[Mb-civic] Invented symbols - James Carroll - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Invented symbols

By James Carroll  |  January 3, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

''HOMO SAPIENS is the species that invents symbols in which to invest 
passion and authority," Joyce Carol Oates once remarked, ''then forgets 
that symbols are inventions." This lesson applies across the human 
condition, although it shows up regularly in the realm of religion, 
where symbolism is the native language.

Last week in Rome, theological advisers to Pope Benedict XVI expressed a 
consensus that limbo, the afterlife state reserved for the unbaptized 
innocent, does not exist. Never formally defined as doctrine, limbo had 
nevertheless found a firm place in the religious imagination of many 
Christians. Limbo's symbolism long seemed to mitigate the harshness of a 
theology that said only those formally initiated into Christianity 
through baptism can gain admittance to heaven, although by banishing the 
innocent to a lesser state (''natural" happiness as opposed to beatific 
bliss), limbo carried a harshness of its own. Now the church is 
acknowledging that the passion and authority once invested in limbo, 
however ''unofficially," can yield. Limbo is an invented symbol that can 
be left behind.

So is the nation-state. It is not religion that draws the most fervent 
investment of passion and authority in our time, but rather the 
politically autonomous entity for which humans have learned to kill and 
die. Wars of national aspiration have been a mark of the age, most 
dramatically in the former Yugoslavia where, only a decade ago, hundreds 
of thousands of people were sacrificed for mere symbols of statehood-- 
''names, battle slogans, and costumes," in Karl Marx's phrase. 
Albanians, Bosnians, Croatians, Serbs -- all finding fierce reasons to 
think of themselves in radical opposition to one another, with Serbs 
doing so most ferociously.

In Europe today, a resurgent nationalism is evident in the large second 
thought on display in the reluctance to embrace a continent-wide 
constitution. In the Arab world, the arrangement of nation-states was 
blatantly imposed by colonial powers, but the fires of indigenous 
ambition, while fueled by varieties of Islamic fervor, have become more 
national than religious in character. Triple-torn Iraq, with Sunnis and 
Shi'ites joined in the fray by Kurds, is at the mercy of an imported 
nationalism. That the invented character of the nation-state is 
forgotten is revealed whenever God is invoked as its source and 
justification. ''For God and country" is an idolatrous slogan, and a 
dangerous one. It is scrawled on walls across the world.

 From the saddle of its moral high-horse, the United States has long 
looked with condescension at the internecine conflicts of distant 
nations, warring against each other as nations. Early in the 20th 
century, a generation of European males committed mass suicide for the 
''names, battle slogans, and costumes" of kaiser and king. In the middle 
of the century, Europe did it again, with Japan leaping in for the 
emperor. When America emerged from World War II in a position of 
dominance, its leaders determined to change the deadly dynamic of 
nationalism, especially once it was tied to nuclear weapons. Hiroshima 
meant Americans could no longer condescend, and it forced the 
recognition that 18th-century nationalism had run its bloody course. The 
nation-state was an invention to be superceded by something larger in 
which loyalties could be defined more humanely.

The new invention was the United Nations. Far more than an organization, 
it, too, was a symbol in which passion and authority could be invested. 
Not only weaponry, but new modes of transport and communication, and 
then a revolution in information technology all forced a redefinition of 
the human condition, and the symbolic power of a cooperative world 
entity came ever more into its own. Not ''God and country" anymore, but 
Earth itself as holy. But, in one of history's great ironies, the main 
inventors of the United Nations, the Americans, found it impossible to 
stop treating their own nationhood as an absolute value. There were, 
perhaps, reasons for this during the Cold War, but since then the United 
States, more than any other nation-state, has reiterated its narrow 
autonomy, repudiating treaties, promulgating unilateralism, making 
aggressive war, and treating the global environment as a private waste 
dump. The United States, in sum, has invested its national sovereignty 
with passion and authority proper to God, not to an invention of human 
beings.

The result is that the United Nations, where the United States is 
represented by a man who holds it in contempt, is now a symbol of the 
planet's new jeopardy. Just as the church is letting go of one limbo, 
America is condemning the world's best hope to another.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/03/invented_symbols/
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