(We are at war. On the other side is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the Chinese Communist Party and Xi Jinping of China, the mullahs of Iran, and Rocketman in North Korea. Of course, there are global economic interests that are involved too, and that implicates private actors, or plutocrats, in this current struggle, also known as great power competition.
Great power struggles often are waged without formal declarations of war, especially when one country is trying to ambush or surprise another which is what is happening. Despite that, we have a number of indications that Putin and Xi are warring against us. The most recent was June 5, 2024 when, as reported by an Indian media outlet, the Russian government through its spokesman declared the USA an enemy of Russia.
Modern war is waged across all spectrums including kinetics, economics, and information operations. Most notably, the Russians and Chinese are spreading disinformation and dissension while at the same time exploiting differences, animosities, and divisions in our own society by using our freedoms to do so. At this time I have to say, had we (especially the Catholics) implemented “Inter Mirifica” we would be more united, healthier, and better capable of dealing with the threat. We would have also been able to better put the global plutocratic class in its place.
As citizens, we have a moral obligation to defend our country against enemies. Despite what some say, it is the view of many others that Xi and Putin are not our friends, and I shall attempt to demonstrate better in future publications the nature of their threat to the international order as well as the USA. If these powers with their supporters from the plutocratic class, succeed, our lives will change and not for the better. It is my view that at least hundreds, if not thousands, of years of Christian laws and order will be threatened or abrogated on the international level. Patriotism heals, unites, improves, protects. Patriotism unites God and Man to do His will in society. Patriotism is the essential virtue.)
PATRIOTISM: THE NECESSARY VIRTUE
As the Cherry Blossoms bloomed around the Tidal Basin, busloads of children were assembling in front of the Lincoln Memorial, laughing, talking, hopping up and down as they all lined up for their group photos. More busloads of the young swarmed the information center at Arlington National Cemetery, the former grounds of Robert E. Lee and his wife, a descendent of Martha Washington. There at the Arlington National Cemetery are buried more than 400,000 on about 600 acres. In hushed silence we walked up the hill to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to watch the honors paid to the fallen. Outside the Capitol Building, dwarfed by the dome under which a Congress in session was debating war, funding, and more, the few from all over the world stood and gazed, snapping an occasional photograph of their friends and family. And in the central chamber of the Supreme Court building, I stood looking at stone busts of Chief Justices who made an indelible mark on American law and the United States — John Marshall, Roger Taney, Earl Warren, and William Rehnquist. As I gazed into the chamber where sat the Supreme Court, I was struck by its simplicity. Here nine justices heard some of the most complex and important matters that affected our lives, our country, and our world.
More than once emotions welled up within me as I visited this place called Washington, D.C. Here in our Nation’s Capital on a cool day in early Spring I gently passed into a reverie from which came this feeble attempt to make sense of things.
What Is Patriotism?
What is patriotism?
The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines it as “love for or devotion to one’s country.”[1]
This is a straight forward definition, but Msgr. John A. Ryan, a noted Catholic moral theologian, writing in 1928 pointed out that such a simple definition is by no means clear. He noted that “love” and “country” were subject to many different meanings. Citing to scholar Dr. George E. Partridge, author of a book called The Psychology of Nations: A Contribution to the Philosophy of History, Msgr. Ryan wrote that patriotism had five possible meanings or categories.
First, patriotism means “loyalty to a place as a place; as home; as the land to one’s forefathers; as the seat of family traditions and relations…it arouses sentiments both filial and paternal…” Second, patriotism is “devotion to the ideas and ideals, the customs, morality, and culture of a national group.” Third, it is loyalty of the individual to the social group which can be considered tribal or clan loyalty as well as social or class loyalty. Fourth, it means loyalty to the government or the head of state who comes to embody the “group spirit and the national spirit.” Fifth, patriotism is conceiving of the “country as a personage” which means the “country becomes a person” and it is this personification that is the “most vital and the most powerful factor” in patriotism.[2]
Before addressing the definition of love, which seems to be in the order of loyalty or devotion, we must first understand “country”. Ryan-Partridge defined “country” as land, ideas, government, or a group of people. There is a relational component to these concepts. All are connected in time and space.
The individual is born into, and comes into being, in a place. He has forebears, starts his life in a certain social milieu that has physical, cultural, moral and ideological components, is a member of a group or groups ranging from family to class to ethnicity to polity all of which present with their own characteristics or traits by which one navigates material, and spiritual, reality. In so doing, the individual attains an identity which gives him a place in society and on earth. All of this is possible while living under a certain government which exerts authority over land, or as I frequently say, a piece of dirt.
Carl Schmitt in The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum concluded that the “Eurocentric order of international law” was “foundering” due to the “legendary and unforeseen discovery of a new world, from an unrepeatable historical event.”[3] Schmitt explained that law establishes “a unity of order and orientation” and the earth is the “mother of law… and justice” for three reasons. The first is the fertility of the soil as brought forth by human labor. The second is the demarcation of the land as it is cleared and worked. The third is the creation of the “orders and orientations of human social life” by which “families, clans, tribes, estates, forms of ownership and human proximity, also forms of power and domination, become visible.”[4]
A human is more than just a brute beast. Christianity holds that he is a physical being with emotions, intellect, instincts, and a soul. A human has needs and wants which include the society of others. All of this makes him a person. The person becomes the object of morality, thought and action in Christianity. Rev. James T. Delos, OP explained the relationship of personhood with the “generative milieu”[5] of the nation which thereby implicates the country. Upon birth, the individual acquires a birthright or heritage which itself developed “throughout time”. It consists of “a common mass of goods, economic (agricultural sciences and implements, etc.), physiological (race), intellectual, and moral, that grows.” These things and “an environment that keeps” the individual from “becoming a physical and moral nomad” provide the individual with the “moral and intellectual nourishment necessary for his life.” This is the function of something called the nation according to Delos. The nation imparts in the “national environment” a nationality which is a
“complex of physiological preformations and mental dispositions, from which result certain ways of seeing, thinking and acting. Through nationality each one receives an ensemble of connatural manners which, in relation to the unqualified or merely potential original human nature, is an enrichment of it. Nationality puts the individual, without effort on his part, in possession of a certain measure of civilization, and raises him to a certain level of development. That is its natural and providential mission….”[6]
The nation is related to the concept of country according to Delos. One of the clearer expositors of the connection between nation and country was the International Union of Social Studies which in 1952 published The Code of International Ethics. The Code claimed its basis in the Natural Law tradition as set out by St. Thomas Aquinas. It centered patriotism as veneration of “our ancestral land (terra patria, vaderland, vaterland, country), which we love, not for its own sake…but because it is the cradle of our race, because it gave us birth, because it is the home in which we share the thoughts and feelings of men of the same blood and culture….”[7]
Nation and country therefore have an intimate, essential connection. We now proceed to the question of love, which Ryan said equates to loyalty and devotion. Delos saw the matter as one of obligations to defend one’s country because it provided a specific milieu:
“It is this mission [of the nation] that creates our moral obligation to the nation. From it man receives a heritage of civilization; and in it he finds the social milieu necessary for his further development. He is bound to respect it as a means furnished by nature for the perfecting of himself and of others; to injure or destroy the nation would be to compromise his own destiny, and that of his fellow-citizens. Everyone is bound, therefore, to defend his country, even at the peril of his life….In itself, its value depends upon its usefulness to humanity; it is relative to the quality of the manners, mentality, disposition – the national formation – that it imparts to its members…”[8]
The duty is to defend or protect the nation and the country which forms a generative milieu that is needed for the development of the person. The fundamental duty of the person is to at least preserve, if not also improve or even perfect, the country and the nation. There is therefore a qualitative aspect to the duty of patriotism as well as a spatial component. We defend the goods that come with the nation as well as the land upon which arose the nation with its goods.
Virtue and Limits
Catholicism long taught, and every day people long knew, that patriotism is a virtue. Fr. Francis Connell, C.Ss.R., the Catholic Theologian of America, said patriotism is of the order of piety. He wrote “Piety is the virtue whereby we give honor and service to those to whom we owe our being – our parents, and more remotely, our country. In this second sense piety would correspond to our idea of patriotism.” And, patriotism is “part of the more general virtue of justice.”[9]
Are there limits to this virtue? The above offers part of the answer, but Ryan and Delos recognized limits long before the philosophers of the late Twentieth Century got into the act of even talking about patriotism. For instance, Ryan recognized that there was a danger in seeing “country as a personage” which means the “country becomes a person.” While this was the “most vital and the most powerful factor” in patriotism, it could give rise to a level of patriotism approaching religious devotion. Patriotism must be “reasonable within certain limits” and exaggeration of any of the five aspects of patriotism results in harm to other people or peoples.[10] The Code stated that nationalism is a “good and sound thing in itself.” However, it is a “lawless and baneful passion when national culture, which is truly valuable and important, is made an absolute value” sacrificing the “cultural values of other nations” or subordinating the “transcendental and universal notions of right, morality, truth and religion.”[11]
Alasdair MacIntyre started the recent philosophical debate about patriotism by questioning whether patriotism is a virtue. In a 1984 talk entitled “Is Patriotism A Virtue?”, MacIntyre argued that patriotism and liberal morality are at odds with each other.[12] He contrasted the unique primary devotion to a particular community, which is called for by patriotism, with a unique primary devotion to general principles applicable to everyone, everywhere at any time, which is liberalism or liberal morality. This made these two moral systems incompatible. MacIntyre wrote:
“The liberal moralist was able to conclude that patriotism is a permanent source of moral danger because of the way it places our ties to our nation beyond rational criticism…[and] the moralist who defends patriotism is able to conclude that liberal morality is a permanent source of moral danger because of the way it renders our social and moral ties too open to dissolution by rational criticism.”[13]
Simon Keller, professor and Head of School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington, holds to MacIntyre’s basic definitions by saying that liberalism, or liberal morality, “states that all humans are morally equal and that the perspective of morality is fundamentally impartial.” The issue of whether patriotism is a virtue is put in terms of whether it is virtuous to put first one’s own country with “its projects and people” with which one identifies and whose values you hold even at the “cost of the vital interests of other countries and people.”[14]
Keller submits that patriotism is rooted in human psychology. George Kateb holds that patriots often “think that to be a patriot you must imagine your country to be much more than it really is” or, in other words, overestimate its goodness and value. This often results in an “active construction of the character of the country,” or a personification of the country as postulated by Ryan, resulting in an idealized vision of the country.[15]
Since MacIntyre’s talk, philosophers have given varied answers to how patriotism can be made virtuous or perhaps more properly, how patriotism can be limited or redirected. Jurgen Habermas, Igor Primoratz, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Stephen Nathanson all proceed from the position that patriotism is real, that it exists, and that there is a “non-voluntaristic membership” aspect of it. We “are born into a context, a family, a community with a history, and that leaves us with moral obligations, even though we had no choice about where to be born.” According to Keller, the sum total of their conclusions is that “it is morally acceptable to be patriotic as long as patriotism is secondary to the commitment to universal human rights or it is directed at improving the moral record of your country, or it includes a recognition that the patriotism of individuals from other countries is legitimate too.”[16]
Habermas made popular the concept of “constitutional patriotism” which Jan-Werner Muller explained as being the political attachment which centers on “the norms, the values, and more indirectly the procedures of liberal democratic constitution” rather than “blood and faith.” Muller argued that such a conception of patriotism would mediate “between the universal and the particular.”[17]
MacIntyre argued that a patriot’s morality is communitarian, meaning that it is “inextricably bound up with the social life of that community” which could place it at odds with “many features of that country’s present organized social life.”[18] He said this conflict is also set forth in concepts put forth by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who identified Sittlichkeit, or customary morality, and distinguished it from Moralitat, a “rational universal, impersonal morality, of liberal morality.” MacIntyre said the “cause of America, understood as the object of patriotic regard, and the cause of morality, understood as the liberal moralist understand it, came to be identified” or as one.[19] This, he said, causes a “central conceptual confusion” but one that may be “required for the survival of a large-scale modern polity which has to exhibit itself as liberal in many institutional settings, but which also has to be able to engage the patriotic regard of enough of its citizens, if it is to continue functioning effectively.”[20]
Appiah saw the discussion of patriotism, especially as set out in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, as limited to “morality within the nation state” and it left “the questions of international morality to be dealt with later.” To address this omission, Appiah constructed “liberal cosmopolitanism.” His proposal was:
“We value the variety of human forms of social and cultural life; we do not want everybody to become part of a homogeneous global culture; and we know that this means that there will be local differences (both within and between states) in moral climate as well. As long as these differences meet certain general ethical constraints, — as long, in particular, as political institutions respect basic human rights – we are happy to let them be….” [21]
Appiah’s liberal cosmopolitanism seems to combine Hegel’s two categories as an essential feature of each of the different societies on earth. That formulation suggests the homogenization that he disclaims particularly if those various societies do not have a history of “basic human rights” as understood by the philosophers.
MacIntyre and Appiah neglect the American historical experience. Patriotism, or devotion to the particular, is capable of being joined with general principles that allow the functioning of that polity when it contains different peoples as is the case in America. This is the essential nature of American Federalism which allows the local communities in the form of states and municipalities to govern their own lives while being united in a political architecture that consisted of the principles of Liberalism. It is a delicate relationship that must be assiduously maintained, and there arises with this relationship or structure a love of the country that makes all of this possible.
Before the United Nations promulgated its Declaration on The Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, various African states were publishing declarations on the rights of peoples as peoples, and Catholic theologians were setting forth general principles limiting patriotism in such a way as to protect all peoples or nations. Ryan wrote that “devotion to the ideas and ideals, the customs, morality, and culture of a national group” could easily be given over to excesses as seen in the Deutsche Kultur and “extremist plans for `Americanizing’ the strangers within our own gates.”[22] The elevation of the nation to a position of pre-eminence over other nations is known as nationalism. Nationalism is a destructive force especially in armed conflict as Professor John Mearsheimer recently mentioned in his talk at the University of Notre Dame.[23] It is therefore easy to see that things like Nazism and modern day things like the nationalism espoused by the current Russian and Chinese political leadership are excesses of the idea of nation, and are hence immoral.
Patriotism gone wild can destroy other nations and even the international community in which the nation exists. John Cardinal Wright, writing about eighty years ago, set forth a positive formulation of a rule that rightly ordered patriotism. A patriot must “seek the furtherance of the common good of his national community by collaborating, so far as is possible for him, in the establishment of that international order without which the national community cannot fulfill its own functions.”[24] This is a good argument for the American Federalist system applied to the world at large, and there exists a growing movement in the world to that effect.
Invoking the common good means the citizen must oppose immorality and evil in government policies, and advance right order. The common good has been defined as the sum total of conditions by which a person may achieve a “fuller measure of perfection.”[25] Right actions and policies, like right order, are essential to peace in domestic societies and to a peaceful international community. The efforts to achieve these goals are therefore part of patriotism. Administrations, rulers, or regimes may sometimes hinder these efforts thereby dampening patriotism, but that does not alter the essence of the national project, or the generative milieu. Patriotism calls the national life, the life of the country to its best both domestically and in relations with other countries. As it is a motivating force to benefit all people in the community, patriotism is the necessary virtue.
Essence of American Patriotism
The American generative milieu is on display in America’s two most famous songs.[29] One is the national anthem, or the Star Spangled Banner, and the other is America the Beautiful. Both link the soil with aspects of character, or the land with the nation or people, while asking for God to purify or improve the American character. These songs are the essence of patriotism as set forth in the Ryan-Partridge formulation.
The Star Spangled Banner tells of the American flag waving over Fort Henry in Baltimore Harbor during a bombardment by the British Navy on September 14, 1814. The first stanza ends with a clear reference to the land, but also to the qualities of the people that inhabit the land: “O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” The land – this land known as the United States — as connected with bravery and freedom is a recurrent theme or motif throughout the song.[26]
America the Beautiful, written in 1893, has a strong motif of place, virtue, and the need for God. It tells of “spacious [or halcyon] skies…amber waves of grain…purple mountain majesties…the fruited plain” and blessings that resonate from “sea to shining sea.” It too presents a powerful theme of American character as one of virtue born from many struggles: “O beautiful for pilgrim feet / Whose stern impassioned stress / A thoroughfare for freedom beat / Across the wilderness…”; and “O beautiful for heroes proved / In liberating strife / Who more than self their country love / And mercy more than life!”
All the while, the song calls for God’s help in binding the nation together in the proper spirit: “America! America! God shed His grace on thee/ And crown thy good with brotherhood …”; “God mend thine every flaw / Confirm thy soul in self-control / Thy liberty in law!”; and “May God thy gold refine / Till all success be nobleness / And every gain divine!”[27]
Joining the land with aspects of American character with a call for God to purify such, we have key elements of the American national project. This is worthy of protection, strengthening, and continued existence.
Dangers to the national project, which is contained within the country, may come from within or from without. These may take the form of harmful ideologies or opposing powers. A domestic regime’s ineptness or ideological predilections may even pose a threat to the national project.
MacIntyre alluded to such a situation when he related the case of Adam von Trott, a Nazi who joined the conspiracy to remove Adolf Hitler from power in 1944.[28] Such a situation reminds us that the country with its national project must be distinguished from the regime, yet the country must be defended all the same even if such efforts seem to support the regime. Hence, the famous toast to the United States of America delivered by Commodore Stephen Decatur in April, 1816 after having defeated the Barbary Pirates: “Our country-In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right, and always successful, right or wrong.
[1] “Patriotism,” Merriam Webster, accessed May 13, 2024.
[2] John Ryan, The Catholic Church and the Citizen (The MacMillan Company, New York, 1928), 71-72.
[3] Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, (Telos Press Publishing, 2006), 39.
[4] Ibid., 42.
[5] I attribute this term to John Eppstein.
[6] John Eppstein, The Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations (The Lawbook Exchange, 2012), 369-370.
[7] The Code of International Ethics, ed. John Eppstein (The Newman Press, 1953), 176-177.
[8] John Eppstein, The Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations (The Lawbook Exchange, 2012), 369-370.
[9] Francis J. Connell, C.Ss.R. Outlines of Moral Theology (The Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1952), 155; Francis J. Connell, C.Ss.R., “Obligations of Citizenship,” Address given at Notre Dame of Maryland College, October 20, 1960, Francis J. Connell Papers, Redemptorist House Archives, Brooklyn, New York.
[10] Ryan, 72-73.
[11] The Code of International Ethics, 178.
[12] Simon Keller, Mitja Sardoc, “The trouble with patriotism,” February 17, 2023, Dialogi or Eurozine.
[13] Alasdair MacIntyre, “Is Patriotism A Virtue?”, 18.
[14] Keller, “The Trouble with Patriotism.”
[15] Keller, “The Trouble with Patriotism.”
[16] Keller, “The Trouble with Patriotism.”
[17] See, Philip H. Gordon, “Constitutional Patriotism,” May/June 2008 Foreign Affairs; Jan-Werner Muller, “A general theory of constitutional patriotism,” I*CON, Volume 6, Number 1, 2008, pp. 72-95 doi:10.1093/icon/mom037.
[18] MacIntyre, 14.
[19] Ibid., 19.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Critical Inquiry Vol. 23, No. 3 Front Lines/Border Posts (Spring, 1997), pp. 617-639 at 620-621 accessed at http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344038 May 13, 2024. Appiah ’s idea of liberal cosmopolitanism is that all persons have “equal dignity.” This means that we should “respect people’s autonomous decisions for themselves, even when they are decisions we judge mistaken.”
[22] Ryan, 71-72; Ryan’s comments can be understood as an expression of the Catholic view against the suppression or fusion of national cultures.
[23] “Prof. John Mearsheimer ANALYSES [sic] The Current World Affairs,” The Strategist, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6oJ7a6X6Kw.
[24] John J. Wright, National Patriotism In Papal Teaching (The Stratford Company, Boston, Massachusetts, 1942), 256.
[25] See, Dignitatis Humanae or The Declaration On Religious Liberty, December 7, 1965, Chapter I, Section 6, Vatican, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651207_dignitatis-humanae_en.html.
[26] “Complete Version of the Star-Spangled Banner,” National Museum of American History, as accessed at https://amhistory.si.edu/starspangledbanner/pdf/ssb_lyrics.pdf as of May 16, 2024.
[27] “America the Beautiful,” Military Order of the Purple Heart accessed at https://www.purpleheart.org/static/forms/AmericaTheBeautiful.pdf as of May 16, 2024. The original 1893 version had in place of “spacious skies” the phrase “halcyon skies.”
[28] To be very clear, I am not advocating the overthrow of the US Government nor the removal of the Biden Administration other than by the legal processes available such as voting. It is my understanding that MacIntyre also was neither advocating the violent overthrow of any governments nor approving of any of the actions of von Trott.
[29] “My Country Tis of Thee,” is yet a third and there are many more. Space limits my discussion to two.