When I found out about the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands, near New Zealand, the most interesting fact I learned was that they did not have a name for themselves. Because they had been isolated from the rest of the world for so long, there was no need for them to distinguish themselves from anyone else. Because there wasn’t anyone else, as far as they were concerned. They were merely ‘people’. I thought this was amazing.
I later found out, however, that this practice of calling your own group ‘people’ or ‘humans’ is not confined to the Moriori. It’s a pretty common thing. The word ‘Inuit’, for example, literally means ‘the people’. The Apache people referred to themselves as ‘Nde’ or ‘Inde’ (not Apache), which again means ‘the people’. There are many such examples.
It all sounds great, and fairly innocuous, until you extrapolate from this that, if you are ‘the people’, then the other humans you meet cannot be ‘the people’. Then who are they? They are ‘not the people’. And if they are not the people, not human, you might even say, you won’t feel so bad about killing them all.
This is the disturbing root of racism.
Because you can’t go round killing people. But you can go round killing ‘not people’. At least, if you do, you won’t feel as bad. Dehumanization.
Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, do it all the time. Groups of marauding males will attack and kill lone males from another group who have strayed too far. They will even attack a neighboring troop and kill everyone except the females.
Bonobos, on the other hand, will welcome a lone traveler from another group. They will take him in and treat him well. They will be affectionate.
So are we chimps or bonobos?
I think of the American tourist my mother let stay on our couch when the hotels were full. And I think of Gaza, Bosnia, and Auschwitz.
Maybe we are both.
But it’s depressing and disturbing to find this out: that dehumanization serves a purpose, and that the purpose is to allow us to kill without feeling bad. That we can convince ourselves that we are the people, and that outsiders are not, and that we do this from the purely selfish need to preserve our own mental health when we kill them – that’s messed up.
And that’s what nationalism does.
Nationalism makes us think that we are the insiders and they are the outsiders. It taps deep into this evolutionary urge to separate ourselves into groups of marauding apes. It facilitates a dehumanization that facilitates war. It is a psychological weapon of such effectiveness that we have convinced ourselves that to be proud of our country is a good thing. Pride in your country! It doesn’t even make sense!
Ireland is beautiful. But I didn’t do that. Ireland has had many successful and inspirational writers. But I didn’t train them. Ireland has a reputation for being a friendly place. But I know plenty of grumpy Irish people. How is it possible that we have been so easily brainwashed into a pride that doesn’t belong?
But you know, when people ask me if I am proud to be Irish, I just say ‘yes’. I hate doing it. But the real answer is too contrary a reply. The real answer is this:
“No. I am not proud. But neither am I ashamed. Neither emotion makes any logical sense in this context. I am eager to explain to the foreigner that Ireland has beautiful scenery, great music, dance, art, literature, and ancient monuments. But my desire to tell people about these things comes not from a place of pride, but from a love of knowledge. I get the same satisfaction in someone discovering the magnificence of the mountains of Donegal as I do from this person reading William Blake for the first time. I grew up with both. That one is Irish and one is English has no bearing on how much I want to share them.
It would be nice to think that in years to come, as John Lennon imagined, there won’t be any countries. Then, we will all be ‘the people’ and there won’t be any need to go to war. But something tells me that’s a long way off. For now, I guess the first step is to recognize that this segregation of humanity comes from a place of awful hypocrisy. And that is wrong.