2
Simon Keller
1 Introduction
1.1 Arguing against patriotism
Patriotism is a kind of delusion. The patriot pretends to take a clear-eyed and informed view of his own country while in fact working hard to maintain a particular patriotic picture of his country, a picture he wants to maintain regardless of the evidence. A patriotic person is inclined to see the world inaccurately, taking his country to be more special and more virtuous than it really is. Patriotic delusions are damaging, both to individuals’ performance as citizens and to political culture and deliberation. It would be better if people were not patriotic. That, at any rate, is the view I defend in this chapter.
My case against patriotism focuses on the patriot’s beliefs, and in this respect, it differs from the best-known and most venerable argument against patriotism, which we can call the universalist argument. The universalist argument focuses on the patriot’s concerns and actions, saying that the patriot has a morally arbitrary preference for his own country and its people over other countries and other people. I want to begin the chapter by describing the universalist argument, both as a way of setting the background to the philosophical debate about patriotism and in order to explain the motivation for my own case against patriotism.
1.2 The universalist argument against patriotism
According to an enticing and influential approach to morality – an approach that is variously called universalist morality, liberal morality, Enlightenment morality, and cosmopolitanism – a person gains her basic moral importance by virtue of the characteristics she holds inherently, not by virtue of the particular relationships in which she stands to others. The universalist might say that a person matters morally because she is capable of experiencing happiness and suffering or that a person has certain fundamental moral rights because she is rational. But the universalist will not think that a person can be made any more or less morally important just because she comes from one country rather than another. A person’s country of origin, for the universalist, is a morally irrelevant characteristic.
The patriot, however, does take a person’s country of origin to matter. The patriot shows a special allegiance to his own country and his own compatriots. He cares about his country in a way in which he does not care about other countries, and he will do things for his country and its people that he would not do for other countries and other people. In the eyes of the universalist, then, to be a patriot is to discriminate between persons on the basis of a morally irrelevant characteristic, and patriotism, it follows, is immoral. Patriotism, for the universalist, is morally analogous to racism (see, e.g., Gomberg 1990; Nussbaum 2002, esp. 14; Tolstoy 1987a, 1987b).
The universalist argument against patriotism is simple and, in its way, powerful. It does seem to expose something arbitrary about the patriot’s pattern of concerns. Why should you care more about someone just because she is on one side of a national border rather than the other? Considering the complicated histories through which countries come to exist and to have the boundaries between them drawn in one way rather than others, why would you be prepared to kill or die for one country, while being relatively indifferent to the fate of the country next door?
The universalist argument faces a major problem, however, which is that it seems to prove too much. There is nothing about the argument, in its simple form at least, that makes it an argument against patriotism in particular. The universalist argument would seem just as strong when expressed as an argument against friendship or against special concern for your children or parents. Any kind of special concern within special relationships involves treating people differently because they happen to stand in some relationship with you, and the fact that they stand in that relationship with you is, for the universalist, morally irrelevant. If the universalist argument against patriotism goes so far as to denigrate all significant special human relationships, then surely – we may justifiably think – the argument must go wrong somewhere.
Accordingly, a good deal of the philosophical literature on the ethics of patriotism can be understood as trying to show what is wrong with the universalist argument. Some philosophers argue that universalist morality should be abandoned because of its unpalatable implications for special relationships. Universalism, they say, should be replaced with communitarianism, or the morality of loyalty (see, e.g., MacIntyre 1984; Oldenquist 1982; Rorty 1997). Other philosophers argue that universalism, properly understood, is in fact compatible with patriotism, or at least with some forms of patriotism. It is possible to respect the moral rights of all people, argue these philosophers, while still showing a patriotic allegiance to your own country and compatriots (see Baron 2002; Nathanson 1993; Primoratz 2000). Often, philosophers embed their claims about the ethics of patriotism within a larger account of the ethics of special relationships generally (see, e.g., Baron 2002; MacIntyre 1984; Oldenquist 1982; Rorty 1997).
There may be strategies by which the universalist argument could be salvaged. Perhaps, it can be expressed in a more sophisticated form, so as to latch onto something special about patriotism in particular, not loyalty in general. Or perhaps it could be supplemented with a story about why favoritism within some special relationships – perhaps friendship and family relationships – is morally acceptable, even though favoritism within special relationships generally is not. However the universalist argument is developed, though, it must, if it is to be plausible, identify respects in which patriotism is different from other kinds of loyalty, and that is a lesson that applies to all efforts to argue against patriotism. A case against patriotism will be compelling only if it is built on something that sets patriotism apart from the wider class of human loyalties and allegiances.
The first task of this chapter, then, is to look closely at the nature of patriotism. I try to show that patriotism is indeed an anomalous kind of loyalty, requiring its own ethical treatment. The second task of the chapter is to show how the features that set patriotism apart from other loyalties give reason to think that patriotism is undesirable – undesirable in a respect in which many other loyalties are not. But before coming to those tasks, let me say something more about the charge against patriotism that I want to press.
1.3 Patriotic delusions
During the campaign for the 2008 US presidential election, the candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, each wrote a short essay for Time magazine saying what patriotism means to them. McCain says that patriotism is “service to a cause greater than self-interest” and draws a contrast between the “good citizen and patriot,” on the one hand, and the “cynical and indifferent” person, on the other. Obama writes that patriotism is the “love and defense” of a country’s ideals and that he loves his own country and its ideals because “with a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya, I know that stories like mine could only happen in America” (Rooney 2008).
McCain’s thoughts about patriotism rely upon the thought that without patriotism, people are cynical and indifferent and do not serve a cause greater than self-interest. That thought is misguided. Selfless behavior may arise from concern for family, compassion for the needy, respect for justice, or a sense of shared humanity, among other motives. You do not need to be patriotic in order to avoid cynicism and indifference.
Obama’s thoughts about patriotism also rest upon a mistake, or at least a failure to consider the evidence. His story, he says, could only happen in America. It is doubtful that he has put any serious thought into the question of whether stories like his could also happen in Canada, Iceland, or New Zealand.
In The Republic, Socrates says that the way to breed a loyal citizen is to bring him up to believe a “noble lie.” The citizen should be taught that the country is his mother and his compatriots are his brothers. This is a lie, because nobody’s mother is really a country and compatriots are not really brothers. It is a noble lie because it is what citizens must believe in order to be loyal to the country, and it is to the benefit of the country and its legislators to have a population comprised of loyal citizens.1
That McCain and Obama speak falsely when they speak about patriotism reveals something about politicians and election campaigns, but it also reveals something about patriotism. The suggestion of The Republic is tendentious, but it captures something about the means and motivations through which legislators cultivate patriotism among the people. When we are in patriotic moods, we often say things that are not true. As patriots, we often indulge in delusions about ourselves and our countries. There is then reason to suspect that patriotism involves certain beliefs, or dispositions to form certain beliefs, and that those beliefs are misguided. There is reason to suspect that patriotism involves delusions, as a matter of its very nature. And there is no reason – or no reason that we have encountered so far – to suspect that this complaint about patriotism can be made about all forms of loyalty. Something special about patriotism appears to lie behind the complaint.
2 What is Patriotism?
2.1 Varieties of loyalty
An argument against patriotism can succeed only if it identifies something that distinguishes patriotism from other kinds of loyalty. On some ways of thinking, that is enough to show that the task of arguing against patriotism is hopeless. Patriotism is often defined simply as love of country, or loyalty to country, or special concern for country, or identification with country, or some combination of these attitudes. Other kinds of loyalty are often defined analogously, so that to be loyal to something (or to love it or identify with it or show special concern for it) is simply to favor it over other comparable entities. Then, a patriot is someone who favors his own country over other countries, a good sibling is someone who favors his brothers and sisters over other people, a loving parent is someone who favors his children over other children, a loyal alumnus is someone who favors his school over other schools, and so on.2 Following this line of thought, patriotism is just one more kind of preference for your own, and it is difficult to see how it could face any special objection. There may be objectionable forms of patriotism – as there can be stifling siblings, overbearing parents, and sycophantic alumni – but it is difficult to see how there could be a special problem with patriotism as such.
Whether patriotism should be characterized simply as favoritism for country, however, is an open question. There are many recognizable forms of loyalty that cannot be adequately described simply as involving favoritism. Think of the loyalty involved in friendship. Friendship is the most familiar thing in the world, but the question of what it means to be a friend is very difficult to answer, as the huge philosophical literature on the question attests (see, e.g., Badhwar 1993). Nobody thinks that you get to be someone’s friend just by favoring her over other people. To say what friendship really is and to say how friends think and what friends do, we need to answer a substantive and difficult question in moral psychology.
What does it mean to be a family man? A family man is not simply someone who favors his family over other families; he is someone who has certain values and emotions and who lives a certain kind of life. A Cubs tragic is not simply someone who favors the Cubs over other baseball teams. A Marxist fellow traveler is not just anyone who supports Marxism. Think about the terms loyal employee, soul mate, disciple, life partner, tennis parent, one-eyed Collingwood supporter, and Trekkie. These terms are all evocative and informative. You learn a great deal about a person when you hear that she falls under one of them. Each of the terms refers to a different, substantive, psychologically and behaviorally complex mode of being, involving a particular, distinctive kind of loyalty.
If patriotism is like one of these kinds of loyalty, then we should expect a full and complete account of the nature of patriotism to be a rich description of a way of thinking and behaving, not a terse statement such as “patriotism is love of country.” Perhaps some kinds of loyalty can be captured with a short formal definition, but many cannot, and patriotism may well be among them. There is more at stake here than just a question about how to use a word. If we offered a quick definition of “friendship” – if we said that friends are simply people who love each other, for example – and then tried to write about the ethics of friendship, then we would probably end up failing to talk about friendship at all. We may fall into the same kind of mistake if we take a similar approach to the ethics of patriotism. That is why we should spend some time asking what patriotism is before we try to evaluate it.
2.2 Identity
Imagine a person called Steve, who loves and admires France. He loves the French people and the French culture and language. He loves the countryside and the food. He endorses the French traditions of secularism and intellectualism, and he takes a special interest in French history. He believes in and admires the French way of life, and he wants the French state to flourish.
Given these facts about Steve, can we be sure that he is a patriot of France? No, we cannot, because for all we know, Steve is not French. He could admire and be committed to France, in all of these respects, and also be an American. He could even be an American patriot. It would be a misuse of language to say that someone who is not French is a patriot of France. As much as you might love and admire other countries, you can only be a patriot of your own country. So Steve, as described so far, is not necessarily a French patriot.
Let us specify, then, that Steve is, in fact, a French citizen: a citizen of France who loves and admires France and wants France to flourish. Now, do we know enough about Steve to be sure that he is patriotic?
Again, no. Steve might be French without knowing that he is French. Perhaps, he believes he is American. Perhaps he was born in France and acquired French citizenship, but then his parents moved to America and never got around to telling him about his heritage. If Steve does not consider himself to be French, then his attitudes to France cannot be the attitudes of a French patriot. It is consistent with his being French that he thinks of France as an outsider. He may love and admire France, and he may in fact be French, without having any sense that France is his. Something required for patriotism is still missing in Steve.
So let us add a further detail. Not only does Steve love and admire France, not only is he French, but he also knows he is French. If asked about his nationality, he truly and sincerely answers that he is from France. To that extent, he identifies as a Frenchman. Now, can we be sure that we have a description of a patriot?
Once again, we cannot. It remains possible, consistently with what we have said so far, that he does not care about being French. Perhaps he has traveled the world since he was young and considers himself a world citizen. Perhaps his French citizenship is, for him, just an administrative categorization. He could take a detached, cosmopolitan point of view from which he loves and admires a few favorite countries, one of which, as it happens, is his own France. Under this description, Steve considers his identity as a Frenchman to be a trivial matter, revealing nothing about his identity in any deep respect. And that way of thinking about being French is not the way of thinking characteristic of French patriotism. The sense in which Steve identifies with his country is not the sense in which a patriot identifies with his country.
Let us add yet more information. Let us say that Steve loves and admires France, is French, considers himself to be French, and – we now add – places a great deal of importance on his being French. For Steve, that is to say, being French is essential to his identity and self-understanding. Now, can we be sure that in speaking of Steve, we are speaking of someone who is patriotic?
Still, we cannot be sure. Perhaps Steve has come to believe that his French heritage explains a great deal about his character, his manner of relating to other people, his taste in romantic partners, and his neuroses. Perhaps he has been discussing these issues with his therapist and has decided that to understand who he really is, he must understand the distinctively French culture within which he was raised. Perhaps he is also, as it happens, a world traveler, who loves France, among other countries, and who judges that France is worthy of admiration. If that is how Steve turns out to be, then he is not a French patriot. He identifies with France in a deep and significant sense, and he has a positive attitude to France, yet in making judgments about France, he still takes the perspective of a detached global citizen. He is still not a person to whom the word “patriot” would naturally be applied.
The reason why Steve fails to be a French patriot, under this last description, is that his identifying as a Frenchman is kept psychologically separate from his loving and admiring France. In his thinking about himself, he takes his identity as a Frenchman to be significant, but in his thinking about France, he does not. He identifies strongly as French and he loves and admires France, but these aspects of his thinking are not integrated. For all the importance of his French heritage to his own self-understanding, when he makes judgments about France, his judgments are not made as a Frenchman, so to speak. That explains why he is still not someone whom we would naturally describe as a French patriot.
To be a patriot, you must have a sense of identity with your country. The point of the example of Steve is to show that not just any sense of identity will do. The patriot does not merely identify with her country, and she does not merely have a strong sense that her being of her country is a significant aspect of her identity. For a person to qualify as a patriot, she must have a strong sense of identity with her country, and that sense of identity with her country must be entangled with her judgments about her country and her emotional attitudes toward it. Insofar as a person is a patriot of France, she thinks of France essentially from the point of view of a French person; insofar as she is a patriot of Australia, she thinks of Australia essentially from the point of view of an Australian; and so on. To be a patriot is to think of your country, first, as yours. If you are a patriot, then you do not think of your country simply as a one more country, and you do not judge and evaluate your country from the perspective you take when judging and evaluating other countries.3
In this regard, the patriot’s sense of identity with her country is similar to the sense of identity that you might have with your mother, for example. When you think about your mother’s virtues and vices and about her needs and her value and what you owe her, you are likely to think of her as only a child of hers can. You are unlikely to think of her as you would think of any generic mother; your judgments and feelings about your mother are unlikely to be isolated from your awareness that this particular mother, as it happens, is yours. There might be times when you take a more detached view of your mother – perhaps this is what you must do when considering your mother as a job candidate – but doing so will require you to take a step back from your identity as her child. Your identifying yourself as this person’s child permeates your thinking about her. It makes you think of her, first, as yours.
2.3 Endorsement
I now want to introduce another imaginary character: Beryl. Beryl is Australian, and she identifies with Australia in the specific sense to which I have tried to draw attention. When she thinks of Australia, she thinks of it essentially as an Australian. But in thinking about Australia, Beryl feels shame, not pride. She is embarrassed to admit that she is Australian. She winces whenever she thinks of Australian culture. If you ask her to tell you about Australia, she will tell you, honestly, that it is awful and that she wishes she had been born somewhere else. She sees Australia as hers, and she sees her being Australian as a deep part of her identity, and this, for her, occasions sadness and regret. As far as Beryl is concerned, she is doomed to be Australian.
There is nothing incoherent about Beryl’s attitude toward her country. Some South Africans had similar attitudes to their country during the Apartheid era, identifying deeply with South Africa and experiencing South Africa’s fate personally while at the same time seeing South Africa as a rotten country and their identity as South Africans as nothing to celebrate (see, e.g., Malan 1990). It is easy to imagine having similar feelings about a parent. You could judge that your father is a despicable person with nothing much to recommend him, and you could wish that you had had a different father instead, while still regarding him as your father and your own identity as inextricably tied up with the place he has in your life.
Beryl is not a patriotic Australian. It does not make sense to say, “I am a patriotic Australian, and I think that Australia is an awful country and I wish I was born somewhere else” or “I am thoroughly ashamed of Australia, I am embarrassed to admit that I come from Australia, and I am, furthermore, an Australian patriot.” When you describe somebody as a patriot, you evoke something that is missing from Beryl.
To qualify as a patriot, then, you must do more than just identify with your country closely, in the manner of identification that involves always seeing the country first as your own. There is also a requirement that you make some kind of positive judgment about your country, or that you have positive feelings for it. At some level, to some extent, patriotism involves a sense that your country is a good country and that your close relationship with your country is something to welcome. To get clearer on what kind of positive judgment a patriot directs at her country, consider some more imaginary characters.
Dennis is an Australian who identifies closely with Australia, in the sense required for patriotism, and who shares, for the most part, Beryl’s negative evaluation of Australia. He thinks that Australia is a pretty pathetic country on the whole, and given the choice, he would have been born somewhere else. Dennis also, however, has a love for Australian football. That is one thing about Australia that he is prepared to recommend. His honest assessment of Australia is that it is not a country to be proud of, though it does have one minor distinguishing virtue.
Mandy is another Australian. In Mandy’s considered judgment, there are many wonderful things about Australia, though she would not take it upon herself to say what they might be. All countries have some good distinguishing characteristics, she thinks, and Australia is bound to have some too. Perhaps, Australia is made special by its landscape, perhaps by its people, perhaps by its history. Mandy has no views on this question, but she is sure that Australia, like any other country, is made wonderful by something or other.
Another Australian, Bradley, also thinks that there is something wonderful about Australia, and he has a clearer sense of what it is. What is wonderful about Australia, thinks Bradley, is its people. Australians, in Bradley’s judgment, are wonderful. They work hard and look after each other and do their best to raise their families and get by. That is not to say, Bradley will add, that Australians are any different from people everywhere. For the same reason that Bradley thinks Australians are wonderful, he thinks that people everywhere are wonderful. Bradley judges that there is something wonderful about Australia, though it is not something that distinguishes Australia from everywhere else.
Rachel, too, is an Australian, and she can tell you exactly what makes Australia both wonderful and special. Rachel loves Australia, she will tell you, because she loves its present government. Australians, in her view, have elected a government that is pursuing innovative and right-minded policies in the most conscientious way possible. That – and only that – makes Rachel proud to be Australian. She is aware that the present government could easily be replaced at the next election, and she is fearful and highly disapproving of the party that would likely replace it. If Australians were to vote out the present government, then Australia, in Rachel’s judgment, would become a country without special virtues.
Dennis, Mandy, Bradley, and Rachel all fail to be Australian patriots, even though they all have something positive to say about Australia. Dennis does not find anything about Australia to be both good and significant; what is good about Australia, for him, is not something of any great importance to Australia’s character. Mandy does not have any determinate sense of what is good about Australia; as far as she is concerned, what is good about Australia could be anything. Bradley does not see there to be anything good about Australia that distinguishes it from other countries. Rachel sees there to be something good, distinctive, and nontrivial about Australia, but it is something fragile and temporary.
All four fail to be Australian patriots because they all fail, in different ways, to have the belief that there is something special, stable, and valuable at the heart of Australia’s identity. To have the mindset of a patriot is, in part, to accept a reasonably concrete picture of your country, on which there is something about your country that is distinctive, central, enduring, and good. It is to take your country to merit your ongoing patriotic loyalty.
There are many different kinds of commitment that could lead you to judge that your country has something special, stable, and valuable at its heart. Your commitment could concern the country’s distinctive political structure, its distinctive history, its distinctive way of life, its distinctive artistic tradition, its distinctive approach to international affairs, or anything, really. Different people can have all sorts of different views about what things are good and about what things do and do not have central importance for a country’s nature. Accordingly, there can be different kinds of patriotism: patriotism focused on the political, patriotism focused on the cultural, patriotism focused on the historical, and so on.
It is quite possible to find something special, stable, and valuable at your country’s heart while at the same time finding much to dislike about your country and indeed while judging other countries to be better, on the whole, than yours. That you take your country to have something good at its heart does not preclude you from judging that it also has something bad at its heart; you might judge, for example, that your country deserves your patriotism insofar as it is home to a wonderful distinctive way of life, but also that your country is characterized by a deeply flawed political culture. You could see there to be many wonderful things about another country, perhaps even judge that it is a greater country than your own country, while still finding there to be something good about your country that other countries lack and in which your fondness for your own country is grounded.
Patriotic dissent, therefore, is possible. A patriot may well disapprove of much that her country does and wish that certain central features of her country were changed. She may even disapprove of much that her country does because she takes her country to be failing to manifest its own best qualities. She may criticize her country, for example, for drifting away from the traditions that make it great or for failing to live up to the values that make it wonderful and special. When dissent takes this form, it is genuinely the dissent of a patriot. It is a brand of dissent that can only be offered by someone who (believes she) appreciates what is best about the country and who is concerned to make her country as good as it can be, according to certain of (what she takes to be) its own defining standards and values (MacIntyre 1984, 15).
Patriotism involves an endorsement of some aspect of your country that you take to be central, distinctive, and enduring. It then involves evaluative commitments. It involves a commitment to a certain picture of your country, according to which the country is, in some central, distinctive, and enduring respect, good. When you learn that a person is a patriot, you learn something about her sense of identity with her country, and you also learn something about her evaluative attitudes to her country. A person who does not find anything good about her country may nevertheless be loyal to her country, in some ways, but she is not a patriot.
2.4 Seriousness
I have said something about how a patriot thinks of herself and something about how a patriot thinks of her country. I have not said anything about how a patriot acts. There are many different ways in which patriotism may be expressed in action. A patriot may salute the flag, sing the national anthem, wear national dress, cook the national dish, and cheer for her country’s sporting teams. All of these expressions of patriotism appear unobjectionable – it is difficult to see how anyone could be against cooking the national dish – and they are all, in addition, undemanding. They are not acts of sacrifice. There are other expressions of patriotism that do require sacrifice. A patriot may choose to give up professional opportunities overseas in order to stay in her country, she may lie or cheat to protect her country, and she may kill or die for her country, all as expressions of patriotism.
There are no particular acts that are necessary for patriotism. A person who is patriotic may also be a pacifist and refuse to go to war. A patriot may think that saluting the flag is silly, and she may have no interest in the national sporting teams, national dress, or national dish. But a patriot must be prepared to express her patriotism in some actions or other, and among the actions she is prepared to perform for her country, there must be some that involve genuine sacrifice and the compromising of other things she cares about. A person who would only ever perform undemanding acts of patriotism – whose alleged patriotism goes no further than what she wears, what she cooks, and what teams she supports – is not really a patriot at all. It is self-defeating to say, “I am a patriot, but I am not prepared to make sacrifices for my country, and when considerations of my country conflict with other things I care about, my country always comes second.”
You can be a loyal fan of a football team, even if you would never be prepared to make serious sacrifices or compromises for the team. That you would never put the team before your family or your job does not demonstrate that you are not really a fan of the team at all. Things are different when it comes to being a loving father. A father who likes his son, but who would not make sacrifices or compromise his other goals and values for the sake of his son, is not someone who could fairly be described as a loving father. Being a loving father takes more commitment than that.
In this respect, being a patriot is like being a loving father and unlike being a fan of a football team. It is a defining feature of patriotism that the patriot takes her connection with her country seriously, and that the patriot’s commitment to her country plays a significant part in her life and her system of values. Patriotism is not a trivial matter. Patriotism is not a mere indulgence.
2.5 The distinctiveness of patriotism
The patriot has a particular kind of identity with her country; she takes it to be a significant fact about herself that this country is her own, and her point of view on her country is constituted partly by her taking the country to be hers. The patriot has a particular kind of regard for her country; she takes it to be, in some robust and central respect, a good country. The patriot takes her connection with her country seriously; her being a patriot helps determine how she prioritizes her values and what sacrifices and compromises she is prepared to make.
Patriotism, all of this implies, is a substantive, complex psychological state. A person does not get to be a patriot just by exhibiting favoritism toward her country or loyalty toward her country, of one kind of another. Patriotism, as it turns out, is not susceptible to an easy definition. We can uncover elements of patriotic thinking and behavior, but to define patriotism, in the sense of providing precise necessary and sufficient conditions for patriotism, is no easier than giving a definition of friendship or love or happiness.
There are features of patriotism, moreover, that set patriotism apart from other forms of loyalty. Not every kind of loyalty requires the particular kind of identification or the particular kind of endorsement involved in patriotism, and not every kind of loyalty is as serious as patriotism. There is therefore the space, in principle, to construct an argument against patriotism that does not count as an argument against loyalty in general.
3 The Problem with Patriotism
3.1 Bad faith
Jean-Paul Sartre famously identifies a kind of self-deception called “bad faith.” A person falls into bad faith when her view of herself and the world is dependent upon her desire to hold one view rather than another, or upon her willful acceptance of a role that entails her taking one view rather than others, and not by direct honest engagement with herself or the world. Here is one of Sartre’s examples.
A woman and a man are out on their first date. The woman would like the date to be fun and friendly and in particular does not want to face the man’s sexual desire or to have to make a decision about whether to accept or reject any sexual advances. So she adopts strategies that allow her to avoid taking any of the man’s words or actions as sexual advances, and she interprets her own words and actions so as to avoid representing them as tokens of acceptance or rejection. When he says to her, “I find you so attractive!,” she judges that he is simply expressing his personality in a sincere and respectful manner; she finds nothing sexual about it. When he takes her hand, she does not withdraw it, but neither does she take herself to consent to holding hands. Instead, she distracts herself, thinking and speaking of other things, as though the hand-holding is not really happening to her (Sartre 1969, 55–56).
The woman is guilty of bad faith because she deliberately undermines her own capacity to see and confront the world as it really is. She wants to have certain beliefs, so she pursues strategies for interpreting the world in ways supportive of the beliefs without admitting to herself that the reason she holds those beliefs is that she is actively pursuing those strategies. She cannot allow herself to acknowledge that her interpretation of her interactions with her suitor is driven by her own desire to see them in one way rather than another, because that would undermine the interpretation itself. This is the nature of the woman’s self-deception. When I fall into bad faith, says Sartre, “I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived. Better yet, I must know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it more carefully” (Sartre 1969, 49). There are other kinds of bad faith, and Sartre gives other well-known and suggestive examples. For present purposes, though, it is enough to say that a person can fall into (one kind of) bad faith by actively trying to form certain beliefs, not because those beliefs are supported by the evidence but instead because she has an independent desire to hold those beliefs, and by hiding from herself the fact that those beliefs are influenced by that desire.
Sartre’s account of bad faith is embedded within his broader existentialist philosophy, but it does not take a commitment to Sartrean existentialism to see reasons why bad faith is undesirable. Bad faith evinces a lack of authenticity. Bad faith is a kind of self-deception, and self-deception is unedifying and, predictably, psychologically damaging. Bad faith can also have bad consequences. To the extent to which your beliefs are formed in response to your desires about what to believe, not to the evidence, your beliefs are less likely to be true. To the extent to which your beliefs are less likely to be true, your decisions are less likely to be well informed and your actions less likely to be successful.
3.2 Bad faith and loyalty
There are some familiar cases in which a person falls into bad faith because she has a certain kind of loyalty. Consider the beliefs an overbearing parent may have about his child. Some parents are convinced that their children are more talented and virtuous than other children and will not take anything as evidence to the contrary. Whatever the child does is interpreted as evidence of her genius. When watching a school soccer game, the parent is convinced that his child is the best player on the field. If the child gets in trouble at school, the parent believes that the teacher is out to get her. Some parents who make such judgments about their children are able to admit that they are guilty of parental bias and that their opinions about their children’s virtues ought not be taken too seriously. But other parents make such judgments perfectly earnestly and will not admit to themselves that their judgments are biased – even though they must be actively working, at some level, to interpret everything in ways supportive of their predetermined convictions.
As a second example, consider the judgments you might make as a passionate fan of a football team. When you are watching your team play, you are likely to believe that your team is getting the worst of the umpiring decisions, that the opposition is using the less sporting tactics, and, if there is a fight, that it only happened because your players were provoked. When discussing football with your friends, you are likely to argue that your own team is underrated, that your team could have won more titles in the past were it not for bad luck, or that one of your team’s players, against common belief, is in fact the best who has ever played in his position. To the extent to which you make such judgments sincerely, you, again, display a kind of bad faith. In acting as a passionate fan of your team, you inhabit a role, and as part of your inhabiting that role, you form certain opinions – not in response only to the evidence but also in response to your desire to see things in one way rather than others.
3.3 Bad faith and patriotism
The beliefs of patriots often display bias of the kind just described. Some patriotic people are like overbearing parents and passionate sports fans. Some patriots are outraged by any suggestion that people are friendlier or drivers more courteous overseas. Some Australian patriots seem unable to admit that there is anything wrong with Australia. Some American patriots just cannot countenance the possibility that America’s constitution is flawed. Whether such patriotic bias is endemic to patriotism – whether it tells us something about patriotism as such or just about some particular patriots – is a further question.
The patriot exhibits a distinctive way of thinking about herself, her country, and the world. She identifies with her country, taking it to be a significant truth about her that she is of this country rather than some other, and she makes positive judgments about her country, finding it to hold certain characteristics that make it worthy of her endorsement. Her identifying with her country and her endorsement of certain aspects of her country are not psychologically separate, but are rather integrated into the one way of thinking. To the extent to which a person is patriotic, she sees her country and the world essentially from the point of view of her own country, and for her, that means seeing her country and the world essentially from the point of view of a country that meets a particular picture. The patriot, on her own view, begins from the perspective of a citizen of a country that has certain specified, enduring, distinguishing virtues at its heart.
When the patriot judges her country to meet a picture of the relevant kind – when she judges that hers is an especially fair country, or an especially friendly country, or a country with a rich and distinctive history – there is more at stake for her than the simple factual question of whether her country falls under a certain description. The country’s having certain virtues is a presumption of her very identity. To tell a patriot that she is wrong about the nature of her country is to throw into question her understanding of herself. It is to suggest that there is a mistake in the very point of view she takes on herself, her country, and the world.
Put it this way. A patriot judges that her country has certain virtues and that those virtues are such as to make her country worthy of her patriotic loyalty. But the patriot does not exhibit patriotic loyalty because she determines her country to hold certain virtues. It is not as though she begins from an objective viewpoint, sets out to learn all she can about the nature of her country, reaches the conclusion that her country holds certain virtues, and then decides to be a patriot. Her patriotism is not derived from or conditional upon a considered judgment that her country has a certain nature. Instead, she extends patriotic loyalty to her country largely because she thinks of it as hers. Her patriotism is as much an expression of her own identity as it is an opinion about what her country is like and how it compares with others.
A patriot’s judgments about her own country, as a result, are emotionally and personally loaded in a respect in which her judgments about other countries are not. When a patriot encounters evidence that challenges her picture of some other country – when an Australian patriot encounters evidence that Britain is not the country she believed it to be – she can, in principle, evaluate the evidence and change her view of the relevant country as the evidence directs. But when a patriot encounters evidence that challenges her picture of her own country – when the Australian patriot encounters evidence that Australia’s history is not so distinguished or that Australia is not so fair and tolerant – she confronts that evidence from the point of view of a person who is committed to the country, in its guise as a country that meets the very picture in question. In the mind of the Australian patriot who encounters evidence to suggest that Australia is not really the fair and tolerant country she takes it to be, it is as though the evidence takes the form of reasons to suggest that the fair and tolerant country of Australia is not fair and tolerant. The evidence is inconsistent with the very basis of her commitment to her country. It is inconsistent with the judgments that form the very perspective from which the evidence is considered.
The patriot, then, has a motive to resist evidence that challenges her picture of her country. The motive arises from the patriot’s investment in her self-conception – the Australian patriot embraces an understanding of herself as a person from the fair and tolerant country of Australia – and it arises from the patriot’s commitment to her country: part of what it is to be loyal to Australia, for our Australian patriot, is to recognize and endorse it as a fair and tolerant country. Seriously to consider the suggestion that her country does not have the virtues she takes it to have is, for the patriot, to wonder whether she is really the person she takes herself to be and who is making this very judgment. And it is to throw her patriotic loyalty to country into question.
Patriotic bad faith emerges from the very structure of patriotism. To the extent to which a person is patriotic, she is self-deceiving. Part of what makes someone a patriot is her holding a certain kind of picture of her country, and that involves her holding certain judgments about her country’s nature. For a person to qualify as a patriot, she must judge her country from the perspective of a person who belongs to that country and not from the perspective that she may take toward other countries. When these elements are combined within the complex way of thinking that constitutes patriotism, they produce a person who holds a certain picture of the world and is motivated to maintain it – not because she judges it to be correct, but because she has taken on an identity that requires her to hold it. She is then motivated to pursue strategies that help her to maintain that picture, independently of the evidence, without admitting to herself that she holds that picture partly because she pursues those strategies.
Patriotism is a serious loyalty. Patriotic loyalty is not held ironically or halfheartedly, and its influence is not kept to decisions that do not really matter. A patriot’s bad faith, then, is likely to be consequential. It is likely to affect her judgments about weighty matters, like what sacrifices she should make and what policies she should support. Ideally, the bad faith of a parent or a football fan is kept in check by the parent or the football fan herself. Someone who takes an analogous attitude to her loyalty to her country, however – someone who maintains an ironic distance from her loyalty to country and makes sure that her loyalty to country does not affect anything that really matters – does not have the commitment of a patriot.
My description of patriotic bad faith has been schematic. Shortly, I will say a little more to explain and qualify my suggestion that patriotism leads to self-deception. Before doing so, though, I want to discuss two more tangible cases in which we see patriotic bad faith in action.
3.4 Patriotic education
Think about what it means to give a child a patriotic education. In receiving a patriotic education, a child is likely to learn facts about her country and also to engage in patriotic activities, such as singing the national anthem, reciting an oath of allegiance, and saluting the flag. The goals of a patriotic education are to impart information about the country, to build the child’s sense of identity as a citizen of the country, and to encourage the child to love and be loyal to her country. A patriotic education aims at once to tell the child who she is, where she is from, and to what she owes her loyalty.
An education that emphasizes the vices of a country is not a patriotic education. When it is our goal to give a child a patriotic education, we are under pressure to tell the story of our country as a story of which we can be proud. Such a story does not need to ignore all the distasteful episodes in the country’s history and all the unattractive features of the country, but it does need to be a story of overarching progress, redemption, or virtue. It needs to teach the child that she is a part of something grand.
A successful patriotic education produces a person who identifies with her country, who loves and is loyal to her country, and whose identification and love and loyalty are inextricably bound up with her belief that her country has a certain character. Consider the response you would expect from someone who has received a patriotic education and later encounters evidence to suggest that the story she was taught is not altogether true; suppose she encounters reasons to believe that the country’s national myths are deluded, its political system corrupt, or the main elements of its culture imported from elsewhere. If her education has been successful, then she will find it difficult to draw such evidence within her learned picture of the world and herself. Rather than confronting the evidence on its own terms, she will find it easier to doubt it, to ignore it, or to conclude that those who offer it are disloyal. A patriotic education discourages honest engagement with evidence about the country’s nature but also discourages any explicit awareness that such engagement is being discouraged. It lays the groundwork for self-deception.
3.5 The politics of patriotism
Often, people wish to present their political opinions as patriotic opinions. As a participant in American politics, for example, you might say that peace is patriotic, or that it would be unpatriotic to give up sovereign powers in a trade agreement, or that your commitment to religious freedom is an expression of your American patriotism, or that it is patriotic to defend the environment or American industry or the principles of free trade. It may be important to you to present your vision for your country as the vision of a patriot, and it may be useful to you to question the patriotism of those with whom you disagree.
In advocating a political opinion as a patriotic opinion, you face two tasks. First, you must make the case that your opinion is correct: that the policy you advocate is right and that your position is supported by good reasons. Second, you must make the case that your opinion represents something distinctive at your country’s heart: that the value you advocate is a genuinely American value, for example. These tasks are conceptually distinct. There is no guarantee that a correct opinion is also an opinion that flows from a country’s deepest values or that an opinion that flows from a country’s deepest values is also correct. So in advocating a political opinion as the opinion of a patriot, you must fight on two fronts, defending the opinion on its intrinsic merits while also telling a story about your country on which the opinion reflects something important about your country’s true nature.
Suppose, for example, that you are an American advocate of free trade. In your role as a patriotic advocate of free trade, you cannot say, “My commitment to free trade is the commitment of an American patriot. The principle of free trade captures America’s true values. Whether or not those values are good is irrelevant; I am not concerned with whether or not free trade, in addition to capturing the deepest American values, is desirable.” You also cannot say, “My commitment to free trade is the commitment of an American patriot. Free trade is a good thing. Whether it has anything to do with American values I do not know; how my patriotic opinion relates to America’s true nature is irrelevant.” Consistently with styling yourself as an American patriot, you cannot so starkly separate the good from the American.
Here are some other things that you cannot say in advocating free trade as the policy of an American patriot. You cannot say, “My commitment to free trade is patriotic. It captures some of the values at America’s heart. Of course, there are lots of different American values, and some of them are not supportive of free trade. But I am not talking about those values. I choose to focus on those American values that support my opinion.” And you cannot say, “My commitment to free trade is patriotic. It captures the values at America’s heart. Of course, how I see America’s deepest values is determined largely by my very commitment to free trade. When I look for American values, I look for the values to which I am independently committed.”
One who presents himself as a patriotic participant in politics, then, must make sure that his story about the nature of his country corresponds to the views that he judges to be correct, but he cannot admit that he is seeking such correspondence. He must present his picture of his country and his political opinions as though they come seamlessly together, but behind the scenes, a messier process must be undergone. He must engage in a creative, deliberate strategy of selection and interpretation, while hiding from himself and others the fact that this strategy is helping to determine his view of his country and his opinions about what we should do.
This distinctively political manifestation of patriotic bad faith is reflected in the passionate disputes about a country’s nature and history often seen when claims about patriotism are at stake. When participants on different sides of a debate are all determined to present themselves as patriots, when there is a shared assumption that a good policy must be a patriotic policy, and when it is considered politically dangerous to have your patriotism called into question, it becomes very important for each side to claim the country and its history as its own. People who are advocating political views find themselves needing to do history and sociology while making sure that their conclusions suit them politically. The resulting debates, characteristically, are passive-aggressive, involving deliberate misdirection and false sanctimony, as each side pursues its own agenda while refusing to admit that it is pursuing an agenda at all.
3.6 An evaluation of patriotism
In as many ways as I can, I have tried to show that patriotism inclines a person toward bad faith. A patriot is primed to be self-deceiving about the source of her beliefs about herself, her country, and the world. She is motivated to maintain a certain picture of the world and to hide from herself the truth about how that picture is maintained. Patriotism inhibits a person’s ability to make informed and clearheaded judgments, and often, the affected judgments will concern serious matters on which good judgment is especially important.
Patriotic self-deception can be overcome. That a patriot is primed to resist evidence that challenges her patriotic picture of herself and her country does not imply that such evidence cannot possibly be effectual. The woman in Sartre’s example, her bad faith notwithstanding, could find herself confronted with sexual advances so overt that she cannot possibly interpret them as anything other than what they are; at what point she will cease to deceive herself about her suitor’s intentions depends upon the strength of her motive to avoid facing them. Similarly, a patriot could well be led to change her patriotic vision of herself and her country, whether by abandoning or altering her patriotism; at what point any challenge to her patriotic picture will have an effect depends upon the strength and depth of her patriotism.
In addition, bad faith can be tempered by other traits. If the woman on the first date is a perceptive reader of human behavior or has an uncompromising commitment to self-transparency, then her desire to avoid confrontation with the man’s sexual intentions might be of negligible consequence. The desire to pursue creative interpretations of the man’s behavior might be outweighed by other desires, or it might be impossible for this woman, in these circumstances, to put the desire into action. Similarly, a patriotic person might, as well as being patriotic, have a commitment to avoiding any kind of self-deception, and she might have a highly tuned capacity to respond appropriately to new evidence about herself and her country. She might then be protected against falling into bad faith. But still, to the extent to which a patriot is not primed to be self-deceiving, that will be so in spite of her patriotism.
4 Life without Patriotism
4.1 The good in patriotism
If my evaluation of patriotism is correct, then it shows, at a minimum, that there is something wrong with patriotism, construed as a trait of persons, and something dangerous about patriotism, construed as a presence in a society. Patriotism involves self-deception. Self-deception is unedifying and unattractive in a person, and it is destructive of such virtues as self-understanding, honesty, and clearheaded judgment. Further, patriotism leads to misguided judgments about matters of social and political importance, so a society of patriots will be, to this extent, a society of people who make worse decisions about questions that matter.
Clearly, however, this is not the last word about patriotism. That there is something regrettable about patriotism does not imply that we would be better off without it. Perhaps there are good things about patriotism to outweigh the bad, and perhaps any attainable alternative to patriotism would be even less desirable than patriotism itself. It is natural to think that patriotism promotes a sense of identity and belonging; and it is natural to think that patriots are better citizens, more committed to the health of the states in which they live. If those thoughts are correct, then it may be that we should approve of patriotism in ourselves and in others and that we should educate our children to be patriotic, even while conceding that patriotism conduces to self-deception. That depends on what alternatives to patriotism are available.
4.2 Nonpatriotic loyalty to country
In trying to articulate an attractive alternative to patriotism, we could look at ways in which a person can be loyal to country without having the distinctive loyalty to country involved in patriotism. As one possibility, we could hope that people will have a robust commitment to country that does not rely upon any sense that the country is a good country. We could wish people to identify strongly with country and to be prepared to make sacrifices for country regardless of whether they approve of the country and hence without pressure to maintain a picture of the country according to which it possesses certain distinguishing virtues. A person could be prepared to pay his taxes and to go to war if his country needs him while at the same time believing that his country does not especially deserve his loyalty and wishing that he had been born elsewhere.
As another possibility, we could wish for a kind of loyalty to country that rests squarely upon an independent judgment about the country’s virtues. We could hope that people will make honest, hardheaded evaluations of the country and commit themselves to the country only if, and only for as long as, they judge the country to merit their commitment. Then they could be loyal to the country while standing ready to give up their loyalty if they judge that the country does not merit it and hence without being disposed to maintain their positive evaluations even in the face of the evidence. For example, a person could ask whether his country is just and beautiful and then be prepared to make sacrifices for it only if he answers, in light of a full assessment of the evidence, that it is.
It is possible to be loyal to a country without being patriotic, and there are real people who exhibit nonpatriotic loyalty. As mentioned earlier, there are people who care deeply about their countries without approving of them, and there are surely also people who are committed to their own countries only on condition that their countries maintain certain virtues. In my opinion, however, the goal of cultivating widespread nonpatriotic loyalty to country is not a realistic one.
A country, in the modern world, is an enormous, complicated, ungraspable entity. Most of us have millions upon millions of compatriots, and most of us live in countries whose histories and characters are long, complex, and morally compromised. None of us really knows very much about who our compatriots are and what our countries really are like. To be loyal to a country, though, you need to imagine it as something tangible. You need a conception of just what this thing is to which you are loyal.
Part of the reason why patriotism is so common, I suspect, is that the best way to cultivate loyalty to a country, in all its size and complexity, is to cultivate patriotic loyalty. People are more likely to become loyal to a country if they see their identities as inextricably tied up in their relationships with the country and if they imagine the country to have certain specified distinguishing virtues. It is easier to be loyal to America if you take yourself to be essentially American and to see the world essentially from an American point of view and if you take America to be set apart from other countries by its freedom and democracy.
Those, anyway, are my psychological speculations. If they are right, then the cultivation of loyalty to country, of whatever kind, will always tend toward the cultivation of patriotism. I think we will do better if we look for an alternative to patriotism that does not involve loyalty to country at all.
4.3 Citizenship without loyalty to country
It is a mistake to think that a person must be a patriot if she is to have an understanding of her own origins and a sense of belonging to a community. You may derive your identity from your connection with your family, your city, your religious community, or your ethnic group or from your profession, your sporting interests, or just about anything else. A person may be stateless, or live in many countries successively, or fail to feel at home in her own country, without thereby failing to have anything in which she could find self-understanding and identity.
It is also a mistake to think that a person must be loyal to a country if she is to be a good citizen of the country or if she is to be motivated to make sacrifices for the good of the country. You can care deeply about a country without being loyal to it in the first instance or without caring about it for its own sake. Think about the kind of concern you might have for a local public library. You might not be loyal to the library and might not care about the library for its own sake – it might be a matter of indifference to you if the library were closed and replaced by a different library – but you might nevertheless have a deep concern for the health of the library, because of its importance for the other things you care about. If you and your children use the library, if you care about the health of your local community, and if you feel strongly that the public libraries should be supported, then you might be motivated to volunteer for the library, donate to it, and fight for it if its survival is threatened, without ever taking the library itself as an object of your loyalty.
We may then find the goods associated with patriotism, like a sense of belonging and identity and the motivation required for good citizenship, among people who feel strongly connected to certain places and communities, but not to a country, and who want their country to flourish, but only because of its importance for the other things for which they care.4
As model for this way of thinking and caring about a county, think about people who emigrate from one country to another. A Frenchman who makes a new life in New York may come to feel closely connected to New York and to the various places and communities in which his new life is lived. He may indeed become a New Yorker, even if he could never become an American, and certainly never an American patriot. He may, in addition, become a perfectly good citizen of America. He may willingly follow the law and pay his taxes; he may have a special concern with the health of the American state and do what he can to contribute to America’s flourishing; and he may be prepared to fight for America, if need be. His commitment to America may arise not from loyalty to America itself, but rather from the importance of America for the things within America to which he is loyal or for which he does feel a more fundamental concern.
We know that it is possible for immigrants to make enormous contributions to their adopted countries, to be greatly committed to the flourishing of their adopted countries, and to form close connections and find sources of belonging and identity within their adopted countries. That is so even when the immigrants concerned consider themselves natives (perhaps even patriots) of the old country, and in any case even when the new country is not their country, in the sense required for patriotism.
Most people do not move from an old country to a new country, but the attitudes just described are in principle available to everyone. I think that we can have the goods associated with patriotism without patriotism itself and without the tendency to fall into patriotic bad faith, if we stop fetishizing countries. Instead of imagining that any sense of identity and belonging must come from membership of a state, accept that there are many other possible sources of identity and belonging. Accept that identity and belonging can be found in entities smaller, more immediate, and more knowable than a country. Instead of imagining that a person will act well as a citizen only if he feels patriotic loyalty to the country, emphasize the crucial role that the state plays in making the existence of other valuable things possible. Much more needs to be said before this collection of thoughts could be turned into an achievable program for cultivating good nonpatriotic citizenship, but it at least shows that patriotism should not be accepted as inevitable, its faults to be tolerated at any cost.
5 Conclusion
There is more to being a patriot than simply caring about a country or identifying with it or taking it to be good. Far from being simply another instantiation of loyalty, analogous to loyalty toward friends and family members and the rest, patriotism, upon examination, turns out to be distinctive and unusual. Once we look more closely at the kind of identification involved in patriotism and the kind of picture of her country to which a patriot must subscribe, it can be seen that a person’s patriotism is a source of pressure for her to hold some beliefs rather than others, independently of the evidence for and against those beliefs. And so, I have argued, patriotism leads to bad faith.
At first glance, this might look like an esoteric argument against patriotism and perhaps like one not worthy of presentation as the case against patriotism. But I have tried, in various ways, to show that the consequences of patriotic bad faith are real and significant. There is the general point that patriotism is a serious loyalty that feeds into important decisions, so any bad faith within that loyalty will contaminate those important decisions. Then, there are more specific points concerning patriotism’s destructive effects when drawn within various institutions; to give two examples, a patriotic education undermines some of the intellectual virtues that an education ought to develop, and a political debate involving self-described patriots is likely to be indirect and impoverished. In addition, I have tried to show that there are possibilities for life without patriotism. If we can get rid of patriotism without thereby losing the goods of identity and belonging and good citizenship with which patriotism is associated, then we should, and there is reason to think that we can. We can choose not to be patriotic, and we can choose not to encourage patriotism.
References
1. Badhwar, Neera Kapur, ed. 1993. Friendship: A Philosophical Reader. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
2. Baron, Marcia. 2002. “Patriotism and ‘Liberal’ Morality.” In Patriotism, edited by Igor Primoratz, 59–86. Amherst: Humanity Books.
3. Gomberg, Paul. 1990. “Patriotism Is Like Racism.” Ethics, 101 (1): 144–150.
4. Keller, Simon. 2013. “Worldly Citizens: Civic Virtue without Patriotism.” In Cosmopolitanism versus Noncosmopolitanism, edited by Gillian Brock, 239–254. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
5. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” The Lindley Lecture, Lawrence, University of Kansas. Reprinted in Patriotism, edited by Igor Primoratz, 43–58. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2002. Available at http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu. Accessed July 10, 2014.
6. Malan, Rian. 1990. My Traitor’s Heart. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press.
7. Nathanson, Stephen. 1993. Patriotism, Morality and Peace. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
8. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2002. “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism.” In For Love of Country? edited by Joshua Cohen, 3–20. Boston: Beacon Press.
9. Oldenquist, Andrew. 1982. “Loyalties.” Journal of Philosophy, 79 (4): 173–193.
10.Primoratz, Igor. 2000. “Patriotism: Morally Allowed, Required, or Valuable?” In Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Nenad Miscevic, 101–113. Chicago: Open Court.
11.Rooney, Katie. 2008. “What Patriotism Means to Obama, McCain.” Time, June 26. Available at www.time.com. Accessed July 26, 2014.
12.Rorty, Richard. 1997. “Justice as a Larger Loyalty.” Ethical Perspectives, 4 (3): 139–149.
13.Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1969. Being and Nothingness. London: Routledge.
14.Tolstoy, Leo. 1987a. “On Patriotism.” In Writings on Civil Disobedience and Non-violence, by Leo Tolstoy, 51–123. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers.
15.Tolstoy, Leo. 1987b. “Patriotism, or Peace?” In Writings on Civil Disobedience and Non-violence, by Leo Tolstoy, 137–147. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers.
Notes
1 414b–e. Translators sometimes call the noble lie the “royal lie” or the “magnificent myth.”2 In different ways, the view that patriotism is just like other kinds of loyalty, just with a different object, is expressed in Baron (2002, 70), MacIntyre (1984, 4–5), and Oldenquist (1982, 179–180).3 I take this to be the point made in MacIntyre (1984, 4–5).4 I say more about these questions in Keller (2013).