"Patriotism is slavery" ~ Tolstoy

After reading chapter five I keep thinking about the connection between civil religion, "City on a hill" and the problems this elitist patriotism creates.

When I hear the word Patriotism I think of 911. I think of all the American flags flying across the country after the terrorist attack. I think of a country torn by tragedy uniting against a common evil. In this sense, patriotism has a positive connotation to me. It makes me proud to be an American.

On the other hand, I do not usually think about the fact that American leaders have rallied support for internment, censorship and other actions that as an American I am not proud of.

In thinking about patriotism I came across two different individuals with contrasting ideas. The first, Leo Tolstoy, is famous for his quotes regarding the evil of patriotism, saying the flag is the banner of war.

A public opinion exists that patriotism is a fine moral sentiment, and that it is right and our duty to regard one's own nation, one's own state, as the best in the world; and flowing naturally from this public opinion is another, namely, that it is right and our duty to acquiesce in the control of a government over ourselves, to subordinate ourselves to it, to serve in the army and submit ourselves to discipline, to give our earnings to the government in the form of taxes, to submit to the decisions of the law-courts, and to consider the edicts of the government as divinely right. And when such public opinion exists, a strong governmental power is formed possessing milliards of money, an organized mechanism of administration, the postal service, telegraphs, telephones, disciplined armies, law-courts, police, submissive clergy, schools, even the press; and this power maintains in the people the public opinion which it finds necessary.

This quote brought me back a couple of chapters to the idea of federalism and how the federal government has been able to grow and gain authority in times of conflict. As a proud American I am not ready to accept the cosmopolitan viewpoint and still want to believe that allegiance to one's country can be positive. However, Tolstoy and other opponents of patriotism define it as blind support of one's country and argue that a patriot must support their country over another regardless. This type of patriotism clearly leads to moral conflicts and would suggest an allegiance to mankind not a specific nation is the only way.

The second individual is Stephen Nathanson, whose essay "In defense of 'Moderate Patriotism'" examines Tolstoy's accusations against patriotism. Nathanson argues that people can love and be loyal to their own country as long as they do so in a moral way.

“it is possible for patriotism to be a virtue. Nothing I have said, however, implies that citizens of all nations ought to be patriots. Whether people ought to be patriotic depends on the qualities of their particular nations and governments. If nations lack the qualities that make them merit loyalty-and devotion, then patriotism with respect to them is an inappropriate attitude. A morally constrained version of patriotism is both limited in the range of actions that it requires citizens to support and conditional on the nature of the nation to which loyalty is directed. In this paper, I have dealt only with the limits of patriotic demands. A full treatment of patriotism would have to describe the conditions that nations must meet to be suitable objects of patriotic loyalty. Some may think that a patriotism that is so bounded by limits and conditions cannot count as genuine loyalty. The alternative, however, is a form of patriotism that is so free of moral limits and conditions that it requires automatic assent to even the vilest evils, so long as they are done in the name of the nation. To insist that patriotism must take this extreme form in order to be genuine is to undermine the claim that patriotism is a worthwhile ideal for morally conscientious people to adopt.”

America is a great nation that I believe has the “the qualities that make [it] merit loyalty-and devotion”. I appreciate Nathanson’s argument because I consider myself a loyal citizen who is willing to defend my country when I believe she is right but who also considers it my patriotic duty to oppose her when I know she is wrong.