“Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live.”
—Rabindranath Tagore (Nobel Prize in Literature 1913)
What does it mean to love one’s country or one’s culture? Is it an innate feeling? Is it what we are taught? Is it our country or our culture that we claim allegiance to?
Today we will focus on the issues of nationalism and culturalism as they play out in our current lives. The lecture featured below was given by Rudolf Steiner in Berlin just three months after the beginning of World War I. Steiner chose this subject knowing that emotions were running high because people from many of the countries opposing each other in the war were working together to build a center for Anthroposophy with sounds of gunfire nearby.
Though not all of us are at war now, the civil unrest and so-called culture wars in many of our countries can feel like we are under attack. So, it’s not just nationalism that is dividing us. The divisiveness within our own countries feels threatening. Extreme views have found a voice in various media thus creating group polarization, while balanced news has become ineffectual at bringing cogent reason to these groups. Everywhere we look, our sense of self as belonging to a particular race, gender, and culture is being provoked; we are being divided. These divisions are real, but how do they appear in light of reincarnation and karma?
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
There is one particular great truth that we should have in mind these days as we look for love and understanding, for a loving comprehension of what is happening all around us – an insight that, fundamentally speaking, is at the center of everything we aim for in spiritual science. In our day this has to present itself to our souls with the full gravity and moral weight inherent in it. It is the realization – and this has by now become the simplest and most elementary fact in our spiritual life – that life on earth recurs. The fact is that in the course of time our souls progress from body to body. The part of man that is eternal hastens from body to body through man’s successive incarnations on earth. On the other hand, there is the part that has to do with human existence in a physical body, the part present on the physical plane that provides the configuration, the formation, the particular stamp to human existence in an outer physical body.
One particular thing that provides the outer stamp, determining the character of a person as it were, in so far as he is living in a physical body on the physical plane is what may collectively be referred to as nationality. This is something we should never forget, especially today. If we turn the mind’s eye to what we call man’s higher self, the concept of nationality loses significance. For when we pass through the gate of death everything encompassed by the term ‘nationality’ is among the things we cast off. And if we do in all seriousness want to be what we think people with spiritual aims should be, it is proper to remember that in passing through successive incarnations the human being belongs not to one but to a number of different nationalities. The part of him that links him to a particular nationality is among the things that are cast off, have to be cast off, the moment we pass through the gate of death…
The only life impulses we are able to take there are those that animate the efforts of our hearts and minds and in the final instance aim to join all peoples on the earth in brotherhood …
Truths that belong to the realm of the eternal do not have to be easily understood. Indeed, they may well be truths which at times go against our feelings – truths we achieve with difficulty particularly in difficult times, and also find difficult to achieve and retain in their full strength and clarity in difficult times such as these …
Today we see the members of different nations facing one another in dislike, in hatred. I am not at this point speaking about what is going on in the combat situation. I am speaking of what is going on in the feelings, the passions, of human souls. Here we have a soul. It needs to prepare for its reception into a spiritual world through which it will now have to pass between death and its next birth, a world that will guide it towards an incarnation that will belong to quite a different nationality from the one it is now leaving.
This is a fact which shows very clearly, in the best and most powerful way, how man resists the higher self that is within him. Consider some real ‘nationalist’ today, someone with national feelings who directs his antipathy very particularly against the members of another nation and, indeed, may be ranting and raving against this other nation in his own country… This is man raging against his own higher self. Wherever the ranting and raving is worst, wherever the hatred felt against other nationalities is greatest and where the most lies are told about them, someone seeing things not as Maya but in truth can perceive the true reason, which is that a great many members of the nation that rages most, is most cruel in its attitudes and lies the most, will have to assume that other nationality at their next incarnation.
Excerpt from: The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations, Lecture 2: Nationalities and Nationalism in the Light of Spiritual Science by Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, October 31, 1914
If each of us, every citizen of every country, recognized the spiritual reality that our patriotism – our affinity to our own nationality or culture – will be discarded at the entrance to the afterlife, we might be able find a more expansive view of ourselves and others. When we incarnate once again, we will most likely be citizens of a different nation or a different gender or a different race than we are now. With this in mind, can we contemplate ourselves and others without the passions that stir so many of us to dark thoughts and even physical violence toward those who aren’t like us in thought or appearance? Can we accept two distinct ideas at the same time – that we must honor each other’s gender, race, and culture, while at the same time acknowledge that these factors are temporary circumstances of this lifetime? Can we seek unity?
From The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman
“…We are striving to forge a union with purpose
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and
conditions of man
And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us
but what stands before us
We close the divide because we know, to put our future first,
we must first put our differences aside
We lay down our arms
so we can reach out our arms
to one another
We seek harm to none and harmony for all...”