Reflections on the 4th

The 4^th of July for me is a bit like Christmas. I enjoy the customs and festivities of both holidays even though I don’t share in the beliefs and emotions underpinning them. The underpinnings of Christmas are of course religious belief and faith. Underpinning the 4^th is patriotism. But I’ve never been keen on patriotism—it’s never had much meaning for me. What is patriotism, after all? Most people would define it in terms of love for, or pride in, one’s country. But what does it mean to “love” one’s country—in our case an extremely diverse agglomeration of 330 million people, many of whom are very different from me; many of whom, frankly, I would probably not want to have much to do with. OK, so the idea of loving 330 million people is rather fanciful, maybe what we love is the idea of America—what it stands for. Most Americans professing patriotism would cite freedom and equality as the country’s foundational values, worthy of our love. America in 1776 was a pioneer in promoting those values, even if the practice of both was strictly limited. But today, there are dozens of countries in the world that can reasonably claim to be as free and equal, if not more so, than the US of A. Most of us learned from an early age to venerate our Constitution, which was indeed a remarkable document for its time. But it’s a badly outdated document, and hard to amend. As a result, our polity is arguably less democratic than many if not most of our peer democracies. So, what’s there to love?

But maybe patriotism isn’t about love so much as about pride in one’s country. We can certainly be proud of the USA, can we not? After all, the oft-heard assertion that ours is the greatest country in the world is not unreasonable. It certainly is the greatest in many ways. In military power and (at least until recently) global political influence ours is inarguably the greatest country in the world. And the US at least since the beginning of the 20^th century has made a disproportionate contribution to our planet’s intellectual and cultural life—over 40% of Nobel prize winners have been Americans. American pop culture is world hegemonic—everyone wears jeans and adores our rock stars. English long ago displaced French as the international language, certainly not due to any lingering British imperial influence. And if Italian—the foreign language I know best—is any indication, English words pop up all over the place in Europeans’ daily usage of their own languages.

So, yes, much to be proud of. But as an inveterate observer of politics, I can’t help noting a historic record that is less than admirable. The US was founded on the genocide—gradual but relentless--of the indigenous peoples who got in our way. Ours was the last major country to practice slavery on a large scale, a legacy that was rectified de jure only after 200 years of national existence with the civil rights laws of the 1960s. A legacy whose importance many of our fellow countrymen continue to deny today. And in international affairs, our country’s record is mixed, to put it generously. As the world’s leading if not always entirely dominant superpower since World War II, the US was largely responsible for setting up an international political and economic order that averted war among major countries and facilitated the growth of international commerce and investment. But it was an order that prioritized the interests of rich countries like our own. And in our Cold War obsession with communism we sponsored dictatorships of varying degrees of brutality on every continent. American imperial arrogance was the direct cause of millions of deaths in Indochina and, even after the Cold War ended, many hundreds of thousands in Iraq. And here we go again, on a smaller scale, with Iran. I could go on. The point is, if pride in country is your thing, there is an awful lot to be ashamed of to balance it out.

Sometimes patriotism takes the form of gratitude. You sometimes hear an immigrant quoted as saying that he is grateful to our country for giving him a chance to live a life he couldn’t have, for whatever reason, in his home country. And the idea of gratitude isn’t limited to immigrants—you sometimes hear people say that they are grateful to our country for the prosperity and freedom they enjoy as Americans. But that’s not really a rational attitude. “Our country” isn’t a unitary actor, with agency. You may enjoy your well-being as a result of circumstances---laws and economic conditions--that have developed over time that are beneficial to you and others. But nobody has chosen to make those circumstances available to you—there’s nobody to be grateful to.

The biggest problem with patriotism, in my view, is that it leads people to accord to their nation’s leaders a presumption of rectitude in international affairs that gives them freedom to do bad things. The patriotism of their respective populations enabled the European powers to send millions of their people to their deaths in World War I, a conflict that contributed nothing to the advance of humanity and set the stage for an even worse conflagration a generation later. No doubt, patriotism can lead people to noble and heroic acts: patriotic fervor surely helped the British withstand the Nazi onslaught during World War II, and it motivated both Americans’ and Russians’ resistance to aggression. But it was German patriotism, exploited by hateful demagoguery, that brought on the war in the first place.

So I have to admit it: I just don’t get misty-eyed when I hear the national anthem sung, no matter how beautifully, or when I see the stars and stripes flapping in the breeze. But I do like fireworks, and yesterday I enjoyed a marvelous USAF show over the Hudson River, with successive groups of fighter planes in choreographed formation and a finale of red, white and blue contrails. Bravo!