Learning from Bosnia: Approaching Tradition

Chapter 11. The Ideology of Nation

11. The Ideology of Nation The tragic experience of Bosnia as a country that has for centuries been defined as unity in diversity prompts two opposing interpretations. In the first, the killings and ravages of war are an anomaly in modern evolution , and are explicable and resolvable from that perspective. In the second, these horrors are the inevitable consequence of the modern preoccupation with nation as the higher and more conscious level of existence of every society. The ultimate achievement of this mind-set is the notion of freedom without God, Who is the Lord of all the worlds, and thus of all the nations. Every nation, from this perspective, has all that it needs to define its ultimate goal, outline the way it will achieve it, procure the necessary means, and finally attain it in the history of this world. This goal and the capacity appropriate to it are none other than the secularization and nationalization of God and the exclusion of human orientation toward utter alterity. The consequence of this is to compel the self to realize its every purpose and intent within this world of finitude as the only reality. As a result, every nation, in one way or another, has its own god, which is always right, as against the flawed gods of others. In fact, national ideology and authority become idols upon which is bestowed the capacity to define and achieve the goal. The creators and executors of such an ideological blueprint elevate themselves to the highest degree, from which they determine both the goal and how it is to be achieved. They refute their mediating role between the supraindividual and nonindividual truth and its realization in society and the world. For this reason, they need national cults and myths of The Ideology of Nation / 115 state. Religion and its heritage are degraded to mere material to suit the national ideology. They are used to inflame egoism as the source of imagination and idealism. In this mind-set, peace and dependability between nations are not, and cannot be, based on a principle that transcends all differences. All their forms are no more than ephemeral states in relation to differences of quantity and power. Whereas in every tradition the attitude toward the Lord of all the worlds is the source and determinant of every individuality and collectivity, in modernity that model has been transmogrified into a new ideology with god in the people . This is the ideology of modern nationalism, although it represents itself as something wholly exterior to traditional rhetoric. The interpretation of these signs in the modern age deals largely with relations within and between societies as the mutuality of quantifiable amounts. In this, the drama of the self, coerced in every ideology of nationalism into isolation and subjugation to the national blueprint, is ignored or repudiated. The self stands between past and future; its only absolute certainties are its present moment and death. Its underlying essence is determined solely by this double certainty. Although this underlying essence, which could also be called the ‘‘primal human principle,’’ is immutable, its manifestations are both mutable and unique. They may reveal themselves in chaos or order, decline or advance, but whatever form they take, they are inseparable from the readings of the past and future that are inscribed within the self. Both past and future are uncertain, and therefore both are accompanied by speculation and, as a result, by illusion. The self’s yearning for the future in terms of ‘‘progress’’ is denied by the certainty of death. Because the mental world is marked by the desire to escape or forget death, the ‘‘end of history’’ is divorced from the certainty that is the innermost nature of the self. This results in a need for ideology as a substitute for tradition. ‘‘Freedom’’ is the name most frequently given to this choice: neither the present moment nor death is seen as binding any longer. Confirmation of this choice is found in ‘‘externalization’’— the human need that the Prophet describes as ‘‘competing to build huge edifices.’’ The greater the externalization, the weaker the consciousness of one’s primal inner nature. This is analogous to a law of inversion: what is outwardly the greatest is the least in terms of the first principle. This rule of esoteric doctrine is indicated by the symbolic relationship between circumference and center. Any circumference is a periph- [3.131.110.169] Project MUSE (2024-04...