8
Simon Keller
1 Patriotism and the Vices
Patriotism, I have argued, is a vice, because it by nature produces an ugly and dangerous kind of self-deception: a kind of bad faith. In their responses, Kleinig and Primoratz raise objections to my claims about what patriotism is, how patriotism is linked with bad faith, and why the link between patriotism and bad faith is significant. I will go through these objections and defend my view as best I can. I want to start, though, with a brief discussion of the vices, and of what it takes to show that patriotism is a vice. This, I hope, will make the goal of my argument clearer.
Cruelty is a vice. The reason why cruelty is a vice is that it involves, by its nature, a preparedness to inflict suffering on others even if that suffering is unjustified. (That is one story. If you have another explanation of why cruelty is a vice, you may substitute it for this one.) It does not follow, however, that every cruel person inflicts unjustified suffering. Consider some possibilities.
You might be cruel, yet fail to encounter circumstances that lead you to express your cruelty in action; you might not encounter anyone you can harm, for example, or you might always get what you want without needing to harm anyone. You might be cruel, but have other character traits that hide or overwhelm your cruelty; you might be very fearful of retaliation, for example, or you might be very obedient or distractible. You might be cruel, but only a little bit cruel, so that your being cruel makes little difference to how you behave. Finally, you might be cruel but also aware that you are cruel, and you might successfully pursue strategies that keep your cruel dispositions under control; you might learn to freeze before you do anything hurtful, for example, or you might learn to avoid the situations in which your cruelty is most likely to take over.
These points are all obvious enough and none gives any reason to doubt that cruelty is a vice – and, indeed, that it is a vice because of its constitutive connection with the infliction of unjustified suffering. They do show, however, that we cannot explain why cruelty is a vice with the conditional, “if a person is cruel, then he will inflict unjustified suffering.” A person can be cruel without ever actually inflicting unjustified suffering. (Similarly, a person can be dishonest without ever actually deceiving anyone and can be cowardly without ever actually running from a fight.)
Describing a cruel person, then, we need to use other expressions. We can say that cruelty inclines or primes or tends to lead a person to inflict unjustified suffering, or that a cruel person has a disposition to inflict unjustified suffering, or that a person is willing to inflict unjustified suffering to the extent to which he is cruel, or that if a cruel person does not inflict unjustified suffering on others, then that is despite his being cruel.
What does this have to do with patriotism? Well, when I argue that patriotism is a vice because of its constitutive connection with bad faith, I do not mean that if a person is a patriot, then she will fall into bad faith. There are various possibilities, as I say in my initial essay, under which a patriot can fail to fall into bad faith despite her patriotism. Patriotism can be mild and it can be outweighed, and the patriot’s tendency toward bad faith can be tempered by circumstances, by other character traits, and by self-awareness (66–67). Those possibilities do not detract from my argument so long as it remains true that patriotism by nature disposes a person to fall into bad faith. We should not move, then, from the bare possibility of patriotism without bad faith straight to the conclusion that there is no conceptual link between patriotism and bad faith. But that, I think, is what some of the objections to my view do.
Kleinig is frustrated that I say that patriotism is deluded while saying that a patriotic person merely “tends to be” or “is inclined to be” deluded (114–115). Primoratz thinks I make conflicting claims when I say that bad faith emerges from the very structure of patriotism and then that patriotism in a person merely “leads to” bad faith (143). My expressions, though, are supposed to recognize the distinction between patriotism, as an element of character, and the patriotic person, whose character will include many things besides patriotism. What patriotism inclines a person toward is not always expressed in what a patriotic person does. As I see it, patriotism is by nature connected with self-deception in the same sense in which cruelty is by nature connected with the infliction of unjustified suffering. A patriotic person tends to be self-deceived, as a cruel person tends to inflict unjustified suffering.
Primoratz thinks I must be making an empirical claim about patriotism, not a conceptual claim, when I say that patriotism “leads to” self-deception and bad faith (143–144). Once we see that it is possible for a patriot not to fall into bad faith, he thinks, any connection between patriotism and faith becomes a matter for empirical investigation. I do not think that that follows, and I do mean to make a conceptual claim. We can imagine a cruel person who does not inflict suffering, but that does not mean that we need to carry out an empirical investigation to see whether cruelty and the infliction of suffering are connected; the connection, still, is conceptual. Similarly, I posit a conceptual link between patriotism and bad faith, and that link can be there even though we can imagine a patriot who does not fall into bad faith.
A more complicated instance of (what I see as) the same problem arises in Primoratz’s discussion of some strategies by which patriotic bad faith might be avoided. Following Keith Horton, Primoratz gives counterexamples to the claim, “were a patriot to admit to bias in favor of the patria, she would thereby concede that if she were free of bias, she would hold a belief different from the belief she actually holds” (144). But that is not a claim I ever make, and I do not think it is a claim I need. In the relevant part of my argument, I say that the patriot is motivated to avoid the admission that her picture of her country is held partly as an expression of patriotic bias, because to make that admission would be to cast doubt on the picture itself (61–64). Patriotism, if I am right, gives a person a motive to deceive herself about her bias, as cruelty gives a person a motive to inflict unjustified suffering. But whether the motive of the patriot in fact leads to self-deception – and whether the motive of the cruel person in fact leads to the infliction of unjustified suffering – will depend on the person’s particular beliefs, circumstances, and character.
For the same reason, I do not think it a serious concession, as Primoratz suggests it to be, to acknowledge that a patriot can be aware of and exercise control over her patriotic motives (145). The patriot may have an overall character that allows her to manage her tendency to fall into bad faith, but that reveals nothing special about patriotism, just a general truth about how one character trait can fit into an overall character. The cruel person may be able to manage her tendency to inflict unjustified suffering, but that is no defense of cruelty.
I do not mean to suggest that the possibilities of patriotism without bad faith are irrelevant. The constitutive link between patriotism and bad faith would not be very troubling if patriotic people hardly ever actually fell into bad faith, as the constitutive link between cruelty and unjustified suffering would not be very troubling if cruel people hardly ever actually caused suffering. Nevertheless, an argument against patriotism, like an argument against any element of character, can only be expected to do so much. What I need to establish is that patriotism, considered in itself, generates a disposition to fall into bad faith, and that that disposition is ugly and dangerous. That does not commit me to saying that patriotic people always display bad faith.
That is supposed to make the goal of my argument clearer: now to see whether the argument succeeds.
2 The Nature of Patriotism
Kleinig, Primoratz, and I offer different stories about what patriotism is, and my story is probably the least inclusive. The main sticking point concerns my suggestion that patriotic loyalty involves a positive picture of the country, by which I mean a picture that represents the country as having some good distinguishing characteristics at its heart.
I do need to be clear about the form that the patriotic picture of the country could take. As Kleinig says at several points, and as I say in my earlier pieces, the patriot’s endorsement of her country need not settle on its political characteristics; patriotism could be grounded in an endorsement of a country’s history, artistic tradition, landscape, or whatever else the patriot considers to be central to the country’s nature. Also, the patriot need not take the view that her country is better than all other countries or that the characteristics she values in her country could just as well be appreciated by outsiders. The primary point of attachment for the Australian patriot, for example, could be a distinctively Australian conception of mateship which she does not expect non-Australians to understand. It suffices that the patriot sees her country to have certain distinctive and valuable features at its heart – whatever shape those features and their value are seen to take.
Accordingly, I do not think that Primoratz’s case of Čapek’s Lot poses a challenge to my story about the nature of patriotism (146). Lot, in the Čapek story, subscribes to a detailed picture on which Sodom has attractive features that distinguish it from other countries and make it merit Lot’s ongoing loyalty. In Lot’s eyes, the girls of Sodom have an attractive and distinctive manner of humming and their hips an attractive and distinctive manner of swaying. Sodom, for Lot, is distinguished by the games played by its children, the clarity of its water, and the fairness of the sound of its tongue. Lot might not expect an outsider to see Sodom as he sees it, but he is committed to a substantive, evaluatively loaded description of Sodom as a condition and an expression of his patriotism.
Primoratz’s “egocentric patriot,” in contrast, does present a challenge to my characterization of patriotism (147). Asked about his loyalty to county, the egocentric patriot says “This is my country, my home, and that is all there is to it; I need no further reason to be loyal to it.” If Primoratz is right, then we have here a case of genuine patriotism that rests on no particular picture of the country and its value. But I think the case is more complicated than Primoratz allows.
Suppose we ask the egocentric patriot to describe his country for us, and suppose that in his response he mentions no characteristics of his country that he finds central and distinctive and that he values. Perhaps he says he has no idea what his country is like, or perhaps he just dispassionately lists some facts about his country. If that is really all there is to his picture of his country, then he would have no possibility of feeling pride in his connection with his country and no possibility of being pleased that he comes from this country in particular. By his own lights, there is nothing about his country in which such pride or pleasure could be grounded. That shows, I think, that the egocentric patriot, as described by Primoratz, is really no patriot at all. I can believe that such a commitment to country can exist, but I cannot believe that it would be recognized as a form of patriotism. Once a person has told you she is patriotic, you know she will have something positive to say about her country.
Behind my disagreement with Kleinig and Primoratz lies a deeper difference in our ways of thinking about human emotions and loyalties. I see patriotism as its own beast: a singular and often confounding cluster of attitudes, interesting more for its peculiarity than for its continuity with other kinds of loyalty. I think that there are many diverse kinds of love and loyalty, including many diverse kinds of love for and loyalty to country. Where Primoratz says that disgust rules out any love or affection for country (147), I think there is a kind of love – of parents, of children, and of countries – that often coexists with disgust, though it is not patriotic love. The task of understanding patriotism, to my mind, is less likely to succeed if we try to make patriotism look just like other kinds of loyalty, if we try to cover all forms of love for and identification with country, and if we imagine that we will be able to give a quick and formal definition. People, and patriotism, are more complicated than that.
3 From Patriotism to Bad Faith
The elements of patriotism that make it anomalous, on my argument, also underlie its link with bad faith. Patriotic bad faith, if I am right, is generated by the patriot’s investment in a particular positive picture of her country as a matter of her very identity, and this kind of investment is not found in other kinds of loyalty. As Kleinig points out, however, many different forms of loyalty can be a cause of bias and self-deception, and he challenges me to say why the bad faith generated by patriotism is any more prevalent or troubling than the bad faith generated by loyalties generally (35–36, 115–116). There are two aspects of patriotism I want to emphasize in trying to meet this challenge. In discussing them, I will also consider some more of Primoratz’s concerns.
First and most importantly, bad faith is produced directly by the motives and beliefs that characterize patriotism, and that is not true of other loyalties. It is possible to display most other forms of loyalty without having the disposition to fall into bad faith. As a loving parent, you might be inclined to resist evidence that suggests that your child lacks the virtues you thought her to have, but you also might not. So far as your love for your child is concerned, it does not (should not!) matter; you do not love her because you imagine her to have certain specified virtues. As a supporter of a political party, you might find yourself inclined to resist evidence suggesting that it does not stand for the principles for which you thought it to stand, but then again, you might not. You have the option, consistently with the structure of your commitment to the party, of considering the evidence and drawing your own conclusions. If you conclude that the party is not worthy of your support after all, then you can abandon the party, or you can see its faults clearly and try to improve it; your deeper commitment is (should be!) to the principles themselves.
It is different with patriotism. If I may appropriate Primoratz’s example of Čapek’s Lot: imagine that Lot sets out to investigate his beliefs about Sodom, and he finds evidence that many children in Sodom do not in fact play the games he used to play, that he is in fact unable to distinguish Sodom’s water from other water in a taste test, and that the range of styles of hip swinging found among the girls of Sodom is much the same as the range found among girls elsewhere. Can Lot happily accept the evidence while maintaining his patriotic commitment to Sodom? No: the beliefs being challenged are the very beliefs he cites in explaining that commitment. Can he happily give up his commitment to Sodom, having learned that it is not the country he thought it was? No: as a patriot, he will find abandoning Sodom to be an act of disloyalty and a relinquishment of a picture of the world in which he has invested his identity. That combination of an investment of identity and a commitment to the virtues of a country, on my view, is what produces the patriotic inclination toward bad faith, and I do not think it is found in standard virtuous forms of loyalty.
Primoratz, following Horton, suggests that a thinking patriot could avoid the pressure to fall into bad faith by standing ready to replace his patriotic picture of his country with a different picture, if the first one comes under pressure from the evidence (145). Perhaps if Lot cannot maintain a commitment to Sodom as a country of pure water, particular children’s games, and so on, then he will replace it with a commitment to Sodom as a country with a special artistic tradition; and if that does not work either, then perhaps, he can be sure that there will be other special features of Sodom, as yet unspecified, on which he can fall back. But this suggestion, I think, fails to recognize substantiveness of a patriotic commitment to a country. Patriotic loyalty rests on a particular positive picture of the country, not just the assuredness that the country conforms to some positive picture or others (56). Lot could not support his patriotic refusal to leave Sodom by saying that something must justify his loyalty to Sodom, though he knows not what.
The second feature of patriotism that makes it especially prone to dangerous bad faith has to do with the nature of countries. This is not a point I have emphasized in my contributions to this book, but it is of relevance to some of Kleinig and Primoratz’s objections. Countries are enormous and their populations are varied. The history of any country includes heroism, artistry, and scientific brilliance, along with unspeakable abuses and crimes and a whole lot of ordinary human mediocrity. You cannot know a country in the way in which you can know another person. Yet, when we picture our countries as objects of patriotic loyalty, we imagine that we do know them and, even more, that we know them as they really are. As a result, a patriotic picture of a country is very likely to be simplified and sanitized and very likely to come under pressure from the evidence.
Horton, quoted by Primoratz, says that it is more or less undeniable that some countries have rich cultural traditions, have produced some great individuals, and so on (144). As an attempt to show that there is always a patriotic picture of a country to be had, this strikes me as much too sanguine. When a patriot thinks of the good things about her country, she does not just note that they exist. She imagines them to capture her country as it really is: to reflect on her country’s true nature and to say what it means to be of this country in particular. It is always questionable whether you can capture a country’s true nature by pointing to a particular cultural tradition, a particular political or military struggle, or some particular great individuals.
A further pressure created by the structure of patriotic loyalty, as a result, is the pressure to dismiss various aspects of a country, or to dismiss various individuals within it, as unrepresentative of the real country. Kleinig, quoting MacKellar’s wonderful poem about the Australian landscape, speaks of a shared “patrial experience” (37). However distinctively Australian is the landscape of McKellar’s poem, though, there are many Australians who do not share in the experience she describes. For many, living in the big coastal cities, the landscape of McKellar’s Australia is distant and unfamiliar, having nothing much to do with their own everyday lives and their own sense of place. It is easy, but dangerous, to conclude that those are not real Australians. It is easy to imagine Lot noticing that the hips of many women in Sodom fail to sway in the manner he prefers and concluding that those women are not part of the real Sodom. And that illustrates another form of patriotic bad faith: a determination, in this case, to spin the evidence in such a way as to maintain a predetermined picture of what a country really is.
4 Alternatives to Patriotism
It is often said that we need patriotism, because only patriotism gives humans the motivation to act as good citizens. Kleinig speculates that “some measure of patriotism” is “necessary for a country to survive and thrive” (111), and Primoratz notes that for many of its defenders, patriotism is “indispensable” for the existence and smooth functioning of the political community (139). The claim, if true, bears heavily on the significance on my argument against patriotism. Even if patriotism does involve bad faith and even if it has all the bad consequences I have claimed it to have, we could still conclude that patriotism is a good thing on the whole, if it really does present our only achievable possibility for a fair, just, flourishing state.
As will be clear from my earlier pieces, I am not at all convinced that we need patriotism to have a flourishing state. We can know for sure, I think, that many people are perfectly good citizens of states toward which they do not have patriotic feelings. The good immigrant citizen is one example, and I think there are many others. We can also know for sure, I think, that people can have virtuous and constructive commitments to many kinds of institutions without identifying with those institutions in the way in which a patriot identifies with a country. I have given the example of commitment to a university, but, again, I think there are many other examples out there. So if we do need patriotism to have a flourishing state, that must be because many people – though not all – cannot be good citizens unless they are patriots, and it must be because of something special about the state.
Those qualifications noted, is it true that we need patriotism if we are to have a flourishing state? The honest answer, for me and for all others, is that we do not know. On one side, the rituals and teaching of patriotism seem to be widespread in most successful modern states. On the other side, there appear to be some states – perhaps West Germany in the second half of the twentieth century – that have flourished in distinctly nonpatriotic atmospheres. Beyond that, it is difficult even to imagine how we would know whether there is some nonpatriotic form of citizenship that would be both effective and widely attainable. We certainly should not pretend to have settled the question here.
I, of course, think that patriotism is unattractive and dangerous, so for me, the claim that we simply cannot get by without patriotism is pessimistic, even depressing. But even if it is true, I think we should take it to show not that patriotism is a virtue, but that it is a necessary vice, and something of which we must be wary. I hope for something better than patriotism, but if we have no option but to live with patriotism, then we should at least be informed about what we are dealing with.
5 Conclusion
Countries are confusing, our relationships with our countries are complicated, and our identities are opaque, even to ourselves. The problem I see with patriotism, if I can put it tersely, is that patriotism tries to make everything look simple, and making things look simple requires a good deal of complexity behind the scenes. Kleinig emphasizes the importance of countries in providing a shared social and political life and, thereby, in framing individual identities and allowing individuals to flourish. Primoratz argues that given the identification with country that many of us display, it is possible and valuable for us to take a special ethical concern for our countries. Much of what they say I find quite convincing. I think we share a wish for something more honest and inclusive, and something with clearer moral vision, than the patriotism that we presently find around us. Ultimately, though, I am convinced that the problems of patriotism arise from patriotism itself, not just from the contexts in which it is usually placed. In our philosophy, our imagination, and our politics, we should not work to salvage patriotism. We should work to replace it with something better.