The Circle

Characteristic of all competing universalisms, competing hegemonies, nationalisms, tribalisms, and so on is the circle – you’re either inside the circle or outside of it.

National Public Radio broadcast a guest essayist several years ago who had converted to Islam and gone to Saudi Arabia during the Hajj in search of the real Malcolm X, who was the essayist’s hero.

The essayist found people of all colors and shades, from the proverbial four corners of the Earth when he arrived in Mecca; he found the rich and powerful in humble proximity to persons who had invested their life savings into making the journey.

The essayist concluded that the reformed Malcolm had been correct – chauvinism, hegemony, hate and oppression of any kind were wrong because we are all the same under the skin.

Then the essayist changed his tune. It is not Malcolm X who had become a beautiful thing, he argued, but Malcolm had discovered a beautiful thing, namely Islam.

I think Islam is a beautiful thing – if you are a Muslim. For all its inclusion, generosity and respectfulness, it still draws a circle, like almost all other beliefs – you are either inside the circle, or you are outside the circle.

I see this as a problem. The community of believers still functions like a membership organization. It is no different than Christianity, or Judaism, or the Communist Party or any other membership organization in this regard. It may be a better membership organization than any other; I’m neutral on that point. Christianity may be better; I’m neutral on that, too. Communism may be better. The National Alliance may be a better membership organization (I hardly believe it is, but for sake of argument, I don’t want to privilege one membership organization over another).

The above applies to nationalisms, too. It’s characteristic of internationalism and the left wing of the human rights movement to be hostile to national borders for the very reason listed above, because of the practical implications of any belief system that say some people are in, and some people are out, which is what nationalism does.

Imagine, if you will, a human rights plank that would say Americans deserve better medical care than Rwandans, or that Germans deserve better housing than Peruvian Indians and so on. You can’t do it. Defenders of nationalism these days are dismissed as racist (even though that’s often unfair and often inaccurate), but they are dismissed for doing something that is no different, and no worse, than what proponents of any competing universalism are doing – they’re drawing a circle, and you’re either inside it, or outside.

Internationalism, which on one level of interpretation simply means the doing away with national borders and privilege and expanding human rights to everyone, equally, has in fact often been associated with hard-core Marxism and Leninism in the 20th century. As such, it’s just another circle. Its idea of inclusion ultimately is conquest of the Earth – it’s no different than any other competing universalism. A lot of people suffered under the worker’s paradise; blaming Soviet-era mistakes on Josef Stalin won’t do, either, because Marxism enabled and promoted Stalin.

So it is with churches, though I put religion and ideology together in one basket, as competing universalisms. They all try to take over the planet; they all seek to explain human behavior on an empirical level; they all seek to guide human behavior on a normative level. Curiously, Judaism, which is the mother of the daughter religions Christianity and Islam, is accused of being “exclusive” and "particularistic" by the adherents of the latter two. The issue of Judaism is confounded by its association to a particular race and/or particular national history, but Judaism as a religion is not exclusive or particularistic – anybody can convert to the religion, and there are scores of national groups represented among the “Jewish” population of Israel, for example. But Judaism does not proselytize, and does not say everyone must belong to the faith, so it is not a competing universalism. In fact, it is the one major religion that has not sought to take over the planet, in spite of the well known charges against it. Judaism does draw a circle around itself, however, and either you're in or you're out.

Conceivably, one of the true universalisms (Christianity, Islam, Liberalism, Marxism broadly defined) could actually conquer the planet, and then everyone would be inside the circle. But that can never happen in the real world because there are competing universalisms that will fight increasingly harder to not let this happen in proportion to how much they are threatened, and there are all the troublesome little “isms” like Judaism or any of hundreds of nationalisms that won’t go away so quietly, either.

Abraham Aamidor is the author of “Real Feature Writing” (Erlbaum, 1999) and Editor, “Real Sports Reporting” (Indiana University Press, 2003), both college-level journalism texts. He has taught journalism at Indiana University-Bloomington, Butler University, Georgia Southern University and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He works in daily journalism in Indianapolis