And at the same time, just as they are too small to address human needs as a whole, nations and ethnic groups are also too big to embody the intimacy of those values shared by small communities. Nations and ethnic groups, in fact, are by definition not a family, a gathering of a few friends, or a tribe. Most certainly, they are not face-to-face communities. They are far too large for everyone to sit around the fire to discuss ideas. Whereas members of a small community spend their lives together, most people within nations and ethnic groups will never meet each other. And yet, they are all supposed to share the same cultural values. But what values do we share with a serial rapist who happens to carry our same passport or have our same skin color that we can't share with a foreigner? Do nations and ethnic groups really stand for something? Maybe it's just me, but any entity that is too narrow to embrace all of humanity and too broad to form a working community seems useless and hollow.
246
The best proof of the futility of these categories is that our identification with them constantly changes depending on the context. Even in a small country like Italy, the notion of “Italian pride” is only useful when facing off against foreigners. But if no foreigners are in sight, the idea that we all stand for the same principles falls to pieces. People from a northern city like Milan will look down at southerners, and vice versa. “Sicilians are not real Italians,” they will think. “Only the north embodies the true spirit of Italy.” But visit Bergamo just a few miles away, and the north won't look so appealing. Suddenly, they'll remember how those guys eat funny foods, speak in a weird accent, and are simply not enough “like us.” So it's time to switch gears: “It's our city, Milan, that we are proud of,” they
will say. “We are the best of what Italian identity is all about. Except for the outskirts of town . . . but those guys are white trash, so they don't count. The real city is the center of town. Please don't include my neighbors, though. Those assholes always play loud music late at night. I hate those bastards. So I guess the real source of identity and pride is my family . . . but not my siblings, ungrateful selfish pricks that they are.” This is how a supposedly meaningful national identity can shrink back down to the individual level. When examined in this light, any illusion of shared values among the entire nation (but not among all peoples in the world) can't survive the filters of family, neighborhood, city, and region.
Despite my deep distaste for patriotism, occasionally even I am susceptible to its appeal. Being a foreigner on the West Coast of the United States, I get oddly sentimental sometimes when I run into the rare Italian. My first reaction is to open up to them and treat them as friends. Why? They are Italians—just like me. When I stop to think about it, though, disturbing questions come to mind. What exactly is the deep bond that connects us, and that's supposed to turn us into instant friends? The fact that we both like pasta? What else do we share? We grew up speaking the same language. We may have read the same comic books as kids. We probably have a few cultural habits in common. But this is pretty much as far as it goes. What we share by virtue of being Italian doesn't exactly go very deep, and it certainly isn't enough to turn a stranger into an immediate friend.
Patriotism and ethnic pride, on the other hand, take the few cultural characteristics that are usually shared throughout a population and overemphasize them to the point of building a whole mystique about them. This is the recipe for creating stereotypes. Only when we give up our individuality in an effort to mold ourselves to a fixed cultural image can those cultural ideals bear more than a very superficial
resemblance to reality. But doing our best to fit stereotypes doesn't seem like a great plan. The individuals I am interested in tend to be much more complex than what the average member of a certain nation or ethnic group is supposed to be like.
To be fair, if you have suffered occasions when someone treated you horribly because of your skin color or nationality, it is understandable to react by developing an attachment to that identity. Perhaps you were trying to move beyond race and nationality, but someone pigeonholed you. Even if you didn't have much in common with others from the same nation or with the same skin color to begin with, now you
do
have in common the very real experience of discrimination. And nothing creates quick bonds like having a common enemy.
Under these circumstances it is normal and logical to want to band together for protection, for safety, for finding the company of people who understand what you are going through. A certain level of patriotism and ethnic pride may be psychologically important if you are the target of an attack, or if generations of your ancestors have internalized a sense of shame about their people. Yet, it's very easy for this to turn into a trap. Nothing is sadder than seeing those who have been oppressed turn around and dish out the same type of oppression against others the moment they have the power to do so. They opposed racism and stereotypes because they didn't like being their victims, but have no problem being the perpetrators.
Even when things are not so drastic, and we don't shapeshift overnight into virulent racists, overemphasizing pride in one's culture can be a problem. After all, we still fall prey to the same
assumption of shared cultural values across all members of a group, which is at the roots of racism. Rather than allowing ourselves the freedom to mix whatever values bring us happiness, we feel bound by duty to conform to the expectations of a particular culture. We may even be embarrassed when we escape stereotypes and embrace our individuality because it could be perceived as betraying our roots, losing our identity, or becoming like “them.”
No matter how good the justification, I still see all the identities that divide human beings along racial or national lines as prisons. I'm not about to give artificial categories and man-made borders the right to limit my ties with other human beings and dictate what values I should or should not embrace.
Many religions have been promoting a collective, global, human identity for hundreds of years, so I'm not preaching anything new here. At the same time, other religions have been fighting tooth and nail to keep the very unholy alliance of religion and nationalism/patriotism/ethnic pride alive in the modern world. These guys are scared now. Their sacred cows were safe as long as humanity was stuck in a slow-moving universe, in which little was known about people in the next valley, and goods and ideas traveled painfully slow. But the game has changed, and we now find ourselves in a world of fast connections, unlikely cultural exchanges, and greater knowledge about other lifestyles than ever before. In an increasingly interconnected world, borders are falling as we speak. Traditional
forms of identity, built as they are on separation, stand in the path of modernity.
The twentieth century took giant steps toward shrinking the power of racism. Let's not stop here. In a global world, the idea of loyalty to a single nation, or a single ethnic group, is anachronistic and useless; it's an obstacle that slows us down, an archaic heritage steeped in a fear of diversity. The time has come for a more open, more courageous way of facing the world.
A weak type of multiculturalism and the resulting spineless relativism are not what I am talking about here. We need to create new cultures, not simply mix old ones. Freed from our old, tired identities and a restricted sense of belonging, we can tune our antennas to a more global form of consciousness. The problems humanity faces don't respect borders: desperate environmental conditions, increased demand for declining forms of energy, overpopulation, international corporate pillaging, and the terrorist threat of religious fascists are not the issues of any one nation. They are human issues. The task of a healthy religion is to give us the courage to shed our old nationalistic skins and help us simply be human. If it weren't for the annoying fact that I would probably end up stoned to death, I would love to celebrate a ritual in which we burn the flags of every country in the world—none excluded. Genki Sudo, my favorite mixed martial artist, displayed a similar distaste for nationalism, expressed in a less pyromaniac and offensive manner. After his fights, he would parade around the ring waving a flag with a picture of the earth taken from space: one planet—no divisions. I cannot think of a better symbol for the religion we need today.
We have only one earth, and so far our narrow-minded “let's exploit resources before the people across the border get to them”
mentality has done a royal job of screwing it up. Developing a global consciousness is the first step in taking care of the only planet gracious enough to allow us to play, sleep, and feed on it; it is the only planet we know of capable of giving us life.
About 2,400 years ago, Diogenes the Cynic, the wildest man in Greece,
247
and one of the most overlooked philosophers in Western history, coined the word “cosmopolitan.” In the face of the Athenians' pride in their own city, he proclaimed, “I am a citizen of the world.” More than two millennia later, it's time for religions to be more forceful in stirring humanity in this direction.
My faith is whatever makes me feel good about being alive. If your religion doesn't make you feel good to be alive, what the hell is the point of it?
—Tom Robbins,
Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
The gods too love a joke
.
—Plato
Those who understand jokes are many; those who understand true laughter are few
.
—Hakuin
When it comes to having a good time, churches and temples usually aren't the first places that come to mind. The majority of religions tend to be gloomy, somber affairs. In my experience, an atmosphere of heaviness and utmost gravity seems to surround them. Capturing this feeling, the great nineteenth century American orator Robert
Ingersoll once said, “When I was a boy, Sunday was considered altogether too holy to be happy in.”
248
We don't need to be familiar with a particular theology to understand that playfulness is typically not welcome among most religious traditions. Just take a peek at the faces of people participating in religious services, and they'll tell you everything you need to know. Most of the time, they look severely constipated. They communicate as much joy as those country or blues songs about someone cleaning out your bank account, running off with your spouse, killing your dog, and breaking your last bottle of beer.
The individuals who run many organized religions seem to believe sacredness and lightheartedness are mutually exclusive. Martin Luther's idea that “God can be found only in suffering and the Cross”
249
would certainly resonate with them. As cheerful as a kick in the groin, this penitential spirit shows up across plenty of different faiths. It almost makes you wonder if their rituals and worldviews were formed after one too many Chinese movie marathons. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with the joys of Chinese cinema, generally at least half of the characters end up killing themselves; and the rest either die a horrific death at the hands of a nasty villain with an evil laugh or spend the remainder of their existence in heartbreak and regret.)
To tell the truth, most of the world's religious scriptures are far from unanimous in explicitly condemning laughter. For example, here is what the Bible has to say on this topic: with its usual clarity, it tells us that joy and laughter are good, except for the fact that they are bad. Confused? Check it out for yourself. In Ecclesiastes 8:15 we read: “Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry.”
250
Ready to pop the champagne and start the party then? Not so fast, for in
an effort to prove that logical coherence is overrated just one section earlier Ecclesiastes 7:3–4 stated: “Sorrow is better than laughter; for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.”
251
As far as how Jesus himself dealt with these conflicting messages, the Gospels are silent. Did he value having a sense of humor or was he too engrossed in his being a Messiah and all to allow himself to smile? We don't know. But despite the ambiguity of the scriptures, much of Christianity has clearly chosen to emphasize the more severe, stern possibility.
When your religious authorities are constantly rapping about suffering, contrition, shame, fear, sin, and the fires of hell, it's kind of hard to have a good laugh. Drinking from these theological downers day after day, vast numbers of spiritual people have come to embrace the attitude that fun has no place in one's religious life. Fun—in their minds—is the opposite of serious. We have no time to play—we're talking about God here, and heaven and hell, and the meaning of life. This is serious business. If you want comedy, watch Jay Leno. Sacred stuff is no laughing matter. Unashamed joy, in their eyes, is a sin to be repressed.
What these people forget is that fun is not the opposite of serious. Fun is only the opposite of boring. I smell too much darkness and self-importance around them to want to join their crowd. I feel much more at home with Nietzsche when he advises, “we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.”
252
Unlikely sources can sometimes deliver deep spiritual truths. Right after Nietzsche, it's time to quote the most famous big-boobed cartoon in Disney's history, Jessica Rabbit, the wife of the main character in
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
. At one point in the movie, she is
asked why a hot woman like her (well, at least as hot as a cartoon can be . . .) is married to the extremely goofy-looking Roger Rabbit. The reason has nothing to do with the things that bunnies are famous for doing constantly. It's a Disney movie after all, not porn. “He makes me laugh,” she answers. Many will dismiss it as a stupid Disney line, but I think the bunny's wife is on to something (I never thought I would get to write a sentence where the subject is “the bunny's wife” . . . I'm oddly pleased.) Whereas some religious authorities and stiff intellectuals like to dismiss playfulness as frivolous, I couldn't disagree more. In my own experience, playfulness is my lifeblood. It's what makes all the difference.