All of which is to abstractly discuss Katha Pollitt's submission to Dissent's symposium, which was a huge disappointment for me. Again, some golden nuggets of thoughtfulness, but the overall thesis is flawed. From jump, Pollitt makes some major errors that then lead her to draw erroneous conclusions. For instance, the way she defines "patriotism" is so facile that it completely ignores why people are so patriotic. It makes "patriotism" into a value that is inculcated in us - in the sense that people who aren't smart enough to get it are just brainwashed. And that it ends up being a knee-jerk reaction of "loving one's country" or even less convincingly, believing that your country is the best - merely because it's been inculcated.
But Jamaicans, French, Japanese and Americans don't believe that their country is "best" in the sense in which Pollitt would have it. Rather, the sense of belonging to a collective - in this case a national collective - brings with it a sense of identity. And identity requires a sense of pride. And pride creates love and love provides us with a sense that where we are from - the collective to which we belong - is the "best" but not necessarily better than all the rest on some objective scale. "Best" when one is speaking of patriotism or nationalism is a subjective term, and no amount of intellectual distance can really change that. "Best" is definitely short for "best for me", which is why patriots want their football teams and olympic athletes to be successful, but it's the extremists that take that feeling and start wars or try to turn it into an objective "best" that leads to xenophobia and genocide.
But we need to be careful not to identify everything with the extremists and ideologues that take it too far. We can't throw out all beliefs, ideas, religions merely because some people have used them as an excuse (or tool) to do great evil. Rather, the moral among us need to be the counterweight, need to control the narrative, need to speak out against injustice and, perhaps more importantly, speak out for justice.
All that said, Pollitt's got some great quips and some interesting points. To wit,
"It may be natural to love one's country, but it's a less noble virtue than a habit, the way people tend to like the food they grew up with, even if it's haggis or lutefisk or roasted rats on a stick."
Which undersells the reasons that patriotism is so powerful - people don't eat disgusting stuff because it's habit, they eat it because of nostalgia, the memories, the emotions - all things wrapped up in identity. But it's a pretty great quote.
Another:
"To us, for example, the detention without charges or trial of some six hundred prisoners in Bagram is a small item in the ongoing and mostly uplifting story of American justice. That's not how it looks in the Muslim world. We're constantly being surprised that the rest of the world doesn't automatically love us. We might see why more clearly if we weren't so in love with ourselves."
Which is a good point, but I think the power of the myth of America is overwhelmingly positive, even if it does blind us to how others perceive us.
A final point:
". . . when the flags come out, people tend to turn off their brains, and the next thing you know, we're at war."
Which points to our responsibility, especially as intellectuals, to be able to dialogue with the wider base, to not get locked up in the ivory tower, to be in a position to be a voice of reason - to understand that the war in Afghanistan was necessary (and perhaps still is), even if the one in Iraq was not. If the intellectual Left had been less wary of Bush and war in general, had been a little more patriotic, then maybe we could have garnered a little more legitimacy by supporting the war in Afghanistan and could have used that legitimacy to lead the American people (or even just the American Congress) to reconsider the war in Iraq.
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