Patriotism
By Callimachus | Related entries in IdeasIt’s finally shirt-sleeve weather here in Pennsylvania, and my wife and son are such good company I find it tiresome to sit down and attack a keyboard when the sun is shining and the daffodils nod in the garden and spread their scent.
With little to say on politics, I’ve said little. It’s a policy I highly recommend. It makes me a poor blogger.
I thought Justin’s question of “what do you want to see more of here” was a good one, and I hope I can take the answers to heart.
I wish I could turn off the churning in my head. I wish, for instance, I could stop trying to remember the name of the font type that Julius Streicher used in headlines in Der Stürmer. Was it Berthold’s Trump-Deutsch? (No, check that; it’s clearly a fraktur of some sort.) Or one of the Bauer fonts? OK, that probably will never turn into a blog post, and I guess I understand why no one had bothered to make a digital version of it.
Another churning matter is a book on reforming Islam that I’ve meant to review for months. And another is the topic of patriotism. That one I finally wrestled into a straight-jacket and evicted into print. But there was something left over:
I notice a tendency of some people on the left to proclaim their patriotism by identifying it with a love of the people of the United States. They love our country because they embrace the people who live in it. That only allows them to hug the nation without having any truck with the government, the history, the flag, the culture, and all the rest of that poisonous material. I can’t help getting the feeling some people are trying to squirm out from under that awfully un-PC word, which is, after all, from the same root as the detested noun patriarchy.
Loving your fellow humans is a virtue, certainly, but its name is not patriotism. Because the American people aren’t the nation, the concept embraced in patria. And that definition of patriotism as love of fellow citizens provides no reason why we should love the people here more, or differently, than the people in Peru.
Adam Smith gave a typically balanced 18th century definition of patriotism when he wrote, “the love of our country” rests on two principles: a respect for the constitution and a concern for the good and happiness of others. “He is not a citizen who is not disposed to respect the laws and to obey the civil magistrate; and he is certainly not a good citizen who does not wish to promote, by every means in his power, the welfare of the whole society of his fellow-citizens.” ["Theory of Moral Sentiments"]
His country was Britain, of course, but the Britain of those years had something in common with modern America; both, for instance, were reigning world powers. Yet in late 18th century Britain, free-thinking utilitarian intellectuals and evangelical Christians worked together, or side by side, to reform prisons, humanize penal codes, abolish slavery, and educate the poor. That the problems were mostly bigger than the reformers could handle doesn’t take away from the power of their combined efforts.
And it seems like Smith’s dictum unites the two halves of patriotism that I often meet: follow the rules and defend your country, and work to make your country a more free, fair place for all. Between doing good and doing right, we don’t have to stand opposite each other and try to decide which is the real patriotism. Both are.
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 6th, 2006 and is filed under Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 6th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
A little off topic, but…
There’s a bumper sticker I’ve seen for many years that says “I love my country, it’s my government I fear.” That bumper sticker used to be accompanied by an NRA sticker. Now I see it most often accompanied by an anti-war sticker. While I suppose it’s possible that there’a a lot of anti-war NRA members running around Texas, my feeling is that the bumber sticker has jumped political parties.
Whether that’s just an effect of the switch from Clinton to Bush or an effect of a shift in America’s political cultures, I don’t really know.
April 6th, 2006 at 8:10 pm
An excellent post, Cal. I shall think on it, and add my two cents later, but don’t expect any German fonts. I especially like the link back to the Patria, as I think many of us forget that in the heat of important and not-so-impotant debates. Thank you for that. Yes, the weather does tend to make us want to slow down … which in most cases is a good thing.
April 7th, 2006 at 8:58 am
Well said! Questioning each other’s patriotism is getting way out of hand.
April 7th, 2006 at 10:54 am
Accusing Democrats of hating their country and wanting the terrorists to win really pisses me off. If it were the other way around that would also piss me off.
Has politics always been this ugly or did it get that way with Clinton’s election? I’ve always voted for the man, not the party so didn’t pay much attention until around ‘96. It seems that’s when it got ugly.
2004 was the first time in my life I ever voted a straight party line, and I hated doing it.
April 7th, 2006 at 11:01 am
“I love my country, it’s my government I fear.�
I gotta get me one of them for my truck, to go next to my NRA sticker.
I can fear the govt just as much as some anti-war person — but probably for completely different reasons.
April 7th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
ford4×4,
No, you probably don’t. I’m anti-war, anti-big-govt, and anti-domestic wire tapping. FOX News and the administration can call it “Domestic Terrorist Eavsdropping” but we should all be adult enough to know the information is pointing in the other direction, especially with Gonzalez telling us its completely legal for them to monitor you and I….
So I have a feeling, you fear for your freedoms…so do I…
So many freedom-loving conservatives are giving up some of their freedoms in blind trust of this administration. I miss the days when I could relate to those on the right who just wanted to government to leave them alone and stop wasting their tax money. Call me a libertarian liberal….but I don’t trust this government one bit.
April 10th, 2006 at 10:55 pm
Hello everybody, I want to make friend with you. Nice to meet you.