"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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about patriotism
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August 9, 2009
In Patriot Acts: Learning from America in The Monthly (June 2009), Waleed Aly explores the contrasts between American and Australian patriotism. He says that the genius of American patriotism (love of country) is that it manages to be inclusive. The same cannot easily be said of Australian patriotism, and certainly cannot be said of the European version, which is so often expressed in moral panics about the supposed disloyalty of migrants. He then asks:
What accounts for the difference? At first blush, the answer is as simple as it is patriotically appealing: that the patriotism of minorities simply mirrors the patriotism of the majority. That is, patriotism is a result of social pressure. If we only demand it stridently enough, our minorities will learn to love us. Or, to put it more acerbically, multiculturalism is a death wish. Such has been the diagnosis of a thousand culture warriors in recent years. Europe's flirtation with multiculturalism has killed its sense of self and allowed its recalcitrant minorities to disappear into a fog of cultural relativism and escape any sense of loyalty to the nation. Europe's multiculturalism is even said to have fostered subcultures hostile to it.
His response is that this makes little sense, and he adds that:
there is something different operating in America, something more subtle, complex and ingenious than the brutish social politics of monoculturalism. Something that is not ultimately about multiculturalism or migration, but about a more comprehensive phenomenon: national identity. There is something in the way America thinks and talks about itself that enables widespread national loyalty and astonishing diversity to coexist. Even its rioters rarely shun their American identity; instead, they assert their place in the nation.
America, like Australia, New Zealand and Canada, is part of the New World and created from settlement (or conquest) and migration. This creates a fundamentally different dynamic, for it is immediately apparent that there is nothing organic about these nations. The vanquished indigenous aside, everyone is a migrant to some degree, which necessarily fosters a more fluid, open notion of national identity: one that is not so firmly anchored in ethnicity as in Europe. Yet this does not explain why the United States should be any different to Australia.
Aly says that America has its creed, but one that corresponds to no particular religious tradition. It is a civil creed constructed on the central political idea of individual liberty. The US was settled by people fleeing religious persecution in Europe; it was thus almost inevitable that freedom, especially of religion, would become the new nation's touchstone. A people who had struggled to attain religious freedom could not easily found a nation on principles that denied that right to others:
The natural outcome of that - and this is the crux of the issue at hand - was a national myth based not on shared religion, ethnicity or culture, but on the shared enjoyment of liberty... American patriotism does not celebrate a country that exists or has ever existed. It is a celebration of the idea of America: of possibility, what Barack Obama calls "America's promise". Where we may look upon America as the country of slavery and racial segregation, Americans see a country that overcame these things. Theirs is a sense of self that is forward-looking, oriented towards constant improvement.
In contrast the message of Australia's staunchest patriots is that ours is a great country with a great history and no need for change. It is a message that replicates the European sense of national self, one bound in a fixed history. The history wars were so intense in Australia for the very reason that our sense of national pride is not forward-looking.
America's unique brand of national identity: it coheres principally around not a social culture but a political one. The values America so frequently celebrates are not cultural but civic: individual freedom, freedom of conscience, limited government. Personal and cultural values are rarely articulated in a national way. To do so would be to undermine the individual's freedom to determine his or her own values, free from government interference.In Australia, by contrast, national identity primarily means cultural identity .... The anti-multicultural commentary that filled our newspapers [held that] Australian values are under threat from migrants who refuse to accept the dominant culture; majority values must be protected by the insistence that they are embraced by minorities. In Australia, we were urged to remember that ours is a nation built essentially on the Judeo-Christian tradition, that ours is a culture derived essentially from Britain, and that we are an English-speaking nation.
If Australia has lately had a message for its migrants, it has been, "Fit in". America's message is, "Participate". The two are worlds apart. The latter expresses a national identity that is dynamic and open, and that offers citizens a belief in their own freedom of conscience and the opportunity to contribute something new. The former expresses a national identity that is comparatively fixed, that makes its demands without inviting input and that, as a consequence, inspires little fidelity.
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| | Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:12 PM | Permalink |
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