lead us to a national sense of shame that we have not done all that we comfortably could to save the lives of starving children.