In June 1983 I arrived in Sri Lanka with a starry-eyed commitment to grassroots Buddhist social change, and a lot of romanticism about national liberation movements and Asian Buddhism. The Sri Lankan civil war that started five days later forced me to confront how dangerous all identities and communities are unless we understand that they are fundamentally imaginary. My two years in Sri Lanka convinced me of the desperate need for a new project of global citizenship.
Today, 26 years later, the Sinhala-Tamil civil war has wound to a close with the decisive defeat of the thuggish Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. During the two years I lived in Sri Lanka the Tigers were one of half a dozen guerrilla groups fighting Sinhalese Buddhist chauvanism and trying to establish an independent country in northern Sri Lanka. Since then the Tigers systematically destroyed their rivals, and pioneered the modern practice of suicide bombing in their campaign. My horror at the realities of guerrilla movements and the cycle of violence they breed tore away my naive romanticism about “national liberation struggles.”
But it was the deep racial-religious nationalism of the Buddhist clergy and populace that even more profoundly effected me. Being in the midst of rioting mobs targeting Tamil shop-keepers, incredulous that they were burning out their neighbors instead of focusing their anger on global elites, I became convinced that all tribal and religious identities were reactionary. Even the old left answers of global worker solidarity seemed inadequate to the need to build a united world.
That was when I began to dig deeper into the question of what we primates should see in one another, or in any intelligent creature, that should call out for our deepest sympathy, our respect and solidarity. What is it about having a thinking feeling mind that might create sympathy in another thinking feeling mind? I began to find answers in the language of citizenship, but pushed to its most radical. A citizenship of awake minds, a galactic citizenship of all creatures that were intelligent and aware of their own existence.
I was rediscovering the ideas of citizenship implicit in the Enlightenment, which I imbibed from my humanist upbringing, from Unitarian Sunday school and the Star Trek mythos to left politics and Buddhism. To boldly go and discover all sentient beings and enlist them in a united federation. Sitting under curfew, and then meditating with my fellow monks, I began to re-imagine my own political and religious identity beyond Buddhism and left politics to what I eventually called cyborg citizenship.
The week after I left Sri Lanka a long monograph I had written on the corrosive effects of racial nationalism on Buddhism was confiscated and burned. For years I would dream that I was back on the streets of Colombo unbeknownst to the Sri Lankan police, looking for something, waiting to be deported. Now that the Sri Lankans are putting this long dark chapter behind them, even with all the work ahead, I feel their relief. I wish them well, and choose to see this as one small step beyond the confines of race, nation and religion to the pluralistic, dynamic, cosmopolitan global citizenship this world so desperately needs.
To build this new imagined community requires new political and cultural projects equal to the nation-building of the last centuries. We build global citizenship when we focus on the need for global governance to address global threats, and provide global affluence. We re-imagine even the imaginary community of “humanity” when we focus on our solidarity with other intelligent species such as apes. We keep our new imagined communities and identities from becoming rigid like the old ones by focusing on how quickly we will become strange and wonderful and diverse, as individuals and clades, in the coming century.
This new community and identity may be as imaginary as the old ones, but it offers so much more.
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