Master and the Middle

Home is where the heart is, goes an old adage. A few years ago, I returned back to Washington DC from a month-long trip abroad. I noticed that the mailbox outside my front porch was overflowing with envelopes. As I opened the door, I amused myself with the thought that home is where the mail comes. I have been lucky to live half my life in Kathmandu, and the latter half in various cities across the United States for education, jobs and such. Yet, childhood associations with a place where one grows up are hard to dislodge. Although places change, memories and nostalgia being what they are, our way of associating and relating to them don’t. As such, Kathmandu and Nepal will always be home.

Food, clothes and shelter. To fulfill one of his primary needs, man learned to build a house. As civilization progressed, the need for a physical house evolved into one for a home. The idea of home is broader. Beyond physical shelter, it provides mental security that comes from familiarity and comfort with a place’s culture and customs, a way of life that one identifies with. This familiarity creates a sense of belonging. Human beings have an innate need for a sense of belonging. Periodic, if not constant, longing for something that feels familiar and comfortable. Even vagabonds are comforted by the rhythm and rise of the planets and the stars. The sense of belonging anchors us emotionally. This need for a sense of belonging may be fundamental; however, no place belongs to us. Not in a fundamental sense. The mountains, the seas, the rivers, the forests, they don’t belong to us. They belong to the earth, to nature. Sure, we have come up with property rights and titles, but the arch of history extends very long. Places we cling to and think as belonging to us, belonged to some others way back and will very likely belong to somebody else in the next decade, the next century or the next millennium.

The story of human civilization is one of constant migration. People have moved around for thousands of years in search of food, security, jobs, education, and adventure. We have fled from wars, tyrants, diseases, and natural disasters. We have taken voyages into foreign lands, near and distant, with hopes of a better tomorrow or just for the sake of change. Nobody is really indigenous to a place if you zoom out far enough into history and extend the arc of time. We, as a species, originated in Africa and spread out to all corners to get to where are today. From Mesopotamia to Bohemia, the Volga to the Ganga.

The mental leap from calling a place home to thinking one and one’s kind are native to that place and ‘others’ are intruders and foreigners is a tribal one. It’s a leap all too easy to make when one feels threatened for economic, physical and cultural security by the pace of changes. Donald Trump promised to build a strong, beautiful wall to keep out the Latinos. This riff resonated with the howls of cultural and economic changes that threatened the sense of belonging of millions of Americans. The Latinos are the “other” of today’s America, culturally speaking. Just over a century ago, it was the Irish. Then the Italians, the Jews. And so on. The politics of who is ‘native’ and who is ‘other’ is always in flux. The Irish, Italians and Jews are comfortably accepted as Americans today, yet they were the “others” a few generations ago. Today’s others will hopefully also become culturally Americans in the not too distant future if the tenets of inclusiveness embedded in American democracy survives the rise of Trump. I think and certainly hope it will. The disease of nativism and politics of exclusion is universal. Viktor Orban of Hungary has already built wire fences to keep out the refugees fleeing wars in Syria. The Rohingya Muslims are being killed and kicked out from eastern parts of Buddhist Burma today. Bhutan expelled hundreds of thousands of ethnic Nepalis to preserve its ethnic purity. To bolster its gross national happiness, no doubt. The Tamils were not accepted as indigenous and native in Sinhalese Sri Lanka. I feared last year that Nepal would plunge back into civil war due to the politics of delegitimizing ethnic groups living along the Indian border. Nativism is man’s eternal disease.

Man is first and foremost an animal. The cognitive revolution miraculously expanded his brain and gave him an ability to develop language and script, communicate in stories, revel in songs, which led to organized religion and nation states. The agricultural revolution freed him from the bondage of foraging for food in the wild, gave us spare time, which facilitated formation of cultures. The industrial and scientific revolutions gave us airplanes, trains and ships that transported us easily to distant shores. This ease of travel flourished commerce and cultural intermingle. The digital revolution has made communication between distant lands faster than ever.

Yet, throughout history, even as social and technological innovations have brought distant groups of people closer with travel, communication and trade, at times of economic and cultural distress, we have let our tribal, animalistic instincts hijack our politics. As animals, an outsider intruding into what we consider our physical territory threatens us. Our instinct is to fight back and protect. This sense of threat is also triggered when we sense an intrusion into what we consider our home, our sense of belonging. In that sense, our policies and politics have not broken free from the shackles of our genes. Whether we survive as a species to continue our story on this wondrous planet will almost certainly depend on our ability to zoom out of our narrow tribalism and view our planet as a whole and our story as one.

It is often said we should live in the moment, enjoy the present. For the past can’t be changed and the future is not under our control. That’s true in a way. The present is to be enjoyed, yes, but it can be dangerous also when it shackles our perspective too narrowly to the here and now. The past and history can be understood differently depending on what we are told, taught and choose to remember. Remembering that we all came from somewhere and no place belongs to us, although we have a strong need to belong, this distinction seems important to remember.