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Article Excerpt
In 1892, a World's Fair, called the Columbian Exposition, was scheduled to take place in Chicago. Clearly, it was gearing up to be a celebration of unfettered greed and egoism. Industry and innovation were to be its central foci, as America planned to welcome the world with displays of technological prowess and material enrichment. Gross inequalities of opportunity in the nation were to be masked by the glowing exterior of the buildings that came to be called the 'White City.' (1)
Advocates for the poor, upset by the plan, got together to think about how the celebration might incorporate ideas of equal opportunity and sacrifice. A group of Christian socialists finally went to President Benjamin Harrison with an idea: at the Exposition the president would introduce a new public ritual of patriotism, a pledge of allegiance to the flag, which would place the accent squarely on the nation's core moral values, include all Americans as equals, and rededicate the nation to something more than individual greed. The words that were concocted to express these sentiments were: "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands: one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." (2)
As so often happens with patriotic sentiment, however, the Pledge soon proved a formula of both inclusion and exclusion. Francis Bellamy, the Pledge's author, was himself both a socialist and a xenophobe, who feared that our national values were being undermined by the flood of new immigrants from southern Europe. By the 1940s, required by law as a daily recitation in schools in many states, the Pledge became a litmus test for the 'good' American; and those who flunked the test faced both exclusion and violence. Jehovah's Witnesses, who refused to recite the Pledge for religious reasons, seeing it as a form of idolatry, soon found their children expelled from school for noncompliance. Then, in a Catch-22, the parents were fined or jailed for "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" because their children were not in school.
Patriotism is Janus-faced. It faces outward, calling the self, at times, to duties for others, to the need to sacrifice for a common good, to renewed effort to fulfill the promises of equality and dignity inherent in national ideals. And yet, just as clearly, it also faces inward, inviting those who consider themselves 'good' or 'true' Americans to distinguish themselves from outsiders and subversives. Perhaps more dangerous yet, it serves to define the nation against its foreign rivals, whipping up warlike sentiments against them. (It was for precisely this reason that Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought that a good nation needed a patriotic 'civil religion' in place of the dogmas of Christianity, which he found too meek and pacifistic. (3))
For such reasons, people committed to the twin goals of a world in which all human beings have a decent set of life opportunities, and a world in which wars of aggression do not mar people's life chances, typically turn a skeptical eye on appeals to patriotic sentiment. They see such sentiments as binding the mind to something smaller than humanity; and, in a way, they are not wrong.
Patriotism is a species of love that, by definition, is bounded rather than global, particularistic rather than universal. Although it calls the mind to many aspects of humanity that lead the mind beyond its domestic confines-for example, human need or the struggle for justice and equality-patriotism is also irreducibly attached to particular memories, geographical features, and plans for the future.
If, then, our political doctrine included the thought that duties to all humanity should always take precedence over other duties, or the thought that particular obligations are correctly understood to be derivative from universal obligations (as a way of fulfilling, locally, those general obligations), it would be inconsistent with giving a large role to patriotism.
In my earlier writing on cosmopolitanism, I tentatively endorsed those two claims. (4) In the meantime, however, my ideas have changed in two ways.
First, having come to endorse a form of Rawlsian political liberalism, I now think it crucial that the political principles of a decent society not include comprehensive ethical or metaphysical doctrines that could not be endorsed by reasonable citizens holding a wide range of comprehensive doctrines. Clearly, a strong form of cosmopolitanism that denied legitimacy to nonderivative particular obligations could not be the object of an overlapping consensus in a political-liberal state. Many of the reasonable comprehensive religious and secular doctrines that citizens hold do insist on the importance of particularistic forms of love and attachment, pursued for their own sake and not just as derivative from universal duties to humanity. (Indeed, duties to God, in most religions, are particularistic in this way.) So even if I had continued to endorse cosmopolitanism as a correct comprehensive ethical position, I would not have made it the foundation of political principles for either a nation or a world order.
I do not, however, even endorse cosmopolitanism as a correct comprehensive doctrine. Further thought about Stoic cosmopolitanism, and particularly the strict form of it developed by Marcus Aurelius, persuaded me that the denial of particular attachments leaves life empty of meaning for most of us, with the human psychology and the developmental history we have. The dark side of Stoic thought is the conviction that life contains merely a sequence of meaningless episodes, once particular attachments have been uprooted; and the solution to problems of particular attachments ought not to be this total uprooting, so destructive of the human personality.
It should be, instead, an uneven dialectical oscillation within ourselves, as we accept the constraints of some strong duties to humanity, and then ask ourselves how far we are entitled to devote ourselves to the particular people and places whom we love.
This, then, is my current comprehensive ethical position, and it makes plenty of room for patriotism, especially in a form that accepts the constraints of global justice.
As it happens, this position allows me to incorporate-both in my political doctrine and in my comprehensive ethical doctrine-an insight firmly grasped by thinkers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: that national sentiment is also a way of making the mind bigger, calling it away from its immersion in greed and egoism toward a set of values connected to a decent common life and the need for sacrifices connected to that common life.
Italian revolutionary and nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, seeing the many ways in which the rise of capitalism threatened any common project involving personal sacrifice, believed that national sentiment was a valuable "fulcrum," on which one could ultimately leverage universal sentiment toward the goal of a just world. He doubted that the immediate appeal to love all humanity could motivate people deeply sunk in greed, but he thought that the idea of the nation might acquire a strong motivational force even when people were rushing to enrich themselves.
Mazzini's argument for patriotic sentiment goes something like this.
1. It is good, ultimately, for all human beings to care strongly about the good of all humanity.
2. Human beings are, by nature, some what narrow and particularistic in their concerns, and are not able to form a strong attachment to all humanity directly.
3. Human beings are, however, able to form a strong attachment to the nation, seen as the embodiment of both memory of past struggles and commitments to a common future.
4. The nation, because of its connection with common memory, episodes of suffering, and common hopes, is the largest unit to which such strong attachments can be directly formed.
5. Such national sentiments, if rightly targeted on things of genuine importance, such as human liberty and human need, will give people practice incaring about something larger than themselves, jolting them out of the egoism that is all too prevalent and preparing them for enlarged concern for the liberty and well-being of all humanity.
6. Human beings...
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