Is Teaching Patriotism Justified?

Is it possible, pedagogically, to instill patriotism without significant risk of instilling jingoism?

I certainly don’t find that students in the US, for example, are particularly lacking in patriotism. The same cannot be said for their having a realistic view of history (domestic or foreign), world events, international justice, etc.

I am not sure what patriotism really is. When I taught, I taught my subject and avoided politics generally, but if students somehow wanted to or managed to bring politics into a discussion, I would be careful to announce what my personal view was and that what it was was my bias. But in general, politics, god, and abortion were subjects I found best avoided and so in essay writing, I told my students to find other topics, subjects less likely to raise blood pressures among the class or readers (me) of papers.

Patriotism? I marched against Viet Nam war but served twice in the American army, once in a war zone (Korea).

Lord knows I’ve tried to figure out what a non-nationalistic, non-chauvinistic, non-jingoistic, “progressive” patriotism would look like, I really have. And maybe it’s only because I’m an American that I have such a hard time conceiving of patriotism as anything more than “Shut up and fly this flag…or else.” But the more I think about it, the more I think GBShaw nailed it: “Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.” Every day seems to bring fresh evidence in his support.

Isn’t the point of school education to teach children the stuff they don’t simply pick up as they go along? We learn patriotism from the cradle to the grave. It’s a total waste of education resources to bring it into the classroom as well.

Some problems in Levine:

1. It’s not clear in his writing what “teach” means. Sometimes it means to implant beliefs. Sometimes it means a more academic kind of teaching, with the hope that if students know their national history, they will learn to love their nation.

2. Reltedly, Levine can’t make up his mind between an academically-rigorous version of national history and a carefully-selected version intended to implant particular moral lessons. Note the false choice here:

“history should be taught truthfully, but it must also be taught selectively. There is no such thing as a neutral or truly random selection of topics.”

All teaching of history and all writing of history is by definition selective — otherwise you would just publish archives. He’s trying to maneuver us into a kind of relativism which would then make the nationalist version the best of the lot.

3. His patriotism itself is of a curiously milk-and-water variety, defined as things like love and obligation to which nobody can object. But of course those things overlap boundaries. If you look carefully, he grounds the argument for nation as a unit on the fact that nation corresponds to the policy-making government, a circular argument. More generally is Levine’s account a plausible representation of patriotism?

If one instead rephrased this as teaching civics, on the grounds that people ought to know how their governments work, and teaching world history including national and indeed local history, what exactly would be lost?

The US Founders shared one thing in common: they all betrayed their country, England. How exactly do we promote loyalty to a country that was founded on the principle that we should cherish principle above loyalty to country? At least to an American, it is hard to overlook this conflict.

And if we teach principles – equality before the law, ruling by the consent of the governed, accountability to the public, etc. – do we really need to teach patriotism? Can we not let each student draw her own conclusions about the importance of mutual aid and civic participation?

I’d like to think so. But I acknowledge that this philosophical question is influenced by two factual questions: What is the role of emotion in education? And how much “social cohesion” do we need for self-preservation?

I suspect that emotion has an irreducible place in education. I forget facts, but I remember stories that pit “us” good guys against “them” bad guys. (E.g., colonists resisting king’s taxation without representation.) The story helps me remember the facts. Only later do I try to shrug off the story so that I can analyze the facts from other points of view. (E.g., king taxed colonists to defray cost of defending them during the French & Indian Wars; king could have taxed people in England to cover this debt, but that would have meant taxing the relatively poor people in England for the benefit of the relatively rich people in the colonies.) Does education really require emotion-laden, us-vs-them stories? And if so, are there any less pernicious ways of defining “us” than by nationality?

How much cohesion do we require as a nation? To me, a divided society is a healthy society. During the 2000 elections, the US is about as divided as it gets. Dissent was everywhere. The news reflected concerns that “racial profiling” was violating individual’s rights. Following the attacks of 9/11/01, in contrast, the US was largely united. We adopted the Patriot Act, people began being arrested and held without charge indefinitely, and concerns about racial profiling evaporated. We patriotically rallied to promote the collective interests of society, even at the cost of individual interests.

Patriotic rallying looks like an adaptive response to threat, but a maladaptive attribute otherwise. How little patriotism can we get away with to ensure an adequate supply during emergencies, but no more than an adequate supply?

I agree with Levine. Patriotism is a good thing, as long as we don’t imagine that it is the only good thing. No reasonable person doubts that crimes have been committed in the name of patriotism, but the history of the last century shows that pretty much any political idea, including solidarity with the wretched of the earth, can become totalitarian if it is exclusive.

In Canada, we have provincial educational systems (and often denominational or racial ones, as well.) The last thing such an educational system wants to do is make controversial patriotic statements. But the result is not a wonderful critical history. In Quebec, the result is propaganda, and everywhere else, it is the progressive retreat from any kind of history whatsoever.

Without patriotism as a motive, why learn history at all? The curriculum is zero sum, and the actual result will be that history is displaced in favour of more instrumental subjects.

I’d like to believe that anon’s epistemic considerations were the central motivation here. I don’t know what proportion of giving goes to national but not local US based efforts; the more of it there is, the less persuaded I am that epistemic considerations are at work. Certainly, though, a good deal of quite local giving has this quality, but also a “close to my heart” motivation that has some legitimacy.

Could someone explain to people motivated by anon’s epistemic considerations how they can tell what Oxfam is doing?

My main problem with patriotism is that any positive aspects seem minor compared with the possible downside — pretty much every major genocide or ethnic cleansing I can think of seems to have been underpinned by some kind of patriotic nationalism. Encouraging loyalty to symbols — flags, anthems, nations, etc. — may seem innocuous, but who knows how that sentiment may be used in fifty years?

I question how much control the US government has over the content of public education. Much of it is controlled at the state and local level – witness our ongoing battles with the teaching of creationism. Even individual teachers have a lot of leeway in what is presented and how. Teachers in California are tenured after two years employment.

In the absence of patriotism or some other sentiment of which Harry disapproves, the result is not generalized altruism, but utter selfishness. So Americans will not increase their foreign giving to above 2% of the total, but eliminate the other 98%. In this context, let us remember the phrase quoted here (I am paraphrasing): “It would be wonderful if the soup kitchens and homeless shelters of America were staffed by ACLU members and secular humanists. (Not to mention professors from the local university.) But they aren’t. They are staffed by volunteers from the local churches.”

Similarly, it would be wonderful if the men who stormed Fort Wagner and Omaha Beach were motivated by love for humanity. But seriously, who would get out of bed for that crap? Those men died for flag and country. From a Darwinian perspective, those who don’t believe in particular yet fictive loyalties are such losers, they are barely worth engaging. They are the John Calhouns of history.

Harry, I believe volunteer activity is more prevalent in the U.S. than in some other countries, and many people give their time rather than or in addition to money. Of course that doesn’t show up in the statistics on charitable giving. Nor would it be likely to fall on the “international” side of the ledger. (However, in my community many of the teenagers I know, including my own two, spent their high school spring breaks building houses in Mexico. I doubt that their labor or their materials appeared in your statistics.) How can you weigh the hungry child or the abused woman in a shelter here against a suffering person across the planet? To turn your back on the person you can see and who can look back at you so that you can send a check to Oxfam because some abstract suffering scale is outweighed by the people at a distance just seems to turn acts of charity into an algebraic equation. Are you saying to the person close to home, “Sorry, you aren’t suffering enough”?

Democracy like justice is not a cumulative understanding in the sense that science is. Each generation needs to chose it: needs to face the same risks and to discover for themselves the reasons to be patriotic. Patriotism (in the sense of patriotism directed towards democracy itself and not the state one’s born in) is merely the byproduct of a good humanist education.
You’re making the case for every damn argument I’ve ever had on this site.

I’m so tempted to say “Don’t you know that you can’t teach values; that ‘s why instilling patriotism is so important!”

All this talk of justice is so absurd it just makes my head hurt. Its that justice is so obviously right, yet’s its equally obviously impossible to even begin to act justly. I mean what practical answer is there to anon’s question about the distribution of charity dollars. There is no answer, but anon is obviously being unjust in giving undue weight to local circumstances. (Unless justice follows some kind of inverse square law.)

I mean any rich kid that actually took justice seriously would be subject to guilt beyond measure. Its almost cruel to even bring it up to the little ones.

Again, I think Harry’s likely correct to be sceptical of teaching patriotism, but its just impossible not to “do patriotism”.

First of all, in many places language is correlated with politcal power. What possible reason other than linguistic patriotism, for teaching in the local language. And so we are forced into a choice between, tradition, equal time for all languges, token multi-lingualism and pragmatic language offerings.

As with language so literature. As with literature, so with history. As with history, so with social science. And if one is to believe the social scientists, as with social science , so with science and technology.

Interestingly enough, I may have come to some of these opinions from an experiment in not teaching patriotism.

Harry may have heard of a program called MACOS ( Man: A Course of Study) developed by Jerome Bruner . It replaced the traditional civics class in fifth grade with a study of Eskimo culture, bushman culture and Baboon behavior.

At my 20 year high school reunion a few years back, a group of about 20 of us recounted how we were taught to act baboon grooming rituals and play whale hunting games. I don’t know how the baboon troops and eskimos are doing, but it certainly bonded us.

The program ended after a few years in the back to basics backlash of the late 1970’s.

Now back to ability to teach values. I don’t know what, if any, values I was supposed to learn but what I did learn was that people the world over and justice means ” You eat what you kill. “

First, I argued that kids should be given a substantially favorable portrait of their own country’s institutions and traditions at an early age, because that builds attachment.

But one would never make this argument regarding the teaching of the history of a country that had gone through a really evil patch, like Germany or Cambodia or Uganda. Thus making this argument commits you to, or implies, a benign or favorable judgment towards the country under study. Not that America or the UK are remotely as bad as Cambodia was, just that taking this pedagogical position commits you to viewing the country’s history through relatively rose-tinted glasses yourself. I don’t see how this conundrum can be avoided.

Not that I would minimize the danger of a “warts and all” approach: kids who are taught that their country is a bad place are more likely to be alienated than radicalized.

In response to #28: Almost every American kid hears a largely positive national story in school, involving Pocohontas and Captain John Smith, Ben Franklin with his kite, Betsy Ross, George Washington, Honest Abe, Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks. The teachers who present this material don’t naturally slip into talk of the Great Leader.

In response to #29: A positive description of the US makes sense, in part, because America is a good and improving regime. Not all regimes are as good. However, I would hope that modern German kids get (along with attention to the holocaust) a positive evaluation of the Federal Republic and its constitution.

I would like to propose that Patriotism be recognized by all intellectuals as a ‘Suspect State-of-Mind.” It should be recognized as such, not for political reasons, but for ‘professional’ reasons. If the ultimate objective of living an Examined Life is discovering the Truth, then Patriotism must be viewed as one of those states-of-mind that has the scary potential to seductively blind us to the Truth, sometimes with devastating consequences.

During the 1930’s, the German people (and the Japanese people, as well) let their enjoyment of patriotic feelings lead them down a path that ended finally in their complete destruction and profound humiliation. Contrary to our propaganda films of the time, the German People were not all savage monsters who wanted to conquer the world and enslave all who were inferior to them. They were people just like you and me. They simply gave in to the desire to feel good about their country. What they fell for then is the same thing that Americans fall for today.

What people ‘fall for’ when they succumb to the patriotic state-of-mind is the good feelings they experience when they hear themselves being praised by patriotic speakers/authors. It is characteristic of this kind of praise that it is indirectly expressed. People normally find indirectly expressed approval much more enjoyable because attention is not directly focused on them at the time.

When we participate in the Group Comparison Game, we [normally] experience a feeling of pleasure whenever a member of our group criticizes a member of some other group (not us). If we mock their imperfections, we are implicitly asserting that the members of our group do not have those imperfections and that we therefore deserve praise for our superior level of perfection. Everyone understands this, on an intuitive level.

This same dynamic is at work in politics and war. Whenever we criticize our [external] enemies, we are praising ourselves, indirectly. That’s why patriotism feels so good (some have reported that their love of America is one of the primary sources of personally experienced happiness in their lives). So if it feels so good, what is the downside? Well, for one thing, it encourages people to “trust” leaders who (like Bush and Hitler) are criminally inept and misguided. The guy who’s been making you feel good about your country tells you that he needs to send the army out to fight a Noble Cause. You find yourself wanting to believe he’s right.

Because the emotional payoff of patriotism is so strong, Patriotic Intellectuals quite naturally become biased observers of the facts that unfold. It becomes extremely difficult to for them to recognize when criticism of their group is justified. That is why patriotism often becomes an obstacle to clear perception of the Truth. It may be possible for intellectuals to be both truly patriotic and intellectually objective, but the only way to really protect yourself from its seductive influence is by maintaining a constant concern re: the dangers of misguided patriotism.

What this means, ultimately, is that true intellectuals need to be willing to ‘fight it out’ with many of the individuals and groups out there in society who claim to be great patriots, but who are actually a great threat to the country they profess to love. When intellectuals challenge these so-called patriots, they need to insist that they are the true patriots in this country, who are trying to protect their country from the great harm that simple-minded patriotism can cause. In other words, we cannot be hoping to experience a comforting UNITY in such situations, but must be willing to subject them to a lot of ridicule, instead.

James,

Is the logic war is suspect, patriotism leads to war, therefore patriotism is suspect?

Or could the causality be reversed. War is bad, losing wars is worse than winning them, therefore patriotism exists.

I’m just not sure what the “objective truth” about war is. That it happens over and over and over and…?

PS, anon, Richard Miller has a terrific paper in Philosophy and Public Affairs which explains in a very fancier way why the insight in your second comment is right (before reading his paper I think I’d have been more dismissive). Its called “Beneficence, Duty and Distance” … and googling it I find it here: http://philosophy2.ucsd.edu/~rarneson/Courses/RichardMillerBenifenceDutyandDistance.pdf

The problem is that an abstract utilitarianism isn’t ethics. You can’t be a normal person, let alone a good one, without some particular loyalties.

Most of the commenters have loyalties that put them at odds with their national government. But you are deluding yourself if you think that means you have escaped the whole samsara of particular loyalties, and care equally about all humanity. You don’t. You just dislike your national government.

Any loyalty whatsoever can become demonic. Any loyalty can lead to atrocity. But children and youth need to address these issues. And it seems far more sensible to me to try to teach them that loyalty to their own is good, but only within limits, then to try to make them into little Peter Singers.

40: Like Canada, or (less so) UK, or Australia, or … you mean?

There is a big difference between `teaching that the United States is an evil country’, and teaching accurate history, or avoiding blind patriotism (or worse, jingoism). You can study the mistakes made along with the triumphs, the failure to live up to ideas along with the ideals itself, no? Noting that a country has done evil and or stupid things as well as great things (to use a problematic terminology, but I’m just following along) is hardly judging it evil, right?

Oh, and if you feel that the nations finest institutions of higher learning education are full of (or even contain a significant number, e.g. `many’) people teaching that the US is evil, you are pretty much out to lunch, as far as I can see. So no, it wouldn’t be an issue, if some people weren’t dead set on pretending it were true, against all evidence….

soubzriquet – Ever looked at the material for Feminist or Middle East studies? There are entire majors where people rail against the “male patriarchy” or “US imperialism”.

james,

you;d be very hard put to find more than a smattering of people willing to teach that the US is evil in our institutions of higher ed; still harder put in high schools. Lots of people oppose US imperialism. most of them are patriots, just as most British opponents of British imperialism were. Really; what is extraordinary to me (as a Brit) is how much consensus there is among educators of right and left on the legitimacy of teaching patriotic sentiment. I agree with you, and other, by the way, that there is something more innocent about the ideas around which American patriotism is organised than those around which, say, English patriotism is organised.

marcus stanley — that is a great idea (and yes, what a good discussion). Any chance of my book being one of the texts?

If one teaches something is there not the requirement of testing the knowledge imparted? How would this work?

Essays (min 500 words):

Why is America so darned peachy?

Explain why living elsewhere would be unthinkable.

Answer the question: If we are so bad, why do they hate our freedom?

Or multiple guess (circle all that apply)

Sure, we invaded Iraq but we did not

a) participate in the Thirty Years’ War.
b) start WWI.
c) render the League of Nations impotent.
d) invade Poland.

Jackson’s Indian policy may have been misguided but

a) many Americans now feel badly about it.
b) casinos abound.
d) yeah, well Armenians, Jews, and Huguenots.
e) Remember the Alamo, er except for Tejano participation.

Optional Extra Credit:
List three Patriotic acts you performed today, and neither recycling nor enger conservation count.

“engels” clearly doesn’t want to distinguish between patriotism and jingoism. (The real Engels did, although frankly he was a bit of a jingo when it came to the Slavs.)

Au contraire “pith” lord – I’d imagine Jingoism 101 would be more demanding, requiring facility with advanced techniques ranging from xenophobia to racism. Patriotism 101, on the other hand, would only require a run of the mill level of complacency and ignorance, which is possessed by any competent patriot.

EXCEPT, abb1, that Soviet “patriotism” was a lie, and was known by everyone to be a lie. What motivated millions of Russians to fight and die facing the Nazis, was not “Soviet” patriotism, but old-fashioned Russian nationalism, which Stalin reactivated in desperation because he realized that Russians would not fight and die for “Communism”, despite official propoganda to the contrary. That’s why he unshackled the Russian Orthodox Church (partly) during the war.

Flip dismissals don’t add up to a rebuttal. My point remains unanswered.

Gypsy Boots, I agree about the Soviets, but same is probably true about any ideology, incuding your ‘institutional arrangements embodied in a constitution’ thing. I can’t imagine why more people would be willing to die for the constitution than for communist manifesto, little red book or mein kampf.