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Editor’s Note: This podcast was produced as part of Persuasion’s partnership with the Civil Discourse @ MIT program, at which Spencer Case spoke late last year on the topic “Does Citizenship Require Patriotism?” To learn more about Civil Discourse @ MIT, visit the program’s website here, and to see prior episodes in the series click here.
Spencer Case hosts Micro-Digressions: A Philosophy Podcast. He is the author of many academic philosophy articles and coauthor of Is Morality Real? A Debate. He is currently an assistant teaching professor in the Bowling Green State University philosophy department.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Spencer Case explore the difference between patriotism and nationalism, what extremists get wrong, and how to think about self-identification in the debate around trans rights.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Why do you think patriotism is important? And why is that a controversial point of view—why is it that that has become something that needs arguing for?
Spencer Case: From the perspective of a lot of people, the idea that you should be patriotic sounds like the idea that you shouldn't commit adultery or that you should be honest: it just sort of seems like a truism. Yet there has always been, at least for the last 150 years or so, a serious intellectual contingent that thinks that patriotism is a very dubious concept. Even when patriotism is widely accepted, there is a lot of disagreement about what exactly it means.
Patriotism is supposed to be something that connects people across a nationality and yet it's slightly coded as right-wing. Liberals may insist that they're patriotic, but I often detect a note of defensiveness about that, like with the insistence that dissent is patriotic. I think both sides of the political spectrum want to be seen as patriotic, but they often have different modes of patriotism in mind. I also think there has been some movement away from the popular consensus that patriotism is a good thing. I see some very strident anti-patriotic sentiments from the left, not just confined to a small intellectual contingency. It’s starting to crop up on the right, too, which is maybe a little bit more worrying because that's the side you'd expect to be pro-patriotic.
Mounk: There's a kind of weird anti-Americanism that is creeping into the right. Of course, the left always had these strains, but it's more surprising to find it on the right.
There is a relatively straightforward set of reasons why we might be worried about patriotism. One of them is rooted in history. When you look at a lot of the violence and slaughter of the 20th century, and some of the beginnings of violence in the 21st century, nationalism was often a big cause—the sense that everything is owed to our nation because it is, for some cultural or perhaps even biological reason, superior to yours. Therefore we can invade your territory, or can annex parts of it, or displace your population and replace it with our own.
Secondly, of course, there's a relatively straightforward philosophical reason to be mistrustful of patriotism, and indeed of any kind of account that allows you to play favorites with people. Don't we owe the same to all human beings, irrespective of who they are? Why should we owe less to somebody who is in need in Kenya or in El Salvador than to somebody who's in need in our own country—who, especially if you happen to be lucky enough to be a U.S. citizen and living in a pretty affluent place, is likely to be in much greater need than our own fellow citizens? There's a moral blind spot if I don’t care about those people as much simply because they don't happen to have the same passport.
How can we overcome the argument from history and the argument from philosophical duties against any special form of patriotism or nationalism?
Case: Let me back up a bit here into more abstract territory, and then work my way forward. I think patriotism is often characterized as a prejudice in favor of one's compatriots, and there's certainly a grain of truth to that. I think a lot of the philosophical resistance to patriotism comes from its limited self-transcendence—patriotism is a calling for people to make a sacrifice for a greater good, the good of the country. But it’s not a sacrifice necessarily for an even greater good—the good of the world, the good of humanity—so it seems morally limited from that angle.
If you look at the origin of the word “patriotism” in the English language, its contemporary political usage goes back to the early parliamentary era in England. The word originally came from thinkers like Sir Henry, Viscount Bolingbroke. It meant self-transcendence, like you were transcending your personal career interests and your party interests for the good of the country. Foreigners didn't really have a lot to do with it. It wasn't associated with militarism, as far as I know, until the second part of the 19th century; it was more like an emotional force that allowed people to overcome the temptations of what James Madison called factions, or what we would in more contemporary terms call special interests.
It's useful, I think, to consider an analogy with other forms of love. The dictionary definition of patriotism usually mentions “love of country.” Love is not a zero-sum game—for example, I love my son, but it doesn't mean I love other children less because I love him. I actually care more about children and their well-being because of my special relationship with him. It’s a special relationship, but it's not a zero-sum game. I think this can be true of love of country as well—if you love your country, you can have greater sympathy for the Olympic athlete from another country who wants to make his country proud, or for the freedom fighter who's resisting an unjust invasion in another country.
Mounk: I broadly agree with this view. I've put forward similar views in the past. Part of what patriotism means in a large, diverse nation like the United States is to say: I might be in Boston and you might be in LA. I might be Christian and you might be Muslim or Hindu. I might be white and you might be black or have origins in Latin America. Well, I'm still going to care about you because we're both citizens of the same country.
Now, I think the pushback towards that would be rooted in a subtle verbal distinction that we've been making here, which is that you've been consistently talking about patriotism. I've been going back and forth between talking about patriotism and talking about nationalism. But we like to divide those two things from each other cleanly. There's a big philosophical tradition of doing that, of saying that patriotism is the good sentiment. That's the sentiment where you care about your fellow citizens, and it doesn't have to involve hatred for anybody else.
But I wonder whether, empirically, those two concepts that we try to keep apart from each other are much more related than they seem. Which is to say: once you have a strong repertoire of patriotic feelings, that the ultimate in-group is everybody who's a citizen of my nation, that can be harnessed for good—but it could also easily be redirected towards a more explicit feeling of superiority, a sense of aggression towards the outsider.
So, can we distinguish as cleanly as you're starting to between patriotism or nationalism? And if not, how can we make sure that the good side of the coin keeps prevailing rather than being the entryway towards the dark side of a coin that has led to so much misery in the 20th century and a little bit before and after?
Case: I agree with what you're saying about drawing this line between patriotism and nationalism. Let me ask, is there a way of drawing this distinction that you find preferable?
Mounk: I think it's a useful fiction to distinguish between those two. In certain kinds of contexts, when you're describing your positive ideal, it makes sense to talk about patriotism. When you're describing a war caused by an excess of the worst kinds of nationalism, it makes sense to use that term.
But I think we get into trouble when we make the conceptual distinction and therefore think that an increase in one form of it, of patriotism, is never going to create the danger of a more negative side, of nationalism. So I think that when philosophers divide those two concepts up and think that therefore they've solved the problem, they've sort of fallen foul to their own verbal trick. I don't think that means that we should reject patriotism. But I think we should be aware of the fact that—this is a metaphor I've used—patriotism is a half-domesticated animal, a half-domesticated beast. We need it. We need to make it useful for ourselves. But we always have to be aware of the fact that unless we do the work of keeping it domesticated, it can become dangerous and it can run wild because these two sides, the good side and the bad side, are always potentially related.
Case: I think that's true. And I do find something somewhat dissatisfying about, for example, George Orwell. Orwell draws a sharp distinction between patriotism and nationalism; whereas patriotism is more defensive, nationalism is more aggressive. But as you say, you can make the conceptual distinction, but that doesn't mean those two things are empirically unrelated.
It is indeed true that some of the instances of patriotism that you genuinely want are probably going to have some bad consequences. For example, consider some times when patriotism was at a very high ebb, like during World War II. You want people to be really fired up with love and willingness to defend their country when you're fighting the Nazis. And yet, look at how, for example, the Jehovah's Witnesses were treated during that time. There were a series of Supreme Court cases in which it was found initially—and then the Court fortunately reversed itself—that you didn't have a right not to salute the flag at school, even if doing so conflicted with religious beliefs. Certain anti-patriotic speech, or speech deemed not to be patriotic, was forbidden. And there were some pretty violent crimes committed against Jehovah's Witnesses during this time.
I think it's not a coincidence that those two things come together. This is true of so many things that are human. Romantic love: how many crimes of passion have there been? Parental love: how much nepotism and corruption has there been? So in all of these cases, as you say, you want to domesticate the animal. You don't want to cull it.
Mounk: That's a nice way of putting it. I think that raises the question of how to domesticate the animal.
I reject the purely ethnic notion of nationalism, which says, for example, that to be American you have to have a particular kind of ethnicity or a particular kind of origin. I'm going to take a wild guess that you also reject that notion. But that raises the question of what to put in its place. What kind of patriotism could be a healthy collective sentiment that helps to sustain the kinds of mutual solidarity that we want in a country like the United States?
Case: Can I just ask you a follow-up question? Does what you said about the United States apply to other countries? For example, is ethnic nationalism inappropriate for the Kurds? Is it inappropriate for every group that either has a country or aspires to have a country? Because a lot of people have thought there's something unique about American patriotism in this respect.
Mounk: That's a really good question. I would say two things about that.
First, a big part of the history of nationalism in virtually every country is the aspiration for national self-determination on broadly ethno-cultural-linguistic lines. And that certainly has led to a lot of complications and misery in history, but it also has a clear legitimacy and seems—barring better alternatives—to be the best form of self-organization. Not in every context, and it always depends on the particular geopolitical constraints and so on, but it does seem like the best solution. So I don't think that there was anything bad about Italian nationalism in the 19th century. I think despite the much greater political problems that may bring up, there's something in itself legitimate about the Kurdish aspiration to have a homeland for themselves. And I do think that in the case of a Jewish aspiration for an ethnic homeland (though I don't have any particular personal resonance with it), we should think of it as clearly a latecomer to the same kind of aspiration and judge it in the same kind of way.
The second thing I would say is that you can have a desire for national self-determination that coexists with a recognition of ethnic minorities, as well as descendants of immigrants, being within your territory and being treated as true equals and as full members of that society. That's particularly true in places where those ethnic minorities have either always existed in that territory or where they now exist as a result of the policies pursued by these self-determining nations. So there is nothing inherently illegitimate about the German aspiration for national self-determination. It obviously went badly off the rails during World War II, but there's nothing wrong about German aspirations for having an ethnocultural nation state in the 19th century. If the government then invites a bunch of Turkish “guest workers” into the country and gives them legal status to remain there, you now have a second and third and fourth and fifth generation of Turkish Germans. Then I think to say, well, sorry, you're not descended from the same set of people in the 19th century, so therefore we shouldn't think of you as full members of our country would be a mistake.
So I think that those entities can make decisions that have implications on the kind of duties they owe to other people in the territory. And one of those duties is that people who live in Germany today, who are not descended from ethnically German people—but who have come to the country legally and legitimately, and who've been there for a long time—have a claim to be treated as true equals. Now, what that doesn't mean is that countries that continue to be pretty homogeneous, like, say, Japan, have some kind of obligation to turn themselves into multi-ethnic countries. I think what kind of immigration policy they pursue is up to them. You certainly are entitled to have temporary visitors that have to be treated fairly and respectfully while they're there, but they certainly don't have to have equal membership in your country.
Case: I think I'd more or less agree with that. That being said, I don't think ethnicity is the sole basis for a country. It is not the basis for American identity. So what is then? I don't accept the idea that American identity is acceptance of a certain set of ideas. This seems popular with a lot of people, both conservatives and liberals.
One reason I don’t accept the idea is that it just doesn't seem sufficient. You could have the right values and not be an American. And it also doesn't seem necessary. If you think that maybe the Tories had the better argument, that doesn't seem like it makes you not an American in some deep sense. So I think it's got to be something like a cultural affinity and a shared commitment to the central institutions. Something like that is what makes us Americans. I think patriotism then, for an American, would be a commitment to a collective political project and to everyone else who's engaged in that project.
Mounk: That's interesting. I mean, that's very similar to the argument I've made in my book, The Great Experiment, where I have a chapter on patriotism. I do think that civic patriotism is a healthy element of patriotism in general, and in particular, the patriotism of countries with a very long history of immigration like the United States. So I would say that a shared civic belief in the importance of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence is one of the things that make us Americans. But like you, I don't think that's either sufficient or perhaps necessary.
So the thing that I've tried to add to that civic dimension of patriotism is a sense of cultural patriotism. And what I emphasize is that cultural patriotism obviously can be rooted in the more positive elements of American history or German history or Japanese history, depending on the context you're talking about. But that doesn't in any way need to be backward-looking. When you think about what people actually think and feel when they're talking about why they love a country, that's pretty much rooted in the present and also has elements of an aspiration for the future. It's the sights and sounds of a country, the cities and its landscapes, and even elements of everyday culture, like big celebrities, YouTube stars, athletes. I think it's this kind of living, breathing culture that really gives substance to what most people talk about when they talk about patriotism.
In that sense, one of the advantages is that in Japan, that culture is going to be reasonably homogenous. It's going to mostly reflect the contributions of people who are ethnically Japanese. In much more diverse countries, whether that's Sweden today or the United States, it is in quite a natural way going to also involve the many contributions that people who don't have ethnically Swedish origin have made to the everyday culture of that country over the last decades. So I think it reflects the change in the ethnic composition in that country in a relatively natural way.
Case: I do think that people have this need for group identity that is primarily psychological and maybe you could even say spiritual. I think that you see national identities in competition with other forms of identity.
In my first essay for Quillette some years ago, called “Inverted Nationalism and Orwellian Patriotism,” I discussed a CNN interview with a young Belgian man who had converted to Islam and joined the Islamic State. His own motivation wasn't about seeking some kind of material good. He had much more material goods in Belgium than he did as a prison guard in Iraq that was occupied by ISIS. But he just thought, all the kids my age, they're out clubbing and I'm Catholic, but people I know aren't that serious about it. But here is this confident identity, with this hierarchy, that gets taken seriously. It just had this attraction for him.
I'm a liberal in the classical sense, as I know you are as well. I want there to be freedom of religion; I want there not to be strict racial hierarchies. But in order for those societies to survive and flourish in the long term, they have to be able to meet the psychological needs that cause people to gravitate to illiberal ideologies and movements. And I think this is a really worrying blind spot. There's something in the psychology—not of everyone, but of most people—that gravitates to what the conservative literary critic Edward Shills called the “primordial.” The primordial he defined as just the desire for territory and blood relations, kin and territory. And the alt-right, the very far right, I would just describe it as primordial collapse, because everything else gets swept away by this clear desire for primordial attachment. You see that with ISIS too.
I'm thinking of this as a new way of conceiving the left-right spectrum. On the far right you would have the desire for connection with primordial things. And then on the other side, you get to utopianism. Albert Einstein would be the furthest person on the left, maybe, on this way of drawing up the political spectrum; Einstein thought that nationality is just so primitive, that surely humanity is going to evolve past it. And there's an attractiveness to that, too. But it's psychologically not sustainable for large groups of people, is my impression.
Mounk: I want to get back to another way of thinking through where nationalism might go wrong. One way of thinking about this is, perhaps you have the wrong conception of nationalism, right? You think my American nationalism is whites-only and therefore I'm not going to think of you as a fellow citizen. Well, that's certainly something that I would think of—particularly in the American context—as a moral mistake, something that misconstrues what the American nation is and cheapens it into something less than what it should be.
But another way of thinking about this is simply as a form of extremism. Perhaps you have the right conception of patriotism. Perhaps you think the civic conception of patriotism is the right one, and you really take pride in being an American because of the Constitution and because of the Declaration of Independence and so on. But it's so extreme, your attachment to that notion of patriotism, that you really go out of the way.
I know you've written interestingly about extremism in general. Not just in the context of patriotism, but of other kinds of moral virtues. When does extremism become a threat? When you're extreme in the pursuit of something good, shouldn't that be something laudable? How should we think about that?
Case: We often talk about extremism as vicious, as a bad thing. And yet it seems difficult to say what the essence of the vice of patriotism would be. Why can't someone always just say, well, I'm an extremist, but I'm an extremist for a good cause? Martin Luther King Jr. says something like this in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Various others who have been accused of extremism have said, so what, maybe everyone's an extremist for something. If I'm an extremist for something good, what's the problem here?
So I wanted to give an analysis that would explain why there might be a distinctive vice of extremism that can resist that kind of criticism. I think that extremism is a fixation with a certain moral concern that is intense enough that it leads to moral tunnel-vision. So the vice of patriotism, then, would be a kind of obsessiveness with a particular moral issue to the extent that you have no ability to see what's wrong with your means of pursuing it, what other harms there might be that you need to take into consideration. I think that's the right way to think about extremism.
Mounk: Let me tease this out. What you're saying is that often we use the word extremist loosely for things we don't like, right? And that, under this account, wouldn't really be extremism. That's kind of a little bit of a misnomer. The problem is not really extremism. The problem is just that you're holding a view that is in itself noxious or implausible or dangerous or something like that.
The puzzle comes in when we're saying, well, look, you're a vegan because you care a lot about the wellbeing of animals and that's sort of reasonable in so far as it goes, but you're now a vegan extremist who won't shake the hand of anybody who consumes dairy products, or who perhaps goes so far as to commit terrorist acts against your fellow citizens who eat meat. Clearly, there, the problem is not so much your underlying cause, which you might agree or disagree with. The problem is that you're taking it too far in a way that becomes dangerous.
Case: Yeah. So to say a bit more: in the case of somebody who says, let's just kill everyone with blue eyes out of some crazy fanatical belief, we probably would describe that person as an extremist. But the extremism isn't conceptually necessary to explain what's wrong with them. You can get everything morally significant about this scenario by just saying, this person is murdering people for no good reason. Then there's another sense of extremism that is just, anything that's far from the center of opinion. And in some sense, that's true. But that's not a morally interesting sense.
I do think one of the ways you can be blinded by extremism is if you're so convinced of the righteousness of your cause that you're not really thinking about whether the means you're taking are going to be self-defeating in the long run. I’m very concerned about animal welfare. I am vegan and I'm even far enough along on being persuaded about this that, yes, if you could stop 100 billion animals from being tortured by committing an act of terrorism, I could see an argument for that. But you're not going to persuade people by vandalizing signs or throwing red paint on people at Whole Foods or blocking traffic. I mean, if you really could stop climate change or something by doing those things I could see a case for them. But you're not. You're making people hate you and think that your cause is probably stupid. So I think it's possible to have a pet cause and be so concerned about it that you're not concerned about other causes. And I think that can lead people to not pursue their own goals effectively.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Spencer discuss the difference between transgender and transracial identities, and how to look at the polarizing issue of gender self-ID from a classically liberal perspective. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
