Nationalism vs. Facism Part II

“The little space within the heart is as great as the vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun and the moon and the stars. Fire and lightening and winds are there, and all that now is and all that is not.” The Upanishads.

(Read Part One of this post first.)

How can a nation and culture the size of Wales maintain its unique identity and language without becoming exclusive? The best answer I ever heard on this subject was made from a Christian perspective, although it’s not necessary to be Christian in order to believe in and apply its spiritual message.

I came across this idea in A.M. Allchin’s brilliant little gem on the Welsh poetic tradition entitled Praise Above All: Discovering the WelshTradition. The idea centres on the polarity between the biblical ‘myths’ of Babel and Pentecost.

The Babel Myth.

In the Old Testament story of Babel, all humanity comes together in unity. The people build a giant, towering city reaching the heavens. They live there together in the one location and they all speak the same language.  

This is against the will of God, who originally decreed that human kind should “spread out, fill the earth and become many.” God deliberately ‘strikes’ the people of Babel with multiple languages in order to confuse their efforts.

With everyone speaking a different tongue and no one able to understand his or her neighbor, the inhabitants of Babel are no longer able to cooperate effectively. Eventually they disperse to different regions of the earth and become various nations.

The Pentecost Myth.

At the other end of the biblical story, in the New Testament, the story of Pentecost repairs or heals the division originally caused at Babel. Confused tongues are replaced by tongues of fire that float above the heads of believers as they miraculously communicate with foreigners who speak alien languages.

The interesting thing here is that God doesn’t unify people by replacing all the various languages with one universal language. Unity coexists with variety – it doesn’t come through uniformity. The Spirit gives different gifts for each individual.

The harmony this miracle brings thrives in freedom and the tolerance of difference.  It brings out multiplicity instead of seeking to suppress it, continuing the richness of the universe that God has created from the beginning.

This idea of catholicity has been a teaching of the Christian church from the outset. The apostle Paul attempts to explain this unity in diversity with the illustration of the human body. There is one body made up of multiple parts – eyes, nose, arms, feet etc. Each part has its own unique attributes and abilities (‘gifts’) to bring to unified functioning of the whole.

“Edau caeth brawdoliaeth dyn, edau ein rhyddid wedyn (In the binding yarn of brotherhood is also the thread of our freedom).” James Nicholas.

Unity in the Spirit.

“The human being is part of the whole, called by us the ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” Albert Einstein.

So it is with the mystical unity of the ‘Church’ (the entire body of Christian believers throughout the ages, despite their being separated by time, distance, race, culture and language). But the Spirit that seeks to unify humanity in this way needn’t be (and arguably cannot possibly be) confined to the sphere of organized Christian religion alone.

“Ynof mae Cymru’n un (In me, Wales is one).” Waldo Williams.

Allchin quotes the Methodist missionary John D. Davies in this regard. Davies experienced the meeting of major and minor languages whilst working in southern Africa, where dominant international cultures were imposing themselves upon the many threatened, local, minority cultures. Davies used the Pentecost story to speak in their defence:

“The miracle of Pentecost is not just that people are enabled to understand each other . . . The point is made with considerable emphasis, that communication comes to them not in the international language of the powerful, but in the local languages of family, region, nation . . . This is the heart of the miracle. Our own language, however insignificant in the eyes of the empire builders and powerful advertisers, is claimed as a suitable vehicle for the good news . . . Those who heard the apostles’ words did not only get information about events external to themselves; they also got an assurance of their own value, through the affirming language which shaped their basic perceptions.” John D. Davies, The Faith Abroad.

The language of a people is inseparable from their perception of the world and themselves. The destruction of a people’s language is therefore not only a loss in terms of their identity as a people, but also as people. Welsh nationalism, in so far as it remembers itself within the unity of all humanity, opposes fascism, opposes imposed uniformity. As someone once put it, “the struggle for the Welsh language is a victory for all indigenous languages everywhere.”

Fiat Lingua: Against Uniformity.

“I think one of the greatest threats to the twentieth century, which is symbolized as a well as represented by the threat of nuclear extinction, is that of sameness, uniformity, of seeing all things and all places as if they were one. But the parochial poet can help make the world larger again, and can help us to breathe, can help us to feel the reality of the world in which we live by dwelling upon the particular, by discovering or rediscovering the particular . . . Drawing attention to the reality of any particular place does something rather similar for all other places.” Jeremy Hooker.

“The disappearance of nations would impoverish us, not less than if all men were to become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its generalized personalities; the least among them has its own unique coloration and harbours within itself a unique facet of God’s design.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn.