Recent developments in our politics have inspired a re-evaluation of patriotism and
a fresh consideration of its worth. Even advocates for the cosmopolitan ideal have
come to understand that the sentiment of patriotism is indispensable to the development
of the kind of social bonds that foster solidarity and mutuality in a society. There
is a naturalness to patriotism, reflecting a healthy love for what is one's own,
gratitude for what one has been given, and reverence for the sources of one's being. Such
dispositions are more visceral than intellectual, being grounded in our natures and the basic
facts of our natality. Yet their power is no less for that, and they are denied only at
great cost. A disposition toward gratitude nourishes the roots of our most important
moral sentiments. There are many meanings to be found in Aristotle's famous declaration
that man is by nature a "political animal," but one of them is that we are in some sense
made to live in community with one another. We are by nature belonging creatures, and
one of the deepest needs of the human soul is a sense of membership, of joy in what we
have and hold in common with others. Much of the thrust of modern political and social
thought, however, has compelled us to look in the opposite direction. This trend is
especially vivid in a work like Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, in which
civilization is understood to rest upon a brutal suppression, even a kind of mutilation, of our
instinctual natures, for the sake of the uneasy equilibrium that makes human society possible.
We endure life in society as the pacing tiger endures the cage, but it is not what we
were made for. That is perhaps a rather extreme version of this view, reminiscent of
Thomas Hobbes's brutal understanding of the social contract, instituted to subdue the
even-more-brutal state of nature. But some of the same ideas, albeit in milder form, underlie the
libertarian strain of conservatism and indeed liberalism itself, both of which often seem to
posit the individual as something ontologically prior to all social relations, capable of
standing free and alone, able to choose the terms on which it makes common cause with
others. It is thanks to such an understanding that we have an endless fascination with
romantic cultural heroes, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman to the current crop of
movie stars and pop musicians - a transgenerational herd of independent minds that can be
counted on to sing the praises of nonconformity and the song of the open road, again and
again, in strikingly similar ways. This autonomous individualism is also visible in
modern conceptions of politics and economics that emphasize the organization of society
into a system of countervailing forces, which together produce an order that no force
standing alone, no matter how virtuous, would be capable of producing. Individuals are
thought to come into the world fully formed and armed with a quiver of imprescriptible
rights and the freedom to exercise them; yet it is not out of their exercise of this
freedom, but instead through the interactions and collisions of individuals and groups,
competing and accommodating, that an enduring social order or a productive economy are
produced. That same vision of order achieved through dynamic equilibrium is visible in our
own battered but still-magnificent Constitution, with its systemic distrust of all
concentration of power and authority, and its low but solid assumptions about the
self-interestedness that pervades our human nature. And to be sure, as that last example implies,
this view of things - that we are fundamentally self-interested creatures, and there will
always be an inherent uneasiness about our lives together - captures some essential part
of the truth about the human condition. But it captures only a part. For among our
deepest longings is the desire to belong, and it is an illusion to believe that we can
sustain a stable identity in isolation, living apart from the eyes and ears and words of
others. Only beasts and gods dwell outside the city, Aristotle warned us, and no city or
nation can long survive in the absence of civic virtues and the loyalties that flow from
them. "Virtue" for Aristotle was a kind of natural excellence that nevertheless required
much striving to be achieved. Its task was prescriptive and aspirational, and it aspired
to a kind of transcendence. Consider these luminous words from the Nicomachean Ethics:
[W]e must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and,
being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and
strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be
small in bulk, much more in power and in worth does it surpass everything. This would
seem, too, to be each man himself, since it is the authoritative and better part of him.
It would be strange, then, if he were to choose not the life of his self but that of
something else. So patriotism, rightly understood, is also aspirational in character, with a
strong admixture of self-overcoming contained in its mandate. Yes, it is an utterly
natural sentiment, whose primal claims upon our souls we deny at our peril. But we cannot
be content with it in the initial form in which it is given. We must work upon it,
refine it and elevate it, if it is to be made into a means by which we can strive to "live
in accordance with the best thing in us." This is not a simple thing, particularly
given the difficulty of isolating and expressing the things that comprise the core of
American civilization. By this, I mean not just that we have lost the ability to think about
these matters, which is certainly true, but that the matters themselves are inherently
complex. Patriotism, in the American context, is an intricate latticework of ideals,
sentiments, and overlapping loyalties. Since its founding, America has often been understood as
the incarnation of an idea, an abstract and aspirational claim about self-evident
truths that apply to all of humanity. There is certainly some truth to this view, but to
focus on it exclusively ignores the very natural and concrete aspects of American
patriotism: our shared memories of our nation's singular triumphs, sacrifices, and sufferings,
as well as our unique traditions, culture, and land. These two types of American
patriotism are undeniably in tension, but the tension has been a healthy one throughout our
history; our nation's universal ideals have meshed with, and derived strength from,
Americans' local and particular sentiments. Among elite opinion-makers today, the universal
variety is viewed as the only legitimate form of American patriotism, while its more
particular loyalties are dismissed as a divisive blood-and-soil nationalism. But there is much
more to American patriotism than this, and we are in real danger of losing the shared
sense of spirit and sacrifice that comes from remembering our past together. THE TWO
STRAINS OF AMERICAN PATRIOTISM The tension between the different versions of patriotism is
well illustrated by a minor controversy from recent history: the debate over the naming
of the U.S. government's new Department of Homeland Security. The use of the term
"homeland" generated complaints almost from the start from commentators, activist groups, and
critics in academia, and the reasons had to do with a clash in fundamental perceptions
about American national identity. "Homeland" seemed insular and provincial, and some
heard in it an echo of the German Heimat, a fatherland of blood and soil. Americans'
attachment, critics of the term argued, is not to something geographical or ethnic, but to a
community built around widespread assent to a universal civic idea of "freedom." In other
words, they asserted, America is best understood not as a country in the usual sense, but
rather as the embodiment of a set of ideas - a nation dedicated to, and held together by
its dedication to, a set of propositions. It is a creed rather than a culture.
Furthermore, they continued, those ideas are deemed to have a universal and all-encompassing
quality; therefore, the defense of the United States is not merely the protection of a
particular society with a particular regime and a particular culture and history, inhabiting a
particular piece of real estate, whose chief virtue is the fact that it is "ours." Indeed, the
fluid, voluntaristic, present-minded, and contractarian nature of American culture makes
it a society built, in Werner Sollors's formulation, upon the value not of descent but
of consent, meaning that every individual is created equal and is equally provided
with the opportunity to give his assent to the values for which the nation stands.