When kamala harris spoke of her nation’s soul

When kamala harris spoke of her nation’s soul

At the start of the US presidential campaign, the media, especially in India, went rah-rah over the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate, Kamala Devi Harris’s India connection. That her mother was a Tamil woman who emigrated to the US from Tamil Nadu, when barely 19 years of age, to work towards finding a cure for cancer, became a huge talking point.

An article authored by this writer, published in The Times of India, titled, ‘Kamala Is Much More Than Lakshmi And Lotus,’ said in its concluding line, “Let us hope that in the days to come, Kamala’s potential and energy unfold, as would the infinite petals of a metaphysical lotus bud, and help realign and balance the chakras of America and its people … and more.”

Does a country have chakras? When we talk of a nation’s chakras, it is a metaphorical personification that seeks to draw a parallel between human and nation. This is exactly what VP-elect Kamala Harris tried to do in the concluding lines of her victory speech at Wilmington, Delaware when she spoke of her nation’s soul: “Now is when the real work begins … To root out systemic racism in our justice system and society. To combat the climate crisis. To unite our country and heal the soul of our nation …”

Do nations have souls? “The soul of a nation, like the soul of an individual, is the root from which decency arises; it is the basis of any desire to behave according to our collectively expressed values,” says Susan Thistlethwaite, of the Chicago Theological Seminary. We do know that a nation is an artificial construct, created to serve the purposes of administration, economy, commerce, diplomacy, aggression and war. But patriotism has a converse side: It inspires people of diverse persuasions, who love their country (read culture, knowledge, tradition), to unite for a common cause, especially during emergencies like disasters, pandemics and … well, war.

While patriotism could have a salutary effect on a country’s people, sheer nationalism could lead to negative surges of exclusivism that is bereft of the soul quotient. Here soul would refer to the softer aspects, the higher dimensions of being part of a collective; of being able to bond together and rally together to defend against a common threat or to gather collective resources for the common good.

If soul indicates the presence of consciousness, of being able to navigate with a moral-ethical compass and do right rather than wrong, then perhaps a nation, as a collective of millions of people with individual souls, could be assumed to operate with a collective soul, an aggregation of all souls but not necessarily mirroring the essence of each of those souls. Rather, a nation’s soul is reflected in the way the country operates at all levels, with the backing of at least a majority of its peoples as one would expect, in a democracy.

An individual’s soul needs healing when it is unable to operate from its consciousness, when obstacles hinder it from doing so. When a nation’s soul needs healing, it points to unhealthy trends that need to be remedied. This is perhaps what Kamala Harris is alluding to when she speaks of the need to unite the country and “heal the soul of our nation …”.