The various dictionary definitions of patriotism are strikingly thin. Most reduce it to “love of country”. Some add “defence”, “devotion” or “loyalty”. Oxford even includes “zealous support”. But isn’t zealous possessive, hence at odds with love? Other absurdities follow: the gentlest human emotion is mapped onto borders; it dismisses shared humanity; it allows for a vast ideological gulf. And what if a person has more than one nationality — which, no surprise, is frowned upon by many governments — or a multi-ethnic ancestry (which, going back far enough in time, we all do)?
Us and them
By its very nature, patriotism is exclusionary. Once someone defines themselves as belonging to a nation, the genie of divisiveness is out of the bottle. It’s a thin line to redefinition: “First and foremost I am South African, then a citizen of the world” seamlessly becomes “first and foremost I am a Zulu” (or a Christian, or a Jew, etcetera).
Although academic studies note the difference between benign strains of patriotism and blind, aggressive variations, the boundary between the two is not as secure as we like to think. Distrust, disdain, scorn or anger towards others can mutate into a hostile mentality of us-vs-them. And history proves how powerful the playbook of us-vs-them is. Right now, we see in South Africa where it can lead: the ghastly toll of xenophobia — 705 deaths and nearly 134,000 people displaced since 1994 — makes a mockery of the country as a beacon of liberal values and constitutional democracy on the continent.
Witness, too, recent events in the UK where a hard-right faction blockaded the port of Dover. The black-balaclava-clad thugs scrawled “Blood is on your hands” outside the town’s migrant arrival centre, embellished with a pool of red paint. The group calls itself Patriot Platform.
Their bellicosity is not a mark of genuine belonging. Patriotism is ersatz — a substitute for broad-minded, open-hearted emotions and tangible values. Research by psychology professor Steve Taylor indicates that “people who experience high levels of wellbeing (together with a strong sense of connection to others, or to the world in general) do not report a sense of group identity”. In contrast, strident patriotism is more prevalent among people who feel insecure and have low self-esteem.
So patriotism is a crutch, heavily leaned upon when these feelings are amplified into perceived threats to social identity. From that point, when stoked by populist politicians who use the sentiment precisely because it wraps exclusion in the language of love, loyalty and virtue, it easily regresses into a national collective narcissism.
Patriotism is also slippery, used to mask the real hidden agendas of self-serving politicians or the sinister manoeuvrings of rabble-rousers. Patriotism is a potent weapon in the arsenal of disinformation agents. Whose interests does this serve? And it is the last refuge of the scoundrel, wrote the lexicographer and satirist Samuel Johnson. More trenchant is a remark attributed apocryphally to Oscar Wilde: patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
Lazy thinking
Overtly patriotic people are parochial. This incurious insularity isn’t benign. Blinkered indifference reflects a lack of affinity with or empathy for others — whether of different nationalities or fellow citizens. I see lots of flag waving and chest thumping at Springbok matches, rainbow-flag-painted faces and fervent dancing at Bafana Bafana games, but in the shocking level of crime, contemptuous driving habits and the appalling state of corruption — disdain for and theft from others — I also know that ubuntu is dead. Shelve the sports jersey on Fridays, I suggest; rather, perhaps, help an old person cross a busy road, or drive your domestic worker home.
And apathy about the world boils down to disengagement at a time when the Earth is at an environmental tipping point and humankind faces existential threats. Loving your country is not a solution when it is being degraded by boundaryless climate change, when a new intelligence is on the loose and when Looney-Tunes billionaire hyper-capitalists are invading space and polluting the planet’s life-preserving atmosphere.
If patriotism’s narcissistic narrow-mindedness is a danger to the world, shouldn’t we see ourselves as global citizens? The idea of cosmopolitanism is not idealistic 21st-century sermonising. In 400 BCE, the Greek philosopher Diogenes coined the term when he proclaimed himself a cosmopolitan, with allegiance not to Athens but to the community of the whole world.
The Stoics built on Diogenes’s ideas, concluding that when we think in cosmopolitan terms we gain self-knowledge. Marcus Aurelius used the analogy of a limb as part of the whole body: “If … you call yourself merely a [detached] limb, you do not yet love your fellow men from the heart, nor derive complete joy from doing good; you will do it merely as a duty, not as doing good to yourself.” So patriotism is not just lazy — it is also self-limiting.
Moral foundations or myths?
One forward-looking argument for patriotism says that it steers collective progress; without it the nation has no compass, lacking the moral courage, hope and vision to work towards a better society.
However, the idea that patriotism is moral does not hold. Jingoist, prejudicial patriotism is clearly immoral: if a nation acts immorally, patriotically defending its deeds is immoral. But even a gentler version is morally vacuous, because, as the ethicist Martha Nussbaum writes, “it substitutes a colourful idol for the substantive universal values of justice and right”. Cosmopolitanism is the more genuinely moral outlook; it is to the community of humankind that we all have an obligation.
It’s also false that patriotism has an anthropological basis. Recent scholarship believes that although hunter-gatherer groups originally formed through kinship, they were “more flexible, mobile and cosmopolitan” than previously assumed, as anthropologist Jason Antrosio summarises.
Fast-forward through evolution and history: the idea of a nation-state took hold with the French Revolution; until then people on the continent of Europe belonged to God and monarchs, in that order. In different structures and concepts of deities, this was also true in, for example, China and the pre-Columbian Americas.
So patriotism isn’t hard-wired. It can’t be, because John Lennon was able to dream a song with massive, ongoing universal appeal: “Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion too.”
Still, if people have an intrinsic need for belonging, something else needs to take root in Lennon’s borderless, utopian expanse. Are there realistic options for organising and cohering massive groups of people?
Actually, as soon as nation-states started being formed there have been movements aimed at forging an alternative societal paradigm. Anarchism is one; its association with lawlessness drastically distorts a complex political philosophy with a long history, varying modern-day schools of thought, and diverse approaches to achieving its core vision that sociopolitical life would be better in a stateless world.
Post-World War 2 Germany saw the emergence of Verfassungspatriotismus, a political philosophy that directs patriotism towards upholding a universal constitution of human rights and democratic values. Conceptually, this is at the heart of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and enshrined in the UN’s founding principles, although in the past 75 years this has only minimally checked nationalism and failed to blunt authoritarianism or theocracy. Still, Verfassungspatriotismus lives in the idea underpinning organisations such as the World Parliament and the World Federalist Movement, and the EU is its most tangible embodiment.
And — at least in some countries — attitudes are changing. In the US, for example, in the past 20 years, levels of significant pride in the country have dropped from 92% to 58% among all adults, and, as in Europe, younger generations are significantly less inclined to feel patriotic.
Indeed, the pace of socioeconomic, political and technological transformation is accelerating, so it may not take another 25 centuries before Diogenes’s thinking is the norm, and the world is free of borders, myths, ethnonationalism — and thus of the source and need for patriotism.
A dead end
Einstein saw the inevitable path of patriotic fervour. In his 1931 essay The World As I See It, he wrote: “This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor … This plague-spot of civilisation ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!”
Despite the horrors of World War 1 barely a decade earlier, his warning was to no avail. A century later, here we are again: MAGA; individual European countries swinging hard right; Narendra Modi’s muscular Hinduism; Xi Jinping assuming the mantle of Mao, for whom communism and patriotism were inseparable. And Vladimir Putin justifies global aggression and a murderous war on Ukraine very simply — and patriotically: nothing is more important than strengthening the Russian state.
Can there be any doubt that the cause of so many of the world’s problems is the plague of patriotism? It is, as Taylor concludes, “a psychological aberration, and we owe it to our ancestors, and to our descendants — and to the other species, and to the Earth itself — to move beyond it”.
