Why are younger people not really patriotic like me? Why do kids these days not realize why they stand for the flag or the Pledge of Allegiance or the national anthem? The first bell of the day rings at a local school, and a voice blares over the intercom, asking students to rise from their seats and say the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. This is a familiar practice to students across the United States, since most states currently require schools to recite the pledge at the beginning of each day.
And yet, some students opt out of the ritual, choosing instead to remain seated, or stand but stay silent. Are these students less patriotic than those who stand willingly and proudly to recite the pledge? As someone who studies how young people engage with politics, I think the answer may be a bit more complex than you think. This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly. Sign in. Log into your account.
Password recovery. Recover your password. Forgot your password? Get help. Four fresh faces will join Boulder City Council and help decide who becomes mayor. On the bricks. News briefs Construction hurts Lafayette businesses. Election reaction All Analysis People. A peaceful display is met with violence. But Kateb is too honest an observer of the human condition to go that far. That is the basis on which a reasonable patriotism may be defined and defended. Yes, the individual community that makes moral conduct possible is embedded in an international system of multiple competing communities that invites, even requires, immoral behavior.
One more step, and I reach the end of this strand of my argument. The existence of multiple political communities is not just a fact that moral argument must take into account; it is preferable to the only non-anarchic alternative—a single global state. Dani Rodrik, a politically astute economist, spells out this case. There are many institutional arrangements, none obviously superior to others, for carrying out essential economic, social, and political functions. But some may be better suited than others to particular local circumstances.
Groups will strike varying balances between equality and opportunity, stability and dynamism, security and innovation. All this before we reach divisions of language, history, and religion.
Individual countries struggle to contain these differences without repressing them. How likely is it that a single world government could preserve itself without autocracy or worse? These questions answer themselves. If the human species best organizes and governs itself in multiple communities, and if each community requires devoted citizens to survive and thrive, then patriotism is not the way-station to the universal state.
It is a permanent requirement for the realization of goods that human beings can know only in stable and decent polities. One familiar line of objection to patriotism rests on the premise that partiality is always morally suspect because it violates, or at least abridges, universal norms. By treating equals unequally for morally arbitrary reasons, goes the argument, we give too much weight to some claims and too little to others. My son happens to be a fine young man; I cherish him for his warm, caring heart, among many other virtues.
I also cherish him above other children because he is my own. Am I committing a moral mistake? I would be if my love for my son led me to regard other children with indifference—for example, if I voted against local property taxes because he is no longer of school age.
This is so because a certain degree of partiality is both permissible and justified. On what theory of human existence would that be the right or obligatory thing to do? But now the second example. In the process, my son will be late for school and miss an exam he has worked hard to prepare for. Does anyone think that this harm would justify me in turning my back on the drowning boy?
These considerations apply not only to individual agents, but also to governments. There are situations in which one country can prevent a great evil in another, and do so at modest cost to itself.
In such circumstances, the good that can be done for distant strangers outweighs the burden of doing it. In this vein, Bill Clinton has said that his failure to intervene against the genocide in Rwanda was the biggest mistake of his presidency.
While it is hard some would say impossible to reduce this balance to rules, there is at least a shared framework—based on the urgency and importance of conflicting interests—to guide our reflections.
As a rule of thumb, we can presume that because human beings tend too much toward partiality, we should be careful to give non-partial claims their due.
Sensing the danger of proving too much, the critics of patriotism draw back from the root-and-branch rejection of partiality. Instead, they try to drive a wedge between patriotism and other forms of attachment. George Kateb does not offer a generalized critique of partial attachments. If we feel ourselves unworthy, it will ultimately be impossible for us to project power as we should.
And being worthy is not a matter of simplifying our past but also about feeling rightly uncomfortable with parts of it. Actually, the real American past — multilayered and beautiful, despite its bouts of ugliness, and also holding stores of inspiration — is right there in front of our eyes, ready to be deployed in the intellectual battlefront.
I am talking about American history as taught by National Park Service rangers and commemorated on historical markers that seemed ever-present during the month I recently spent driving across the country. It is accurate, balanced, thoroughly researched, and immune to academic fads. Military history — that is, the erection of forts on the prairie, plains, and mountains in order to manage Indian affairs in the 19th century — is paramount in importance according to this version of history, followed by the activities of settlers, the many steps toward equality of women and African-Americans, the establishment of labor unions, and so forth.
This is a nuts-and-bolts story told in plain English, free of jargon and full of nationalism and heroism. And it has been published in a plethora of books and pamphlets available at visitor centers in parks across the country. DeVoto intuited deep in his bones, perhaps better than anyone else before or since, that the conquest of the Great Plains and the Rockies had been a necessary prelude in order to defeat the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II.
He despised the isolationism that is seeing a rebirth now. He traveled where his characters had gone, seeing what they saw, listening to what they had said, and arguing for the conservation of their world. Edgar Hoover and the red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, is, incredible as it may seem now, almost no longer read. Webb, a Texan all his life, had one subject: the Great Plains as the key to unlocking the mystery of everything America was and was to become.
After all, it was the Great Plains that gave us the cowboy culture. Indeed, the heroism of the Oregon Trail lay not in settling the Oregon Territory — which in many parts constituted a hospitably well-watered, timbered terrain similar to the Eastern Seaboard — but in actually getting to Oregon in the first place. One can argue that the modern basis of American power, and what America can do with it, was given form by these three men in the middle decades of the 20th century.
They were merely studying geography in the classic 19th-century sense of the word: whereby geography is a starting point for the study of history and culture — which is sometimes more illuminating than 20th-century political science methodologies. All three men argued and intuited that since the West was arid, the myth of rugged individualism had to be complemented by a government-directed communalism, in order to manage water resources.
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