In the course of many different lessons, usually involving some sort of literary interpretation that “There is no such thing as ‘Canada.’” Of course, they usually scoffed, but I would follow up that claim by observing that it is not distinguishable from outer space. In other words, there is not a pink “Canada” mounting a purple “United States.” When we travel from one country to the next we don’t cross a giant dashed line running from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Nor do the animals seem to know of its existence—the different sides of the border are effectively the same as far as they are concerned.
Then I would point to Mt. Pilchuk, a tall peak readily observable from the school, and indicate that it really did exist. People and animals had to account for its existence as the made their ways over or around it. It also collects snow—even Nature acknowledges it.
Thus, I made the case that Canada exists only in people’s heads. It is a collective delusion, one we choose to act upon as though it exists as Mt. Pilchuk exists, but the fact is that though Canada would cease to exist if people ceased to exist, Mt. Pilchuk would not. I would also caution students not to make this observation upon crossing borders, because pointing out to border agents they are merely enslaved to a delusion might result in a stay in a truly real jail.
It is not difficult to jump from this observation to the notion that most of the distinctions we make and that we think are so real are fundamentally chimerical in this fashion. This is especially true with respect to abstractions that are value laden like, “Freedom,” and “Patriotism.” At least in the case of the names of countries, there are mutually agreed upon boundaries, etc. And it is this last class of terms that I wish to talk about here. I will deal with the others elsewhere, I hope.
In the case of countries, as it has been with respect to other shared delusions, the result has been the loss of incalculable lives and other awful suffering. And yet we persist, and in fact, in most places young children are inculcated from their earliest years with some form of “Pledge of Allegiance.” The impulse for such indoctrination is obvious enough. The alternative would be some form of questioning and that could have very negative consequences for those whose existence and livelihoods are predicated upon the preservation of this abstraction maintaining a putative reality. How many soldiers would be willing to die if the reason for their being deployed was clearly predicated on a “fantasy” in both senses of the word? Would they be willing to die for the Koch Brothers? For Haliburton? For the generals? Fortunately, the indoctrination process works so well that most people find the expression of even the smallest “unpatriotic” gesture, like Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the National Anthem, as a challenge to the deepest parts of their belief systems, and a “belief” it is, since it has no reality—it’s only a shared dream. The idea of America has become, what is described in philosophical terms, “reified.” It is a concept that has been turned into something “real” and dealt with as something as concrete as a mountain.
All of this doesn’t represent, of course, anything like a novel observation. John Lennon, after all, alludes to exactly this point when he asks us to “imagine there’s no countries/It isn’t hard to do, Nothing to kill or die for.” The next line for Lennon seems to follow logically from the previous one, and is, as we all recall, “And no religion too.” One of best expressions of the pernicious nature of human religious beliefs (Remember, the animals have no religion either), is to my mind a short essay by H.L. Mencken, part of which I have excerpted here:
The hell of dead gods is as crowded as the Presbyterian hell for babies. Damona is there, and Esus, and Drunemeton, and Silvana, and Dervones, and Adsalluta, and Deva, and Belisama, and Axona, and Vintios, and Taranuous, and Sulis, and Cocidius, and Adsmerius, and Dumiatis, and Caletos, and Moccus, and Ollovidius, and Albiorix, and Leucitius, and Vitucadrus, and Ogmios, and Uxellimus, and Borvo, and Grannos, and Mogons. All mighty gods in their day, worshiped by millions, full of demands and impositions, able to bind and loose-all gods of the first class, not dilettanti. Men labored for generations to build vast temples to them-temples with stones as large as hay-wagons. The business of interpreting their whims occupied thousands of priests, wizards, archdeacons, evangelists, haruspices, bishops, archbishops. To doubt them was to die, usually at the stake. Armies took to the field to defend them against infidels: Villages were burned, women and children were butchered, cattle were driven off. Yet in the end they all withered and died, and today there is none so poor to do them reverence. Worse, the very tombs in which they lie are lost, and so even a respectful stranger is debarred from paying them the slightest and politest homage…
What has become of Sutekh, once the high god of the whole Nile Valley? What has become of:
Resheph
Anath
Ashtoreth
El
Nergal
Nebo
Ninib
Melek
Ahijah
Isis
Ptah
Anubis
Baal
Astarte
Hadad
Addu
Shalem
Dagon
Sharrab
Yau
Amon-Re
Osiris
Sebek
Molech?
All these were once gods of the highest eminence. Many of them are mentioned with fear and trembling in the Old Testament. They ranked, five or six thousand years ago, with Jahoveh himself; the worst of them stood far higher than Thor. Yet they have all gone down the chute….
They were gods of the highest standing and dignity-gods of civilized peoples-worshiped and believed in by millions. All were theoretically omnipotent, omniscient, and immortal. And all are dead.
(From the “Graveyard of Dead Gods”)
Mencken’s point is simple enough—people believed in and died for these fictitious constructs. Thus, it may be said that a certain type of “faith,” that which forbids any kind of critical thinking, the kind that requires children to be indoctrinated early and then sent to schools and even universities that guarantee, not merely never to challenge, but always to reinforce a notion that to relinquish one’s hold on a mere phantasm of reality is to forswear all goodness and hope, is akin to kind of “patriotism” that can’t allow for the fact that neither exists anywhere but in the human brain. And the fact that this observation would shock my students is, sadly, one of the most shocking things of all. I think I may as well close with another Mencken observation:
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable.
Mencken doesn’t mince words here, and I would probably exercise a bit more tact and respect for those who have agonized over these matters. Even Mencken respects that in other places. But whether as a function of religion or nationalism, I can’t help but think that as Prospero observes at the end of The Tempest, when our “performance” here on earth is over,
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Or, as Shakespeare’s contemporary Pedro Calderon de la Barca, observed in the title to his great play, Life is a Dream
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