True Or False: Patriotism & Nationalism Are Forms Of Stupidity

"Patriotism is the veneration of real estate over principles."

nationalism is pretty gross but in a t/s with monarchism it comes out ahead i think. if people are citizens and not subjects then they sort of have to be citizens OF something, right? anyway, Benedict Anderson to thread.

nationalists are just euphemised racists
they should be tried by a jury of euthanized rapists

Patriotism, likewise, takes multiple forms. You've got Orwell's patriotism of loving the land and people as well as the patriotism of "LIKE IT OR LEAVE IT USA USA USA USA."

But as you're likely referring to the more common and US-centric latter pair: dud.

PATRIOT, n. One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.

PATRIOTISM, n. Combustible rubbish read to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.

In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.

See also his "The Ingenious Patriot".

Well, folks, these Eurotrash liberals who hate America can go to hell! God's United States of America is the greatest country in the world!

there's a certain sense of romance about america that i like, a sense that you really can do anything (how many other nations are founded on a goal as fantastic and ambiguous as "the pursuit of happiness"?) and i think that's where a lot of extreme patriotism is rooted. unfortunately, it's also a doomed, impossible sort of romance - the horatio alger myth that any american regardless of background could make himself a millionaire through hard work was, ultimately, just a myth. fitzgerald probably summed it up best in the last page of the great gatsby - that notion of a fresh, green new continent about to be discovered has never quite gone away, even though the continent itself is so overcrowded it's about to sink into the ocean.

Lately, though, there have been some interesting defenses of nationalism; David Miller's On Nationality or Margaret Moore's The ethics of nationalism, for example. For the most part, I'd agree with many of the arguments made by these authors.

I don't think nationalism has to imply valuing "certain human beings over other human beings simply because they were born into a different country and system". Or at least, I think there might be some good justifications for doing so.

Moore: Nationalism is defensible because:
- it strengthens democracy (representation etc.)
- it reduces the need for self-interest-based arguments
- it is unavoidable (ie. institutions operate in a given language, etc)

There's a lot more in there, but that's some of it...

Maybe it's just that the idea of cheering on a dominating superpower like the United States is faintly embarrassing, even when it's in a sport like soccer where we're traditionally not that great. I mean, I love the U.S. in a lot of ways -- mostly all the "land of opportunity"/"pursuit of happiness"/"melting pot" stuff -- but I don't like the idea of getting competitive about it.

I deeply consider myself a Houstonian so I root pretty strongly, almost against my will, for Houston teams to do well. I also self-identify as an American, so ditto. It has not much to do with producing rational reasons for WHY i should support those teams. If a team I identify with plays like assholes and thugs i will get embarassed but i wont stop identifying with them.

Patriotism and Nationalism, on the other hand, strike me as identification that is blind to faults, especially perhaps because they are so large scale that the point is to COVER UP differences instead of exalting them into a regional quirk, but thankfully in sports most of the time your inferiority is objectively demonstrated to you.

Though perhaps that is a rather Pinefoxian statement to make.

It is a form of egregious vanity (and stupidity) to think that you enjoy most of the benefits of social organization because of your personal merit, i.e. thinking "I am so wonderful that my forebears and compatriots built roads, schools, homes, and libraries, and have preserved these things for me by their sacrifice of both wealth and blood, all as a tribute to me."

The best and most reasonable forms of nationalism and patriotism are those which recognize the debt you owe to people who never knew you and benefitted you only because you are a citizen of the same nation. This also applies to the actual soil, rocks, flora, fauna, sun and sky of your native place, which nourish and strengthen you. It is good to love them, too.

The idiotic forms of nationalism and patriotism are too obvious to name.

this truth, where it is true, which is to say almost everywhere, is as true in one place as another, and the wrongs are felt as deeply in one place as another. but nowhere is this true on such a colossal scale, nor as recently, as in the americas, and most especially north america and the united states. i can love the neighbors i have there, the way that people are, the music, the easy way of greeting. enough to fill a lifetime. but the sovereign entity of the united states is impossible to love in toto - it has done some good and some evil, like all national powers. but in common with all sovereign entities, too, its territory was taken and carved by blood.

HI DERE ROMAN EMPIRE/EUROPEAN COLONIALISM IN AFRICA

FFS

i think it's quite possible to be proud of the american republic established by jefferson et al (and betrayed by most leaders since) while not condoning the genocide committed by columbus et al. if i have any feelings of patriotism at all it probably stems from living in a country that included "the pursuit of happiness" as a goal in its founding statement.

Congrats on getting out of the US. I was telling Sarah the other day to emigrate somewhere more civilized. “It’s too late for your mother and me...the US is a big-ass bus that has been in a wreck...there’s a small fire now, but it’s spreading to the gas tank. It’s going to go up any year now. We are pinned in the wreckage, but you’re not. SAVE YOURSELF.” I was sort of making a funney, but I was actually pretty serious, and I think Sarah got the message.

Genuinely curious -- why is this (knowing who someone is) important on an Internet message board?

Anyway, I once had a kneejerk reaction to patriotism, probably because I'd read that Johnson quote at an early age, and I was a punk, and vaguely left wing, and all those kinds of relatively unexamined adolescent positioning things. I may have examined a few of those stances since, but I never got around to patriotism again until recently. I don't know what clicked for me, but I realised that it's no more irrational to love the country I live in than it is to love my family, my friends, my townsfolk, my fellow United fans, whatever. Perhaps this is because I'm an immigrant, that I've made a conscious choice to make a life in a different land from the one in which I was born and raised, but whatever it is, it's a real feeling (of love, of pride, of hope?) I now have towards Canada that I never had towards England (and yet I did, and still do, feel that way about Manchester). These things are complicated because they are about belonging, which is one of the biggest words in the English language.

In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.

Am I the only one who finds the Devil's Dictionary to be kind of a bore?

It doesn't matter that it's a messageboard. I know some ILXors, and if they told me to get some fucking perspective, I'd care enough to ask what they meant by that. I don't know ryan, and he doesn't know what perspective I already have, so he might as well have posted "WHEN COME BACK BRING PIE" for all I care.

so all these items conspire to create a personal illusion of 'nation' that bears no relation to the political project that is the actual nation. fine.

my question then is whether people's personal illusions of nation are important. i would argue that they are

(omg, i love all nations' birds lol, you shd have seen me in montenegro trying to snap all the blue rock thrushes and crag martins - but the birds here have a certain fond familiarity for me. i guess there is a key point here that one can love lots of things about other countries as well, but it's hard to spend enough time in each one to create a strong personal illusion of their own nations, unless one has the money and means for regular travel)

Crumpets will never stop being a legendary food just because the Brits killed loads of Irish people, does that clarify things LJ? But I might have things to say if one implied my enjoyment of the former should influence my opinion of the latter. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(Also if it came out the crumpet was invented by someone using the grain they were shipping out of Ireland during the Famine.!)

the english/british actions in ireland (and half the world) for the past 800 years or however long it has been are a source of tremendous shame, yes, and my feelings on all of it are that it should be taught in schools as a matter of firm principle, both in order to demonstrate how a nation should not be and to further internationalist causes

also, crumpets are delicious, yes

well i hesitate to call myself a 'patriot' really as the word has come to represent a reactionary force in politics. but i'm genuinely curious - was it always thus? were progressives from the arts, politics etc not once happy to be thought of in those terms?

A lot of people who work in the arts who think they are progressive turn out not to be, often because they trip over this stuff.

"local wildlife" is an odd one though, imago. Do you exclude migratory birds lol? Rootless cosmopolitan fish?

― rob, Tuesday, March 7, 2023 9:48 AM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Regardless of their seasonality, they at times rely on habitats in your nation, yes?

i'm still confused about what "nation" adds to the mixture of specific things that one likes

damn it's like the Treaties Of Westphalia up in this bitch

i had a friend in high school named Thilo. his parents were German and they had emigrated to Tennessee a couple of years before i met him because his father got a job Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Thilo was an amazing drummer. (probably still is.) anyway he and i were hanging around in his basement one day, probably smoking weed, and he was telling me how insane it was that our high school flew an an American flag in front of the school. "Tracer!!" he was saying. "do you know how crazy this is? In Germany you would never see this! In Germany... they would think the Nazis had come back!"

xxp i guess it's as a riposte to 'why would you go on holiday in the uk, total shithole'. in other words it is a sort of defensive assertion of the presence of excellence - the illusory nation of nice things

equally though, it's usually not the uk as a whole being called that but just a part of it, so the illusory Derby or Lincoln or wherever is the more relevant entity, sure

@peace, man

Yes -- can you go on? I genuinely don't understand what appreciation for wildlife habitats that pre-exist nations by ages has to do with pat/nat. Maybe it's because I can see another country if I climb a nearby hill on a clear day, but for me ecology underlines the arbitrariness of national borders and the fact they exist to control human movement

These things are never as clear cut as people want them to be. Thackeray wrote one of my favourite novels ever, Vanity Fair. But he was also responsible for the coverage of the Famine in Punch. As per this piece:

The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, a regular writer from 1843 to 1854, expressed the view that humour ought ‘to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness; your scorn of untruth, pretension, imposture; your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy’. This was indeed the mission of the early Punch which led philanthropic assaults on sweated labour, poor law abuses, and terrible urban conditions.

Like Sir Charles Trevelyan, the assistant Secretary to the Treasury, Punch regarded the continuation of famine conditions in Ireland after this time as entirely due to indigenous moral and not biological failures. Ireland had been warned of the folly of potato dependence by a ‘natural’ disaster, but had perversely chosen to ignore the danger; no further responsibility could be undertaken by the ‘imperial’ government.

In contrast to the earlier cartoon, the Irishman is no longer ‘brother’, but bears the simianised features that were to become so familiar to Punch’s readers in later years.

am currently reading CLR James' Beyond A Boundary (which is spectacular obv), and he too has to deal with the fact Vanity Fair was his favourite book as a kid (he says he read it about 20 times!) - to have these texts as foundational parts of who one is, and yet, to come to terms with the awful inconsistencies of the attitudes of their authors, the often staggering obliviousness to one set of wrongs where such sensitivity exists elsewhere...James is very good at explaining how people are products of their political circumstances, obviously - he has unstinting yet compassionate instincts, and I think he is sympathetic to (if not now completely uncritical of) Vanity Fair itself - how could he not be? - rather than Thackeray, insofar as the two can be divested

I wrote this on Quora about a decade ago in response to the question "Why are so many Chinese irrationally defensive when it comes to discussing their country's issues?" - It's a different question for a different audience, I only still agree with about 70% of it, and especially since I moved back to the UK in 2016 I feel that I have learned/realised/remembered a lot about the character of the English people, which I didn't want to think about at the time. Anyway, it's relevant to the discussion, so thought I would share.

I'm from England, I still have a British passport. I take an interest in British politics and culture. For many people here I'm the first British person they'll have met, and I have to remember that their impression of "my country" is going to be based on their impression of me. And yet, I do not actually represent Britain - it's just a piece of land I was born on, whose customs I grew up with, whose passport I hold. I don't happen to agree with the leaders of my country on most issues, and am happy to hear non-British people talk on this issue as it shows they are interested in the place I'm from and are engaging with it. People from Britain did very bad things in China a hundred years ago - I am not descended from them, and I am not personally responsible for what they did. As a British person I do, however, have unfair advantages in life which stem from the Empire, and it's important I remember that.

The difference in China (and this will be a series of gross generalisations, I'm afraid, sorry about that) is that the country is usually "we" and anyone else is "you" - that "you" isn't necessarily hostile, but it does show an identification of the country as part of the self, way beyond what I find to be normal in the UK or anywhere else I've been. I'll leave it to others to show how this ties into Confucianism, but it seems obvious that the relationships between ruler/subject and father/son still have a lot to do with it. The country is a family - and family ties in China are strong. When you criticise the Chinese government it's a bit like telling someone their father is an asshole; it may well be true, but you'd still be rude to say it.

Now, the thing I should say here is "it's a different culture, learn about the differences and respect them" but the longer I stay here, the more that seems like a coward's way out. There are many Chinese people I respect and love, and it makes me sad to see them constrained by unnecessary respect for institutions and people who don't represent them or care about them at all. China is a major player on the world's stage now and as such will be criticised by people from everywhere, much as the USA and the UK are - but this "China" is actually just the Chinese government. That’s the distinction we really need to make. I hope someday when listening to “a foreigner criticise China”, they can instead hear “an interested person expressing a view about the government of the country they happened to be born in”.

For “our” part, I hope “we” laowai can be more educated about the west’s role in the imperial horrors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and try to understand the complexities of issues like Tibet and Taiwan before getting into arguments about them.

i'm still confused about what "nation" adds to the mixture of specific things that one likes

― satori enabler (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 7 March 2023 bookmarkflaglink

You could have most of the things one likes without a border. And you could 'holiday' anywhere for however long or even stay in a place if you liked it. Imagine! Instead British ppl want to loot and hoard, they then get defensive about their attitudes and wealth that allows them to 'holiday' abroad when it's grey here.

China has been around a hell of a lot longer than the UK tbf.

these days if you say you vacation in England etc etc etc

*Pulls out CLR James in a foreign drinking establishment, think complex thoughts about the English back home*

xxp don't know if you intended it as such, but it's an interesting point, in the past China was not considered a nation state but instead the possession of the current dynasty, most recently the Qings were non-Chinese* and had an empire which stretched into Tibet and Xinjiang, lands which had been conquered and therefore needed to show fealty. Their unwilling inclusion in the modern Chinese state really shows the lie in claims that the CCP are somehow representative of the people they rule.

*non-Han, this is another complication.

obviously this is far from a unique situation, but talk of nationalism needs to recognise what a recent (and western) development the nation state is.

Derby is a steep rail fare nowadays but I'd probably not call it foreign

(xp) Yeah, I don't really know that much about nationhood in non-Western contexts.

Patriotism.

unbelievable stuff this, genuinely morally depraved https://t.co/w9sWbwG7Dk

— Peter Mitchell (@pdkmitchell) March 7, 2023

fucking hell, by the next election it'll be Kill The Paedos

In Vade France

Don't act shocked. You and soref have been arguing for a soft form of this shit.

is patriotism even about logic or reason tho. the reason I'm not patriotic is because I'm not, not because of some reasoned argument, but because I don't feel patriotic. being a kid in the 70s and 80s and not being white meant that it was p clear patriotism wasn't really an option open to me. equally all the other kids on my street who were white might well be and I was/am fine with that.

That is basically how I feel about religion, and as with religion, I would then say it's fine for ppl to be patriotic as long as they keep it out of their politics.

does that ever happen?

No, that was the joke.

haha I get it

This tweet made me think of you all.

"They think our love, our light, our laughter, and our joy are signs of weakness but they're wrong because that is our strength." 🔁: @RuPaul pic.twitter.com/5uDcBI8SQa

— RuPaul's Drag Race (@RuPaulsDragRace) March 8, 2023

My parents and my parents’ parents eschewed displays of patriotism, despite one set being perfect candidates for flag-waving immigrants to the US.

It is absurd to believe that it is administrative categories large and minute that make an individual who they are— that anyone could believe such a thing is baffling to me.

As far as the original revive post goes, I agree with what many others have said— given that patriotism and nationalism are dependent upon the construction of an Other, I find no way to defend them without making an enemy of an amorphous grouping, which goes against my most deeply-held values. That I also take issue with the very idea of “borders” is further evidence, to my mind, that neither patriotism nor nationalism are worth much except my scorn.

That said, when I was homeless and traveling, I would wear an old military-issue shirt, and people would often give me money assuming I was a vet. I
am not, and would often tell them so, but they never blinked— that is, there are elements of a certain patriotic impulse that can be based in empathy, but moreso as a result of understanding the pisspoor job that the government does of taking care of veterans.

Related to who got this thread revived, If Books Could Kill just posted an episode on Haidt’s _The Coddling of the American Mind_ and all the cultural grumblins therein

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-if-books-could-kill-104279346/episode/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind-110229222/

To clarify, there is an element of patriotism that is very much based in its shadow, which one can see in action if one looks— think the POW-MIA stickers that say “Only our Government Has Forgotten.” I don’t think that such a shadow patriotism is widespread nor based in the type of anger that would be necessary for leftist aims to be at their center. Usually, in fact, it’s the opposite.

living in Scotland, it can feel like a lot of our national identity is based on "we're not the English" and that's always made me massively uneasy.

I don't have any real personal sense of national pride or identity. The place where I was born and grew up isn't something I chose. I'm proud of things I've achieved and things I've done, not the accidents of birth that have shaped the way I've grown. My country and my culture will have shaped me undeniably, but to claim pride over it seems so alien to me. Scotland has 6m people in it, many of them will be great but many of them will be awful, why would that be something I need to attach myself to?

6 million? Not yet.

Reading about the revolutionary period in Europe from 1848 to 1851, it's interesting that nationalism was associated with radicalism and the left and vehemently opposed by conservatives. But then the French Revolution kind of kick started the whole nation state thing anyway.

well i guess it was nationalism vs royalism or feudalism or w/ev at that stage

i cant wait until its nationalism vs church here, thats going to be a right barney

(xp) Yes... and the church too.

i suppose at its best nationalism was theoretically about democracy and the power of citizens when they act together, potentially in opposition to the interests of nobility/church or what have you - a pretty progressive idea until you realise how many caveats came with the word “citizen” though even then a pretty different way of doing things

it's interesting that nationalism was associated with radicalism and the left and vehemently opposed by conservatives

“We should have a country of our own so we can make our own laws and not be oppressed/murdered by imperial overlord” vs “We should have our own country for our own people and no other kinds of people”

Yeah it's not inconsistent with leftist politics to say that there are times when non-left ideologies can be used in the service of liberation, the issue for me is when nationalism is an end in itself

The "nation" only really applied to nobility prior to the French Revolution. So you have ridiculous situations in the 1840s where Polish radicals are trying to foment a democratic revolution only to be slaughtered by Polish peasants who deny they are even Polish, because identifying as a "Pole" means you are a feudal lord.

Basically 19th century nationalism was a bunch of movements in service of bourgeois revolution

Pretty much.