Old Habits

A Syrian refugee, photo from the U.N. Refugee Agency

I was finishing reading a new book on the Armenian genocide just as the anti-refugee sentiment began its upswing. The actions were different, but the basic instinct behind it--a fear and hatred of those different from ourselves--was the same. Often, our default instinct is to be suspicious, and hostile, towards those who are outside of our group. It's a habit that seems common, but it remains disturbing to see it in action just the same. 

Send them back, lock them out, take care of our own first. And those were just the mildest sentiments anyone could hear. There was certainly anti-refugee sentiment before (right-wing groups warned of the President admitting "10,000 Muslims" into the country), but the tenor ratcheted up after the attacks in Paris. The very same people who make a habit of never helping anyone suddenly were overcome with concern for the homeless in our country, for veterans, when before they decried any such help as "entitlements" or something we can't afford due to the need for a balanced budget. Similar sentiments were voiced before the Second World War, when Americans were opposed to letting in Jewish refugees attempting to escape the horror that life in Germany had become for them, saying that the United States needed to help its own first. Anti-Semitism played a role then, just as anti-Arab and anti-Islamic sentiment is playing a role in the current debate. 

Mark Twain is once said to have remarked that "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." The attitude towards Syrian refugees seems similar to the attitude held towards Jewish refugees. The same arguments against immigration from Mexico today were deployed against immigrants from Ireland barely a century ago. The Assyrians believed that those who didn't bow to their god had to die, which seems to apply equally as well to the beliefs of ISIS. Because of differences in language and culture and religion, humanity has slaughtered and enslaved each other from Westphalia to Anatolia, Baghdad to Wounded Knee with relish. This common thread makes studying history an often depressing enterprise.

This old habit, this division of "us" and "them," is something that we can no longer afford. The problems that confronted us in the 20th Century, and continue to confront us in the 21st Century--nuclear proliferation, food insecurity, climate change and a host of others--do not confront individual nations, they confront the whole of humanity. We cannot overcome them on our own. All of us must work to solve these problems. And we cannot do it if we refuse to recognize that people who dress differently, speak a different language, or worship differently than ourselves are not so different after all, worthy of the same concern, the same dignity, that we expect will be accorded to us. We are all one species, on this shared planet.

Humans have shown a tendency to exhibit the same distressing failings again and again, but in spite of that we have made progress. Where once the practice of slavery was considered normal, one by one nations of the world finally decided that this was unacceptable. We can be better than we were in the past. The increasing complexity of our world demands it.