Dear Editor,
The eloquent article written by Mohamed Sheriffdeen titled “The terrors of immigration” advocates for a universalism that is, I am afraid, incongruent with the natural mode of human life.
It’s true we all ought to share in a sense of global community, but to discount the role of local community — and therefore, local values and traditions — is a grave mistake. People naturally form communities based on the geographical, social, and religious contexts in which they find themselves.
This is not a mistake or a flaw in our nature, but is perfectly normal, and the instances of nationalism and xenophobia that Mohamed rightly denounce are really just corruptions of the ideal of universalism — just as the development of a monoculture is a corruption of the same ideal.
The reason why nations exist in the first place is precisely because the tribal groups in which humanity has lived for the majority of its existence discovered there was something common they shared. Nations, therefore, are as natural as the regions, cities and families that comprise them, and ought to be protected as the primary means of enacting the common good for the average person.
Will there one day be a world nation, composed of all the members of humanity? Perhaps. However, establishing such an entity will first require us to acknowledge and value what separates us, because it is precisely what separates us that allows us to have individual expression (a value which you advocate for, albeit incoherently) within the context of a larger community.
To increase our commonality without destroying our diversity is thus the greatest challenge facing the advocates of a “humanity-wide consciousness,” and that will certainly require more than just believing in “respect and acceptance.”
It’s interesting that he speaks of the ideal of the “Ummah” as providing a genesis for your ideal of universalism. As a Filipino-Canadian Catholic, I am quite familiar with such themes, given that my Church is an advocate of global human values (the word ‘Catholic’ is derived from the Greek word meaning ‘universal’).
Of course, this universality is predicated on a unity of values (which the Church doesn’t really hide), but then again, isn’t unity of values precisely what Mohamed seeks by looking forward to a fully global community?
Sincerely,
Juan Tolentino
This letter contains some unrealistic and inaccurate sentiments. You have completely romanticized notions of “community” and “nation” – your conception of both denies the role of power.
Nation states are not a “natural” development. In no instance have they ever been such. Rather, nation states were formed historically by powerful elites who sought to coerce populations into both extracting resources and fighting their conflicts after the fall of the hegemony of the Church.
There is nothing “common” about the development of the nation state. It is not nations who enact the common good – rather, these common goods have had to be fought for by the people. Constitutional monarchies (often leading to republics) did not just materialize out of thin air – monarchs did not simply decide that equal rights would be better for their people. Rather, it took massive amounts of struggle and death for these polities to become actual.
Similarly, it took large groups critical of constitutional monarchies to create the modern republic/democratic state, and since then the state has been concerned primarily with eroding, not developing, the rights of the people in order to secure the domination of economics over ever-day life.
There is worth to your point – that community must be preserved, and indeed it was philosophies of universality that arguable have led to genocide, the justification of death for the progress of universal history (although I am not saying that Mohamed’s point is similar in any way to these versions of universality). However, we cannot romanticize notions of “community” and “nation” either, to do so is to simply turn a blind eye to history. Furthermore, in attributing some sort of rational inevitability to the development of nation states, you also fall into a philosophy of universality in assuming that the nation is a natural, universal by-product of human activity.