European nationalists are therefore taking it easy. For all the talk of the return of the nation, few Europeans are actually willing to kill and be killed for it. When the Scots sought to break away from London’s grip in the days of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, they had to raise an army to do so. In contrast, not a single person was killed during the 2014 Scottish referendum, and if next time Scots vote for independence, it is highly unlikely that they will have to restage the Battle of Bannockburn. The Catalan attempt to break away from Spain has resulted in considerably more violence, but it too falls far short of the carnage Barcelona experienced in 1939 or in 1714.
The rest of the world can hopefully learn from the European example. Even on a united planet there will be plenty of room for the kind of patriotism that celebrates the uniqueness of my nation and stresses my special obligations towards it. Yet if we want to survive and flourish, humankind has little choice but to complement such local loyalties with substantial obligations towards a global community. A person can and should be loyal simultaneously to her family, her neighbourhood, her profession and her nation – why not add humankind and planet Earth to that list? True, when you have multiple loyalties, conflicts are sometimes inevitable. But then who said life was simple? Deal with it.
In previous centuries national identities were forged because humans faced problems and opportunities that were far beyond the scope of local tribes, and that only countrywide cooperation could hope to handle. In the twenty-first century, nations find themselves in the same situation as the old tribes: they are no longer the right framework to manage the most important challenges of the age. We need a new global identity because national institutions are incapable of handling a set of unprecedented global predicaments. We now have a global ecology, a global economy and a global science – but we are still stuck with only national politics. This mismatch prevents the political system from effectively countering our main problems. To have effective politics, we must either de-globalise the ecology, the economy and the march of science – or we must globalise our politics. Since it is impossible to de-globalise the ecology and the march of science, and since the cost of de-globalising the economy would probably be prohibitive, the only real solution is to globalise politics. This does not mean establishing a global government – a doubtful and unrealistic vision. Rather, to globalise politics means that political dynamics within countries and even cities should give far more weight to global problems and interests.
Nationalist sentiments are unlikely to be of much help in that. Perhaps, then, we can rely on the universal religious traditions of humankind to help us unite the world? Hundreds of years ago, religions such as Christianity and Islam already thought in global rather than local terms, and they were always keenly interested in the big questions of life rather than just in the political struggles of this or that nation. But are traditional religions still relevant? Do they retain the power to shape the world, or are they just inert relics from our past, tossed here and there by the mighty forces of modern states, economies and technologies?
8
RELIGION
God now serves the nation
So far, modern ideologies, scientific experts and national governments have failed to create a viable vision for the future of humanity. Can such a vision be drawn from the deep wells of human religious traditions? Maybe the answer has been waiting for us all along between the pages of the Bible, the Quran or the Vedas.
Secular people are likely to react to this idea with ridicule or apprehension. Holy scriptures may have been relevant in the Middle Ages, but how can they guide us in the era of artificial intelligence, bioengineering, global warming and cyberwarfare? Yet secular people are a minority. Billions of humans still profess greater faith in the Quran and the Bible than in the theory of evolution; religious movements mould the politics of countries as diverse as India, Turkey and the United States; and religious animosities fuel conflicts from Nigeria to the Philippines.
So how relevant are religions such as Christianity, Islam and Hinduism? Can they help us solve the major problems we face? To understand the role of traditional religions in the world of the twenty-first century, we need to distinguish between three types of problems:
Technical problems. For example, how should farmers in arid countries deal with severe droughts caused by global warming?
Policy problems. For example, what measures should governments adopt to prevent global warming in the first place?
Identity problems. For example, should I even care about the problems of farmers on the other side of the world, or should I care only about problems of people from my own tribe and country?
As we shall see in the following pages, traditional religions are largely irrelevant to technical and policy problems. In contrast, they are extremely relevant to identity problems – but in most cases they constitute a major part of the problem rather than a potential solution.
Technical problems: Christian agriculture