Last year, when Your Humble Blogger found that he had missed Loyalty Day, it was the occasion for a note about the recent Loyalty Day proclamations, and what they revealed about Our Only President and his immediate predecessor. This year’s proclamation is more of the same, so I won’t go over it, but rather go on to something else.
Loyalty, for my money, is a tricky business. Adherence to anything unpredictable is tricky. I’m not against loyalty, I’m just ... wary of it. I find it easier to deal with loyalty to a person than to an institution, but even there it’s problematic. The question is what loyalty obliges me to; if I’m going to be loyal to a friend, does it just mean I need to be friendly with him? Or does it mean I have to shield him from just prosecution? I mean, if my friend commits a heinous crime, and asks me to hide him, what does my loyalty entail? Yes, I know, no true friend of mine would commit a heinous crime. I think.
Taking this back to the national level leads me to a distinction that I like to make between patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism, to me, is love of country, and I am a patriot. The USA, for good and ill, is my country, and I am an American. I care more about America and Americans than I do about other people. It’s not rational, but there it is.
Your Humble Blogger has a brother (actually, two brothers and two brothers-in-law, but they are no good to my rhetoric at present). As it happens, he’s quite clever, a good writer, and a nice guy. That’s not why I love him, though; I love him because he’s my brother. I don’t pretend there aren’t nicer, cleverer, better writers. I don’t expect other people to care about him, particularly, or to follow his career, or to seek out his stuff. If you, Gentle Reader, have a brother who writes, I certainly don’t expect you to prefer my brother’s stuff to yours, although of course I’m proud if you do. Frankly, even if his stuff were crap, I’d read it. He’s my brother. And he’s important to me. He’s more important to me than your brother is, Gentle Reader (probably—you never can tell who’s reading this), and I hope your brother is more important to you than mine is. If only one of the two is going to be happy, I expect we would submit different ballots.
To me, patriotism is the way in which nation is like family. Yes, they drive you crazy, but they’re yours, and you’ll stick with ’em. Nationalism, on the other hand, is the odd belief that your country is somehow better, in some essential way, than other countries. More important. Not more important to you, but more important absolutely. And, you know, that’s easy to fall into when your own country is the hegemon. The US is, in a lot of ways, more important than other countries, in the sense that it has more influence over other countries than other countries have over it. But that wasn’t always true, and it may not always be true. And if whether or no, it’ll still be my country.
Look, if there’s a choice about the residents of China or the residents of America being happy, my instincts will be to the Americans, despite the greater number on the other side. But I certainly would not resent someone from Beijing having a different opinion, nor would I resent a Parisian, a Berliner, or a Sao Paulan (Sao Paulian? Sao Paulerino?) disagreeing with me. And, if it came down to it, I might well shout down my own instincts, just as if, the Lord forbid, my brother committed a heinous crime, I might well turn him in.
Americans can be brutal, and vicious, and criminal, and awful in every way, and still be my countryman. They can shame me, and still be my countryman. I can’t disown them; that, to me, would be disloyal (I can, of course, loathe them—heck, I could loathe my brother, and have, now and then). I can work against my countrymen and their interests, and can badmouth them as well, while still acknowledging their connection to me. That’s what loyalty is to me, and I suppose May Day is as good a day for it as any.
,
-Vardibidian.
I find interesting the whole idea of having a strong connection with someone (or some organization) for reasons other than who they are as a person (or as an organization).
Why is it (this is a musing philosophical question, not an argument or an attack) that most people feel this strong familial bond to people related to them, even if they don’t like the people in question? Say you (generic you) have a brother who not only commits a heinous crime but is a horrible person. There’s nothing to like about him. He kicks cute little big-eyed puppies, and he steals the nickels from blind men’s cups. And yet I think a lot of people would say “He’s my brother, and I love him, right or wrong.” And I find that odd; why should someone connected to you by birth (I almost said “by genetics,” but I think that would be missing the point) be inherently more important to you (still generic you) than, say, a close friend? I have a certain amount of this family-feeling myself, but not nearly as much as most people have, and I find it odd in myself too.
Same thing with loyalty to a nation. I can totally understand being loyal to a nation because you believe in what it does, what it stands for, how it behaves, what results it gets, or even the people who make it up. But if the nation starts misbehaving, why should someone remain loyal to it? I don’t even mean the “my country right or wrong” kind of blind loyalty; I think that even the kind of loyalty you’re talking about having is a loyalty tied to the fact that you were born here and grew up here and live here, much more a family-feeling than a loyalty born of believing in what the country does. (But I may be wrong; correct me if so.) And again, I have some of this kind of loyalty too, and it puzzles me.
He’s my brother, and I love him, right or wrong.” And I find that odd; why should someone connected to you by birth (I almost said “by genetics,” but I think that would be missing the point) be inherently more important
I think you conflate “inherently more important” with “love him anyway” here.
I know an X who loves a relative, but that relative has dones such terrible things X will not associate with that person. Yet nevertheless, X finds love still remains, even without forgiveness, and always without acceptance. That relative is not *inherently* more important (in fact, the fate of this relative has been stated to be less important than others’ well-being). But love remains, ironically.
Maybe the relative-ness makes the love more probably, biologically driven. I couldn’t say.
I have read arguments that loyalty to family and community is biologically driven, as a way of improving individual survival and propagation of individual genes. Nation is simply a larger community in those arguments. Attachment to the familiar and familial is also biologically advantageous/necessary for a species which is born as helpless as Homo sapiens.
V, I like your description of the difference between patriotism and nationalism. They are so often confused.
Jed, I think there are several important reasons to be loyal to a nation even when it misbehaves. From the individual perspective, there are a small number of nations to choose from (and many people have no real choice). We cannot simply vote with our feet, and feeling stateless is uncomfortable. From a larger perspective, a nation which misbehaves has far less chance of righting itself if everyone who disagrees with the bad behavior abandons their personal or political investment in the nation.
Just briefly: If I were to say, “I love her because she is my sister,” I would be offering an explanation for my feelings, not stating the reason for it: that is, my love for that person is something that exists as part of me, and, in examining that feeling, I recognize that the familial tie between us has something to do with that feeling. Talking about the reasons for something often confuses causes with explanations.
As to what the causes are, I see it as lying more with the way in which human selves and identities are created than with biology. We create identities by _identifying_. Put another way, we know ourselves from our relationships with other people and, more generally, with human communities. Once a relationship becomes part of our identities, our selves, it exists independent of conscious decisions and choices. We cannot give up these relationships without changing ourselves. Sometimes it is right to make such a change; sometimes it is not. But it is not something simply or casually done, and it does not take place purely through the exercise of conscious decision-making.
I’m curious if I agree with Jed in theory or not. That is … would it be better if we didn’t love our families or our countries irrationally? If we didn’t wind up loving people (or countries) we didn’t even like?
Sometimes I think yes, sometimes no.
The ‘to me’ part of ‘inherently more important to me’ is what I’m on about. I still want to know what my family is doing, if they are well or healthy, and so on, even during times we are alienated. I might want to save my time and interest for those friends who really do make the cut, but I can’t.
For nations, as Michael points out, it’s even more complicated. Similarly, as a Jew, if I am embarrassed by Jews, I can’t reasonably stop being a Jew, nor can I stop (for instance) Ariel Sharon from being a Jew. I’m stuck with them, as I’m stuck with my family, and they are all important to me, in a way my family is, in the same way America and Americans are. More or less.
,
-Vardibidian.
Fascinating comments. I don’t have responses to most of them yet, except to say that the discussion is making me think, which is good.
I wanted to note that I don’t necessarily think it would be better if we didn’t love our families or countries irrationally; more logical, perhaps, but not necessarily better. But yeah, I see some good things and some bad things about such love.
V’s paragraph about Jewishness opens up all sorts of interesting ideas. There are several categories in which one might make the choice of whether to remain loyal to the group or to renounce it, such as:
Family
Company or organization
Nation
Religion
Culture
And probably others. I think there are some subtle differences among those. For example, if you’re embarrassed by Sharon’s actions, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re embarrassed by Judaism per se; you may want to disassociate yourself from one or more people who are parts of the group, but renouncing the group seems excessive unless it’s the group as a whole (whatever that means) that’s embarrassing you. With a corporation or organization, it can sometimes be very valuable for someone who disagrees with the direction it’s taking to resign—though (as in Michael’s comment about nations) that leaves only the people who agree with (say) the repugnant policy as employees of the corporation, it can be a way of putting public pressure on the corporation, of drawing attention to the problem. (Whereas renouncing your nation is less likely to put such pressure on the nation.) With a family, you can’t exactly renounce membership in the family, but you could cut off all ties with them; but that doesn’t seem to me quite the same as leaving those other groups. Interesting. I’m a little muzzy today, and this isn’t sorting itself into neat categories or generalizations for me, but I’m finding the contrasts interesting.