Love of Country, I
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America 250 on Mostly Aesthetics part 6: patriotism defended
Patriotism gets some side-eye from many, and—in elite clubs and back-room meetings—patriotic Americans get more. But patriotism can be defended, and is given a worthy defense, in Spencer Case’s soon-to-appear book Why It’s OK to be Patriotic. I got a sneak peak, and some access to the man himself. (Spencer is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, at the University of Arizona; his website is spencercasephilosophy.com.)
1. Patriotic love.
Patriotism is “love for one’s country and compatriots as such.” As such: I love my wife, who is my compatriot, but my love for her is not an instance of patriotism. This definition of patriotism is simple, but love itself is confusing, even for the philosopher.
What do you love about America? Some will answer with the values the nation professes: among them, liberty, equality, democracy, justice. But America is not unique in these ideals, nor, some think, does it live up to them better than others. If a patriot learns of a place that does it better, he will love America still, but how can this be? If those values ground your love, shouldn’t you switch your allegiance, if a superior option comes along? Spencer asks,
If patriots simply love abstract values such as democracy or justice, why couldn’t they “trade up” to countries that better instantiate those features?
Certainly if I value flashiness in a car, I’ll buy a flashier model, if I can afford it. But when people move countries, and profess justice as their reason, they are not much regarded as patriots, of the countries they abandoned.
Spencer answers his question by suggesting that what we love, when we love our country for its values, is more specific, than a bare four-item list:
Patriots don’t just love their countries’ values in the abstract; they love particular elaborations of those values—shaped by specific histories, constitutional structures, and cultural inheritances.
America may be unique in its elaborations of its values, even if many countries share the values elaborated. By “elaborations” Spencer means, at least, ways of trading off values when they conflict:
Most democratic countries share overlapping values but weigh them differently when they come into tension. Americans weigh gun ownership rights heavily and allow citizens to “sit it out” during elections, whereas Australia forbids most private gun ownership and requires all citizens to vote. It’s not that the US values freedom and Australia doesn’t, or that Australia values civic participation and the US doesn’t, or that Australia values safety and public order and America doesn’t. Rather, each country has come to different arrangements for how to realize the optimal balance between these values.
Maybe America’s way of trading off values is better than Australia’s (many certainly say so!); or maybe no way is ideal, each country’s way is a mix of good and bad, or is best suited to its ways of living, and there’s no saying which is, abstractly, “better.” Either way, the patriot is safe, from the danger that Australia might have more of what he loves about America.
Spencer also suggests that the threat of “trading up” misunderstands how love responds to the thing loved:
A country’s values...need not be optimal in order for it to be a worthy object of patriotic love.
Even in, per impossible, Australia’s safeguarding of liberty were superior to America’s, America’s is good enough, to justify patriotic love: just as it’s okay to admire a great person, though they be not a god.
This all seems right. But more might be said. In Spencer’s discussion, loving America for its freedom is giving a justification, or a motive, for one’s love. But that is not all it can be, and maybe it need not be even that. Love itself brings an impulse to admire the thing you love, and to attend carefully to its features, with an interest in finding in it features that are admirable. If you love America for its freedom, then you admire America for its freedom, and this admiration is an expression of your love, not a cause or a reason for it. If that’s so, the existence of other free countries need not undercut your love, as freedom is not the basis for it.
2. Is patriotism bad?
Patriotism can be a force for evil, when it causes zealotry, or the demonization of “enemy” countries. Spencer describes the murder of a German immigrant by American citizens during World War I. The mob acted out of anti-German hysteria. It “paraded Prager through the streets of Collinsville, Illinois, barefoot and wrapped in an American flag. The mob forced him to sing patriotic songs,” then lynched him. Prager was not just murdered on the basis of his nationality—horrible enough; he was made a spectacle, in a disgusting display he was made to parrot expressions of American patriotism before his death, a humiliation that was motivated by a dark form of patriotism itself. There are too many examples: the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; the persecution of “communist sympathizers” during the Cold War.
But a considered judgment about patriotism must weight its bad effects against its good. Those goods may be “mundane,” day-to-day, not headline news, and so easily ignorable; but if they are small by some measure, they are also many, and should not be ignored. Spencer includes among these the facts that
Patriotism fortifies people against temptations to take bribes, cheat in an election, or refuse to accept the results of an election, judicial decision, or other political process when these are unfavorable.
We take these things for granted (maybe less than we used to), but they are the acts of a patriotic people. Spencer mentions one instance of this that was indeed newsworthy:
The Republican politicians who resisted Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, most notably Vice President Mike Pence and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, didn’t seem to be acting out of self-interest alone. Both men were under pressure to go along with the scheme: Pence from a mob that physically threatened him, Raffensperger from anonymous threats he and his wife received, and both men from the president and their electoral base. Patriotism seems to have been an important part of why they ultimately did not succumb to these formidable pressures.
What else is good about patriotism? In general, since patriotism is a kind of love, and surely is “relevantly similar to other forms of love,” then “it, too, should make the world better on the whole.” And while love can be “twisted” or vicious, it’s wrong to to think it cannot be a virtue, or a cause of justice:
The good father isn’t someone who puts his children ahead of morality; rather, he does right by his family because he loves them. Likewise, the patriot is one who puts country ahead of self without putting either before right.
For example,
Those who love their own countries can more easily have empathy for the patriots of other countries. They can understand why it’s so important that their country be treated with dignity on the world stage, and why many react with outrage at perceived slights to their country’s dignity.
Also, love of country (when virtuous) is wanting what’s best for one’s country, and an unjust country is worse for being unjust:
[Patriots] have special reason to be concerned with their country’s moral standing as well as its prosperity.
3. When Patriotism erodes
After the Nazi victories of 1940, France was occupied and by an alien and evil regime. Most of the French (correctly) regarded its rule as illegitimate, and offered the minimum compliance needed to avoid punishment, and no more. Many took opportunities, where they could, to cheat, undermine, and generally oppose that regime, both materially and symbolically. When I studied this recently, the details of what they did, and how they thought, were a disturbing echo of the way many Americans think and act today (maybe different Americans, over the last few presidential terms). This decline is many things, and has many causes, but one thing it is, is an erosion of patriotism, which is a harm to the nation. Spencer’s articulation of this stood out to me:
A flourishing country requires citizens who are willing to sacrifice on its behalf, capable of restraining their passions when the common good demands it, and willing to see their political rivals as compatriots committed to the same shared goods, not enemies. Post-patriotic politics, if it can be called “politics” at all, is a zero-sum struggle for power: every election feels like a coup, every loss like a foreign occupation.
4. Beauty.
Finally, Spencer writes this about patriotism, a thought I’d not considered before:
Patriotism, like other forms of love, is partly aesthetic.
He elaborates,
Countries have distinctive landscapes, ways of speaking, architecture, culinary styles, and artistic traditions that create unique aesthetic experiences and contribute to an overall national character.
Spencer gives a few examples in the book, but none from America, so I asked him to try his hand at a statement of the American aesthetic, that only a patriot (and maybe, only he) could produce. It will appear next, in “Love of Country, II.”
Read more of America 250 on Mostly Aesthetics:
A mature patriot loves the country enough to see its flaws.