National Healing: Race, State, and the Teaching of Composition

A Decent Nation

A Decent Nation As I reported in Part 1, “Cage: The Provincial Composition,” in The Decent Society, political theorist Avashai Margalit (1996) argues that when a nation’s agencies humiliate its citizens, these agencies denote an indecent society. I want to extend this definition here. When it has the power to do so, an indecent society will initiate economic policies that exploit and humiliate the citizens of developing nations as well. An indecent society will exercise what it claims to be its military options in the name of spreading a favorite “-ism,” whether it be democracy or religion or any ideology. When it does so, it will be in the name of principles that have become empty slogans that pit “us” against “them.” When it does so, it is granting free reign to run amok patriotic fervor and nationalist hubris and, potentially—or probably—greed. This, too, is indecent. My country’s government, on many occasions, has exploited without conscience, or even, in some cases, awareness, and waged war without cause. My country has acted, in light of Margalit’s theory, indecently. It needs, now, to recover decency. It will have to face the facts of what it has done in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere and it will need to heal, not in the same way that the countries of Iraq and Afghanistan will need to heal, but in the full light of its actions. It need not have been this way. There are, after all, proud nations whose governments treat their citizens and the citizens of the world with respect. These nations establish social programs to promote the well-being of all of their citizens. These nations do not entertain profiteering desires and designs on either its own citizens or the citizens or resources of other nations. They do not declare their right to invade other nations. Many even cooperate with the governments of other countries to address world problems such as global climate change. But my country, the United States, has sometimes been an example of a state that does not contribute to world health even when the majority of its citizens would. We need to understand how this can be so. As citizens, we need to understand the state and how nationalism incorporates us and sometimes commits us to courses of action we would not otherwise entertain if we were thinking clearly. 144   national healing But seeing will not be easy. In Banal Nationalism, Michael Billig analyzes how we are continually “flagged” (his term) as we go about our daily lives. According to Billig, we are so completely indoctrinated to the national character of the country in which we live that nationalism may rightfully be called common sense (1995, 4). Our news services are textured by an us/them rhetoric; our advertising promotes a citizenship of possession; our national sports teams encourage international competition ; our living spaces contain icons of nationhood; national flags fly over our buildings; they are pinned to the lapels of our politicians; they wave on our postage stamps; and they hang at the front of many of our classrooms. In other words, nationality is all around us. “Nationalism,” Billig tells us, “far from being an intermittent mood in established nations, is the endemic condition” (6). And that is the danger: nationalism is everywhere, always active, always ready, running deeply within us, blinding us to other ways of thinking and seeing. It keeps us alert and in a state of preparedness so that when the government calls, when a “crisis occurs, and the moral aura of nationalism is invoked: heads will be nodded , flags waved and tanks will roll” (4). Clearly, it is time to bring out the flags, but this time to tag our ethnocentrism for display in the public square. Maybe if we can learn to see the content of our centrisms, we can learn to see ourselves, the standards we raise high, salute, and follow. Maybe, too, if we can analyze the beliefs we espouse, we will learn to see and understand the ways in which we all hang together. If so, we might better be able to see and even feel the deeper complexities of our nation, the connections among what once appeared to be separate problems: such as our dependence on fossil fuels and our willingness to go to war with oil-rich nations. As teachers, maybe then we might better be able to see our teaching in terms of its relation to the economic and political realities...