Patriotism as a Virtue
Patriotism as a Virtue
And "idolatry" and "idiocy" as vices
Patriotism is the moral virtue of proper piety to one’s country, and is based on the well-cultivated and well-ordered sentiments of gratitude and loyalty.
To celebrate the Fourth of July, I will be watching my town’s uncancellable Main Street parade (not even Covid could shut it down in 2020), attending “the oldest paid rodeo on earth,” and participating in the best all-day, public-and-civic-and-private fireworks celebration—“show” does not describe it—in the country. (Read all about it!) But before all those “guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations,” here are some thoughts on patriotism as a virtue.
Aristotle does not analyze patriotism as a virtue, leaving it to epigones such as myself to make the attempt. The following repeats and expands some comments from my review of Steven B. Smith’s Patriotism in an Age of Extremes for Modern Age.
Three features of Aristotle’s moral theory are worth noting. First, for Aristotle, each moral virtue is the stable disposition of the soul toward a particular passion; each moral vice is a disordered disposition—too much or too little—toward the same passion. Courage, for example, is the mean disposition toward the passions of fear and confidence; recklessness is the vice of too much confidence (and not enough fear), while cowardice is not enough confidence (and too much fear). This is Aristotle’s “doctrine of the mean” for moral virtues. Notably, each moral virtue is based on, relevant to, and unimaginable without a passion: fear, desire, anger, etc. There is no courage without fear; there is no moderation without desire. You need the passion before you can have the moral virtue (or vice).
Second, each virtue is more akin to one vicious extreme than the other. Courage is more like recklessness than like cowardice: we are more likely to incorrectly identify the reckless man as courageous than the cowardly man. Moderation, the virtuous disposition toward bodily desires, is more like the vice of excessive abstemiousness than it is like the vice of gluttonous licentiousness.
Finally, each person has his own bent for which he must correct when aiming at a moral virtue. To become truly courageous, a naturally timid man aims at recklessness; to practice righteous anger, a naturally gentle man aims at harshness. Perhaps we can generalize this point to the social level: when a society becomes aware of its tendency toward one extreme, it should try to correct for it by aiming at the other. Certainly, we can think of recent examples of societies doing exactly that: perhaps the most martial societies of the first half of the 20th century, Germany and Japan, were forced toward the opposite extreme of pacificism after their defeats.
As St. Thomas teaches, patriotism is a form of piety. Thomas quotes Cicero: “It is by piety that we do our duty towards our kindred and well-wishers and render them faithful service.” We are indebted above all to God, and after Him, to our parents and our country. “Wherefore just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so does it belong to piety, in the second place, to give worship to one’s parents and one’s country.” The former, which we might call familial piety, “includes the worship given to all our kindred.” The latter, which we might call political piety or patriotism, “includes homage to all our fellow-citizens and to all the friends of our country.”
(Incidentally, we note here that civility—or, if you prefer the Greek, politeness—depends on shared membership in a community: a civitate or a polis. Such shared membership entails a shared love, based on apperception of the same objects as advantageous, just, noble, and good.)
The passions in the soul relevant to piety in general, and political piety or patriotism in particular, are gratitude and loyalty. Together, these make effectual the duty in response to a debt that St. Thomas discusses. Gratitude is the feeling (‘merely’ a feeling!) of being joyfully indebted to someone or something; loyalty is a love, and willingness to serve, a person or thing one recognizes as “one’s own.”
Ordinary English usage does not give adequate general names for either the excessive or deficient vice relevant to patriotism. I propose “idolatry” for the former and “idiocy” for the latter.
Elite discourse proposes “nationalism” as the term for the excessive vice relevant to patriotism. But, given that patriotism is proper gratitude and loyalty to the authoritative political community to which one is indebted, and that most of us refer to such communities as countries, nations, or nation-states, “nationalism” as a vice implies that the virtue of patriotism inclines more toward the deficient vice than toward the excessive. But surely this is wrong: following St. Thomas, we see that patriotism is the dutiful discharge of a debt toward those (like family and God) to whom we are so indebted that we cannot fully repay that debt. The virtue of patriotism, then, inclines more toward the excess than the deficiency. Referring to the excessive vice as “nationalism” confuses the issue and stacks the deck in favor of elite proclivities. It confuses the issue because it raises the spectre of modern European ideologies of the nation, which were from the beginning attempted substitutes for older ways of navigating competing loyalties; whatever changes have occurred in the history of American patriotism deserve their own, distinctively American rather than Eurocentric treatment. And it stacks the deck against old-fashioned love of country and in favor of new-fangled cosmopolitanism (about which more below).
“Idolatry” is an imprecise way to designate excessive gratitude and loyalty to one’s country: it designates giving divine worship to anything or anyone but the true God, so there are many examples of idolatry that have nothing to do with politics. But it is useful because it reminds us of St. Thomas’s hierarchy of debts and duties, and of the more general virtue of piety of which patriotism is the political form. Political idolators make a god of their country, or subordinate God and His will to their country’s character and destiny, just as those who are excessively obsessed with their family’s success and legacy make a god of their own lineage. Kin and country are both proper objects of love when loved properly; it is the hierarchy of loves that is important.
The difference between political piety and political idolatry is glimpsed in the difference between parsing the verb “shed” in the refrain of America the Beautiful—“God shed his grace on thee”—as a prideful statement of fact, or an even-more-prideful command, rather than a fervent and hopeful prayer. (It is, in fact, a prayer.) It is of course possible to declare in the indicative, “God shed his grace on America,” in a humble and fearful rather than presumptious and prideful manner. A charitable interpretation of American folk patriotism recognizes that, more often than not, the good country people who say things like “God was guiding the Founders’s hands when they wrote the Constitution” are expressing wonder and gratitude at the favors God has bestowed on our country—and, often in the same breath, calling us now to repent and be mindful of His will—whereas a hostile interpretation lumps together all such expressions of folk patriotism with the vice of political idolatry. As Aristotle observes, from the perspective of one extreme, the true virtue will often appear to be the other extreme: the coward derides the truly courageous man as reckless, the stingy derides the truly generous man as spendthrift, and the cosmopolitan derides the patriotic American as “nationalistic.”
As for the vice of not enough gratitude and loyalty to one’s country, we can think of several terms for its particular manifestations. “Ingratitude” is fitting, though too generic, as it is said of those who are ungrateful to friends, family, and God, as well as country. “Disloyalty” has a more political (and military) implication. At its most extreme, deficient patriotism manifests as “treachery” or “treason” (consider the very bottom of Dante’s hell); but these terms refer to the words and deeds that spring from a vice in the soul, not the vice itself.
I propose that we call deficient patriotism “idiocy.” The word comes from the Greek idiōtēs, which means generally a private person or individual—and, ironically, one’s fellow-citizen as opposed to a foreigner—but pejoratively one who neglects the common concerns of the political community. “Idiot” has the advantage of a negative connotation in English without the more specific implications of having acted as an enemy against one’s own country carried by “treachery” and “treason.” Calling someone an “idiot” for lacking the gratitude and loyalty proper to patriotism is particularly fitting, as it is a common insult, and patriotism is something that the common American (quite literally, especially on holidays) wears on his sleeve and takes for granted as good, while it requires a particularly rotten sophistication to condemn patriotism as such.
Beyond the common manifestations of the unpatriotic vice of idiocy, we note here the elite manifestation, all the more vicious for masquerading as a virtue. Cosmopolitanism is the delusion that one’s membership in a larger community (“humanity” or “the world”) overrides one’s membership in the particular nation or country to which one is indebted. It is a self-flattering term for a certain kind of idiot. As Tocqueville points out, the post-Christian, democratic mind is overwhelmed when it tries to raise its eyes from the narrow circle of the individual and his small concerns, and rather than settling on something that stands between the individual and the general, slips from the one to the other, missing entirely the local, regional, and national communities as proper objects of love. In many of its adherents, cosmopolitanism is doubly idiotic, in being an example of useful idiocy. Those who call themselves “cosmopolitan” rarely do anything to serve “the whole” or “humanity”; rather, in the noble name of such causes, they tend to serve a part (our postnational ruling class, staffing the highest positions in government, finance, business, and academia) rather than the relevant whole (their own nation, considered as a whole). Rule by the few for the sake of their class interest, rather than the advantage of the whole, is the classical definition of oligarchy. “Cosmopolitanism” is one mask worn by the oligarchs who rule all bien-pensant Western nations. (“Our democracy” is another—but that’s a story for another day.)
I end with John Adams’s prediction for how Americans would celebrate their independence.
I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.
John Adams calls us to celebrate our country by prayer, parades, and pyrotechnics. I’m with Adams—and so is my town.
Happy Fourth!
This is absolutely brilliant. One of the VERY" BEST articles I have ever read about the virtue of patriotism - thank you, PostModern Conservative.... GREAT
Any thought on Anthony Appiah's concept of a rooted cosmopolitan?