One of the most sensible things ever written on the subject of patriotism was a short essay by the Anglo-Irish writer and wit Oliver Goldsmith in 1765. At that time, Britain had just ended the Seven Years War, had half a dozen smaller wars going on around the Empire, and would soon be at war with the new United States. Goldsmith thought this was all madness. The main point of his essay was this question, I quote: “Is it not possible to love my country without hating the inhabitants of other countries?”
Patriotism is not a subject that lends itself to quiet, rational discussion, or even thought. It’s an emotion, and usually a positive one. Your birthplace gives you your language, culture, memories, and prejudices. It is always a big part of who you are. So patriotism is a kind of self-love, and as Oscar Wilde said, “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” Nothing could be more normal and healthy than patriotism.
The 4th of July, on Friday, is a big patriotic celebration, but here’s where nationalism enters the picture. Flags, parades, triumphal songs and triumphal rhetoric seem more like nationalism than patriotism. Patriotism is quiet, nationalism is loud, and often aggressive. Nationalism, very often, is patriotism weaponized and looking for a fight. This has been a problem ever since nation-states were invented.
Whenever we take an international flight, we get a lesson in human geography that we usually prefer to ignore. Looking down at the moving patterns of the earth we see that it is all connected. France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany flow by as a seamless carpet of land. Even England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland show none of the dramatic differences that you might expect. They all look exactly the same, give or take a mountain or two. And even when we return across the Atlantic into Canadian airspace the surface of the earth is not obviously Canadian, although I’m sure there must be maple leaves down there. Yet more shocking, when we fly over the invisible border into the United States, nothing changes. From thirty thousand feet, it’s one world. From space, it’s just a bright blue marble with no frontiers, and nothing to distinguish Texas from Mongolia.
If only we could, to follow the example of the Roman Emperor Caracalla in AD 212, who proclaimed that all the nationalities within his fractious provinces - Saxons, Gauls, Turks, Syrians, and dozens of other nationalities – would become Roman, under a single government, with a single language. All became citizens, about thirty million of them, which must have been the biggest grant of citizenship in the history of the world. Nobody was undocumented. Nobody was alien.
What a gloriously idealistic gesture that was. It’s a pity that nationalism prevailed and the newly created Roman citizens of the new Roman mega-state continued fighting one another as if nothing had happened. The empire itself soon fell apart. Emperors can do many things, but as Oliver Goldsmith sadly concluded in 1765, it seems there’s not much that even they can do about belligerent human nature.
