On Patriotism

July 4, 2007

Patriotism. It’s become a distasteful, even shameful, word to me. I don’t know when it changed, at what point in the evolution of my thinking the mere invocation of the word started to make me shiver.

I love this country, though not to the exclusion of all others. The United States is a good place to live, for which I am thankful. There are other great places too. The American experiment—and aren’t all nations really experiments?—is noble and well-intentioned. For all its faults, I feel fortunate to live in the United States. The relative safety, the material comfort, the continued existence of open spaces… I try to be mindful of the gratitude I should feel. And the art! Just as there could have been no Dostoevsky without the panoramic panoply that was (and is again) Russia, the languorous sprawl of Whitman, the concise blinding insight of Dickinson, and the trickster enlightenment of Frost could not exist without the essential largeness—the oversized aspirations, the appetites, the sheer bulk—that is the United States of America.

But patriotism has become—or come to represent, or be twisted as the basis for—an essentially narrow conception of the world that values insularity and entitlement over engagement and charity. Love is a powerful force when it is open and unfeigned, improving the lover and loved alike because with the right mind there is no separation between the two. But as we all know, love can go wrong, becoming one of the most destructive forces at our command, one of the longest lasting, and one of the most difficult to recover from. Like a misdirected searchlight, the love of country and who we are in it—patriotism—can instantly change character from illuminating to blinding. It’s an ironic symbol of how things have gone awry that recognizing the narrow, destructive effects of patriotism as an ideological rubric that informs, say, suicide bombers, is likely to result in one’s being branded with that most shameful of labels, being marked as unpatriotic.

I have two children in their mid-teens. I know what it’s like to love someone without liking them very much. I recognize how people aren’t best summed up as beautiful, athletic, or studious—as if such characteristics are intrinsic, genetic attributes. Instead it is better to appraise them honestly, to recognize and support their efforts in taking care of their bodies, studying hard, working to improve themselves, and for being thoughtful about the world and their place in it.

I love this country, though lately I don’t like it too much. Patriotism has too often become a love of what people think our country inherently is, an affection for what they see as natural superiority, rather than what we as a people and our representative government actually do. Believing that we are particularly blessed, naturally and in our nature, diminishes—even negates—our desire to be engaged, charitable, and open to the kind of dialogue and tolerance that are, in total, the very thing that patriotism is meant to celebrate!

I make no claims about myself except to recognize my own imperfections and misgivings. As I consider the collective of the Nation State I’ve come to realize that I must find my own posture of mindfulness before I can reliably extend my hand to others. I must learn to avoid despair, to retain my hope that it’s not too late. The framers of this remarkable country built in a resiliency that justifies and rewards optimism. But no political structure is unbreakable. If nothing else, a major step forward would be to recognize, again based on the idea that we are the things we do, that we are not immune to the painful lessons learned by past nations.

If we can recognize our kinship with others not like us, that there is room for difference and even value in other systems, that the most productive path is to learn to live with other countries and cultures rather than reshape them in our own image, then we might be able to move past the tendentious, polarized skirmishes that pass as dialogue and relegate the ideologues to the political margins where their rhetoric remains valuable. It seems like this recognition should be easier to come to than it has been so far given the technologically shrinking globe we live on.

If, as a nation, we can resume the always incomplete business of self-creation, we’d have something worth lighting up the sky with fireworks for. Not as a symbol of our might and not as a light with which to admire ourselves and our accomplishments, but as a beacon in the best tradition of America, a signal for others to come and be themselves and still be with us, that as they give of themselves so shall we, each of us learning to be right in the world.

Tags: journal, politics