Tue 10 Feb, 2009
Are We Citizens of a Global Community?
Comments (2) Filed under: Society, Subsidiarity, WorldviewsTags: citizenship, environmentalism, peace
I ran across this interesting book review in one of the book sellers forums to which I subscribe.
The Vanishing Face of Gaia – James Lovelock (Penguin Books).
Why would a ninety year old man choose to defy his most trusted physician? Because in an act of splendid generosity Sir Richard Branson offered him the chance to fly into space, to share that transcendental feeling known only to astronauts – that our home is the Earth itself, not the house or the street or the nation where we live – which for a scientist who has spent a lifetime studying the way our planet works was irresistible.
This is a nice sentiment. It is something that we have heard before – early in the Presidential race Barak Obama made a similar statement in France. We are citizens of the world. What is a Catholic to make of such a claim? Are we citizens of the world, or are we citizens of our local communities? As is often the case, the Catholic answer isn’t one or the other – it’s both-and.
C.S. Lewis (who was not officially a Catholic, but who sure thought like one) made an interesting point in his book Screwtape Letters. Loving humanity as a vague generality is easy, and not of much value. The true test is how well we love the man or the woman next to us. To love man in general is easy. To love a particular man is often much more difficult. I see a parallel here. To be a citizen of the world is a vague, ambiguous construct. It is easy to generate vague feel-good feelings about such universal citizenship. To be a citizen of my local community is much more difficult. That level of citizenship requires me to actually interact with real people, to get personally involved in real issues and to seek out real solutions to real problems. It may even require a self-sacrifice (such as those who give themselves for the security and defense of their country in the armed forces) in a way that being a citizen of the world could never demand.
As followers of Christ, we are called to love all of humanity, but we are specifically called to love our neighbor. Jesus defines “neighbor” as any human being in need, but even his parables illustrates that we owe a particular love to those people we actually encounter. His question after the parable of the Good Samaritan was, “who was neighbor to this man?” The answer was the Samaritan, who directly took care of his needs.
On the other hand, being a member of the Catholic Church, the universal Church, immediately makes us the neighbor, indeed the brother and sister, of every human being on earth. Through Christ, all believers are members of One Body, and those who do not believe are invited to enter through Baptism and through lives of faith, hope and love. The love of a Christian needs to be both local and universal.
I might argue, though (and feel free to debate me on this), that the idea of being a “citizen” of the world is quite different than the idea of being a member of the human family. Citizenship invokes a very different response than family. It invokes a sense of legal responsibility and civic duty. It invokes a sense of shared immediate and proximate needs. I think this is the sense that both Barak Obama and James Lovestock are trying to get across. The idea of worldwide citizenship are especially evoked in the name of environmentalism and world peace. I think this view is naive. It paints the needs of individual nations and communities with a wide paintbrush. It glosses over real differences that will always cause conflicts and cannot be erased by mere sentiment. Unlike family and faith, citizenship does not call us to love and to be loved.
Care for our environment is important for two reasons. God gave us this world as a sign of His love for us. To care for this world is one way that we return that love. We also care for the world because we love our fellow human beings – as family. Environmental care is an act of love that protects real human beings, especially the poor and vulnerable. But we must care for the environment in real, concrete ways that meet our local needs while at the same time takes care of our planet.
World peace needs to be approached through negotiations between local communities in ways that attempt to peacefully meet the divergent needs of local communities. This is not easy, but it is the only way to do it. Sentimentality about being one global community does nothing but ignore very real differences. It also ignores the fact that war is caused by human sinfulness, which will not be conquered until Jesus brings all things to Himself.
How important is this paradigm shift? Perhaps (and only perhaps) the importance is illustrated by the rest of this book review. Lovelock’s environmentalism takes the typical liberal turn. The earth is an organism (this coming from a scientist?) and it is overloaded with “too many people, pets and livestock for the Earth to carry.” Is it too much of a leap to go from this erroneous view of the earth to seeing the world of which we are citizens as important and individuals as expendable resources or liabilities? After all, the nice thing about being a citizen of the local community is that we donate ourselves to the community, but the community exists to serve individuals.
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M.A. says:
It is interesting that you chose the parable of the Good Samaritan to illustrate your point that we “owe a particular love to those people we actually encounter”. Until I got to that paragraph in your post, I was thinking of the same parable to illustrate a different point. Jesus makes the hero of the story someone with whom the victim would have been cultural enemies. One concept that the parable shows is that we are called to care for those outside of our immediate communities – the foreigner, the stranger, the enemy. Jesus is also quite specific about commanding us to love our enemies and do good to those who hurt us. Of course we will always have war (and poverty) as you pointed out, but that does not exempt us from working against those realities of life. In fact our Christianity compels us to work against them.
Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS says:
That is exactly why the Just War Theory is so important. If we are going to war against our neighbor for selfish reasons, we are not loving our enemy. Just reasons almost always mean defending innocent life against a malicious aggressor. In such cases, we cannot stand idly by and say we’re loving our enemy by not going to war. Yes – we must work against war and poverty, but we must not lose perspective. If our actions of “social justice” lose their perspective, we are in danger of working out of ideologies other than love.
Thank you for your insightful, thoughtful comments!