Are you proud to be an American? What does that mean? America is a nation state. So does the pride in being an American mean nationalism? Is pride in an “ism” a good thing? Is it even real? Interesting questions!
Our goal in this essay is to go a little deeper than the knee-jerk responses around the issue of patriotism which we all understand, if we are not completely unconscious, to be an illusion. Where does the P-B idea of America come from? Let’s riff on that to begin with. Ah yes…democracy! Democracy, some say, comes from the Greeks, from the city-state of Athens in the Age of Pericles. Free men only to begin with, women excluded, but that’s a start. Sexist and non-inclusive democracy but at least the idea had gotten started.
How did it get here? From the Greece of Alexander the Great to the Republic that was Rome the idea flows through history. The whole notion that seemed to create energy, a torch of sorts that began to light the way along a path that led to freedom and autonomy. Then the light almost goes out as civilization collapses into the Dark Ages. Classical knowledge and the yearning for something better is kept alive by Irish monks hand-copying the accumulated wisdom of a 1000 years of human yearning so that it could be reborn later. The fire of human possibility actually flares up in Islam first before it can be re-kindled in Europe during the Renaissance.
Out of the Middle East the energy of the religions of the Book, Judaism, Christianity and Islam laid the foundation for western civilization which also spreads over time into the East. The followers of these three religions now comprise half of the population of the global village; one billion Muslims, two billion Christians and a relatively small but influential number of Jews. America is not a Christian nation—not if we understand democracy. It is even less so if you understand Reality.
So far this essay has only traced the flow of the democratic ideal in the western half of the world. That is because, until recent times, it never materialized in the eastern hemisphere. But America would not be America without the influx of energy from the East—and the Eastern wisdom that is powerfully influencing Western philosophy especially starting with men like Emerson and Thoreau.
If we are proud to be an American today we are also proud to be human? Because our being Americans is inseparable from the flow of the global history of humanity across time and space—all the way back to Africa some four million years ago.
Are we “better” today as Americans than the people of other nations (American exceptionalism)? Be honest now because I know that most of you think you are. However, the realistic answer is…No! We are not even separate from the people of other nations. All the people of the world and indeed all of creation itself is/are inter-related and inter-dependent. Any ideas of being separate will be a dangerous self-deception—whether in spaces that we occupy, in the time of an imagined history, or in the individual or collective ego that lives to divide and dominate. Hubris, as we all know leads to a fall. Pride always leads to self-destruction because it derives its energy from fear and fear clouds Reality. A separate America and a separate American proud or otherwise is an illusion.
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Much more can be found in the book Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival.
