"Your Country Loves You" (More on the Dangers of Patriotism)

Brian Tamanaha

Earlier this week I wrote in a post: “I don’t love my country.” On the blogosphere, as I knew, that’s the equivalent of tossing red meat to a pack of hungry dogs, so I expected a sharp reaction would follow. What I did not expect was that a serious law professor, obviously piqued at my temerity, would write this response on the top international law blog:

Brian you may not love your country, but your country loves you, even if you don’t know it. You are its raison d’etre.

Ordinarily I would not single out a response, but the issues raised are too important to let go without elaboration. The point of my initial post was to highlight the fact that states have killed over 100 million people (their own citizens and others), and that patriotism is manipulated by government leaders in ways that lead to these horrific consequences. The miffed professor’s response to me illustrates the dangers of patriotism.

Let’s consider his assertion “your country loves you.” This is what I want to know: Does my country’s heart beat faster when it thinks of me? Does it miss me when I am away? Does my country worry when I am sick? Will it shed a tear for me when I die?

Need I go on?

Okay, I know he did not mean “your country loves you” literally (right?), although he did wax at length. But it is precisely talk like this that makes patriotism so dangerous, substituting metaphor and emotion for reason and careful evaluation. Much of his post consists of glorified abstractions of the state, slogans we repeat unthinkingly so often that they become truths in our mind (confirming my recent post that legal theorists often trade in myths and myth making).

Several Enlightenment thinkers worried that with the decline of religion people would not behave in a moral and orderly fashion, and they suggested that the solution was to replace worship of God with worship of the state and law. It is not a coincidence that “your country loves you” sounds a lot like “God loves you” or “Jesus loves you.” They create a sense of personal relationship, and all relationships have obligations. The difference is that, while I don't know whether God and Jesus love me, I know for certain that states have killed untold millions.

Perhaps this is all too abstract, so let’s make it real by harkening back to the period leading up to the Iraq War. I attended two anti-war marches (D.C. and New York), which felt like a pathetic and impotent act, but what else could I do to resist the war. Indeed, I thought I was doing my civic duty (although I feel no sense of patriotism, I embrace my civic responsibilities as a member of the community).

At the time, as everyone should recall, one of the charges often leveled against protestors was that we were unpatriotic (after the war began to go badly, the charge became: we don’t support the troops). Every true patriot, of course, supported the imminent war, because that’s the patriotic thing to do.

Notice that there is no reasoning going on here: it’s all emotion.

One of the signs I remember seeing held up by a group of counter-demonstrators draped in American flags was this: “AMERICA LOVES YOU”

I remember it because it was simple and yet powerful in its implicit, devastating accusation: “How could you, anti-war protestors, betray your country with your disloyalty, when your country loves you.”

I felt a tinge of guilt when reading that sign (it's far more subtle and effective than that blunt old favorite: "Love it or Leave it").

That is the power of patriotism. It is so powerful that “we the people” were swept up in it in our inexorable march to war. The President and his cabal played on our patriotism. Most of the Democrats in Congress, despite their reservations, supported the war in their burst of patriotic enthusiasm, or kept their objections silent for fear of being branded unpatriotic.

And now the war is a disaster: many tens of thousands of Iraqis are dead and injured, over 3500 American troops are dead and twenty thousand-plus more are maimed (14 more soldiers killed in the last two days), the U.S. has committed torture, world opinion of the U.S is at an all-time low, and many more terrorists with intense hatred for America are being recruited and trained.

Some good follows from patriotism, of course, but the bad that follows is supremely dangerous.

Those of you who think my assertion—I don’t love my country (there, I said it again)—is scandalous, before you tell me about the error and ingratitude of my ways, please reflect just for a moment on what patriotism is, on how it works purely at the level of emotion, and consider its abuses.
Posted 10:10 AM by Brian Tamanaha [link]