Wrestling with Patriotism
If you read my article Healthy Competition: The Lost Art of Sporting you already know that my issues with patriotism — as it is practiced, not as a concept — are the boosterism and superiority complex and my-team-ride-or-die-attitude and rampant schadenfreude. Aspects that are so pervasive that one begins to wonder what, of value, is left if we strip that stuff away. Well, that’s what I hope to wrestle with in this article. Let’s label and discard the stuff that’s unhealthy, that doesn’t serve life, that doesn’t contribute to a better world for future generations. And after the housecleaning, let’s see what’s left.
In Exposing the Roots of Privilege, Supremacy, and Discrimination I wrote about eliminating the myth of exceptionalism — national, racial, familial, etc. Certainly the powerful myth of American Exceptionalism is one aspect of contemporary American Patriotism that doesn’t serve us well. It is mostly a lid we use to keep some very toxic histories and realities hidden from view, but like all pressure cookers you’ve got to remove it from the heat and move to the next phase if you want to avoid an explosion. One manifestation of this is the way that the American Flag has become an idol in the Biblical sense. I mean, when I was searching for an image for today’s article I literally came across several images of Jesus with a crown of thorns interacting with an American flag. Although it is a subject for a later article, I suspect that we’ve also turned Jesus into an idol — in the Biblical sense — in order to avoid living up to his teachings. After all, the teachings of his disciples and churches are so much easier to follow… we’d do almost anything to get off the hook of actually loving both our neighbors and our enemies. Almost anything to keep our guns and our armies and our wealth and our dominance — never mind that Jesus preached against all these. I mean, if we truly believed in the transformative power of love? What then? That would be almost as crazy as truly believing that we are all created equal! Or that we all deserve equal protection under the law! Or that governments and corporations are here to serve us, not the other way around. Look, our problem is not that we haven’t been idealistic enough, our problem is that we haven’t been accountable to the ideals we profess. We’ve figured out that the excuse ‘that’s just the way the world is’ is a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, and so we built a super-highway through the damn thing and rerouted all the traffic. But we’re living in the consequences of that lie — we’re miserable, stressed, unhappy and unhealthy — and we know why, but we’re terrified to change. Terrified that things could get worse, terrified to believe that a better world is possible — in part because we’ve lived as if these lies were true for so long, that we’d rather double-down on being assholes than admit we were wrong. Adolescents… again.
Despite the temptation, I’m not going to laundry-list America’s greatest sins or greatest triumphs — both lists are long and familiar to anyone interested. What I want to turn to next is an examination of how the death-phobia of our culture interacts with these toxic aspects of our nationalism and patriotism. From Ernst Becker’s The Denial of Death in 1973 to Stephen Jenkinson’s Die Wise: A Manifesto For Sanity and Soul in 2015 we’re in the midst of a major reckoning about how we deal (or don’t) with death. While much of this struggle has been about our death — death as experienced by humans, organic death — I want to view it through the lens where the outer reality reflects and refracts the inner reality. I want to talk about how our discomfort with death turns the work of our lives into immortality projects. (I’m going to save the conversation about our actual immortality projects — aka. Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity — for a later day.) What I want to talk about on this particular 4th of July, is how we are even more terrified of the death of institutions we expected to outlast us than we are of the human deaths of those we love, perhaps as scared as we are of our own death. This death phobia is neither natural nor inevitable, it is yet another result of the perversion of our wisdom teachings by immature institutions and people serving their own needs — churches, governments, corporations. Instead of using Jesus’ teachings to make peace with death and each other, we deify him and name him as the gateway for escaping the consequences of death. This hasn’t brought us closer to God! This has disconnected us from our most basic reality. It has transplanted his dream of a heaven on Earth that we participate in making, into an ethereal other-place that we can only arrive at after we’re dead. So we demand that our institutions live forever, we assume that a human death is only ever a failure of medical technology and that an institutional death is only ever a failure of ours. We find it difficult to image what a good human death would even look like — and projecting that onto an organization: a business, organization, institution, or nation is even harder. (For a good-long-struggle with these ideas I recommend Jenkinson’s book.)
So let’s start here: at ecology. Death is the Yin to Life’s Yang. Death is the return of energies, materials, and wisdom to the next iteration of birth. It is the ending of one chapter so that a new one can begin. If death is your enemy, you can only lose. If death is feared, you can only live your life in terror. Death is the foundation upon which your house of life is built, and it is the ground to which that house will return after it has served its purpose. Life feeds on death as much as death feeds on life, this is the nature of nature. So it is at the micro, so it is at the macro. Nation states are living things — inhuman, but living — they are born, and lest we tempt the demons of dystopia, they die. The unformed idea that they OUGHT to go on forever is not based on any reasonable understanding of history, it rests only upon our fear of not knowing what would replace it. The idea that it might be forgotten and, so too, us. I’ve read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy in my life — the idea that an institution (national, governmental or otherwise) could go on forever has never been successfully explored without descent into dystopia. Intuitively, we know that our institutions should die, must die, just as we know that the same is true for us. I’m going to hit pause on this death-thread for just a minute and return to our patriotism theme, before we merge the two.
Patriotic — showing love for your country and being proud of it.
We can start with the concept of country at the center of this definition, and we can acknowledge that this July 4th article is about The United States of America (to whom I have casually made reference previously as just ‘America’ or ‘American’ — although those terms can apply to others in the hemisphere). So let’s upack the other words — in their best and worst lights.
Showing — there is something performative about patriotism. There is a ritual aspect where certain actions, costumes, props, and affectations are expected as proof of one’s social and cultural belonging to America. Flags, fireworks, the pledge, the anthem… you know the signs. Non participation, or worse — protest, are viewed on a spectrum from disapproval to discipline (ask Colin Kaepernick). As we might expect the use of these shows for socio-cultural unity isn’t very problematic, but their use as tools of boosterism, superiority, or exceptionalism is problematic. It isn’t a problem to have an identity, It is a problem to think that identity is better or makes you better than others with other identities.
Love — Is love inclusive or exclusive — I mean this is the whole ballgame! Jesus, and a bunch of other wisdom elders, taught us the love is inclusive — that it doesn’t exclude or play favorites. By this definition, I love my country — all the people and all the land and all the beautiful ideals it struggles to realize. Now, there is an exclusive, zero-sum version of ‘love’ out there. I put it in quotes, because I think it is love’s near-enemy — not the thing itself. But this version of love is comparative, it says you have to love this one more than that one. You must love America and Americans more than you love other lands, other people. You must love your family more than you love your neighbor’s family or your enemies’. But that’s natural you might argue. Yes, it is — for an adolescent… not for an elder.
Proud — Okay, here’s where the rubber meets the road. The Cambridge Dictionary has three definitions — and their delineation is quite telling.
- feeling pleasure and satisfaction because you or people connected with you have done or gotten something good
- having or showing respect for yourself
- feeling that you are better and more important than other people
I think definition 1 hits the Pollyanna problem of patriotism on the nose. This kind of pride is the most rampant and it precludes criticism and accountability with its selective focus on the good. Look, I’m a fan of gratitude practices — I understand and embrace the power of positivity in that way. So, even I, can get behind a 1-style version of national pride if we replace ‘pleasure and satisfaction’ with the more-mature ‘gratitude’ and the immature ‘gotten’ with the mature ‘earned’ — because there are some of those things in America’s history. Good that has been done and earned and that is a genuine source of gratitude. And. We can’t use ‘proud’ as a lid to cover up all the things that we’ve done whose only source of gratitude would be if we learned never to do them again. But, sometimes, this is exactly how we use it.
Definition 2 is the only one that rings as truly healthy. Respect is a mature word, it intimates a successful reckoning with ones successes and failures, hard work and mistakes, light and shadow, good and evil, learning and forgetting. If American pride can be grounded in respect, a respect that — like love — is always inclusive in it’s truest form, then I can be fully on board with that. After all, I am a product of this place and these people, these institutions and this culture, this history and this present… And I am grateful for most of it — I am just not willing to pretend that we’ve learned from the parts we’re actively trying to bury. When we’ve learned from them, we can be grateful for them too — but first we have to acknowledge, embrace, reconcile, and heal from the damage they’ve caused.
Definition 3 is the one the drives me bonkers — the one full of schadenfreude and destructive juvenile energy. It is the one that makes me want to ask: what’s the opposite of patriot — that’s what I am, that’s what I want to be! (Sadly, I can’t encourage you to look up antonyms of patriot — suffice to say that there are no positive ones…) It drives me bonkers, not because it is marginal to our collective experience of patriotism and nationalism, but because — screwed up as it is — it seems to be THE DEFAULT VERSION! I mean, every President in my lifetime from both parties SPEWS American exceptionalism and superiority as a standard part of their political speech. We’re so awesome, we’re so great, we’re so amazing… And even if only a few have actively denigrated other non-Americans from that position of power, they are only saying out loud what is left unsaid by the others. America is the greatest nation on Earth!
No it isn’t. It is A nation on Earth. It happens to be MY nation. I love it, warts and all, good times and bad. My love for it makes me want to make IT right. To turn all the shames into gratitudes. To ask and answer the question: “If America too shall die one day, how can that death feed the birth of something even more beautiful?” And there’s the tie in.
What does a worthy and beautiful and meaningful and heartbreaking and health-rejuvenating death of this great nation look like. I think it would be a conscious death — messy and painful, but under her own power. Something like a unanimous constitutional amendment that ends the federal and state governments as we know them and begins the transition to something new.
Something that can start with as clean a slate as we can imagine.
Something that we can be proud to hand to the next generation.
Something capable of governing the global world we already are.
Something that puts in place education systems that generate both healthy adults and wise elders.
Something that puts in place economic systems that mirror and respect the complexity and beauty of the ecology in which we are embedded.
Something that returns honor and respect to public service by reestablishing trust and growing out of corruption.
Something that honors the needs of the many over the wants of the few.
There was a dream that was America, it was a good dream.
We’re ready for an even better one.
