Home, Sweet Home

A Reflection on Personal and National Identity

“You were abandoned by your motherland and robbed of your blood relatives. And I do realize that without a country to trace your history back to, or a race to draw your culture from, pride is the one way you have of maintaining your identity… But that way of life is much too flawed. Three things make a man: the homeland he was born into, the blood running through his veins, and the bonds he forms. If you have none of those and try to preserve your soul with naught but your pride, you will eventually lose your sense of self and crumble into nothing… Hear my words and commit them to heart.” Frederica Rosenfort in 86 – Eighty-Six: Run Through the Battlefield, Part 1 by Asato Asato

This statement from Frederica, a young character in 86 – Eighty-Six that anime viewers only meet in the second half of the show’s first season, resonated with me in a somewhat odd manner. Mostly because I have been growing quite discontent with the current zeitgeist about disassociating from one’s heritage in some manner. One way in which this is accomplished is to repudiate one’s family; another is to repudiate one’s country for its sins. The former deserves its own post so today we will focus on the latter, which is typically emphasized in the phrase “X isn’t a place, it’s a people.”

A case in point to demonstrate this argument for disinheriting one’s country is Thor: Ragnarok. By the end of the film, we and Thor are told that Asgard is built upon innocent blood shed in wars of conquest (though what Odin conquered and why that territory is not held in the present by Asgard is never shown nor stated), that Thor had a bloodthirsty elder sister (who is actually Loki’s daughter in myth and comics), and Ragnarok itself seems to be less of an inevitable “Twilight of the Gods” and more of a karmic retribution on the generation of Asgardians who had no part in the wars which occurred previously.

Even 86 – Eighty-Six at least had the decency to point out that a proper punishment for a generation’s sins would be that generation recognizing where they went wrong, asking their victims for forgiveness, and then being denied it (or, at the very least, learning that forgiveness does not preclude atonement) to be properly chastised for their evil actions. Thor: Ragnarok tries to get even with a past that is (a) false based upon the myths and taking nothing from the comics and (b) which died with Odin. Punishing Thor and his people does nothing because they were not the ones who committed any crime. Making them nomads looking for a new world to call home does no better, as where can they find an uninhabited world large enough to rebuild their society practically from the ground up again?

It’s all well and good to say they can have a place in Norway, but that is Norway’s land. They are leasing it to the Asgardians – or, even if they have essentially sold it to them, Asgardians live millennia. They also possess powers no mortal can match or overcome. They have the capacity to rebuild their civilization of magic-that-is-not-magic from the ground up. Who in their right mind would allow such potentially dangerous people to set up shop on their metaphorical doorstep?

Some would say, of course, “Who could stop them?” However, abiding by the theory that the Asgardians planted themselves in that particular part of Norway with no questions asked means the land was acquired by theft. In other words, they stole it. Bloodlessly, but it is still stealing, and wars have started because one people moved onto land that technically belonged to another people but wasn’t being used by them, because sooner or later those who technically own it decide they want it back. This is either for its own sake or due to the fact that the newcomers living there have something they want.

You might begin to see the problem, readers. John C. Wright covered it in more detail here and here, but to simplify: people have been living on land taken from others since the dawn of time. Sometimes the land is purchased with money, sometimes with blood, and sometimes it is simply taken because the previous residents vacated the premises permanently through death, invasion, national decline, or some other occurrence. But in all cases the land one stands on the world over was previously inhabited by other humans at some point in the past.

This is as much the case for Americans as for any other country on Earth. The only difference is that, within the borders of our own nation, Americans are not tied to the soil they are born on as most other people are. We can – and have – packed up everything to move on to greener pastures within our own nation. As Mr. John C. Wright states here, America is a faith and a creed more than a place. In that respect, within our own borders, home is where we Americans stake our claim and build our lives. For those who are American in spirit but not yet in fact, home is not the nation where they were born, but the nation they intend to move into and assimilate to at some point in the future.

Americans are not like the rest of the world population, which is tied to the soil and has built upon the ruins of previous domiciles even after an attack has reduced the original town to ruins. A primary modern example is the Twin Towers; though perhaps we should have constructed a new building on the site, we didn’t. We erected a memorial instead.

In Europe, the memorials are typically added to the village, town, or the city, with something new built (more often than not) on top of what stood there previously. A happy case in point would be the Irish pub that has existed for roughly nine hundred years and is standing on the foundation of all the previous incarnations of the same building. That doesn’t typically happen in America. We’re different, and I am not writing that as a point of pride. It is a fact.

Learn more about Sean’s Bar here.

Should you divorce a man from his homeland somehow, he loses a fundamental part of his identity. That is part of the problem for the titular 86 in the story; they have been robbed of everything. Their families, their names, and their national identity were all stripped from them by those who wanted to foist their national defense off on someone else. Since the 86 were all “colored” or non-Alba, they were an easy scapegoat.

Most reviewers focus on that fact, but what Frederica’s statement brought to mind for me is the very real erosion of modern man’s ability to recognize that his country is part and parcel of his individual identity. America is a country based on a philosophy, a belief. Take an American out of his native state and put him in another one in the continental U.S., Alaska, or Hawaii and he will still consider himself fundamentally American. If you put someone from another country who wants to assimilate to the U.S. in America and give him that chance, he will be at home anywhere in the “Lower 48,” Alaska, or Hawaii for the same reason (though he naturally might prefer some regions to others due to the climate).

While the statement “X isn’t a place, it’s a people” is accurate with regard to Americans in the sense of how we move around within our own borders, the fact remains that the expression isn’t being used in that manner when it appears on screen, a la Thor: Ragnarok. There it is being used to try to divorce Americans from their belief in their country.

None of this is to say that this faith shouldn’t be questioned – believing something blindly is almost as ill-advised as believing in nothing at all. But it does mean that certain fundamental truths have to be recognized as true, or the person doing the questioning is going to tilt off their axis and go spinning into oblivion.

A number of the 86, as Frederica observes, have this precise problem. With no national identity, no family, and their fellow 86 taken from them by both the Legion and the Republic of San Magnolia, they have no grounding force. Nothing to root themselves in, to hold them together and give them shape, save that they will fight to the bitter end and never abandon their responsibilities on the battlefield. That is a noble goal for someone who is fated to die or, as Raiden Shuga put it, someone who knows they are going to be executed tomorrow. It is not, however, conducive to a free life where the threat of being executed simply for being a convenient scapegoat is no longer present.

The 86 are many things but, I think, it is also possible to see them as a warning. Relativism, which has a choke hold on the modern mindset, insists that there is no absolute truth. But that very statement is itself an absolute and – even worse – believing in it means someone becomes untethered from reality. This means he spirals into darkness because he has no anchor holding him to life, community, and nation.

Unbridled cynicism and skepticism have the same problem in that they lead one to question everything and never find a definite place on which to stand. The early cynics were often called dogs by the society of their time for their lack of manners and willingness to fight their friends as well as their opponents, something they said they did to “keep them honest” and prevent them from being hypocrites. Uninhibited questioning and disbelief can be compared to a man cutting a sturdy branch from beneath him, or reducing the cliff ledge on which he stands to a narrow, weakened shelf of rock. Sooner or later both the branch and the thin ledge will give way, leading the relativist, cynic, and skeptic to tumble to his doom.

This is what the 86 have to fear and fight against. Having cut themselves off from memories of a happy past and been denied everything that makes them human while being slaughtered in droves, they embrace a very pessimistic view of life. It allows them to face their assured executions with pride and dignity but it has no place in the hearts and minds of those who can – and should – fight to survive and live on.

In perfect honesty, the fact that 86 – Eighty-Six is so willing to spit in the eye of relativism and call its bluff is one of the most refreshing things about the series. Rather than tell the 86 they are doing fine or, just as bad, that they should simply leave their beliefs behind now that they are in a better position than they were previously Frederica confronts them. She knows they recognize that their new position of freedom is tenuous and that they will not trust it immediately. For this reason, rather than tell them what to do, Frederica urges them to think about an alternative belief system. She does not deny their right to return to the Legion war – in fact, she supports their choice.

However, she does not encourage their nihilistic view of life, urging them to consider that there may be more out there than they realize. She reminds them that they can and should dream again. That they are no longer bound by circumstance to believe in this negative worldview. That there is “light and high beauty,” to quote Professor Tolkien, forever beyond the darkness’ reach.

It is a message the 86 need to hear – repeatedly. They at first scoff at and/or tolerate it simply to avoid argument. Over time, though, their experiences show them the flaws in their own psyches which made their fatalistic beliefs seem the only acceptable ones. By volume nine in the series, the 86 have all learned to hope again.

Hope is a much harder thing to accomplish than despair. It requires strength where despair necessitates only apathy, and it hurts much more than indifference, though through personal experience I have to say that I have found lethargy to be less conducive to dulling pain than some might think. It doesn’t really numb a person to anguish; it just gives one the illusion of being separated from whatever emotions one is feeling. At least when hope is disappointed, the visceral quality of the pain can fade to a scar which will stop hurting.

Americans are, we all know, at a crossroads. We are, to a degree, feeling like the 86 due to decades of propaganda and abuse. We have made mistakes as a nation. We have fallen, we have sinned – may God help us and forgive us.

Yet we still have three things that make us who we are: our family (adopted or biological), our faith in our founding, and our belief that we can maintain the tradition of that founding through to the future. Despite many, many efforts to tear those things from us the success rate has been incredibly poor. Not as poor as we would like, perhaps, but certainly not as effective as it ought to have been, according to the numbers.

If the 86 can fight through surviving past their execution date to find hope for the future, then why can’t we? Our enemy is Legion, too, after all. Just because he does not wear a mechanical face (for most of us, anyway), that does not mean he is any less our foe.

We are not the 86 in fact nor in spirit, but this is still our battlefield. So let’s fight to the end…

…and then go beyond, as Americans always have, to see what’s over the horizon. Who knows? Maybe there will be greener pastures for us there, too.