Embracing the Sixth Principle: Circling the Wagons

Martha Hodges - 2007-06-03

Those of you who are my age or older remember the heyday of the TV Western. In those less politically sensitive times, it was the good guys vs. the bad guys. Shows like Wagon Train depicted the valiant white settlers struggling westward in their Conestoga wagons, looking over their shoulders for hostile Indians and bandits. At night or when threatened by attack, the wagon train master would call them to “circle up the wagons” and the wagons would form a defensive circle around the horses and cattle, not to mention the women and children.

This image seems an apt metaphor for much of what is going on in the world today. Despite, or even because of, the shrinking of our world through travel, instant communication and a global economy, we seem to be getting more polarized, more mutually hostile – not less. You might think that, as the peoples of the world learn more and more about each other and can communicate more freely, the “us and them” way of looking at the world would become irrelevant. But clearly, this is not the case. Nations, religions, ethnic groups and political parties all seem to be circling the wagons. Shutting out “the other.” Protecting “their own.”

Here’s a disturbing little story recently reported on Weekend America, on NPR. One Wafaa Bilal has been living in an art installation in a Chicago gallery. He wanted to call this conceptual art piece “Shoot an Iraqi” but, apparently, that was considered too controversial. At any rate, a web cam records Mr. Bilal as strangers around the world shoot him with a web-operated paintball gun. This goes on twenty-four hours a day. The poignancy and irony of this story is that Mr. Bilal fled Saddam’s Iraq in 1991. His father and brother were both killed in the current Iraq war.

This true story illustrates the kind of human behavior that a friend of mine calls “You’re not from my cave.” It illustrates a reality about the world and about our human nature that makes the sixth principle of our faith, “the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all” sound like an empty, feel-good and, ultimately useless and delusional statement.

In the book, The Places In Between, the author, the Scotsman Rory Stewart, walked across Afghanistan just weeks after 9/11 and the fall of the Taliban in that country. Did he discover that we’re all brothers and sisters under the skin? Not exactly. His journal recounts behavior that seems, quite literally, foreign to me – sometimes frankly repellant. Stories of being stoned by village children while adults sat by, expressionless. Of men with guns terrorizing little boys for the fun of it. But also stories of these desperately poor and war-scarred people, every night, giving him shelter and sharing what little they had to eat – most often, bread and tea. They didn’t always do so graciously or kindly, but they did it.

Stewart knows something about “world community.” He is well-connected with international aid and development groups – the kind of organizations that are working toward this goal of world community. Most of these policy-makers, he observes, “knew next to nothing” about the villages where 90 percent of the Afghan population lived. They came from post-modern, secular, globalized states with liberal traditions in law and government. It was natural for them to initiate projects on urban design, women’s rights, and fiber-optic cable networks; to talk about transparent, clean, and accountable processes, tolerance, and civil society; and to speak of a people ‘who desire peace at any cost and understand the need for a centralized multi-ethnic government.’

“But what did they understand of the thought processes of Seyyed Kerbalhi’s wife, who had not moved five kilometers from her home in forty years? Or of Dr. Habibullah, the veterinarian, who carried an automatic weapon in the way they carried a briefcase? The villagers I had met were mostly illiterate, lived far from electricity or television, and knew very little about the outside world. Versions of Islam, views of ethnicity, government, politics, and the proper methods of dispute resolution (including armed conflict) and the experience of twenty-five years of war differed from region to region… These differences between groups were deep, elusive and difficult to overcome. Village democracy, gender issues, and centralization would be hard-sell concepts in some areas… Without the time, imagination, and persistence needed to understand Afghans’ diverse experiences, policy makers would find it impossible to change Afghan society in the way they wished to change it.”

Without the time, imagination, persistence and desire to understand the diverse experiences of any group of people, anywhere on the planet, the world’s democracies, the US, or Unitarian Universalists, for that matter, will find it impossible to change any society. And yet, we proceed as if we were sure not only of our moral imperative to reshape the world in the image of ourselves, but sure of our ability to do so.

If I sound a bit cranky about this sixth principle, I guess I am. Is world community even something to be desired? Does it mean a world economy in which the rich nations of the world exploit the poor? A world community in which the cultures of the world become so diluted by our American consumer values that they become unrecognizable? Or one in which, in the name of peace, liberty, justice and democracy for all, we engage in a seemingly endless war against an enemy we know little about – and don’t try to know?

But, I remind myself, there is another story here. There is another truth. We’ve all seen those pictures of planet Earth taken from space. Pictures of a blue and white ball seeming to float in the blackness, the shapes of continents and oceans visible through the clouds – but no nations. These are the words of Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, the person who took many of those pictures. “It was the only color we could see in the universe. ... We're living on a tiny little dust mote in left field on a rather insignificant galaxy. And basically this is it for humans. It strikes me that it's a shame that we're squabbling over oil and borders.”

And Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian-American woman who, last year was the fourth person to pay twenty-million dollars to fly to the International Space Station, had this to say: “The sheer beauty of it just brought tears to my eyes. If people can see Earth from up here, see it without those borders, see it without any differences in race or religion, they would have a completely different perspective. Because when you see it from that angle, you cannot think of your home or your country. All you can see is one Earth....”

Many of the astronauts have remarked on how fragile the earth appears from space, how thin its life-giving atmosphere. We may be talking pie-in-the sky when we so boldly proclaim the goal of peace, liberty and justice for all, but there are other goals – goals for humanity that transcend national interests and cultural differences of the meanings of liberty and justice. Saving the Earth and its atmosphere is one such goal that is truly planetary in scope. One that no nation can accomplish without the cooperation of the entire industrial world.

World health is another cause that requires international dedication. Just as AIDS and drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis and other diseases are oblivious to national boundaries, so must we be if we are to save ourselves.

Not blowing ourselves up is another.

Just as globalization played a key part in the spread of these threats to human life, it holds the key to our salvation as a species and as a planet. If we can overlook our “you’re not from my cave” mentality – this “us vs. them”, “good vs. evil” mentality – this “circle up the wagons” mentality – we may stand a chance. This is one lesson of those photographs of planet Earth.

And there is another one. If nations are human inventions, then so is nationality. A baby has no nationality, no religion. Line up a bunch of infants side by side and you won’t be able to tell which one is an “American” or which one is a “Muslim” or a “Jew.” These are categories that we adults assign to them. We all start out the same. A baby is a baby. At what point in that child’s development do we start attributing to him or her things like national character, cultural biases and traditions, religious beliefs? When they are ten, or six, or three?

We are all descended from the same parents, children of the same African continent. If we are to insist on global cooperation to find global solutions to global problems, we must remember this.

And this is where these two pictures come together – the picture of infinite human diversity and finite human sameness. To achieve cooperation among peoples and nations, and, ultimately, peace, we must not turn a blind eye to our differences. We cannot pretend that cultural differences are trivial or easily overcome or not worth understanding. Like Rory Stewart’s international development officers, we need to take the time to learn about the world and accept that the solution to everyone’s problems is not for them to become replicas of ourselves. We need to walk across Afghanistan, so to speak.

The goal of world community demands this kind of close attention to differences, this curiosity, acceptance and humility. An understanding of community not as sameness, but as cooperation and mutual responsibility. If anyone should be able to do this, it is Unitarian Universalists, with our commitment to diverse beliefs united in mutual respect and compassion. Our ability to be together, even to love each other, without glossing over individual differences, diverse needs, personalities and understandings of the world – the commitment that lies at the heart of the behavioral covenant we heard about earlier. Perhaps that’s why our sixth principle belongs there after all.

The days of the TV Western, of cowboys and Indians, are gone for good. Circling the wagons and turning our backs on those who would harm us may get us through the night, even through the year, perhaps, but not through the decade, and certainly not through the century. Much as we might like to see the world again in those simple terms, we can never return to that illusion that we live in a protected and exclusive world.

World community – peace, liberty, and justice for all – will certainly not arrive anytime soon, if ever. But one thing’s for sure: We must try or we will all perish together. The days of circling up the wagons are gone for good.