Saturday, August 25, 2007

Creedal Patriotism; Legitimate or not?

(Note: Do not neglect to read John Savage's first comments to this post. John's comments further reveal that the 4W position betrays their actual desire to formulate a new American creed more conducive to their own brand of patriotism...)

John Savage has suggested that I post the following comments I made earlier this morning to his fine entry “Toward an Understanding of Patriotism According to WWWW,” here at Webster's.

I should explain that John got my attention on this when he cited the header description line at the AFB as an example of the kind of ideological patriotism that 4W had taken their stand against.

As I explain in the comments below, my view is that if creedal patriotism can be shown to be an illegitimate form of patriotism, then it should be rejected. And if it truly is an illegitimate form of patriotism worthy of rejection, then its antagonists should be able to lay down reasonable arguments for its illegitimacy while fully adhering to the dictates of their own reasons...

John poses this interesting question in reply to an earlier comment of mine:

“Back to what Terry said. I'm wondering if it implies that creedal patriotism is not uniquely American, but there's always some unifying creed that binds a nation. That creed may be relatively unstated, but it commands love for certain symbols, heroes, etc. The fact that we have a shared ancestry needs to have some meaning attached to it, I suppose. Otherwise kinship had better be very close if we're going to care about it, and act upon it. Is that right, Terry?”


Here is my answer:

“Well, I tend to think that way, yes. Indeed, it seems to me that family unity and so forth is part of the creed, not separate from it. We can analyze them separately, but I don't see how they can be completely separated as distinctive kinds of patriotism and loyalty capable (or not) of themselves to satisfy the elements comprising 'legitimate' patriotism.

I don't deny the importance of natural affection, familiar places and smells and all of that. As a matter of fact I affirm it, but it only goes so far. Cella and Martin seem to leave no room for a blending of these, claiming one to be an illegitimate form of patriotism and loyalties, supposedly rejecting it in favor of the other.

If it's truly illegitimate then it oughta be rejected. But if it's truly illegitimate as they claim, then why do they adhere to it? I doubt, for instance, that Cella and Martin would assert that their own blood ties with their extended families are stronger inducements to loyalty than their ideological kinship to one-another. Even if they are blood relatives, they likely don't identify as well, nor do they have as strong a bond to other blood kin whose ideological beliefs are different than their own. The proof seems to me in the pudding.

It seems to me that blood ties and kinship based on purely natural kinds of affection would tend to break down in proportion to the distance removed from the immediate family. And that's just speculation on my part because I don't think we have any real examples to look to where this kind of purely natural loyalty is adhered to in strictness.

Ideological loyalty has its limitations too. It would break down the further removed one was from the core ideas and principles. But you cannot simply reject it based on its inherent limitations anymore than you can reject the other based on the same thing.

Again they concentrate their efforts on identifying the weaknesses inherent to ideological loyalties, neglecting to deal with the limitations and weaknesses of the more primitive kinds of loyalty.

In short, it seems to me that Cella and Martin argue in favor of an ideological loyalty. Their creed seems to be no-creed. But it's still a creed, isn't it?”

John's comment that follows to the effect of this not being my final word on the subject is fair enough. It certainly wasn't intended as the final word from this end, but more of a beginning. And I certainly intend to say more. As for now this should suffice to give you a window into what I believe some of the problems are with the 4W position on ideological patriotism. In the absence of a more compelling argument for a rejection of creedal patriotism, I take my stand for it.

-DW

11 comments:

John Savage said...

Terry, I just now read the comments added several weeks after the original WWWW post by John E., and Cella's responses. I realized that one of Cella's fears is that if creedal patriotism is required, then Cella might not himself be a good American. Now it sounds like the general tone at WWWW is one of doubting the wisdom of our Constitution and system of government in the first place. I think I saw somewhere that Zippy Catholic considered himself rather a monarchist, and generally there seems to be a lot of deep questioning of fundamental American institutions among many of the authors. Yet they still believe patriotism is a virtue (though I’m not sure why), so they have to come up with a definition of patriotism that includes them as good patriots. So Cella (and probably to an even greater extent Martin) is afraid that if he concedes the validity of creedal patriotism, then he’s placing himself outside the club of patriotic Americans. He doesn’t want to do that.

Whereas I’d be inclined to say that although the core of American identity is not liberal in the modern sense, that it is possible for a native-born American citizen to be a poor American. Obviously there are plenty of left-wing globalists who I think are very unpatriotic. But why wouldn’t it be possible for a right-wing localist to be rather unpatriotic as well? Even one who would be willing to fight to protect his home and family? Wouldn’t he still, when push came to shove, decide he’d prefer to accede to a foreign army that credibly promised to govern America in accordance with his preferred vision of government, rather than fight for the existing regime?

For example, let’s suppose that we have an ultratraditionalist who is a lifelong American citizen, but believes that Britain right after the Glorious Revolution (a limited monarchy) was the closest to a perfect regime that has ever existed on Earth. Suppose, in a hypothetical world, that this Britain exists at the same historical moment as today’s America. The British army invades America, promises to rule America the same way that it rules Britain, and promises not to harm Americans unless they fight back. What would make this ultratraditionalist fight on behalf of the American regime against the British one? By surrendering, he would get to live among the same people he does now, but under the perfect regime rather than a badly flawed one. So why not surrender?

On the WWWW thread, Gintas, who takes an extreme position against “ideological patriotism”, gives the example of Germans who didn’t like Nazism, but fought “for home and family” against the invading Soviet armies at the end of WWII. But they had every reason to believe they would be treated brutally by the invaders, which generally did happen. So there’s no parallel there. They were merely choosing the lesser evil of continuing to be ruled by the Nazis over the greater evil of being brutalized by a foreign power. Curiously, Gintas doesn’t mention German “patriots” fighting back against American invaders.

So it’s one thing to think your country has gone a little off the rails, but quite another to say it was founded on the wrong principles. It’s a bit like the way that it would have been reasonable to argue that William the Conqueror was not the legitimate ruler of England in 1067, but quite another to say that the ruler from his line was not legitimate a century later.

Loving your home and family is absolutely laudable, but I'm not sure that feeling alone makes a person a good patriot. What do you think?

Terry Morris said...

John, good call in the first paragraph on their redefining patriotism to exclude creedal attachments, thus creating a new creedal patriotism.

I recall reading in one thread at 4W where they had called into question the validity of the DoI phrase "...governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

more later...

-Terry

Vanishing American said...

Gentlemen, I've already blogged a good bit about this, and I am not sure it can be addressed in a reply here.
It sounds as though I am not on the same page with you gents.

Our Founding Fathers, I think, did not intend to found a nation based primarily on an idea or an ideal; they considered themselves already a nation, simply a variety of Englishmen who 'wanted the rights of Englishmen' (I forget which Founder said something like that) who wanted to establish a better form of government than their existing arrangement.

I cannot imagine that they would ever have envisioned an America in which virtually anyone and everyone could be an American, fully equal to their own posterity for whom they created this nation, simply by virtue of assenting to a set of ideas. If they had been founding a strictly creedal nation, should they not have stressed that it should be a universal country with people from anywhere, as long as they held the correct views on government? Instead, the 1795 Naturalization Act specified that free White people only could become citizens. And there was no specification of holding a certain ideology, such as belief in 'democracy' (which the Founding Fathers thought little of anyway) or even a Republican form of government, or 'freedom' and liberty. They did specify that the alien wishing to become a citizen had to forswear allegiances to any foreign princes, nations, potentates, etc.

Certainly they believed that our Republic exemplified the best possible form of government -- for us; they did not envision it as being necessarily exportable. They said that only a 'moral and religious people' could be governed under our Constitution.
I think the Founders did not spell out the importance of the English roots of this country because they simply did not feel it necessary; they did not anticipate the claims to making this a universal nation or a multiracial and diverse nation in which a belief system would supposedly bind us all together.
My own patriotism and loyalty is to the people I consider Americans in the traditional sense, those who are part of the American cultural tradition which prevailed in this country up until the liberals started tearing it apart. My loyalty is not to a regime or an ideology or a political party or an idea; it's to ancestry, heritage, kin and to posterity. The ideals of freedom and so on are implicit in the heritage that comes down to us from England and Christendom. No need for any other 'ideology' or creed.
-VA

John Savage said...

I've written up another post on this topic, but I think I want to mull it over a bit more before I put it up. I don't want to back myself into a corner by carelessly taking a position that's way too favorable to ideological patriotism.

Terry Morris said...

I cannot imagine that they would ever have envisioned an America in which virtually anyone and everyone could be an American, fully equal to their own posterity for whom they created this nation, simply by virtue of assenting to a set of ideas.

VA, I think we need to put this in context. I've never said that anyone and everyone should have the opportunity to become American simply by assenting to a set of ideas. I've never even implied that anywhere that I recall, not even in my ignorant youth.

My main contention with the 4W position is that they totally reject the idea of an ideological patriotism, not that they express concern for an exclusive one.

I hope you'll write something else up on the subject in the near future.

-Terry

Terry Morris said...

John, I hope you'll put that post up soon, even if it's in a (slightly) edited version.

Though I'm very guilty of it myself, I don't think we should repress our ideas like that. Before you know it we're repressing all of our thoughts that we think might be open to attack by someone we respect and admire. i.e., we don't fear being attacked by liberals because they're our ideological opposites; but we don't want to be attacked by other conservatives and traditionalists, particularly those who we highly esteem, because they might expose some weakness in our own conservatism/traditionalism. Speaking for myself, if there are weaknesses or untenable aspects to my conservatism, I want them exposed so that I can work on correcting them.

The main theme at the AFB is Balanced Government, which has always meant to me, when ya boil it all down, a balanced perspective on an individual level. I think Cella and Martin present us with an imbalanced perspective on patriotism. I don't want an exclusively ideological patriotism anymore than I want an exclusively non-creedal patriotism. Both are crucial elements to patriotism from my view.

-Terry

Terry Morris said...

John, I don't know how germane to this discussion this is, but let me touch on what you said in your original comments about Zippy Catholic counting himself a monarchist.

On second thought, let me say that we've discussed this before over at the AFB, most particularly in this post.

Maybe you can take something from it.

-Terry

John Savage said...

Well, maybe I'll post it a bit piecemeal, in the form of comments here, and then once I've hashed out my ideas, I'll put them up. I didn't intend to hold back my ideas forever, I was just hoping maybe I would get a chance to read a couple of books first that seemed to inform the other side's arguments.

One premise that I see taken for granted over at WWWW is that nationalism, and to a large extent democracy, are "products of 1789", i.e. of the French Revolution. Since the French Revolution was both bloody and very leftist in character (unlike the American Revolution), WWWW doesn't like anything that is tainted with the "spirit of 1789". Everything intellectually connected with the French Revolution is viewed as naturally anti-Christian, totalitarian, and conducive to violence.

Lew Rockwell, a well-known radical libertarian, coined the term "red-state fascism" to describe Bush-style neoconservatism, and I've thrown around the term "red-state fascism" carelessly, thinking it was mostly accurate. I'm guessing that the WWWW folks would agree with the "red-state fascism" assessment, and suggest that this is a fairly natural outcome of democratic politics. They would manage to tie together, one way or another, democracy, nationalism, and fascism. And "creedal patriotism" is for them not very different from nationalism. So as long as we espouse creedal patriotism, they think we're tainted by our refusal to reject one of the crucial aspects of "fascism". So, in fact, I feel I have to tread very carefully to avoid being thought of by the WWWW bloggers as an enabler of fascists, or whatever.

Now, I imagine what Auster would say is that this country has (probably wrongly) fallen for neocons, but even neocons are very far from fascism. That's because neocons, for Auster, are still essentially "right-liberals", who still believe in liberal principles, and therefore tried to bring "democracy" to Iraq to solve their problems. All liberals, including neocons, have a tendency to bend over backwards before Muslims, immigrants, or any other people demanding concessions from the West. Liberalism is poles apart from fascism, since it's extremely egalitarian, anti-racist, and submissive to outsiders. And as I recall reading in Paul Gottfried's Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, one of the main arguments of liberals after WWII was that all countries were basically guilty of the Nazi crimes, and therefore all countries must "de-Nazify" themselves by defining themselves as "proposition nations", or what have you.

So if our country is very far from fascism, it might make sense to propose a dose of nationalism as a remedy. As Peter Brimelow wrote, "Hitler's Revenge" was our immigration policy, which represented an attempt to deny everything Hitler stood for. So I tend to believe that under the sway of liberalism, we've had an extreme reaction against everything Hitler stood for. Moving a little bit back toward the reasonable middle would be helpful. On the other hand, if you think (as WWWW seems to) that we're still very close to Nazism, in spite of all the liberal successes since, then it would seem that nationalism is a very dangerous thing to encourage, even in small doses.

You might ask how I got to introducing fascism into this discussion. One of the WWWW bloggers who usually blogs mostly at his own site, Daniel Larison, is a big admirer of John Lukacs, a noted Hitler scholar. Larison summarizes Lukacs' latest book as follows: "Simply put, democracy is and has been degenerating into a brutish populism most often in the form of nationalism." So Lukacs sees Hitler everywhere in today's politics. That despite many decades of leftist success in trying to weaken our attachments to nation and place, and replace them with some sort of "world citizenship". So either WWWW denies that leftists have weakened our nationalism, or they think it's a good thing.

What's your reaction?

John Savage said...

Sorry, I didn't get a chance to see your last comment before posting mine. I'll check that out.

Terry Morris said...

tcBased on what you said, my reaction would be that 4W is caught between a rock and a hard place.

-Terry

P.S. I did go to the link you provided and I read probably a third of it, but I had other things on my mind and caught myself wondering a couple of times what I'd just read. So, essentially, I gave up on the article, and what I did read I didn't take much from. Perhaps I'll try again later.

John Savage said...

Terry, my "first thoughts" are exhausted. Perhaps I'll come up with some new ones in a couple of weeks. I'm going out of town Wednesday and may return to the subject after I get back next week.

I looked at your old post from the AFB, but didn't make any connections to what we're discussing now. I'm not sure if I can really grasp what's at stake there out of context.