MARCH 9, WEDNESDAY

IDENTITY AND FUNDAMENTALISM

I just read an article by David Brooks in the New York Times about the reason that Putin has ordered a Russian invasion of Ukraine and why he has general Russian support. He argues that the reason for the attack is Putin’s feeling and the feeling of many Russians that since the break up of the Soviet empire Russia has been diminished and humiliated by the Western democracies, by Europe and the United States. Having Ukraine join NATO would not be as much a military threat, since it is very unlikely that NATO would attack Russia, but a humiliation of Russia‘s self image when a brother country which has always been considered to be Russian by the Russians rejects Russia in order to join Europe. It is an emotional issue, a matter of honor, much like an honor killing of a girl in the family who marries someone unworthy outside the family. It is a matter of identity.

I‘ve heard from Irena Glybina, a Russian, who went to Warren Wilson College, wanted to stay in American but couldn‘t and went back to Russia where she worked in a language school in Moscow. But eventually she married an American and is now Irena Glybina Keller living in North Carolina. Her parents are doctors in Russia, her aunt lives in Ukraine and Irena when a girl used to spend summer vacations with her grandparents in Ukraine. She is, of course, distraught, with relatives in three countries.

The issue is painful for Irena. She lives in a country with its own identity issues. I have nothing helpful that I can say to her or to anyone else. All I can do is to wonder about the issue for myself and so this is what this post is, simply my attempt to wrestle with an issue that is too big for me to resolve.

Lately I‘ve been wondering here about the bubble that each of us lives within. I am convinced that what is most real to me is some combination of unconscious inner animal drive that impels me along through life within the larger bubble of a culture that gives me structure and meaning. What is most real is both within me and around me but beyond these two bubbles there is an empty, endless universe of cause and effect the began with the Big Bang and is shrouded in mystery.

If this is true, at least for me, then my bubble is my identity, it is what is most real, and because it is my one fundamental reality, if it is threatened then I am very uncomfortable and want either to escape or to fight back.

But this just leads me back to terrible quandary. Because identity and threatened identity is what animates MAGA, white supremacy, racism, homophobia, sexism and on and on. All of these fears of people who are different can threaten people‘s identity and they, like me, either want to escape, or change the world through politics, or fight back. And in the United States the liberal educated elite to which I belong often humiliates people who believe they are threatened by liberal values and often condemns them as being bad or stupid or ignorant people. The backlash to liberalism comes from the good God fearing righteous people who feel threatened by liberal values.

And the same thing is happening in Ukraine. Ukraine‘s liberal values and rejection of Russia is a threat to Russian identity. The same is true of fundamentalist Islam in the Middle East, of fundamentalist Islam in Afghanistan, of fundamentalist Hindu nationalism in India, of a feeling of Chinese superiority in China. In fact, threatened identity is everywhere.

What I believe is most real, is fundamental, is what impels me through life and gives me structure. Anyone who threatens my identity or humiliates me infuriates me.

But another side of me steps outside myself and objectively recognizes that there cannot be any universal, absolute, truth only individual truths which are very real but are relative to each other, including my own basic values of the bubble that I live in (which I am tempted to think are universal).

This leaves me with a great problem. If all values are relative, which in itself is a threatening idea if you are a fundamentalist, probably the most threatening idea, then I have to accept other people‘s values as being equally valid. But does that mean that I have to feel that the threat to Putin‘s identity or Russian identity is valid, which would mean accepting the invasion of Ukraine? That is hard for me to swallow.

But maybe I can come at the issue from a different direction. For myself, from my own experience, I can affirm certain forms of behavior can make me feel very alive. I can affirm that Ukrainian families living in peace in Ukraine makes me feel good and Ukrainian families being blown apart makes me feel bad. I can choose the first over the second, at least for myself. I can live as full a life as possible, without feeling threatened or humiliated by others. That seems to be what Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King did, although living their acceptance of others caused all of them to be killed. I‘m not as strong as they are but that is the direction I could at least try to go in. They refused to be threatened or to fight back violently for what they felt to be the way to be fully alive. Those are my models. But beyond that I don‘t know what to do in a world where fundamentalism and threats to identity seem to be everywhere. Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes everybody blind.” That seems to be where we are now and I don’t see a way out.