SETTING THE STAGE
As the Iraq war drones on, so does the U.S. public's attempt to understand this military quagmire. Collective habit tends easily to veer the effort toward justification rather than critique. Whenever it does include critique, emphasis on current detail often loses sight of larger analysis. Our local peace vigils have recently become a case in point; frequently a U.S. flag now waves atop an earth flag. The reasons for this vary. Some of my protester friends hope the U.S. flag presence promotes some sense of commonality (non-offensiveness) with the mainstream traffic reading our peace banners. Others elect a more confrontational use of this flag mix, one that seeks to reclaim the U.S. flag's supposed original meanings, and which have been usurped by the current war. Both are versions of the familiar 'peace is patriotic' argument, and therefore disavow the jingoistic 'my country right or wrong' type of patriotism.

Leveraged from the vigiling experience itself, what follows offers a brief but fundamental disclaimer to any nationalism/patriotism on grounds of world citizenship. Allegiance is to the human race...the planet...not to any one nation. The claim is made in full respect of the role that emotion plays in our allegiance to any and all human identity construals. Because emotion follows cognition, the choice of world citizenship is assumed to carry as much 'visceral viability' as the choice of any patriotism. For today, that calls for a U.S.-based discussion. It is from here, for reasons largely unattended below, that patriotism's prowess currently impacts the world most severely and where an alternative concept such as planetary identity is most needed. Yet it would be myopic argumentation for a purportedly worldwide solution to overlook a need that is also worldwide, and as old as the human species. That caveat bears on all that follows [1].

Prevailing conceptual hurdles to world citizenship, especially in the U.S., usually depict frightening prospects of world government and the loss of national identity. From there a consequent skepticism of even UN and International Law concepts follows. Less explicit but equally frightening to that mindset is the world community's growing critique of this country's highly consumptive and wasteful lifestyle as planetarily unsustainable and unjust. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the veto-power of dominant nations in the UN for instance, remains so unquestioned and why it continues to have such a 'stranglehold' on UN potential to raise planetary consciousness. Space here prevents even a side-glance at these quite textured issues, but the underlying tenor below will relate by implication.

The following world citizenship concept is leery of any top-down connotation, especially if it precedes grassroots practice and education. Allied with the latter, planetarians see patently the causal relationship of most human conflict (such as war) to the forces of greed, and consequently also to injustice, vengeance and/or desperation-fueled terrorism. At the same time they find the rationale for the conflict rooted in human identifications [2].

Although we acquire these identities mostly accidentally and naturally, we decide to own and commit to them. We identify with the nation-state, class, kinship, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and certain religious and/or philosophical traditions. These designations, while convenient labels in some sense, can also be divisive powder-kegs. When they—or their most valued features—are absolutized, notes the world citizen, they become polarizing agents. They trump the truth and moral mandate of life's most basic identity--our common humanity.

This identity, from a full-fledged planetarian perspective, starkly contrasts the mind of the typical patriot, as government leaders well know. These leaders invest particular interest in forging citizens' sense of identity in the nation. The ideological and emotional 'building block' they use in attempting to absolutize this identity is always the drumbeat of patriotism, that indispensable tool to create a supportive citizenry prior to and during warfare. Adolf Hitler's deputy, Hermann Goering, made the point earlier:

"Naturally the common people don't want war....It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Goering is insightful not only in identifying a characteristic of all state leaders regardless of ideological particulars. Much more troubling, he also unveils the ease with which a citizenry can be influenced - and this despite the great, insatiable human penchant to think and explore outside convention's box.  Once set by officialdom and chivalrously 'massaged' by the culture on occasion, patriotism 'runs on its own'. The depth of its lock step with the nation is comprehensive. Note for instance its emotional display when exposed to instances of protocol-dissent in culturally quite benign settings such as a courtroom. Or (to digress autobiographically) note the verbal paroxysm I received personally from coaches and spectators in fastpitch softball, first in Canada and then in the U.S. in the 1970's, for refusing to stand along the third base line to participate in the national anthems.
Less 'overt' patriotism signalizes a stance of loyalty with supposed discrimination as to what that allegiance ought to mean. The 'peace patriot' carries this concern acutely, seeking to align US national performance with its founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The concepts of freedom of speech and assembly, rights and democracy are understood as the basic objectives as well as the working tools for the recovery and implementation of this vision.

NATIONAL PRINCIPLES: HISTORICAL/ETHICAL ASSESSMENT
Despite its sincere intent, this patriotic idealism, I proffer, is suspect. The 'lofty principles' of the U.S., from before their Constitutional redactive process began until today, have not been an ethical showcase [3]. The independence and self-determination the white U.S. constituency gained from Britain in 1776 were contradicted from the outset by the new nation's policy toward the Native American people. Subsequent colonialist and neo-colonialist (corporations) U.S. history has continued the contradiction. The U.S. has engaged in 159 flag-waving 'interventions' between 1787 and 1941 in which military force was used or threatened. That pattern continues today. During the Truman presidency orders went out to remove the Declaration of Independence from the overseas libraries maintained by the U.S. out of fear of its possibly incendiary influence. Meanwhile, as the biggest military force today, the U.S. continues to use the 'God bless America' claptrap to feign its foundation in genocide and racism. Freedom has come to mean license, exploitation and domination. Democracy is verbal veil for political manipulation and corruption [4]. Peace is not only everyone's 'ideal' but also the operative cover-word with both religious and secular 'gradations' for the Pentagon to solicit the public's support for war and its preparation. Today, that enables the U.S. to lead an international political-economic system that depends upon the subjugation of the many to support the wealth of a few.

To clarify, the point here is not to tarnish yet another familiar, sketchy historical overview with negativity, in the pretense of wielding a solution to patriotism. This template merely gives historical context to the world citizenship argument below, lest its viability be usurped by patriotically filtered intellectual 'optionalism'. To argue one's case by applying the 'drumbeat of patriotism' in reverse is only to perpetuate that methodology's evasion of untidy historical factuality, logic and ethics. The world citizen wends through that untidiness with more than the common suggestion that one must get out of a country in order to understand it. The planetarian on principle refuses to try to 'save' the sovereignty of any particular human system. That refusal, in effect, jump-starts humanity's potential to think honestly cosmically, yet to act personally and with new structural possibility in all matters mundane.

Even despite this caution, however, the fact of the drastic gap between visionary U.S. principles and historical practice might simply be dismissed as tiresome focus on the obvious. Aren't we all just human, blatant imperfections included? Indeed we are, as are our systems and their accompanying documents. For this reason we are all, patriot or not, behooved to hold each other as well as our governments critically accountable to declared promises and principles. The world citizen, however, further challenges government with an upward ethical, legal and structural tension toward the universal embrace of peace. Hypothetically the patriot could obviously also participate in this stretching task—thus having to 'own up' to world citizenship too. The typical patriot—even with peace patriot shading—however, 'deals' with human imperfection with a nearly instinctual accommodationist stance instead.

That is to either pedestalize the nation's performance as based on founding principles or else to justify it (with typical 'just war' reasoning) by lowering the moral sights relative to 'the best workable option in the situation'. Either way, planetarian honesty's incisive scalpel reveals a subtle avoidance of substantive national critique. 'The national interest' has been left intact as an assumedly valid self-defining, sufficient reasoning premise, therefore with meanings hardly different from those of the mainstream. As concept, the nation thus retains an essentially inscrutable ethical status. In effect that negates the ethical/legal stretch available to all nations from the give and take of good international relations. Instead, this inscrutability turns these relations into an exercise in comparative self-righteousness, and the citizenry unable to free themselves from insular national self-absorption. To illustrate, at Pearl Harbor in 1941 the killing of 2300 people became U.S. justification to kill at least 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, the killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001 continues official justification for ongoing U.S. warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq (and elsewhere). Patriotism has quickly transmuted even the flaccid principle of proportion into the insatiability of vengeance. Underneath, the nation is revealed to be the antidote, usually quite unconsciously, to individual and structural human imperfection. As we will see, it therefore becomes a primary identity vessel, a 'deliverer' much superior and quite impervious to even the scrutiny of founding principles.

The problem of patriotism is much deeper than one of caring for U.S. principles and their being relinquished, intentionally or not. I submit that at least two intertwining and unnecessary factors, one conceptual and one emotional, reflect the problem. Conversely, both also imply and rouse a planetarian solution.

The first, noted at the outset, is demonstrated by the peace patriot's peace flag counterbalancing the 'war and domination' meaning of the U.S. flag.1 This quite common approach seeks to rescue 'old glory' by transforming a national (and therefore excluding) symbol from a penultimate to ultimate one. It's as if the U.S. flag can convey ultimate meaning, even peace and justice. Critique notes that as long as the meaning of any symbol retains even the remotest option to kill, for whatever reason—as is undeniably the case with the flag—it remains a provincial, illiberal image. The option to kill by definition disproves all the prior principles claimed, such as liberty, equality, peace and justice—no matter how universalist they may sound. The kill option more than anything else erases the 'distinctiveness' decoy that nation-states proudly use to construct the patriotic mind. The same goal of all institutions and nation-states in fact is self-preservation. Because they so far haven't learned another way, they all choose varying concentrations of the same ethic, violence, to achieve that goal. Largely for that reason, Gandhi—though aware of it as also comprised of individuals—called the state a 'soulless machine'. In other words, when the principles themselves are parochial we will always recoil to nationalistic performance-measuring and congressional principles-tweaking efforts. However
'useful' on occasion, such efforts, whether through party politics or lobbying and protest efforts beyond that, fail to recognize the fundamental problem underneath; they serve national, not universal interests. If those interests were pursued in reverse priority, we would become conscious of our truer-selves— planetarians—and the attempt to-be one in patriot's garb would be understood as self-deception.

In the dynamic of modern culture, the peace patriot may retort by proposing other less 'remote' conceptual meanings for the U.S. flag than peace and justice. The flag may be gestured as an innocuous identity-label like a.' human name. Yet, how does that interface with the unapologetically violent and arrogant meaning of the U.S. flag in our dominant cultural mindset and as oppression for most of the rest of the world? Moreover, even if personal idealism—such as the flag's re-definition as human name benignity—can conceivably begin a new public reality, why not avoid cumbersome symbol redundancy by promoting only the earth flag instead? It already has the non-oppressive and nonviolent meaning such as a human name. If that promotion does not at the same time resist the U.S. flag's 'we are number one' presupposition, then the original earth flag image has been co-opted.

Second, if the human were only an emotionless animal, reason could enable a smooth leap from provincialistic selfishness to world citizenship. A general U.N. concept or the sensibilities of the World Social Forum (begun in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil), would need little persuasion: This country's military budget, bigger than the rest of the world combined, would wither like white elephant abstrusion. As it is however, a largely subconscious 'immutable' U.S. emotional need for a shared belief system predominates. The 9/11 attacks illustrated this acutely when an abiding, highly regarded 'cultural pluralism' suddenly gained a 'United We Stand' flourish instead, an all but official attribute of national identity. Subsequently, Patriot Act legislation has further confirmed the latency of this monoculturalist coup d'etat over the multi-culturalist bent in the U.S. psyche.

Because the emotion element in conventional primary identity—ethnicity, nation-state, kinfolk, culture—can be so entrenched, to challenge it by reconception is usually deemed impossible. It sounds strange (unfortunately) to identify the self, for instance, first as a universal citizen, a planetarian. However much all conventional identity designations may seem like natural
emotional phenomena, it is critical to note their cognitive or choice-factor as well. To own our identity consciously is to choose to attribute an ethical component to it. It is to draw an ethics-distinction between human and other species. It is to disclaim that, say a national identity, can validly have its own pro-nation ethic built into it by emotional default. For that reason planetary citizenship makes the choice to nullify the primary status of all emotion-carrying, normal yet penultimate and likely divisive human identity designations. Such citizenship thereby works for the egalitarian emotional, cognitive and cultural life-celebrating validity of these differences instead.

Larger critique of these cognitive and emotional impediments to the sensibilities of world citizenship names a deeply interwoven national loyalty tendril underneath. In both secular and most faith-claiming constituencies this twist extends beyond the rather benign popular understanding of religion as an 'art' that discloses and celebrates with complex symbols the transcendent source and meaning of human existence. It extends beyond even the national symbols and holidays that typically connote surface meanings of U.S. 'civil religion' [5], to what an older term called 'idolatry'. Historically, this was a figurative reference to an obsession with created realities like wealth, fame, ideology, kin family identity, sex and tribe—those things that supposedly issue comfort, prestige and security. Thus, as a disguised, often ritualistic form of self-worship, idolatry was an ultimate valuing of a selected portion of life's various penultimacies. Scrubbed of antiquated superstitious connotations in some of these obsessions, this term can help the patriot-vs-world citizen discussion even today.

Idolatry observes that despite our solipsistic [6] predilection, we in fact are social selves. That links our weightiest perspectives and foremost experiences of self-understanding with those groups or social entities with which we most strongly identify. We tend to give them higher loyalty than even personal principles consciously held. These identifications all influence how we see ourselves and life in general. Yet, to try to avoid internal personal chaos, we cannot possibly allow these groups equal loyalty and influence in forming our identities. Therefore, unless one of their loyalties in some fashion prescribes the roles each of the other groups play in our lives, we will lack inner unity (or at least more than we think we can bear). The group we find most attractive and give our deepest sense of belonging, helps us integrate our other group loyalties into some sort of harmonious whole. Whether by some innate anthropological default and/or by various conscious and unconscious cultural influences—today's nation-state tends almost invariably to fill this role.

In symbiotic relationship to our social selves, nations (and their cultural ethos) sell themselves as 'benevolent public glue' to 'prevent chaos', thereby trying to associate with our identity bulwark. Then, unaware of another option, we the public allow that glue to be militarized. This is especially true for a society such as this, that seems so interminably to trust violence as the 'only option' when 'all else' has failed. From that trust, consequently, the nation (any nation?) readily comes to assume that to have a military makes all problems appear to need a war. That 'need' is war's rationale. After all, besides money and workers (weapons and soldiers) war needs justification (patriotic support) to be implemented. When the public, subliminally or not, yields to this tripod of mutuality, all facets of personal identity capitulate to a public equivalent of militarized national self-aggrandizement.
The nation, its weapons and symbols are therefore adored and trusted, not merely to 'defend' our individual physical existence, but also the meaning of our lives. The nation—or anything all encompassing like it—transcends all frailties of individual life. It is the divine lens by which the rest of reality is judged. In this way it becomes the living value-center (nationalism/patriotism) to interpret all the choices, actions, competing loyalties, perspectives and ideologies we encounter. This makes the nation undoubtedly 'permanently preeminent', the final arbiter of human destiny—typically understood as a divine attribution. The sincerity of this belief—implying that God is on our side and vice versa— preempts self-critique and erases doubt. It tidies up human existence especially in that it allows the absolutizing of whatever adversary is perceived as the chief threat to our life. That largely explains why as recently as 1976 an amendment to the national code regarding the U.S. flag reads, "The flag represents a loving country and is itself a living thing." That in effect makes the flag's defamation a litigious equivalent to murder. Any serious challenge to the nation and its symbols represents a life-threatening challenge also to the self. To desanctify the flag is to expose its impotence as a false 'savior'—the utmost in iconoclasm. As in ancient times, so apparently in modern understandings of human identity, there are no godless states and no stateless gods. The human heart seems to be an idol factory.

LEARNING PLANETARY CITIZENSHIP THROUGH NONVIOLENT COMMITMENT
All cultures know the visceral power of natural human identity rootage, in all its beauty and diversity—as well as the likelihood of conflict when absolutized. The paradigmatic insight of world citizenship, as the solution to that conflict at its source, is that a chosen identity can outweigh those roots, with as great or greater visceral 'ownership'. Normal roots can and must be respectfully superseded—without being replaced—by the decision of a universal, grass-roots primary identity, and from which, due to the very nature of the case, flows a nonviolent ethic. Thus world citizenship epistemology is not a rote semantic nicety, it 'audaciously' claims any primary identity definition is valid only if it hinges first on the well-being of at! people on the planet, making the plausibity of violent world citizenship an inherent contradiction, both in concept and utility. The only 'protection' against such contradiction is planet-based commitment. Similarly, it is planetary idealism's best armor against dissolution from 'semantic over-use'. Commitment seems to remain humanity's most indispensable, yet elusive concept (at least with sustained integrity). After all, high ideals are always much easier to verbalize than follow. In this discussion that is doubly true, given the intent to rescue this war-ravaged global village from lofty language and symbolism used for partisan purposes. The indispensability of committed, 'earth flag' knowledge can therefore not be overstated in a critique of patriotism. Both as lived model and as ongoing quest, the planet-as-primary-identity counters the grip of nationalistic confines on the level of an epistemological-ethical re-invention of the wheel.

In fairness, the scissions in the coherence of human thought, rhetoric and deed are noted by virtually all of us. And rightly so. Without at least some gap between the visioning and its sincere pursuit, the human project necessarily stymies. As with ethical knowing generally (contrasted with truth such as a mathematical computation), the role of apprenticed, or lived truth, seems to be the only possible way to learn and build the vision of world citizenship.

That is, just as any lie lives parasitically off the truth, so the world citizen argues that the scourge of violence can never be understood unless human lives can show themselves to be determined first by the practice of peace. That journey, to show that nonviolence is fundamentally more determinative than violence, overturns popular notions and some intellectual incrustations of an inherently-violent human nature. But more than that, it imposes a stark caveat into the ostensible process of learning and transformation itself. We humans apparently behave our way into thinking more than we think our way into behavior. Especially on challenges to long-held defenses of primary identity such as patriotism, more thinking tends to be done to rationalize what we already are or are not doing or being. Apparently behavior change - commitment - best mitigates rationalization and increases thinking. Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin for that reason implored workers and scholars to exchange roles in a life-long dynamic of mutuality. Without 'flesh and blood' presupposition and practice, communally and individually, the possibility for nonviolent human change and the truth to inspire it will remain elusive at best.

in its most stereotypical form, that elusiveness tends to center on the 'effectiveness' debate. A 'non-action' of ongoing respectful, edifying listening to the 'enemy', for example, would be regarded as ineffective torpidity. Armed with the 'raw data of history', stereotype dismisses it with intellectual prudence or else with nation-worshiping emotional vigor, as the most wimpy, dimwitted ether of human fantasy. Conversely, a nonviolence unhampered by that stereotype, looks at the same pool of raw data to point out the constantly self-perpetuating and ineffective nature of violence. Nonviolence identifies the ends-in-the-means principle as the cosmic 'law of gravity' for all human experience. Hence the short and long-range rebound-effect of violence and war—such as resultant catastrophic unmet basic human needs, loss of faith in persistent negotiation and conflict resolution without violence, or the next war's seed in the last one—becomes obvious. From that honesty with historical experience, the world earthling extrapolates with the deepest realism the pointlessness of ultimate trust in any violence-assuming nation or empire, since violence is self-deceiving quicksand. Yet this does not put the force and relevance of nonviolence somehow above the mundane. Nonviolence is not an aloof slice of a relativistic, optional 'feel good' spiritual or intellectual peculiarity. Nor is it an ethical or ethnic personality barnacle. Rather, grounded in history as deeply as the practical effort of science or law, nonviolence insists that all human power is relational. Like British philosopher Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651), nonviolence knows that all governments fear the insurrection of its people. No sovereign—no matter how well equipped with warriors, weapons, bureaucrats, money and mind control—can survive unless the people obey. The question therefore is not, can the proverbial tyrant be toppled, but how best can nonconformity to any unwanted power or issue be sustained. Behind the specifics of analysis, strategy and discipline—and outside this discussion—lies the cogent planetarian conviction, in communally embodied rigor, that there is an ongoing fructifying, never complete yet unifying truth available to the entire human species.

That said, planetary citizens tenaciously refuse simplistic prescriptions. There is a world of epistemological difference between 'violence is not the answer' and 'nonviolence is the answer'. World citizenship declares, with the sapience of Gandhi and other less known theoreticians and practitioners of nonviolence, that finally there is not, and never can be, a complete definition for it. Sometimes in ethical discernment, the best way to embrace a preferred stance is to name its opposite. With that in mind, nonviolence as concept and power can be grasped, minimally, only with an unhesitant prior sense of ontological humility—openness to the unknown and to surprise—much like the Hebrews' disavowal of the naming of 'YHWH', or God. To try to do so was to insinuate a quest to impose Divine limitation and human domination, something that was understood as beyond the mortal's purview and capacity. Similar examples we can note: Hippocrates' 'do no harm' dictum in the field of medical ethics; the earth flag connoting a non-prescriptive-ness much like 'not-violent'; Sanskrit's 'absence of the desire or intention to harm' (ahimsa); some of Torah's 'thou shalt not'; or pacifism's 'no killing'.

Rather than connoting inaction, each of these prohibitive ethical samples instruct elementally about the nonviolent imagination, or universal love's inexhaustibility. Nonviolence stands for something so original, so life-inducing, so active and pro-active that we cannot quite fathom it with our minds or hold it with our weak words. That is, selective prohibitory law (e.g., do not kill) helps reign in human creativity's tendency to go afoul. The prohibitory starting point unbridles moral creativity in the intended direction and strategy, the proper spirit. For example, if I can't kill you, I will have to find another way to resolve our conflict. To guard against an assumption of so-called control, predictability, and the proverbial blueprint, frees the imagination from the mantra that war and violence are ever necessary to solve conflict's entire spectrum, from interpersonal to international.

In essence then, the peace patriot pursues peace and justice by trying to extrapolate universals from penultimate identity documents and principles. The world citizen starts with the universal and proceeds into the penultimate—armed
only with the truth that nonviolent, interdependent potential exists in the entire human scenario—individually, communally, structurally, practically. Contrasted with those of any nation-state this vision is foreign because of the inherent appeal of the universal other, societally and individually [7]. Somewhat analogous to an Aristotelian type of subordinated self-knowledge, this attraction looks at a friend as to one's second, or companion self, much like looking in the mirror. More than that, planetarians' primary interest in the universal other has to do with fundamental vulnerability to both the stranger and the enemy, since both are ontologically assumed to be 'friends in the making'. Unlike a dormant connotation, this is to pro-actively embrace the other, to favor difference, and to denounce categorically any quest for territory, protection, and control. It is not to foster an aloof 'rootlessness', connoting a disdain for nonviolent societal organizing. Instead, such work cogitates with the creative wiles of integration and universal justice seeking in all human relations and structures, thus to extend the golden rule's hand of mutuality. Planetary citizenship knows that only by going to life's margins—to those human groupings, issues and persons deemed expendable and outside any patriot's pale of primary commitment—can humanity anticipate finding its center. If human differences somewhat define us, it is only our commonness that can redeem us.

PLANETARIAN FACING OF ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
That commonness, the genius of the sages, dangles a troubling three-toned puzzle before today's world. The first tone is the 'global-village' voice of corporations, banks and affluent nation-states. The second is the decades-old and continuing threat of nuclear holocaust. Third is the looming dark global cloud of (inevitable?) 'generic' environmental disaster. All three raise critical questions. Can only the environmental crisis, rather than the world citizenship concept per se, prompt patriotism's demise? Since the mushrooming environmental crisis already explicitly exceeds all national borders and analysis, can it end patriotism's syndrome of scape-goating and finger-pointing away the dire problems affecting all humanity? Can only urgency possibly nudge egalitarian global presuppositions forward? Can only the multi-faceted (not only nuclear) threat of environmental calamity bring us 'inadvertently' to peace? If the age-old cataclysm that all war is, has still not precipitated the common sense of human commonness (planetarianism), is it reasonable to assume the environmental specter can?

Various data prompt pensive speculation about these questions, all of which, I suggest, fortifies the foregoing disavowal of patriotism on planetarian grounds. While the nuclear specter and elitist global corporations continue their parochial presuppositions in security concepts and unsustainable practices, the larger environmental crisis and its abaters are widening global public consciousness. The truth of the butterfly's flight affecting wind currents halfway around the planet is becoming familiar. Reminders of earth as our common domicile abound, as in long-ago pontifications like D. Eisenhower's, "...there can be no assured peace and tranquility for any one nation except as it is achieved for all."

While acknowledging a Darwinian 'survival of the fittest' secondary dynamic in some ecology, today's environmentalists ascribe to its predominant 'cooperation' paradigm instead, for pro-planet reasons. Economic and social systems are analyzed with an eye toward a reduced human environmental footprint. Through prisms ranging from micro-biology to astrophysics, environmentalists assiduously work for the claim of cosmic interdependence and sustainability. Cooperation, we are consequently learning, depicts best the inseparable bond between the physical and spiritual. Environmentalism espouses in scientific language the same primacy of the interdependent cosmic web that faith communities claim in religious terms. Logically, environmentalism's interdependence—or world citizenship—like religion's universalism, inheres a nonviolent 'we are all one', presupposition as basic common sense.

Meanwhile, irony's twist stays near. Thanks to its perseverance, in numerous locales environmentalism is triggering some sustainability projects even by an institution intrinsically antithetical to world citizenship, the military. More noteworthy than the military using these commitments also as a recruiting ploy, is how this 'military greenwash' is intentionally, thus far successfully, derailing even some major environmental organizations [8]. They are teaming up with sustainability-oriented lifestyle changes on military bases and training exercises without dissenting from the military's mission [9]. Thus far, evidently, Darwin's conflict paradigm usurps the environmentalists cooperation paradigm at the human point, exactly where cooperation is most needed, given the environmental nightmare. Meanwhile most faith communities, usually deemed the 'spiritual beachhead' for humanity, today participate in war and/or hardly question citizenship concepts beyond the peace patriot level. A primary identity in the nation-state continues to hold a deeply insouciant upper hand for most environmentalists and most faith communities [10], superseding even their valued sacred-secular overlap as constituents and in general environmental philosophy. Their 'a-political' stance—whether to honor their non-profit legal status and/or to avoid party politics for other reasons—reveals itself to be a larger, trans-partisan nationalistic commitment. Intentionally or not, it lines up with mainstream politics of identity and allegiance. Our point here is not further critique, but only to observe the difficulty even planetary emergency evidently has in transforming human identity concepts when so ensconced in the nation-state. That has been and continues to be the case with the nuclear specter as a cowardly nationalistic tragedy of muscle-flexing and blame-fixing. Today this political-and-environmental nightmare continues easily to hide behind the conventional public and judicial will of nation-state loyalties. Likewise, most faith communities and environmental organizations fail to grasp, thus far, that national principles and documents—regardless of the 'holy massage' they are constantly given—are simply too small to embrace whole-earth responsibility.

That is, whenever a paradigm is challenged, we tend to question the data rather than our presuppositions, if the paradigm of nation-state identity is not replaced by planetary primacy, we can expect parochial presuppositions and their emotional reinforcement in the face of each political 'hot-button' that comes along, to continue obscuring the commonness of our problems. Planetary citizens therefore hear the global environmental alarm as default of a latent solution, unmodeled because of nationalistic distraction.

The alarm continues planetarians' specific commitments already operative on prior epistemological grounds; to end patriotism is to end war and pro-actively fling open the door to planetary (beyond nation-based) consciousness, much like mothers' milk prompts the lesson of our commonness. Therefore the environmental crisis does not derail the planetarian into a cynical anthropology that claims people conceal 'immutable selfishness' behind nation-state loyalties. Planetarians insist people don't choose something they believe to be false and wrong. Their choice, based on known alternatives of the moment, appears to be true and good. Hence all the extant traditions of pre-modernity whose ingress continues today, understand the essence of evil largely as choice based on deception and dissemblance. They know we can be duped, that nothing is more dangerous than sincere ignorance. At the same time, perhaps out of impatience with that suspected possibility, we seem unable to be in honest, permanent denial. We need resolve. We may be cynical intellectually, but cannot afford to be so absolutely—as anything from proverbial New Year's resolutions to patriotic fervor indicates—not even in the face of environmental perplexity.

Standing on the best life-affirming strands of these traditions, the world citizen operates with human possibility rather than casuistic futility—but not naively. Possibility overcomes futility not by Neo-Platonic pipe-dreaming but rather—in the form of an argument extended in time—by a public socio-political alternative vindicated by the living of it. The alternative embodies the paradigmatic truth of the universal human family, hinted at recently on an emotional level at least, in the compassionate international response to the 2004 Asian tsunami. Likewise, averting the encroaching global environmental disaster, in the underscoring echo of planetarian 'realism', has possibility if the way of the universal family frees humanity from its 'patriotic fate'.

Till that way is incarnated by the larger world, the planetarian remains an interim 'wet blanket' contrast to modernity. As perspective and as society, it is not an innocuous 'Utopian ornament' in a smorgasbord of whimsical human options. Its contrast is its impelling, universalist challenge. It contrasts not for contrast sake but by virtue of the values-judgment of the surrounding 'normal', thus-far parochial societies within which world citizens live. That judgment—for now tinged with varying intensities of ostracism in different cultural settings, due to their societal nonconformity when deemed necessary—tends to make 'resident aliens' out of world citizens. Structurally and individually, creatively and pro-actively, they are at home everywhere yet never entirely at home anywhere. At the very least, that buries the patriotic hatchet and births the rule of nonviolent world matriotism.

Peter Sprunger-Froese
919 Sahwatch, Colorado Springs, CO 80903
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NOTES AND CITATIONS
[1] A language tilt wherever suitable, for the predominantly secular readership of this discussion, needs respectful highlighting. Any larger topic would conceivably widen that tilt even more, to acknowledge the linguistic potpourri in this society, even despite its 'melting pot' cultural history Here it is nevertheless noted, from a faith orientation, that this prided 'post-religious' society is due a sober reminder about the large, naive and quite unconscious assumptive overlap in typical secular-religious discussion, especially on topics like citizenship and loyalty. Since all human existence includes physicality, these topics are inescapably mundane (secular), contrary to the largely mythical, ahistorical ontology some religions tend to 'wish' for and even pretend. Yet these topics are also inescapably mythical in that they assume and reflect the ideological—that which transcends human palpability and logical reasoning processes. That means the challenge of linguistically muddy and nuanced interlocution with these topics must be less taboo than the two 'camps' usually assume. What follows will indirectly make that clear, even though that is not the discussion's focus.

[2] On one level the old adage, 'peace begins when the hungry are fed', may be extrinsic to a discussion of human identity and loyalty, yet on another level it is axiomatic background. Economics would argue that to attribute warfare in one way or another to the unjust acquisition of resources—greed—is simple, historical honesty. Warfare's reason is about injustice and deprivation, the 'haves' asserting their powerful boot on the necks of the 'have nots' in a finite world of limited resources. Consequently, charity and service concerns spring forth, as well as how to promote less greedy and more sustainable personal lifestyles, and more just structures of resource attainment and distribution. These concerns are and always must be of critical importance. Yet it is striking how little the identity factor is typically allowed to pertain. If honesty were given its greater due, I propose, we'd acknowledge greed's other problem; like killing, it exceeds the durability of conscience. For that reason greed too must have justification. Thus the voices of identity, such as patriotic, terrorist, ethnic, pedigree or class shibboleth—both in secular and/or religious vigor-become an indispensable 'working tool' to validate behavior, whether that of a transnational company, nation, group or individual- Discussing the rise of the national security state, Nicholas Wolterstorff argues quite similarly: "...the more injustice a state tolerates or perpetrates, the more it finds it necessary to appeal to (and cultivate) feelings of national loyalty in order to maintain a consensus that its policies are indeed legitimate; roughly speaking, the more gross the injustice, the more excessive the nationalistic appeals must be." Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids Eerdmans, 1983), 121.

Some analysts take careful note of certain elite U.S. companies deliberately reconceiving themselves as global entities, chiefly because their markets are global. Prom this they argue that these companies protect their interests better through monetary and trade policies than military might. Inference can then conclude (almost like Marxist economic theory of an eventual international proletariat consciousness, but with different premises) that the territorial state—and its patriotic support—is losing its raison d'etre. See eg, Michael L. Budde, "Selling America, Restricting the Church," in Wes Avram, ed., Anxious about Empire: Theological Essays on the New Global Realities (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004), 79-88. However true this may come to be in changing times, a rationale to justify transnationals' exploitive forces can be expected to continue. One of those is militarism, a pervasive 'unspoken' ideology that exalts military values, methods, and industry to maintain an affluent economy. For U.S. based transnationals this is particularly advantageous, given the U.S.'s extensive lead in patriotism, and the close meshing of patriotism and militarism. Patriotism is the transnationals' easy 'ace card' to abate criticism and to allign the U.S. public against potentially uncooperative trading partners.

While a social psychology lens would helpfully also depict U.S. patriotic alacrity as an adolescent, insecure cultural mindset needing ego-stroking, our point here is related but simpler; any primary identity designation can rationalize behavior in any direction. Its ignominy starts with something as 'innocent' and 'unrelated' as name-calling, or even as team-preference among athletic fans. In the case of the sustainability movement identity designations can even be used as not-so-subtle 'holier than thou' posturing among its members about their personal consumption-reduction achievements. As related to economics and resources, primary identity designations can justify domination and exploitation by the elite (as nations and/or corporations) as well as vengeance by the poor against the rich or against other poor (gangs, terrorist groups). The examples of Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir indicate how easily even female identity and gender politics can be usurped by what they understood as primary identity, the nation-state. In total these designations indicate the human capacity, both socially and individually, to exceed benign instinct with cognition—and therefore to have choice—but also that our lives and our systems want legitimation, not just physical survival. Ernest Becker in Escape From Evil (New York: Free Press, 1975), extends the point to insist it is our mortality-consciousness as our greatest insecurity, that most drives our quest for survival. Consequently we seek refuge in a 'publicly validated' quasi-immortal identity, such as the nation-state. If Becker is right, a case-by-case study—even despite the futility of adequate answers to 'chicken or egg' questions—would reveal human conflict, such as war, to be more likely spawned and perpetuated by rationalization than by greed per se.

[3] Jim Wallis comments similarly, about the relationship between slavery and the U.S. Constitution: "Even in the founding document of our nation, the famous constitutional compromise defined the slave as only three-fifths of a person. The professed high ideals of Anglo-Western society could have existed side by side with the profitable institution of slavery only if the humanity of the slave was denied and disregarded." Cross Currents 57, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 198.

[4] As operative, frequently interrelated terms, 'freedom' and 'democracy' can be construed as the most instinctual distraction by the U.S. public from honest inquiry about their conceivable substance. As national values, they can align with Lincoln's reference to democracy in the Gettysburg Address as an experiment, not a dogma. The typical assumption underneath is that they are the byproduct of military force, and by correlation, can be protected only that way. Hence 'freedom and democracy' as ideology trumps and replaces the people. Their further confusion with patriotism adds to the irony. See Carol Hunter, "Teaching Peace Issues in U.S. Survey Courses," in Louise Hawkley and James C. Juhnke, eds., Nonviolent America: History Through the Eyes of Peace (Newton: Mennonite Press, 1993), 143-157.

[5] Though derived from eighteenth century French philosopher Jean Rousseau, the term was first popularized by U.S. sociologist Robert Bellah in reference to the intermeshing of this society's religious and civil segments. See his "Civil Religion in America," Daedalus 96.1 (Winter 1967): 1-21. Donald B. Kraybill has given this interrelation an interesting book-length treatment in his Our Star-Spangled Faith (Scottdale: Herald, 1976). With the adaptation of beliefs, practices and symbols from the Judeo-Christian heritage, civil religion denotes a common religion 'for everyone' that transcends all religious affiliations for the sake of the values and priority of the nation-state. Ironically, civil religion contradicts one of this country's most esteemed political and religious concepts—the separation of church and state.

[6] The term is used here intentionally to identify a quasi-innate cultural issue. Aaron Stern, in Me: The Narcissistic American (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), instead uses 'narcissism'—love of self—to warn of an affliction in this society that somewhat overlaps 'solipsism'. Although narcissism is an innate and necessary human force from birth, it can and must be controlled. In proper human socialization it balances out with the discovery of and concern for others—thus making societal, interdependent existence possible. Stern argues that in a society such as this, where human struggle for basic survival has been achieved, the struggle for rewards, pleasures, self-gratification, youthfulness, and love of power dominates—leaving in its wake maladies such as mental illness, child abuse, disregard of society's elderly, and the rule of violence. Rectification of the problem of over-balanced love of self is possible, through arduous re-education and media reform. Conversation with Stern would note possible differences such as individualism, between the U.S. and other societies which also have achieved basic survival—but without the extensive narcissistic maelstrom in its wake. Solipsism, long ago rebuffed by the rigor of Enlightenment disputation, has more a philosophical than sociological tone. It argues that the individual human mind has no basis for believing in anything but itself. This 'egocentric epistemological predicament' includes even 'sensory skepticism', the belief that sensations are relative and unreliable because they are modifications of the knower, and no more a part of the world than say the pin prick is a part of the pin. Regardless of its philosophical unfeasibility today, solipsism serves in this discussion to point to a deeply lingering xenophobic and, by extrapolation, 'manifest destiny' type of cultural mindset here in the U.S.—since well before the mainstream's 'basic survival' point had been achieved.

[7] Chris Huebner, A Precarious Peace: Yoderian Explorations on Theology, Knowledge, and Identity (Waterloo, Ont: Herald Press, 2006), 196-202.

[8] More background information is at www.fortcarsonsustainability.com

[9] Often the environmentalists assume a 'centrist', stepping-stone relational strategy; if the military can be conscientized toward gradually more sustainable training practices and means of warfare on the battlefield—maybe the notion of war and strife will evaporate and slowly be replaced by a sense of the interdependent, 'we are all one' pacifist planetary web. The ends-in-the-means principle has been completely lost in this wishful ether. As long as the military mission employs whatever means best expedites winning, dominating, destroying and killing—which it always does by definition as well as by patriotism's powerful psychological drumbeat—it will create ends that inherently belie any 'we are all one' wholism. Even knowing that a 'violent' participant, by conceivably consenting to a particular project's nonviolent mission statement and strategy (means), can help it to eventually depose an unwanted leader or issue without violence (end), our point holds; 'nation-state environmentalism' can no more lead to peace, justice and sustainability than a spinach seed can produce a tomato. Furthermore, the means-ends principle is as applicable in environmental work as in the nonviolence-learning-through-commitment caveat observed earlier (p. 9). If 'green-minded' soldiers on the battlefield were allowed consistency of means, environmentalism's inherent pacifism would lead them to quit their work precipitously. Their prescribed mission contradicts the pacifist 'end' that the soldiers' commitment to green 'means' would logicaly lead to. The other rationale environmentalists give for their sustainability-partnering with the military mission, is 'rip off; such teamwork channels some military dollars into the less wasteful hands of their own organizations. Both strategies indicate recoil, an 'unconscious' Faustian pact with the military mission by those environmentalists who were not pro-military beforehand.

[10] That could be very different. As a perspective predating modern environmentalism, faith communities could provide the precocity sometimes available in the advantage of a longer history. By resisting war with body, mind and money, for instance, they could model and articulate their prophetic roots as a societal identity concept prior to and beyond all nation-based citizenship. Such inherent internationalism could then erase the parochialism in typical environmentalist organizations and strengthen those that already are 'whole-earth1, including the World Social Forum as well as administratively shackeled organizations such as the UN or World Federalists. See further discussion about other action options in Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Jonah, Jesus, and Other Good Coyotes: Speaking Peace to Power in the Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007).