Patriotism: What is it good for?

Great Debates
1

I tend to think that patriotism just boils down to outright partisanship. In the end I think it winds up being a destructive force in the lives of the peoples of the world.

One’s country after all, especially in the post-colonial world, isn’t always a place of natural geographic boundaries and cultural similarities. On many borders around the world, the people close to either side will share more commonalities than differences.

When it comes down to it, what really seperates many countries is bureaucracies backed up by armies and police forces. I have no love for any of these. They are for the most part necessary evils. After all, if we could live without armies, police, and bureaucrats, wouldn’t we have done so?

Love of one’s country I think actually translates into a type of subservience to these evils. Hence it only tends to perpetuate them and give them more power and respect than is absolutely necessary. This,IMO, is a bad thing.

2

So long as your country is never in a conflict with another country, you are probably correct. Petriotism during such times can be a source of conflict in itself, and thus complicates or worsens diplomatic relations.

When the welfare of the state, and hence the citizens of the state, depends upon men and women doing desperate and dangerous things, then patriotism becomes quite beneficial. Many people, when asked: will you lay down your life for your country, have answered “yes” without question. It disturbs me to see you characterize their sacrifice as subservience to evil.

Patriotism’s heart is a sense of group identification at scales beyond the tribal. It is certainly true that as tribalism conflicts with attempts to form nations, patriotism conflicts with attempts to form multi-national governmental structures, but that does not seem to be your complaint. From the OP it appears that you would see those structures as simply larger ‘necessary evils’. shrug I disagree, but that’s a digression.

Personally, I would love to live in a world where the majority of people had replaced both patriotism and tribalism in their hearts with humanism. Unfortunately, I do not, and I have no hope that I ever will.

3

I think it boils down to a difference between patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism is just the love of one’s country and culture. Nationalism, though is the belief one’s country and culture are superior to any other.

Nothing wrong with patriotism, It’s this nationalism that’s got me bugged.

4

But cultures are not distinct to a nation. Many nations share cultures. There are many cultures in one nation. What’s left in nation besides the bureacracy?

5

It disturbs me that you only see their willingness to die without seeing their willingness to kill. The military is force trained to ultimately and simply to murder human beings. Can you not see that as an evil?

I recognize the need for self defense, so I will call it necessary. But if all nations only acted in self defense it would be very hard for a war to start. Throughout most of my lifetime the military has engaged in actions that have little to do with self defense. Therefore it seems ridiculous to characterize our military as simply those who would lay down their lives in my defense.

6

SYLLABICATION: pa·tri·ot·ism **
NOUN: Love of and devotion to one’s country**.

You are wrong** erratum** , patriotism is a love of the topography, the mountains, streams, and physical properties, as well as the social culture and common bonds of the people, within the boundries of a land.

But conversely erratta, only countries that have governments with the voice and vote of free people have the moral authority to be unabashedly patriotic.

7

Perhaps I wasn’t clear in how I see the difference. I think of patriotism as simply being “I love it here! I love where I live. I love my customs.”

And then I think of nationalism as “This is the best place on earth and if you don’t like it, leave it! My country is better than yours and you have no right to criticize it.” and other jingoistic crap.

8

The boundaries are often arbitrary however and have little to do with the topography or the cultures involved. The Canadian/American border is a great example of this for the most part.
A patriot might remark,“On this side of the imaginary line the countryside is beautiful and the people are great. But 2 feet over, that’s Canada, I guess it’s all right”
Because of my location, I probably share more cultural similiraties with those across the border in Canada than I do with you in Alabama.

On top of that we, in particular, have a multi-cultural society even if it doesn’t always look like it on tv. So if we’re to be a nation we have to rise above our cultures and not expect us all to share the same one.

Look at the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq. They probably share more differences across the border than they do across their respective nations. What keeps them apart other than bureacracies and militaries?

Hmmm…let’s see how this comes into play.

9

Well I suppose that could also be statism or neighborhoodism or a preference for monoculture.
A nation is defined literally by it laws and its boundaries. Which are enacted by bureacrats, the police and the military. Without that you don’t have a nation, you simply have common cultures and geographical areas.

10

Where did I say that I did not see the willingness to kill. It is every bit as important to the survival of a state that its citizens be willing to kill as that they be willing to die. That is the world.

In one breath you claim to understand the need for self-defence, but in the breath previous you called it simply evil to be trained to kill. Do you imagine that a nation without citizens trained to kill can defend itself? I do not.

As to the justifications for particular military actions by the United States, that is rather a different topic than patriotism.

11

I see that it is a necessary evil as long as there are Stalins, Hitlers, Pol Pots, Osamas, and Hussains in this world.

I suppose, but such a thing is impossible. A complex society requires some form of organization. If nothing else, who builds and maintains the roads? There are certain economies of scale benefits that result from living in a cooperative society.

The benefit of patriotism is that people enjoy feeling like they are part of a larger group. When people take pride in being part of something, they work to improve it. They become involved and everyone is better off. In may ways, patriotism is no different than feeling pride in you school, religeon, a sports team or band you are involved in or caring for your family. It keeps us from being completely selfish and self-centered human beings.

The flip side of course is nationalism. Like any group, there is a fine line between pride and viewing those outside the group as inferior.

12

I can believe something both necessary and evil. It is not a contradiction to me.

Prisons for instance, are awful places, yet they are for the most part necessary. No one expects me to love a prison or celebrate the fact that its there. It’s just something we’ve resorted to because we haven’t thought of anything better. When and if we do however, they should gladly discarded.

I feel similarly about the military.

13

My point is that even though so far it’s necessary, it’s really just one solution that we’ve found and by it’s nature has flaws that we only bear due to the consequences of having nothing better. Hence it’s nothing to love, it’s simply something to be put up with.

Many of these things sound fine, but one can be involved in one’s community and contributing to it without giving a flip about the USA. Why should I care about the people on one side of the border more than the other?

And given that there is a fine line between patriotism and nationalism, why encourage it?

14

Because of my location, I probably share more cultural similarities with those across the border in Canada than I do with you in Alabama. * ~ errata*

Wrongo againo** errata**, I’m sure you wouldn’t “Boo” when the United States National Anthem is being played like Canadian hockey fans have being doing lately, now would you?

This is strange. Canadians would likely now be speaking Roosian were it not for we sabre-rattling war-mongerings US’ens.

15

I hate to keep coming from the realistic standpoint here, I think deep down inside I’m utopian, but ultimately patriotism makes sense to me.

Think about it, you love your wife/father/mother/husband more than you love some guy you me off the street don’t you? You care about them more, and in some cases you even think they are better than most people. That does’nt mean you have no care for most of humanity, or that you are just mindlessly following some jingoistic dogma that your loved one has told you, it just means you love them more. And why would’nt you? Your mother has made you who you are. You have a major investment in your loved ones, they’ve been there for you and taken care of you whenever things got bad, and youve done the same for them. Now imagine if people kept insulting your loved ones. You’d get feelings of nationalism (or I guess familiyism) too. That’s the way it goes for pariotism. It’s good because it shows a general appreciation for one’s country. It’s a respone to our feelings of love for a place that’s treated us pretty well and we also have major investment in it. People really should’nt feel shame in having feelings of patriotism, I think cynisism is’nt exactly a good quality to have anyways.

Just because alot of bad things have been done in the name of patriotism, does’nt mean it is a bad thing. In fact it should show how good of a thing it is. Leaders never want to claim to do bad things in the name of other bad things. No sane political leader would say “Let’s murder 10,000 people in the name of gluttony!”. That’s because patriotism is generally a good thing that some leaders misuse. Just like religion and pleasure domes filled with beautiful virgins.

As someone already stated patriotism also has another good use: It allows us to mobilize our citizens and increase their efficeincy. It gets the citizens to stop focusing on themselves and focus on making the country a better place. It allows the country to be a far more formidable fighting force.

Now on the subject of the military. I cringe whenever someone gives me the “war is bad” routine, alittle too simplistic for me. Yes we have people who are trained to kill. They are there because we have things other people want. I don’t think Micronesia has a very large military and there’s a reason. Also, and this may be hard to swallow, but we tend to use our military to kill for good reasons. WWII would’ve been interesting if we would’ve negotiated with Hitler for 12 years while he was summarily killing Jews. Kosovo might finally be cleansed if we did’nt load up our playstation 2’s and commence the video game war on them. Kuwait would be short a couple of hundred thousand people and I guarantee you Sadaam would be working on nukes if we did’nt put on something green and fight him in the first Gulf War. War has a use, sorry people. I sometimes wish it did’nt, but then again I wish my apartment would magically restock itself with Victoria Secrets models. It’s not a “nessecary evil”, it’s just “nessecary” somtimes. Wishing a problem would go away won’t help it much.

Back to patriotism. Why would I encourage it? Why would you fall in love with someone knowing that you’d care less for the fate of humanity than about how great your loved one is? Why would someone buy a loaf of bread to feed their family instead of buying a loaf of bread to give to a homeless shelter. Simple fact is, I don’t know. I guess I’d encourage it because, as we speak there are dictators around the world slaughtering their own citizens, police and military forces are taking over neighboring countries and raping the women and killing the men. All the while, the most serious complaint the average citizen here has about the police force is “That cop was rude”, or “It’s not fair that cops get to speed”. I guess I’d encourage it because while all that is happening, i’m sitting at home in my undies with a coke in one hand , my mouse in the other, surfing the world’s finest porn, and in about 9 hours I will be inside a club clumsily trying to pick up the first attractive girl I see. Sorry folks, if you want me to feel guilty about being prosperous, you’re talking to the wrong guy.

So let’s rephrase the two questions: “And given that there is a fine line between love and fanatisism, why encourage love?” and “Love: What is it good for?”.

16

I think patriotism is one of the most dangerous ideas in history. Patriotism conditions people to stop questioning government and its actions- that is the aim, and that is the accomplishment. What can happen when a government has this powerful support?; well it can do things with that power that people would otherwise not support. If people dont like what is being done, you can do it in the name of patriotism and suddenly people think it is a duty to support the country. Patriotism is nothing more than a device to gain control- control of its own people- control is a form of power…

So to follow my logic: patriotism = propaganda —> control = power

Power is routinely abused by groups who have it, we should not give away any more power than is absolutely necessary to maintain a government (and even that is questionable)

Does anyone honestly think that the US government always has pure intetions?

As an aside i happen to be watching the news right now and im watching all these patriotic people in the streets wearing red white and blue, shouting, smiling, honking thier horns, holding up signs in support… it looks like a friggin keg party and everybody is happy. Do they forget that we are killing many people? not to mention the soldiers we are losing… truly disgusting IMO.
I cant remember anyone having a party after planes crashed into our towers in NY (execpt maybe OBL’s private party) So whats all the excitment? Am i really missing something here?

17

Have they? How cute. I sympathize with them completely. If I were attending a hockey game in Canada, I just might join them in booing.

By and large their dissapproval is not aimed directly at the people, culture and geography of the US but at the government and its policies backed up by a large military. And that’s also the sort of place where those misplaced aggressive feelings should congregate: at a sporting event, not in politics. If Canada took an overly aggressive and unreasoning stance towards us, it would be counterproductive.

I do think I would be in the less a minority there politically than I would be in the south. My experiences there socially have also been much more rewarding than in the southern US.

And, as you may have guessed by now, I have little emotional attachment to the Star Spangled Banner. The fact that the founding fathers “fought and died for my freedom” doesn’t seem all that important when the Canadians next door seemed to have developed a free society without needing to kill and die. Mostly I associate it with the really boring beginning of sporting events.

18

But you love them because you know them. That guy off the street though, they’re (US) american too, would you care about them more than some guy off the street in another country because of that? I don’t.

Or maybe it hasn’t treated us well. Or it has done so at the expense of others in ways we would rather it not.

I’m not trying to get people to be ashamed of patriotism, but to think about what it is that they mean by it and understand why they feel that way. I happen to feel very differently, but I don’t wish to shame anyone.

I disagree here. I’m not sure how important this is to the larger debate, but I think most of our military engagements have been to further US economic, military and political hegemony.

As I have said I think there can be legitimate uses, but killing for good causes or bad causes still remains killing. There’s nothing noble about putting a bullet in someone’s head, or blowing them into thousands of pieces from a mile away. Yes I’m glad people were saved from being killed by Hitler, but I’m not happy we had to fire bomb Dresden to do it. It was an apparently necessary and dirty job. It was dangerous, but if an executioner’s job is dangerous, they’re still in the end an executioner.

Many young men sacrificed their lives, but it was a sad and awful event, not a noble and glorious one. The whole world lost what innocence it had left as the allies turned some of the awful strategies of the axis against them. We bombed civilians and did so with a weapon so terrible that it has never been used since.

On top of that it was patriotism gone wild that allowed Hitler and Hirohito to accomplish all that they did. I know many of you want to distinguish between good and bad patriotism. Yet without the good how could we have the bad?

And because a person’s connection to one’s country is such a vague feeling, it’s really easy to distort. Manipulating people’s emotions for political ends is not a good thing to me. If Hitler is really evil, we don’t need to “love our country” to get rid of him. We just need to understand why he’s evil and can’t be stopped otherwise.

Ick! Too much information. Does surfing porn make you mistype your apostrophes?
I wish I’d noticed this part earlier. I wouldn’t have given such a thoughtful reply.

19

And, as you may have guessed by now, I have little emotional attachment to the Star Spangled Banner. The fact that the founding fathers “fought and died for my freedom” doesn’t seem all that important when the Canadians next door seemed to have developed a free society without needing to kill and die. Mostly I associate it with the really boring beginning of sporting events. ~ errata**

Sorry errata, I was wrong. You have little affinity with the free thinking good people of Alabama. Good luck to you.

20

The phrase “necessary evil” has always seemed an oxymoron to me. I understand the social use: it indicates that the best course we have available still has unpleasant elements. But as an ethical label it makes no sense, unless one has determined to act unethically.

For instance, calling killing in self defenese a “necessary evil” is a fine social signal. It indicates that I wish that I had not had to kill, yet I felt it was necessary (i.e. an ethical obligation). But it does not mean that I think the act was evil. If I did, then I would not have killed.

I think that errata is confusing the social signal with the ethical judgment. It is true that we wish we did not have to kill. That does not make it evil when we kill out of necessity. (Again, I seak in general terms. I am neither defending nor condemning any particular application of military force.)

Really? Is that the lens through which you view all of human events? It does not matter what motivates someone to act if the tide of history might have carried us to nearly the same shore eventually? I suppose that you feel similarly about the Civil War, the Civil Rights activists, the airlift of Berlin, etc.

I’m afraid I find that a pretty poor method for evaluating human endeavors. You are welcome to look down on any historical struggle you choose, of course, but I have little respect for any perspective that dismisses the actions of men based upon a coincidence of history.

Agreed, but there can be something noble in risking a bullet in the head or being blown into thousands of pieces from a mile away.

On behalf of myself, my family, and anyone else who has ever served as a soldier, sailor, marine, or airman, let me express an appropriate gratitude at the aptness and perspicacity of your metaphor.
:wally

It was both.

If Americans and Russians and Britains et al had not been able to view it as noble and glorious, then it qould quite likely have been more sad and more awful than any of us would like to imagine.

If you don’t think patriotism can be a real motivating factor for troops in combat, then I suggest that you need to read more military history, specifically more first hand memoirs. Sure, Hitler and Stalin and Mussulini et al can also stir up the patriotic fires. That is a reason for us to nurture our own patriotism, not for us to abandon it.

It is the same argument that I have with pacifism. Yes, the world would be a better place if all humans were pacifists. Until that world comes about, though, I will continue to place violence within my arsenal of ethical response.