Gary Gutting reflects this Fourth of July on the morality of patriotism, which is grounded in a kind of in-group loyalty at odds with moral theories that require that we treat all human beings equally, regardless of whether we are part of the same family, tribe, or nation.
He notes that Alasdair MacIntyre has given a defense of patriotism:
Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, argues that morality is rooted in the life of a specific real community — a village, a city, a nation, with its idiosyncratic customs and history — and that, therefore, adherence to morality requires loyalty to such a community. Patriotism, on this view, is essential for living a morally good life. MacIntyre’s argument (in his Lindley Lecture, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?”) has provided the most powerful contemporary defense of a full-blooded patriotism.
Gutting doesn’t go into detail about MacIntrye’s reasoning, and I haven’t read the Lindley Lecture, but it’s not hard to imagine how MacIntyre would approach this problem. In After Virtue he argues that morality must be grounded in the ends of human beings, in the Aristotelian sense of end (or “telos”). For Aristotle, what is good for human beings are certain end-states toward which we naturally tend. These end-states perfect or fully actualize some set of dispositions, some potentiality. Just as an acorn will tend to develop toward an end that actualizes its full potential (Oak tree), human beings strive to function well in a way that is appropriate to human being. This functioning constitutes eudaimonia – “happiness” (understood in a particular way) or “flourishing” – which Aristotle takes to be “activity in accordance with virtue.” Virtues are kinds of things that constitute functioning well for a human being (“excellence), such as courage and temperance.
This is not to say such tendencies are necessarily conscious or that they can’t be thwarted: some acorns will not fall in the right kind of soil, and so may not fully develop (or develop at all). And some human beings will adopt ends that are at odds with their own nature: which is to say, they will have two sets of dispositions in conflict. One set of dispositions is determined by the kind of thing they are – by their human nature; the other by something particular to them, based on their idiosyncratic development. For instance, if John’s psychological development led him to become a serial killer, then he belongs to at least two kinds of thing -- or types -- with two respective sets of conflicting ends. Insofar as he is a human being, his natural end will be a certain kind of comportment to other human beings that generally doesn’t involve killing them. Insofar as John belongs to the type serial killer, or even the sui generis type John-the-Serial-Killer, he will have tendencies discordant with his nature. This kind of conflict is at the heart of an Aristotelian account of morality: it’s difficult to imagine how we’d account for the immorality of John’s serial killing activities if we thought he had ceased to be a human altogether and if his core nature were merely “serial killer.” It would be like trying to fault lions for killing gazelles: the lions are simply doing what they are made to do – in fact ideally they will be excellent at killing gazelles. Likewise with the serial killer who has ceased to be human.
As we have seen, our ends our determined by the type of beings we are. And while we may accept Aristotle’s account that there is one core kind of being that’s most important to establishing our ends (human being), it’s clear that each of us belongs to many “kinds” and that these kinds will determine various kinds of ends. I’m not just a human being: I also belong to a certain family, profession, nation, and numerous other groups and activities. And these groups and activities structure me -- alter the kind of being I am: they give me certain potentialities, toward which I naturally strive.
MacIntyre expands the Aristotelian account along these lines: he emphasizes, for instances, “practices.” If I start playing chess and hanging out with chess players, I internalize a certain set of skills and values. I’m altered by these activities: they give me new dispositions, one of which is to perfect just this set of skills. Chess may have meant little to me until I started playing it: but once I start, I create a new set of inward dispositions that will survive even my subjective loss of interest in chess. I become a chess-playing machine, so to speak, and this inner machine will have a tendency to preserve and actualize itself even after I’ve decided that chess is not what I want to do with my life and I’d better spend my time on other things. That’s why it might be hard for me to resist the temptation to play chess when the opportunity presents itself, for instance if I’m walking by players in a park. That’s not merely because chess is pleasurable and because I seek pleasure: rather, once I learned some chess, I started down the path at becoming good at chess – and now there is a built in tendency to become better and better at chess. The chess-playing part of myself strives for survival and actualization, and when I take up a game in the park I’m playing not merely for pleasure but for practice: I’m trying to get better at chess, and to continue structuring myself as chess player – or to become more and more a chess playing type of being.
So the activities and practices into which we enter not only give us a certain set of skills, but a tendency to continue to perfect those skills. Likewise, belonging to any sort of community will have the same sort of effect: insofar as I am an American, I’ll have a tendency to actualize and perfect some associated tendencies. In this case, I’ll seek to perfect those tendencies that allow me to form social bonds within the group and pursue its values (the “American dream,” for instance). I’ll also have the tendency to defend (including by violence) my group against outsiders. To the criticism that this is an irrational tribal loyalty, and if that I’d grown up in Norway I’d be read to lay down my life for an entirely different group, I could respond: it makes perfect sense for me to defend whatever group to which I happen to belong. Because while my belonging to a certain nation or group is a matter of accident, once I become altered by the group – once I become American – then it’s no accident that this part of me will seek survival and actualization. I’ll naturally want to see American-ness – my kind – survive and thrive.
Of course, one could give an Aristotelian response to this Aristotelian defense of patriotism: which is to say, I might fall in with the wrong crowd. Not every group is good for me. Ultimately, I have to revert to my membership in some core natural kind – the human kind – to judge the appropriateness of the effects that practices and groups have on me. They may give me dispositions that are at odds with my humanity and hence my happiness. So it’s conceivable, to return to our serial killing example, that the serial killer part of John thrives and flourishes at the expense of his humanity: he may be very happy qua serial killer, but very miserable qua human being. And of course, most cases are as extreme as this: as we grow our experiences structure us, and these structures take on a self-preserving and self-actualizing life of their own – sometimes to our detriment, to sometimes to our benefit. This structure is what we call “character” (and we can think of this more broadly no just in the Aristotelian sense, but the psychoanalytic sense, as consisting of “defenses”; and when some part of our character thrives at the expensive or ourselves and our overall happiness, we have Freudian “death drive”).
So the question then becomes whether being American, Norwegian, or belonging to any other sort of group or practice, is ultimately good for us or bad when measured against ends defined by our humanity. And this leads us back to a conception of morality which, while still Aristotelian, seems consistent with the kind of enlightenment moral standpoint – a universal one – that MacIntyre has used Aristotle to argue against.
-- Wes Alwan
I find patriotism to be a function of the unconscious shortsighted, cavedwelling instinctual fears that inhabit the human mind actively ventriloquizing a disturbingly large segment of the public. There is simply no reason for it, your birth in to any given nation is an entirely contingent circumstance. Ethical commitments should be to emancipation for every person in the world unconditionally, as long as we are willing to admit we could have also been born in to any existing form of human subjugation, and with much larger odds than being born in to some decaying American suburb.
The universal of our humanity might also only be a function of a certain kind of being an animal, or being living, and so you would have to compare your commitments with humanity to your commitments with all of life (this would consist in the Peter Singer argument). There is also no reason though that your being alive, is any more necessary than your being of organic matter, and here we can see that making ethical appeals to conventionally decided upon universals quickly breaks down. Of course there are still certain people who believe this way, I would characterize it as a sort of Bergson/Whitehead process philosophy.
We lastly found however, that the being of organic matter, is merely a necessary result of there being matter in general. We can not assign human freedom in the form of an ontological category because it is rapidly becoming apparent the world is not and never will be in any way for-us, our pitiful existence pales in comparison with its vast expanse, our consciousness is in many ways very similar to a rock lying on a windy plain being carved away by its environment, before whatever life or process follows each of us is inevitably vaporized by the expanding sun.
Freedom is only a certain sociopolitical situation that we might attain if we do not first go extinct. I think in this sense we are forced to deal with the existential problem of knowing we are always member to the wrong crowd, humanity must eventually consume not only large numbers of one another, but all other species, the planet, and of course much more implausibly the solar system, and all of the galaxies, as it desires to persist against all odds. We have not been conducive to life for the large swaths of species that we have already caused to go extinct, and as ecological catastrophe develops, nature likewise does not seem in any way to care for our presence.
Good post! I think this is an interesting line of thought on the virtues of a kind of particularism, or to put it differently a diversity of life approaches in a objective moral system- namely that our specific groups make us into different kinds of people, who can become better in unique, or at least different ways, in accordance with their ends and traits, and that thus a diversity of life-styles can produce a diversity of valuable, virtuous perspectives, like Aristotle’s pot-luck analogy in the Politics. The one thing I might point out is that this sounds like what Carl Schmitt used to criticize the English pluralists for- the failure to distinguish between political association and other forms of association. I think it is right and true to say that on an Aristotelian account the groups we belong to can require our devotion, and that they shape us, but for both Aristotle and Schmitt political association is qualitatively different from, say, the chess league. In fact, most of book 1 of the Politics is dedicated to showing how politics is fundamentally different from other forms of association. If we loose track of this difference I think there is the danger of making the mistake the Medievals made of understanding Aristotle to be calling man a “social animal” as opposed to a “political animal” (not their fault, the translations were bad).
Thanks for the cool post!
We must remember this is the same MacIntyre who says: “What we confront in advanced societies is the conjunction of an excluded and dependent proletariat with a set of overlapping elites who control the presentation of political choice, the manipulation of economic organisation, the legal structures and the flow of information.” (1991)
And: the “costs of economic development are generally paid by those least able to afford them. … I am not a communitarian. I do not believe in ideals or forms of community as a nostrum for contemporary social ills. I give my political loyalty to no program.” (1994)
So we must be careful to distinguish patriotism as a virtue not only from nationalism, but from other senses in which it could also be interpreted.
Alasdair MacIntyre’s brand of patriotism strikes me as quite objectionable and even a bit disturbing. It amounts to an endorsement of provincialism and irrational attitudes of submission to tradition. What’s morally praiseworthy or virtuous about loving one’s own team? And these attitudes can and do quite easily turn ugly and hateful and warlike. The national anthem and the fourth of July are basically kabuki bomb theater, which tends to construe war as noble and even beautiful. I’d even go so far as to say that this brand of patriotism is a moral failing, a virtue spoiler and, insofar as it constitutes a lack of concern for non-Americans, a case of arrested moral development. Sorry for ranting and raving but, like I said, I find it a little disturbing.
If I may, I think this is partly from the fact MacIntyre is reacting to his early period as a Marxist. However, I tend to think that MacIntyre’s devotion to the real community would make abstract patriotism an impossible telos.
Ed Feser wrote a shooper’s guide to teleology which, whether you are religious or not, I found helpful in getting to grips with the various types of teleology.
http://www.epsociety.org/library/articles.asp?pid=81
Feser is the go to man on telos, but not so much on science.
Problem is that we – people of the earth – may have a problem agreeing to what exactly the ends defined by our humanity might be, beyond perhaps empty generalizations that poorly serve as the unambiguous basis of globally shared ethics.
And further problem is that political practices based on universalized human nature can lead to supremacist imperialism every bit as oppressive as parochial jingoism.
If we look at “patriotism” from the point of view of ethnonationalism resisting degradation of a minority culture and economic and political exploitation in a neo-colonial situation, pride in ones culture / group does not seem as nefarious as if we look at Nazi Germany, for example.
In MacIntyre’s moral schema, Patriotism should be seen as being a part of a community and being concerned with the welfare of the the community. As such it does not privilege the Nation State, and certainly could not be used to justify the extreme Nationalism that one sees. Certainly, the “my country – right or wrong” Nationalism that is often seen could not be justified in MacIntyre’s schema.
As for the accusation of particularism: one of the limitations of being human is that we are born at a particular time, and live in a particular place. We are not transcendent. Thus, we have relationships with those around us – with our families and the communities we live in. These relationships are greater than our bond with the rest of humanity, and therefore have greater sway.
This is not to say that we are not concerned with the welfare of people around the world – it is a question of what weight do we give these concerns. For example, we are often more concerned about the structures of the tax systems in our own communities than in other communities, such as Afghanistan or Zambia. A universalist would, in principle, object to this but it is hard to argue (since one could legitimately as what business of our is it to interfere in these relationships).
Another aspect of the Aristotelian ethics is that virtue lies in the middle. Thus, extreme Patriotism is wrong because it disregards the rest of the world, and no Patriotism is wrong because it disregards the local community.
What weight do you give to the concern that if we continue with our historically short-sighted individualistic ways we certainly will not be able to meet the global ecological and economic catastrophes that our world is presently suffering from? That’s fine if you prefer to put on the horse-blinders and remain ignorant as to how the affect of everybody on earth acting in the globalized economy has a much stronger presence in your life than whoever your suburban neighbors you’ve probably never even met happen to be, but that’s not going to be very fruitful to survival for our species even on the very short term. Really it seems that only more and more authoritarian regimes will be able to meet these urgent demands, and isolated individuals or small communities will have no way to respond to them but to comply.
You are not “apart” from nature. If you think you are, dont worry–nature will have the last laugh on you whether it is ashes or dirt.
Wait what does that even have to do with anything I wrote? If nature as you have anthropomorphized it finds death to be amusing for some reason then I assure you I am very much apart from it in that sense at least. Regardless you’re also wrong more generally, the idea of man’s relation to some nature is just an evolving artifact of the human mind, our modern conception of that only having been conceived within the last few hundreds of years, and went through many drastic changes even in the 20th century. “Nature” dies with man.
Well written Wes. After some recent readings of Roger Scruton “philospoher on Dover beach”‘ ,I am more sympathetic to the tribe mentality. Your summary lends itself to a nature vs nurture provocation. I think most people who reflect may take at some point in their life a stance of philosophic indifference or neutrality but they themselves are grounded by institutions. Institutions and traditions (and culture) for better or worse are the grounds for self.
Most thinking individuals are chagrined on the 4th when witness to silly propaganda such as Lee Greenwoods, “I’m proud to be an american”, but on a deeper level, we cannot dispose of our inheritance through self abnegation or less we sunder ourselves.
You could argue, as Claude Levi-Strauss did in his controversial 1971 speech to UNESCO, that cultures / societies need to consider their ways of life superior to others in some way, for if they don’t why would they hold on to their particular value system. Of course there is a range of reactions that one might still have to cultural “other”, from a mutually beneficial exchange of ideas to benevolent disinterest or violent rejection. The valuing of your own values over different ones does not necessarily lead to a particular attitude towards outsiders.
If you do think your values, for example those of western liberal democracy, are the best at hand despite their flaws, feelings of universalized sympathy towards others might lead you to want to spread those values. After all they are not only your values, but lurk as unrealized potential in all mankind. Now this is certainly not “tribalism”, but can lead to very nasty results (see my comment above or any history book).