What’s Wrong with the World

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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Ideology and globalism.

Poor David Gelernter. I suppose he just cannot see the difficulties in his own argument, as exposed by his own argument. He cannot see that what is right in his argument overturns what is wrong. He cannot see that his most compelling polemics may be easily applied to him. He cannot see, in short, that he is arguing against himself.

The Democrats are not unpatriotic, but their patriotism is directed at a large abstract entity called The International Community or even (aping Bronze Age paganism) the Earth, not at America. Benjamin Disraeli anticipated this worldview long ago when he called Liberals the “Philosophical” and Conservatives the “National” party. Liberals are loyal to philosophical abstractions — and seek harmony with the French and Germans. Conservatives are loyal to their own nation, and seek harmony with its Founders and heroes and guiding principles.

This is certainly true. The derailment of patriotism by ideology is one of the more prominent features of our age. Men delude themselves that ideas are countries, or countries ideas, and thus that patriotism is merely a sincere commitment to philosophical abstractions. But when Gelernter gets around to telling us how we should oppose the Liberal ideology, how to counter the derailment of patriotism, he can only offer another ideology:

Americanism is the set of beliefs that has always held this country together in its large embrace. Americanism calls for liberty, equality, and democracy for all mankind. And it urges this nation to promote the American Creed wherever and whenever it can — to be the shining city on a hill, the “last, best hope of earth.” Ultimately, Americanism is derived from the Bible. The Bible itself has been a grand unifying force in American society, uniting Christians of many creeds from Eastern Orthodox to Unitarian, and Jews, and Bible-respecting deists like Thomas Jefferson — and many others who respect and honor the Bible whatever their own religious beliefs.

So really the charge against the Democrats is not their mania for abstractions, but that they adhere to the wrong ones. Their abstractions are not ambitious enough.

Gelernter rages against pacifism, appeasement, and globalism — a kind of unholy trinity of false abstractions. One is inclined to cheer him on in this, but the trouble is that his theory is particularly vulnerable to the derailment he detests. The substitution of ideology for patriotism will always expose this vulnerability. Not matter how vigorously he resists it in his case, ideology is inevitably subject to the whims of ideologists. His “Americanism” may be grounded in our “Founders and heroes and guiding principles,” and above all the Bible, but since it is still a mere “set of beliefs,” still primarily a matter of abstractions, it need not stay grounded in those admirable things. It can be captured by other abstractions. It can be hollowed out by miseducation. It can hijacked by intellectual fashion. It can be undermined by subversion.

There is an analogy that might help illuminate the problem. Early in Christian history a priest named Marcion was convinced that numerous excrescences on Holy Scripture were corrupting the faithful. He sought to reduce it to what he regarded as the pure gospel, undiluted by the narrative jumble of the Old Testament. According to the great historian Jaroslav Pelikan, Marcion’s object was to narrow the Christian Scripture down to a version of St. Luke’s gospel and St. Paul’s epistles. Above all he sought to remove the Judaic influences from Christianity. Encyclopedia Britannica 1911: “His undertaking thus resolved itself into a reformation of Christendom. This reformation was to deliver Christendom from false Jewish doctrines by restoring the Pauline conception of the gospel, — Paul being, according to Marcion, the only apostle who had rightly understood the new message of salvation as delivered by Christ.”

Marcion was excommunicated, labeled a heretic, and resisted with great vigor, by Christian thinkers from Justun Martyr to Tertullian to Clement of Alexandria. His heresy was defeated, though occasional attempts to revive his doctrine reach us now and then. His opponents recognized the danger of a purely intellectual Christian doctrine, a theology narrowed to its purest abstract essence and detached from the narrative history of Israel, and from the sacred polemics of the prophets. It is the danger of ideology, the danger of ungrounded speculation, of a faith fit only for intellectuals. (Indeed, Marcion himself soon became ensnared in tangled speculations, eventually positing that the God of the Old Testament was a mere demiurge, the author of creation and of evil, and that Christ came to free us from his tyranny.)

Not for nothing are the narrative portions of the Bible often the most beloved, especially by simple men bereft of a taste for heavy theology. Christianity is perfectly inconceivable without them. They save us from the treachery of the human intellect; they provide ballast against the winds and waves of false abstraction.

Where do we find such ballast in the American tradition? We find it in our communities, in our neighborhoods, in our churches, in the beauty of our land; we find it in our laws and our history; we find it even in our prejudices, or assumptions, in the questions we have closed and the others we stubbornly insist on keeping open. We find it anywhere but the field of political speculation and abstraction. We find it not in a creed but in a way of life, a living tradition made not by intellectuals but by men and women living their lives in light of how their fathers lived theirs. We find it in America’s “democracy of the dead,” whereby we have refused to submit to that arrogant oligarchy of those who just happened to be walking around, but rather give votes “to that most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.” “All democrats,” continues Chesterton is his famous passage, “object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.”

Gelernter tries mightily to embrace this sort of thing, a living tradition, but since his theory hinges eternally on abstractions, it must always remain an ideology. There is no real America in Americanism; it is America the abstraction. A mere “set of beliefs” cannot long hold a country together in this age of ideological fashion. We need more than that.

Our Liberals offer us their pitiful globalism, a universalism of pure platitudinous abstraction; but our right-Liberals, the “authorized” opposition, counter only with a variation on the same. It is globalism, alright, but led by Americans and informed by an abstracted abbreviation of our tradition. As Christopher Caldwell once wrote, letting the cat out of the bag as it were: “Some time before the end of the Iraq crisis, it will become clear that the US differs with Europe not over the need for post-national structures but over how those structures should be built. A nasty shock could be in store. By the time Europeans realise they do not have a monopoly on multilateral thinking, the US may already have come up with a more serviceable blueprint for a post-national order.” Namely, Americanism.

For the rest of us, a “post-national order” appears as what it always has to Conservatives: a monstrous tyranny in embryo. Over the past few years I have witnessed a really astonishing spectacle. North American politicians gather in negotiation to prepare these “post-national structures” here, most of the economic-integration variety; populist Conservatives react with some annoyance; and mainstream right-wingers sneer at them! Quite as if the object lesson of the European Union were not right in front of our faces. In Europe, thanks to those grand post national structures, it is basically illegal to argue against Islam. A demonstration against the Jihad, scheduled for September 11, was first proscribed and then put down with brutal force. Statements like the following sentence have landed men in the dock: “Islam is a dangerous religion, and we ought to work actively to weaken it.” Such is the fruit of the Post-National Global Order.

In my reading, constitutional government, that is, real limited government, with efficacious mechanisms to check the aggrandizement of the state over the individual, and which perseveres in the face all the rapacious schemes of the sophists and radicals, is a peculiarly evanescent achievement. In the modern age, outside of the British Isles and North America and a few other isolated places, it has hardly ever existed; in ancient times it was even rarer. Now, as the modern age comes to its miasmic and disordered end, we have influential people, many of them near to centers of power, who seem to fancy that this precious commodity, this delicate achievement assembled on a mass of human knowledge and wisdom astonishing in its range and profundity, can be simply imposed, following the effacement of that troublesome structure the nation-state, on the globe from the lofty heights of a world government. It does not strike me unreasonable to reply that such a project will merely mean the demise of constitutional government.

“The real American is all right,” wrote Chesterton. “It is the ideal American who is all wrong.” Mr. Caldwell’s vision of a post-national order, with Mr. Gelernter’s ideology as its guide, is an attempt to remake the world in the image of that ideal American. It is noteworthy that in this Post-National Global Order there is no room for patriots, only ideologues. Patriotism rooted in home and hearth, in actual places and actual people, in particular things rather than tedious abstractions — patriotism of this sort will be crushed. Men who fancy themselves conservatives regularly repeat the mantra that one may become an American by assenting to certain ideas about democracy, thereby making American patriotism contingent on a democratic ideology. It is no longer enough that a man simply loves his country. He must embrace an ideology.

Well ideology is the handmaid of tyranny. America was long blessed by the absence of ideology; and it is no accident that she has thus abhorred tyranny. Our creed arose out of a living tradition, not out of the conjectures of intellectuals. Even our Founders were most of them working lawyers, farmers, businessmen, not intellectuals; and in any case the Republic was informed by a tradition much larger than any of them. That tradition cannot be abstracted and fashioned into ideology without fatal violence to it.

Comments (125)

I certainly agree that we can't just (ta da!) make other countries into constitutional democracies. It seems naive to think so. This is partly because many cultures are inimical to such a form of government.

But I get uneasy on the other hand with so great an emphasis on love of home and hearth that it seems that there _is_ no such thing as a set of beliefs, yes, even a set of ideas, that are distinctive of American government, American freedom, etc. I'm happy with the notion that a love of home and hearth can provide "ballast," but even in our prejudices we can and often do reflect certain unstated ideas that are distinctly American. For example, if some small businessman or farmer is impatient with bureaucracy and feels a prejudice against petty rules, this is part of the American notion of individualism and limited government. Perhaps in another country the small businessman or farmer would be more patient with all the red tape.

Then, too, love of home and hearth can apply in countries characterized by tyrannical government, abject poverty, imposed false religion, and horrible cultural customs. What makes American patriotism _different_ from any patriotism in any country, however regrettable that country's set-up? I maintain that while it's true that patriotism cannot be reduced to a set of beliefs that can then be applied automatically to "democratize" other countries by magic (and by force), neither can patriotism be reduced to love of home and hearth. I am proud of America. I am not proud of America _simply_ because I love my home, but also because of what America stands for. There really isn't anything so very bad about being a city set on a hill. And I think we would be fooling ourselves if we tried to pretend that America _hasn't_ been a light to the nations. And why try to fool oneself in that way, anyway? Why not admit an obvious fact that can be only to our credit? There are reasons, and not only reasons of material prosperity, why so many people want to come here. And those reasons do indeed have to do with _ideas_, ideas put into practice in this land, such as liberty of conscience and religion, limited government, and the like.

I agree, Lydia. Ideas certainly do play a role. But Gelernter seems to want to make it only about ideas. So many of our right-Liberals have left the real America behind, vanished into the DC-New York corridor of Americanist globalism, that we simply can no longer trust their native attachment to the country as it really is. To them the country is just a set of ideas.

In short, my heavy emphasis on love of hearth and home is an effect of what is (in my view) a huge and terrible distortion the other way.

An egalitarian empire needs a different and more explicitly ideological justification, than a small and isolationist republic. For the empire's rule to appear legitimate across locales and religious, racial, and ethnic divides, the focus of loyalty must reside in the universal ideology and the state apparatus that constitutes it in the name of representing it. That this veers rather easily into state-worship of the sort you decry, and that Gelernter welcomes, is easily observed.

I think you err, Paul, in perceiving a sharp break between this and American tradition. Gelernter's Americanism is so effective, and so accurately sums up what many or most Americans already believe, because it draws on hallowed parts of the American self-conception. The idea of America as the new Israel is far older than the Constitution, as is the idea of imperial expansion. Wasn't British resistance to westward expansion one of the grievances of the colonists prior to the Revolution? Universality is right there in the Declaration of Independence - written by Thomas Jefferson, who would, with his simultaneous advocacy of an agrarian republic, seem literally to embody this contradiction. None of this is to deny a conservative thread in early American thought, though not very conservative; these men did rebel against their king, after all. It is to say that it's difficult to argue that the America that found inspiration in Republican Rome, Sparta, and the Whig aristocracy is somehow more really American than the early America that found inspiration in Athens and the Roundheads.

Well expansion on the North American continent is not exactly the same as "democracy for all men." Nor should the Declaration's most famous sentence totally elide the rest of the document, which is much more restrained.

I agree with John Zmirak that there really was a sharp break, that it is pretty recent, and that it is largely a consequence (and even an understandable one) of the effort to erect an ideology to counter Communism.

As I said to Lydia, I do not deny the philosophical content of American patriotism; what I deny is that this forms the primary or exclusive basis of our patriotism. And I must say I am a bit disturbed to see you agree with Gelernter, even if you think it's bad.

I am not sure that our Founders were absent of ideology. I think of the Declaration of Independence, which states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This appears to me to be a global ideology. The rights of men are not limited to race, language or nation, but are intrinsic to all human beings.

Expanding on the ideas inherent in the Declaration of Independence and also the limited government concepts within the Constitution, I wonder if the United States can ever deviate from the true United States, or is the United States always what it is in actuality? Imagine that communism had taken over the United States. The people remain the same, the language remains the same, the body of land remains the same, the name of the country remains the same, and the history remains the same, but something tells me that communism is un-American. Something tells me that it is possible for America to cease to be itself.

I think that America is a nation based on an idea unlike any other country, but I also agree that America is not simply an idea. For example, imagine that Iraq adopts all the principles of “Americanism”. Even if this is the case, the people of Iraq are not Americans and Iraq is not America. While ideology is important to what America is, it is not the sum of America.

I think that Burkeans tend to underestimate the role of what they themselves would call (disapprovingly) "ideology" in the founding, and that this is just an historical matter. It just isn't true that (as my Burkean friends used to tell me) the founders of our country were merely trying to reassert their traditional rights as Englishmen and were doing nothing new. On the other hand, it isn't true that the Declaration of Independence is part of the Law of the Land. Which is just as well, as the interpretation of "all men are created equal," while something I might trust Jefferson and Co. on, isn't something with which I want to trust Justice Kennedy and Co. But to my mind it's also just as well that the founders were, in fact, doing something fairly new in their day. If they'd really merely been trying to reassert their traditional rights as Englishmen, I think we would have gotten something less good than what we got.

In short, Zmirak is right insofar as he points out that the America of the founding was hardly a group-equality paradise. (Nor is this a problem.) But he's wrong if he means to imply that America was from the outset just one more very-slowly-changing Old World traditionalist country.

I agree with John Zmirak that there really was a sharp break, that it is pretty recent, and that it is largely a consequence (and even an understandable one) of the effort to erect an ideology to counter Communism.
Zmirak grants quite readily the partial basis of the American project in "Locke’s Deist individualism, an elite doctrine accepted by leaders among the Founders." It is not, again, the only basis, or the only thread of American tradition, but it is there, and it is not something invented from whole cloth. Zmirak is right to place much of the blame for the ascendance among conservatives of the liberal ideological view of American history on the distorting influence of the Cold War. Yet he does not say, nor would he be correct to say, that this view originated there. At the very latest, it is visible in the words of the abolitionists, and it has been triumphant since Appomattox.
As I said to Lydia, I do not deny the philosophical content of American patriotism; what I deny is that this forms the primary or exclusive basis of our patriotism. And I must say I am a bit disturbed to see you agree with Gelernter, even if you think it's bad.
I'm afraid that for most Americans, alienated and atomized lot that we are, it probably does form the primary basis of our patriotism. There is some inchoate blood-and-soil patriotism in the body politic, but that patriotism, as distinguished à la Lukacs from nationalism, lacks much if any élite backing. It is, by and large, not cultivated in schools or churches, is generally not depicted favorably in entertainment, and is not advocated by prominent politicians. It has had some resurgence as a consequence of the immigration debate and websites like this, but it is secondary to the Jacobin variety described by Gelernter and others before him as "Americanism." It disturbs me, too.

Oops. I messed something up on that last post.

I'd assert that no nation that is healthy is based on an idea. A nation will have ideas that are peculiar to it, that are based on the people, the culture, the religion, the traditions.

Saying that "America is a nation based on an idea" (even if the idea is unlike that found in any other country) suggests an image of some men sitting down with this idea and planning out the country. This has actually happened many times, in many places, only the country they were planning already had a country there, in place, right in the way. Hence, bloody revolution.

Fixed it for you Cyrus.

Well, Gintas, there is that story about Benjamin Franklin coming out of the hall from passing the Constitution and being asked, "Mr. Franklin, what sort of government have you given the country?" And he said, "A Republic, if you can keep it." There is a very real and obvious sense in which some men _did_, historically speaking, sit down and "plan a country." That's what the constitutional convention and all the ratifying debates between the Federalists and anti-Federalists were about. But partly because there was no country already there in the way, there was no bloody revolution. It was a fortunate set of circumstances, partly accidental and partly helped along by the wisdom of the men in question.

I can't myself deplore this. I think they did a pretty good job.

There is a vast difference between planning a government for a nation, and planning the nation itself. It is the former enterprise in which the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were engaged; they proposed to grant to an already-extant nation, possessed of a remarkable degree of cultural and historical unanimity, and having a distinctive identity - albeit expressed in several graduations along a common scale - a republican form of government. Government is neither constitutive of, or identical with, the nation, which is itself simply the people themselves.

They did do a fine job, Lydia, but they were working with materials already available -- for one, a very old tradition of liberty, that is, self-government, which derived from their British ancestry. The American political tradition did not begin with the Declaration of Independence (the whole second half of which does certainly lend support to the Burkean "traditional rights of Englishman" theory). Willmoore Kendall published some wonderful studies of the continuity of this tradition, stretching back to the Mayflower Compact. (And he was fiercely critical of the Burke/Kirk theory of tradition rights of Englishman.)

In my view the abstract or ideological side of the American tradition itself points to concrete, practice reality: namely the reality of self-government. If America can be said to be an "experiment," as some of our scholars are wont to express it, than she is an experiment in self-government; and self-government is not an abstract or ideological thing at all. It is a lived tradition, and day-to-day activity almost.

Somewhere along the line this tradition got derailed, captured by ideologues. Some think it began as a derailment, or maybe that it was derailed with the Civil War; but what seems decisive to me is what Zmirak's article points to -- that during the Cold War even the Conservatives absorbed the derailment.

Great post, Paul. If might jump in here, I will raise one of my standard objections in relation to Lydia's last comment. Lydia, you wrote:

"There is a very real and obvious sense in which some men _did_, historically speaking, sit down and "plan a country." "

I understand what you mean here, but on this question I think precision is vital. The gentlemen in Philadelphia planned out the structure of a federal government to coordinate the common work of other already existing governments, which ruled over their respective countries. There was no Jacobin-style revolution because the war for independence and even the creation of the Constitution did not attempt to uproot the existing institutions to pave the way for a new political system. As I realise we all know, the Federalist system incorporated the existing state governments into a new, more centralised framework. In a similar fashion, the northern provinces of the Habsburg domains in the Lowlands and the cantons of Switzerland organised a level of government for the collaboration of their several constituent polities in a confederation, but they did not in this way "plan" the existence or character of Zeeland or Schwyz, which pre-existed the political arrangements in question. Belgium is an outstanding example of what are arguably two countries (or two distinct groups of old Habsburg provinces distinguished by the language and religion of the inhabitants) being brought together under a common government. Nowadays, loyalty to Flanders and Wallonia is reemerging as being more important. I probably harp on this point too often, but I cannot stress how important it is that we do not mistakenly conflate country with government. You can "build" a nation and "plan" a state, but your country is one of those given realities that precedes you in which you really have no choice. You can even "plan" a family, to use the debased terminology of our time, but you cannot do the same with your parents. I think the difference between government and country is similar.

Government is neither constitutive of, or identical with, the nation, which is itself simply the people themselves.

I am not sure that you can seperate what America is from what kind of government it was created with. We could replace the government and still retain certain aspects of what America is, but we would be losing something fundamental. Is this to say that we can have a communist or fascist America? I sense that if the U.S. Constitution was replaced with the communist manifesto, we would be America in name only.

Lydia, darned if there wasn't already a country here, and it was called the United States of America! Looking at just the political level, the Constitutional Convention was a revision (or evolution) of an existing government, not a plan (or a revolution) for a new government. See the Articles of Confederation for the previous government.

I'm sympathetic to many objections that some have made to Paul's thesis, but I stand with Paul in that I meet and see far too many young people, men especially, who are all ideology of one sort or another left or right who do not feel as the poet felt who wrote this:

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung.

Young Libertarian males in their stark puerility never look about them and simply love their nation and people. We know the Left can't even begin to think of this land without utter contempt, and the National Review, inside the Beltway Republicans are not without feeling and sense, but seem to lack poetry and righteous passion for their principles. Everything is reduced to the urbane tones of cocktail party chatter when some occasional, out of the belly visceral anger like Cromwell's "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken!" is called for. But they are more courtiers than Minutemen.

It is in stories that America can live. Paul Revere, the Boston Tea Party, The Charter Oak, Bunker Hill, Nathan Hale, Washington and so on. What they believed is important but what they did is even more valuable.

The thought of being hanged for a spy terrified me as a child, but the words of Nathan Hale have never ceased to inspire me.

Well, as I said before about the loss of any sense of holiness now permeating society, so too has the natural regard for country as Walter Scott wrote seems to have fallen by the wayside.

Coming home is always sweet after traveling, but that deep sense of soulful unity with one's land, I fear that sentiment is going undiscovered for far too many of my countrymen, especially the young.

If such feelings are hardly ever spoken or related, then people don't find them in themselves.

(Going backwards here in response, because Gintas gets me just a little hot under the collar but the rest of y'all don't.)

Gintas, the ratification of the Constitution was controversial *because* it was notably different from the Articles of Confederation.

Maximos, et. al., I think you have a good point about the difference between planning a country and planning a government. And the state sovereignty issue, of course, is crucial to this point as well, since allowing the states a good deal of sovereignty meant leaving so much in place that affected daily life. Certainly even the most "federalist" of the federalists had a much stronger notion of state sovereignty than anyone does now, leading to the oddity (which some of you may know the origin of--I don't) that now the term 'federalism' _means_ "some notion of state sovereignty," whereas during the federalist _controversy_ it referred to those who favored a somewhat greater degree of centralization than the anti-federalists wanted.

OTOH, I want to echo something that X has gotten at twice, now: If our nation's government were changed radically, there would indeed be a sense in which the essence of the country had changed. I don't think it's possible to identify patriotism with love of family and hearth, love of the "given country" in such a sense that it would and should make no difference if America becomes a communist country or a sharia state. When I voiced this opinion before in a different thread on exactly the same subject, I was told (by Gintas) that this means that I am no patriot. A true patriot, apparently, in his view would find himself just exactly as proud, loyal, and patriotically bound to a Communist or sharia America as to the one we presently have, because this is his given land, the place of his birth, etc., etc. Well, all I can say to that is, if this be treason, make the most of it.

Lydia, I can't help it that my patriotism is more visceral than ideological, it has to be that way when you grow up in conquered, occupied territory.

McGrew, isna that Scottish? You should ken something about that, then.

Yes, there was lively debate at the Constitutional Convention and at the states' ratification conventions, but even Virginia ratified in the end.

Thank you for fixing my formatting mistake, Zippy.

Somewhere along the line this tradition got derailed, captured by ideologues. Some think it began as a derailment, or maybe that it was derailed with the Civil War; but what seems decisive to me is what Zmirak's article points to -- that during the Cold War even the Conservatives absorbed the derailment.
This was decisive for the future of American conservatives and conservatism, perhaps, but not for America, where the trajectory of history had been, and has continued to be with few interruptions, decisively liberal.

Jeff:

Government is neither constitutive of, or identical with, the nation, which is itself simply the people themselves.
It's not that simple, though. Peoples, or their leaders, can make governments, but governments make peoples, too. It is not for nothing that it used to be said that forty kings made France, and similar observations could be made of most European countries.
they proposed to grant to an already-extant nation, possessed of a remarkable degree of cultural and historical unanimity, and having a distinctive identity - albeit expressed in several graduations along a common scale - a republican form of government.
They did, but that culturally and historically unanimous America no longer exists. Immigration, industrialization, and the war between the states saw to that. There is continuity, but the continuity is perforce ideological because a non-English, non-Protestant, and very soon non-white country can't be ruled in the name of a long-defunct WASP identity. All that's left is the state and its ideology.

Gintas, I have to confess that I only married the Scottish name. But I also cannot resist saying that my husband agrees with me unhesitatingly on this one. :-)

My own ethnic and regional background is plain vanilla, Heinz 57 Varieties Yankee, from Chicago originally (and I hated Chicago from earliest childhood), with the additional uprootedness of having been adopted in infancy, an event for which I am profoundly grateful, given the alternatives. I came to appreciate southerners deeply by living in Nashville for four years while my husband was in graduate school, but that's the most I can say.

But using my imagination as much as I am able, I'm inclined to say that if I did grow up in a country or region that I regarded as "occupied territory," or if the U.S. actually were conquered and occupied, it would seem to me that my attachment would be more rather than less ideological. That is, my attachment would be to "the way it used to be," to what I considered the place to have stood for and been before it was conquered.

Gintas, I have to confess that I only married the Scottish name. But I also cannot resist saying that my husband agrees with me unhesitatingly on this one. :-)


Then he is not a true Scotsman, is he? ;-)

On the contrary, a deep attachment to the land, it's people and their ways, makes ideology unnecessary, it matters not who is moving pawns and scheming globally in the capital.

I must admit, I've never considered what a person might think who grew up in D.C.


Interesting post. There are many problems with David Gelernter's classifications, which most of you have already pointed out.

First, his view of a "nation" is rather shallow. He claims that liberals are loyal to philosophical abstractions, and then abstracts away any substance from a classical notion of "nation," which as the Latin 'nascere' suggests, implies link by blood. "Americanism is the set of beliefs that has always held this country together in its large embrace" is just propositional nonsense.

"Americanism calls for liberty, equality, and democracy for all mankind. And it urges this nation to promote the American Creed wherever and whenever it can — to be the shining city on a hill, the “last, best hope of earth.”"

What is most interesting about this article is that it is indicative of EMPIRE, as empires breed such propositionalism, resulting in multiculturalism and seemingly universal creeds. A humble republic would shun at such idealistic - and utopian - classifications.

That's a fine comment, Bede.

Lydia, I have no difficulty saying that the republican form of government comprises an important aspect of the American identity; and that if this were taken from us, we would be a lesser people -- a broken, subjugated nation. There is even a clause in the Constitution that insures a republican form of government for every state.* In Burke's terms a Communist or Islamic America would lose much of her loveliness, and therefore would be more difficult to love.

But it does not follow that the purely theoretical structure of the republican form of government is the primary or exclusive content of American patriotism. Yet this is precisely what the right-Liberals argue: that a "set of beliefs" about democracy (they won't even maintain the distinction between republic and democracy that was not vital to the Founders) is would constitutes our patriotism.

I realize that "blood and soil" talk alarms you a bit, Lydia, and were there a danger that America was becoming a pure "blood and soil" nation, I might join with you in that alarm; but what I would like to impress upon you is how emphatically I feel that the pressing danger comes from the exact opposite direction.


_____________
* Which clause (it seems to me) presents a possible angle of approach against the agents and agitators of the Jihad. Since most Muslim organizations (even the "moderate" ones) purpose to replace this republican form with a shariac form, we ought to, at the very least, label them primarily political not religious organizations. I would go farther than that of course -- I would label the promotion of sharia sedition -- but this would be a good first step.

Paul, I suppose part of the practical issue for me is this: While I agree with you that there are real problems with saying that (say) being an American is entirely constituted by believing a particular set of propositions, and that saying that seems to lead to other errors--about the ease of transporting American constitutional republicanism, about the ease of assimilation for immigrants--the clear and present danger to America in terms of the facts on the ground right now seems to me to come chiefly from people who believe the wrong sets of ideas. I could be, and probably often have been, an ally with a person who holds to some of the metalevel propositions Gelerntner does but who had his specifics right--on abortion, say, or on the threat of Islam in the U.S., or whatever. If all you told me was whether a person answered "yes" or "no" to the statement, "America is a propositional nation"--where this was fleshed out in roughly Gelerntner-esque terms--this wouldn't tell me how much I'd have in common with him overall as a conservative. Either answer would merely allow me to put up question marks about other things and wonder whether we'd disagree or agree. They'd just be different sets of other things that I'd be wondering about for the person who said "yes" and the person who said "no." And I could end up in the end have much more serious problems with the person who said "no" than with the person who said "yes." It would just depend.

Gintas, I realize your “true Scotsman” comment was partly in jest, but it seems revealing to me in any case.

Are you suggesting that Mr. McGrew, who presumably is a lifelong American citizen and permanently removed from Scottish soil, should remain a Scottish patriot? That he should rightly be neither plainly American nor “hyphenated-American”, but plainly Scottish, though living permanently outside of Scotland? Surely you are not suggesting that.

Would you explain how, in your view, an immigrant rightly changes his loyalty from the old country to the new? And why you would expect that Mr. McGrew would retain an understanding of patriotism that Lydia or I, as "plain vanilla" Americans, might lack?

I am not sure that you can seperate what America is from what kind of government it was created with.

Except for the fact that America was not created with her present form of government, whether this is conceived, nominally, in accordance with the Constitution, or functionally, as a managerialist, bureaucratic state; America antedates her forms and mechanisms of government.

Moreover, I think that we would all do well to eschew the sort of meta-level ratiocination that seems to characterize this debate. Republican governance is, first and foremost, a specified social practice, and not a disembodied, abstract discourse concerning the relations of propositions; when we discourse over the forms and requirements, the presuppositions and structures, of republican government, we are - or at least ought to be - referring to concrete social practices integral with the American way of life. America would be altered, perhaps irrevocably, were she to fall under the dominion of some communist tyranny, or even the superficially benign, but substantively malignant, bureaucratic dominion of a "North American Union". This, however, would be because political architectures of these types would functionally abolish the (tenuously) existing republican forms of governance in America, and not because the ideational expression of concrete practices would have changed. Seriously, now, this repeated jousting and parrying with epiphenomena is wearying, inasmuch as it obscures the thing itself with the idea of the thing.

Lydia, commitment to any expression of propositionalism entails commitment to any number of dubious, and incontrovertibly concrete, policy positions, and this without regard to the cognizance, or lack thereof, on the part of the propositionalist. Propositionalism does entail certain things with respect to immigration and national identity, not to mention cultural integrity, to mention but a few examples, regardless of whether an individual propositionalist succeeds in deducing the (formally) correct positions from his commitment to ideological expressions of Americanism. This, therefore, may well be the primary cause of wonderment as one contemplates the possibilities attendant upon answers to the propositionalist question.

Except for the fact that America was not created with her present form of government

You are right that the United States existed before the creation of the U.S. Constitution. It also existed before the creation of the Articles of Confederation. However, under the Articles of Confederation the United States was hardly united. It was simply a bunch of loosely connected states. This led to a convention to amend the Articles of Confederation, but what happened instead was not an amendment of the articles, but its replacement with the U.S. Constitution. This has since been the supreme law of the land and the essence of how America should be governed. I am saying that this legal contract is fundamental to what America is, but it is not exclusive.

If I understand you correctly, you are saying that abstract principles tell us nothing about actual social practices and that it is the social practices that define what America is. I agree with this, although I think our legal principles vastly help define our social practices, such as the American principles of individual liberty (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness). It is the case, however, that we could have a republican form of government and be a radically secular country. We could have a republican form of government and have Spanish as the national language. We could have a republican form of government with legalized drugs and euthanasia and so on.

I am not sure if I am interpreting you correctly, but maybe you are saying there is a problem with upholding certain abstractions without any care for actual government policy or social norms. This reminds of people that believe the abstract principle of freedom of speech necessarily means that nothing anyone says can ever be wrong. As a result, they end up defending the most ignorant and disgusting rants, not from government interference, but from public criticism. It is the idea that if you criticize what anyone says you are interfering with their “right to free speech”.

Cyrus, your criticism is reasonable and just; governments can, and often have, remade the peoples they purport to govern/rule. The repugnant regime in power in China, the worlds first politically mature fascist state, according to some political scientists, even now engineers a new people in Tibet; and our own establishment is engaged in the generational undertaking of constituting a new, more pliant, ethnically-diverse, but culturally homogenized and economically stratified, populace - ye shall know Empire by its works, for they are wicked. My argument is the (probably formal) one that such policies on the part of a regime towards a people presuppose a distinction between the rulers and the ruled - between the regime and the country/nation/people - along with the substantive and normative judgment that such disjunctions are abominations, inasmuch as they negate the very purpose of political order, namely, the preservation of the people and their inherited way of life. A government that strives to negate the very community which constitutes it is engaged in a low, base form of treachery.

Well, it actually doesn't seem correct to me to say that the propositionalist position _deductively entails_ an incorrect position on immigration. For example, you can believe that it's sufficient for someone to be an American that he believe certain propositions while realizing that some people probably don't believe those propositions. There are few things farther from the set of propositions in question than sharia, so if a certain group of potential immigrants wants to establish sharia, they don't believe those propositions and won't make good Americans.

Similarly for the establishment of constitutional republics similar to America elsewhere. Suppose that one defines "a constitutional republic with a governmental structure similar to that of America" in terms that make no reference to culture. To be honest, this doesn't seem such a stupid thing to me to do as a purely conceptual matter. But it doesn't follow that a properly functioning government of that sort can be established just anywhere. You can define "car" in terms that make no reference to the entire process of steel manufacture, but you then don't have to be stupid enough to think that you can make a car with two sticks and a ball of twine.

Also, dare I say it: Immigration is not _the_ most or only important conservative issue. I know, Maximos, that you've had some sympathy with the (in)famous First Things symposium on legitimacy some years ago, related to the Supreme Court and the abortion issue. But the Chronicles folks (who, I assume, have all their immigration ducks in a row, then and now) were very unsympathetic. They said that by raising the question of legitimacy, the FT writers were being ideological! And I'm sorry to say that in the article in question they rather pooh-poohed the abortion issue. In fact, not all paleos are as staunchly pro-life as I could wish. Sometimes they seem too focused on other issues, and perhaps part of the problem is an underlying disdain for evangelicals, who tend to be both strongly pro-life and "mainstream conservative" rather than distinctively paleo.

With whom am I going to have more in common: A strongly pro-life evangelical or Catholic who is wishy-washy on immigration and who is inclined to think of the U.S. as a "propositional nation" or a paleoconservative who spends most of his time talking about the evils of hawkish neocons and foreign policy, is strongly anti-illegal immigration, and cares little, if at all, for domestic life issues and thinks it was the right thing to do to dehydrate Terri Schiavo to death?

I'm sorry to be so blunt, but these are some of the things we need to keep in perspective when we talk about what a dangerous thing the "propositional nation" idea is.

Here is the problem, or a problem, it seems to me.

Every nation has a civic religion which will in part consist of abstract doctrines. Even though a great variety of propositions may be compatible with a particular nation, some are clearly not. Every nation suppresses heresy. The modern liberal state does so every bit as much as the medieval, and arguably takes a more comprehensive approach to the activity. Conservatives deride the modern suppression of heresy as "political correctness" or "thought police", etc.

But the problem in the abstract is not in the (prudent) suppression of heresy per se. Every community must suppress heresy in order to survive as itself, to avoid being destroyed or equivalently remade into something else entirely. The problem rather is twofold: (1) that the modern liberal state suppresses heresy without being honest with itself that that is what it is doing, and (2) much of what the modern state suppresses as heresy is in fact the truth.

I think the propositional nation business arises not because of the existence of doctrines and heresies per se, and the support of the former accompanied by suppression of the latter, but because we refuse to acknowledge them for what they are: a refusal which in itself is a doctrine of liberalism. Every concrete community has its doctrines and heresies in addition to being these people in this place with this history.

There are few things farther from the set of propositions in question than sharia

Really? On what grounds can you say that, Lydia? Why aren't the Liberal set of propositions -- egalitarianism, multiculturalism, globalism, all of which together disarm us against sharia -- the right ones?

The reason, of course, is that they are alien to our tradition; indeed together they amount to a falsification of our tradition. But we have to appeal to our concrete, lived tradition to demonstrate this.

Propositions are abstracted from the tradition, and without it they have no real substance, and we are at the whim of ideologists.

Now I'm not really interested in getting into the neocon-paleocon debate. I am interested in arguing against an aspect of Liberalism (against which this site has squarely set its feet) that has, as it were, penetrated deep into Conservatism. Our Liberals, as even Gelernter realizes, long ago relinquished their grasp on the authentic American tradition. It would be a shame if Conservatives followed suit.

The FT symposium is to me an important fissure point in this very dispute. There, a bunch of Christian Conservatives, like Aquinas when he settled the Manichees, gave the table a good hard wack, and declared that as the Court has subjected us to its alien Liberalism, we are going to deny its legitimacy, at least among ourselves. The Court has derailed our tradition by its tangled speculations, its damnable propositions; and we're going to call it lawless and illegimate.

It was mostly the propositionists of the Right who came unglued at this statement.

Paul, by "the set of propositions in question" I meant specifically the ones that I'm guessing a conservative "propositionist" would say are constitutive of the American nation. For example, I would guess that such a person would refer to something in broad terms like equality before the law, which is denied by the aspect of sharia according to which a woman's testimony counts for less than a man's, a husband has the right to beat his wife, and so forth.

As for the FT symposium, I think it really is worth pointing out as I did that there were some who definitely were not "the propositionists" who came unglued at what FT did. And one of the reasons they were did so is that, frankly, they didn't seem to care that much about the slaughter of the unborn, whereas the FT folks, who are themselves probably "propositionists" in some measure, did. And this is relevant to the question of how dangerous propositionism might or might not be: Again, if you have a propositionist, sort-of-propositionist, semi-propositionist, whatever, who stands firmly against abortion/euthanasia and against judicial tyranny, that's two big points in his favor. It seems that the chief areas in which propositionism is a danger are immigration and foreign interventionism, but these aren't the only highly important issues out there in the multi-dimensional space of politics. And I say that as (as you know) a real load-em-up-on-the-buses-tomorrow immigration hawk.

Lydia, the belief that subscription to a set of propositions concerning the American system of rights, free markets, individualism, and democracy suffices to identify one as "American" manifestly does entail certain policy prescriptions regarding immigration: to believe that such a creedal confession is sufficient is to believe that any assemblage of random third-worlders, if only their convictions may be construed as affirmations of individual rights, democracy, and markets - which is a rather loose sort of propositionalism, but the only sort with which we are ever confronted - may be deemed Americans. Moreover, as innumerable neoconservative polemics have demonstrated, and as numerous personal conversations with neoconservatives have confirmed, this merely creedal affirmation will often bestow upon the confessor a greater claim to the title of "American" than that accorded to a dissenter such as myself. We've all heard the phraseology concerning those immigrants who are "more American than native-born group x, y, or z"; and there is no value in pretending otherwise.

As regards the Chronicles article which you have referenced, I am not conversant with it, and so cannot comment. For my part, and in the interest in stimulating - hopefully - further conversation, I will lay my cards on the table, so to speak: even were it the case that continued mass immigration from Latin America, tending toward the gradual submersion and eventual dissolution of the native, Anglo culture, would inexorably and necessarily result in the reversal of Roe v Wade and the institution of a regime of abortion prohibition, I would remain stalwartly, intractably opposed thereto. First, because I cannot but regard such a replacement of the American people, on account of their injustices, as the very nadir of dishonour; to conflate the American people with a legal regime, a regime repudiated by sizable pluralities, at a minimum, and to countenance their abolition on account of that regime, would be treacherous enough; to countenance the replacement of the American people, merely because one has come to regard them as flaccid, or decadent, or requiring of "fresh blood", in the telling but fulsome phrase even some conservatives employ, not much less so. I dare say that it is a form of faithlessness and despair, a rejection of Providence, and a form of hatred no less malignant than that of the usual, leftist humanitarians and altruists. Second, I would reject this hypothetical Faustian bargain because I cannot, and will not, accept the reduction of an entire culture, an entire mode of existence, to a few controverted moral questions - even ones on which, I dare asseverate, I am further to the right than the average conservative (I would readily countenance the proscription of abortion, even were this a position favoured by but 5% of the population, for example).

Other conservatives are welcome to articulate that argument, if they so desire; for my part, the notion that I might countenance the consignment of my own children to a squalid, stratified, caste-ridden, race-conscious society, fulminant with resentment of everything my country has ever been, only to resolve a grave injustice that does not touch them personally, is too monstrous for me to contemplate. Were I to accept such a pact, I know, with certitude, that I would suffer the insomniac torments of the damned. There are licit and illicit means to redress injustices; I cannot but think that the abolition of one's own people falls into the latter category. The propositionalist, as evidenced by his policy prescriptions, is sanguine about the prospect of my children dwelling in an America far nastier and more brutish than the present America, if only his ego and ideology receive the requisite stroking.

Apropos of Zippy's sagacious remarks, I should state that I have failed to practice charity if I subscribe to the Nicene Creed, yet detest the members of my parish, even to the point of wishing to replace the lot of them; so also do the propositionalists and immigration enthusiasts fail to exhibit charity in their obsessive confessions of an American creed, a dessicated epiphenomenon of a way of life their own managerialism has effectively abolished, or corrupted beyond recognition, combined with a cultivated indifference to actually-existing Americans and their circumstances.

Or, if I might state the matter succinctly, I want it all in conservatism: opposition to abortion and the culture of death, and opposition to the abolition of the American people and their culture.

Very briefly for the mo--I wasn't proposing any such bargain, Maximos. And my own posts on incommensurable evils between Islam (which is ostensibly anti-abortion) and liberalism make it clear that I regard all such proposed deals or bargains with great suspicion. My point, rather, concerned merely a sense of alliance or political shoulder-to-shoulder-ness with individuals. I can imagine hypothetical propositionalist, pro-immigration individuals with whom I would disagree on that point but with whom I would overall find myself to have more political agreements and commonalities than with some hypothetical anti-propositionalist, immigration restrictionist individuals. Of course, to flesh out such hypothetical individuals and make it clearer how and why I would feel that way I'd probably have to say a lot more than I already have said about them. Those were very sketchy sketches that I gave.

It is a fair point, but I'm dubious that it demonstrates the harmlessness, neutrality, or indifference of propositionalist convictions; that I might have more in common, in terms of a political checklist of sorts, with Joseph Bottum than with Donald Collins (a VDare contributing editor of population-control sympathies, which extend, apparently, to a certain issue already mentioned) does not prove that the former's propositionalism is virtuous, or, at least, not vicious.

May I say, Paul, what a fine essay I thought it was. Perhaps a little more emphasis on a Christian understanding of the hearth and home (the culture) you treasure, as that is the thing any edict of government ought to be concerned to protect, the latter owing its very life to the former.

Maximos, what can I say? As I understand the position you're attributing to Donald Collins, in my view such a position is abhorrent and evil. I can't believe that I'd say anything similar about any of J. Bottum's views that spring from or are in any way related to his "propositionalism," no matter how soft he is on immigration. Does that mean that his views on that subject are definitely neutral, quite unimportant? No. But between saying that someone's incorrect political views are evil and abhorrent and saying that they are no biggie at all there's a lot of space.

In the spirit of potentially annoying everyone in the discussion, isn't one core issue though taking the propositions (doctrines) as erasing blood and soil, as opposed to being a modal aspect of them? Isn't what is at issue the attempt to saw abstract truths off from history and incarnation, to treat them as a complete and free-standing system disconnected from its roots in reality? IOW, isn't the real problem not propositions or adherence to universal truths per se but positivism?

After all, the world would be a better place in at least some senses as a universal Christendom rooted in Western Christendom. But one of our principles or traditions (it is difficult to say which really) is modesty in our encounter with the incarnate world: that something may be abstractly desirable by no means licenses us to usurp its actual realization in particular times and places among particular peoples from Providence. It is this latter principle or tradition which I think began to wear at the edges during the Civil War and which was decisively pushed to the background in the twentieth century. And whether we call it principle or tradition by name, it is essential that it be recovered.

Thanks, Bill. That is a very good criticism, which I will keep in mind in future excursion into this subject.

Lydia, as it happens Bottum is the author of some really vicious hyperbole on the subject of immigration. If I recall correctly he said that specific restrictions on Muslim immigration, i.e., discrimination against them in immigration policy, would make us as evil as the terrorists. Perhaps Jeff knows the quotation exactly.

Now undoubtedly endorsing population control is worse, but this is a really lunatic statement: sufficiently lunatic, in my view, to call into question his judgment and wisdom.

Zippy: Yes; and that is very well put.

(Although you might have to elaborate on the term positivism in this context. I'm having trouble relating it properly.)

(Although you might have to elaborate on the term positivism in this context. I'm having trouble relating it properly.)

From a certain perspective the positivist-postmodern dichotomy represents an encounter between the abstract/universal and the particular/local/actual, where one attempts to dominate the other to its exclusion.

Clearly there are universal truths, and clearly there are local particulars. Positivism on this understanding attempts to take some set of local particulars and make an abstraction out of it: to make us omniscient in our knowledge of at least the domain in question; to in a sense reduce the domain in question to our abstract knowledge of it (the abstract/universal utterly dominating some sphere of the particular/actual: in this case, America becoming nothing but some comprehensive set of abstract propositions defining what it is to be American). Postmodernism realizes (correctly) that this is impossible, and concludes (incorrectly, in what amounts to a tantrum directed at the impossibility of even a localized omniscience) that this falsifies the possibility of universal truth: the postmodern is in this sense the particular/actual dominating the abstract/universal.

Both are wrongheaded, and indeed are in my understanding two sides of the same erroneous coin.

But also I wanted to tweak Lydia even while agreeing with her. :-D

You might be reading far, far too much into my stated views in this instance. It is certainly true to state that, in the abstract, Collins' views on population control and that hell-spawned euphemism, "reproductive freedom", are more abhorrent and evil than Bottom's views on immigration and identity. However, in the concrete, for an individual actor such as this father of two, the calculus changes, and the weighing of normative statuses becomes, if not altogether irrelevant, than at least beside the point - this latter being that we can know, apodictically, that Bottom's doctrines - which are the doctrines of the political establishment, as well as of the economic establishment, the plutocracy - will result in an America nastier and more brutish than the present America, an America less good, in many substantive ways, than any America a conscientious father should desire to bequeath to his children. The significance of this is that I believe it incumbent upon me to oppose Bottom's immigration fanaticism with the same vigour with which I oppose Collins' "just enough of me, waaayyyy too many of you" nostrums. It is not sufficient to state that one has opposed the culture of death, if one has connived at policies which will worsen the circumstances in which one's own children must dwell. With Collins, some of the positions in question are just plain evil; with Bottom, and those like him, it's personal.

Paul, you're right, that's a lunatic statement of Bottum's. Probably the reason I missed it is that the blogosophere took care of the part of my mind that First Things used to appeal to, so I let my subscription lapse.

And I agree that it calls into question his wisdom and judgement. But I'm a sufficiently curmudgeonly sort of person and have a sufficient number of very strong opinions that I think a lot of things call into question a lot of people's wisdom and judgement. Maybe even call them seriously into question on this or that type of issue. Don't get me started listing particulars. What I try to do is to say, "I don't trust so-and-so's judgement on such-and-such. He's off his rocker in that area." So what this means is that I absolutely don't trust Bottum's judgement on any immigration issue, not even just Mexican immigration (which I'd hoped perhaps was the worst it got with him).

Would I still consider writing for a journal he edited? Yes, I would. But I can't imagine that I'd want to be associated with a population control person in any pundit-ish way whatsoever.

Zippy, one reason why we really can't say, I think, that particular beliefs or commitments are a modal aspect of blood and soil is because of the phenomenon of successful immigration. I don't think any of us wants to say that it is impossible, or shouldn't ever be allowed, or is always bad, or something like that for (say) a Vietnamese person to come to America and thoroughly to make it his adopted country, really become an American. But in that case whatever it is he adopts can't really be a modal aspect of blood and kinship, because he doesn't have the blood and kinship.

It is not merely - as I perceive the controversy - that neoconservatives and other propositionalists reduce the actuality of America by conceptualizing America as a set of relations among abstractions, though they do this. It is also that the abstractions in terms of which they define America are the worst elements of our tradition, or, at a minimum, that they are the most easily distorted and perverted of all the elements of our tradition: individual rights, democracy, capitalism as the temporal summum bonum? Translate that back into the particular, and you're left with the braying fool, the mob, and Gordon Gekko as the essence of America. Apply this to foreign affairs, and you're left with the Ugly American, only with guns and bombs, and an unshakable conviction that he is entitled to make the world a "better place" by killing people.

But in that case whatever it is he adopts can't really be a modal aspect of blood and kinship, because he doesn't have the blood and kinship.

No, but he can certainly embrace the American culture, perhaps a hybrid version of it, and he can transfer his patriotic loyalty to place to America, and the little corner of it in which he dwells. This is possible for a hundred-thousand Vietnamese in the greater Philadephia area in a way in which it is not possible for tens of millions of Mexicans spread throughout the country. Any propositions he affirms could certainly be modal aspects of that.

But in that case whatever it is he adopts can't really be a modal aspect of blood and kinship, because he doesn't have the blood and kinship.

Immigration though is somewhat like adoption. Adoption doesn't reduce a family to nothing but a set of abstract propositions. The actual filial love in the case of adoption isn't merely an abstraction, I don't think, and I would have a hard time considering an arbitrary commune of people who are not and never have been blood related who nevertheless pledge filial love to each other a family in the same sense that a family who (say) adopts a Vietnamese child is a family. At bottom the proposition nation is anti-essentialism with respect to nations riding on the back of propositions: thus meriting the label "positivist".

Can he be loyal to Americans over against foreigners, to the extent of being perfectly loyal to the net taxpayers of our citizenry, and to the exclusion of loyalty to the fellow nationals of his source country, who increase the level of aggression on some of our citizens by coming here? This is a hard challenge, can the nation mean less than that we owe loyalty to fellow nationals when foreigners arrive here in a manner which increases the level of aggression on our citizens, some or all of them? I don't think anyone will feel strong enough to answer it directly and properly, but then, I'm not going to go through all the controversial statements above and try to spell out what's wrong with them, or almost right.

That's an excellent point, Jeff: it's not just that the propositionalists overrate the importance of abstractions, but that they emphasize so many inferior ones. That's why I like Chesterton's real American/ideal American line.

For example, they always go for "democracy" instead of much better, nobler concepts like "self-government" or even "republicanism." They prefer capitalism to free enterprise. They underrate American localism, regionalism, state-based-loyalties. They distrust the rugged individualism of the West, which is not about self-assertion but self-possession. They sneer at the long agony of the South, and are tone-deaf to the aching tragedy of her just defeat. They're alienated from Christendom. They are altogether too polite and friendly with creeps like Christopher Hitchens. They don't understand, and misuse, old Ronald Reagan. They emphatically prefer the Executive to the Legislature. The vast wonder of American variety bores them. They preach rootlessness and are shocked by ugly proletarianism.

So there. Got that off my chest.

If I may make a mildly-worded comment here about which abstractions are being embraced, it does seem to me that the willingness to work hard and not demand handouts is one of them. Now, I'm afraid I'm going to anger Jeff here, but it does not seem to me that people who use the exaggeration "so-and-so is a better American than so-and-so," where the first is not actually an American citizen and the second is, are always saying something so very evil. It can be a kind of hyperbole, where in fact the respects in which A differs from B are to A's credit, and to A's credit in ways that actually do reflect what we have come to think of as "the American spirit" or "the American way," and to think of in that way with a rightful pride--industry, courtesy, not expecting hand-outs, and so forth.

Now, I'm happy to admit that such character traits aren't the only important ones, even or perhaps especially in immigrants. You could, e.g., have them in a man who wanted to establish sharia and who was exceedingly discourteous to his immediate family. And I'm happy to admit that they can be thought of as, in fact, being associated with America through a set of traditions, though obviously immigrants who bring them here got them somewhere else originally. And I'm happy to admit that it's a dangerous sort of hyperbole to go saying that people who have them *really, literally* are Americans and people who don't really, literally aren't.

But I won't admit that they are the worst part of our national character, or even one of the worst. When I hear that in New Orleans some of the only rebuilt neighborhoods are the Vietnamese ones, where the residents didn't wait for government help, I have a strong urge of my own to talk about "good American immigrants" vs. "un-American natives."

All of these quasi-Burkean attempts to put soil, blood, and tradition on par with principles are really quite tedious. Aristotle, who was far wiser than Burke, argued that a city is defined "above all" by its regime and every regime has an arche or ruling principle directed at an end. As a result, the city is chiefly NOT the race or nation or the matter out of which it was formed, but rather the chosen form. In the case of America, its ruling principle is indeed the self-evident truth (proposition) that all men are created equal who are endowed with unalienable rights, and it was that principle for which the American revolutionaries fought and bled. And despite Willmoore Kendall's attempt to torture the words of the Founders into meaning essentially the same thing as the Mayflower Compact rather than Locke whom the Founders paraphrased left and right (and ordinary Americans were reading Paine's Common Sense, which is Lockeanism without Locke's characteristic caution), the American Revolution constituted not merely regime change, but the most radical break with previous political tradition in human history (and, by the way, "traditions" are by and large the mummified fragments of old politics).

This does not mean, however, that America's devotion to the principle of equality entails a commitment to ideological politics. In recognizing the need to yield to what "prudence indeed will dictate" in securing the rights of individuals, the Declaration distinguishes between principled politics and ideological politics (which leaves no role for prudence).

All of these quasi-Burkean attempts to put soil, blood, and tradition on par with principles are really quite tedious.

Yeah, as is all that nonsense about a family meaning blood relatives. A family is whatever we say it is: it is nothing but a bundle of principles, a bundle of principles that we can arbitrarily include or exclude from the definition at our pleasure. And anyone can be a member of a particular family in a plenary act of the will by adopting whatever principles define a particular family.

[Shaking head]. "The nation is just what we choose it to be, nothing more, nothing less."

Just don't fall off that wall, because all the King's horses and all the King's men won't be able to put you back together again.

If I may pull a couple of the strands together, here, I think both the adoption metaphor _and_ the idea of a "form" of a nation can point to the importance for the immigration issue of gradualism and serious limitations on numbers allowing for assimilation.

Take the adoption example: A thoroughly American family adopts a Vietnamese child as an infant. That child grows up thoroughly American and, let's say, marries another person, also Vietnamese in ethnicity, with the same background--adopted as an infant. They start a family which is (might as well bring the race issue out into the open) entirely non-white but thoroughly American in its attitudes, traditions, religion, etc.

Now, analogously, it could in theory happen by gradual change (though I don't think it will) that the United States of America became majority non-white, populated in the majority by the descendants of immigrants who, say, came here after 1980, while retaining its cultural character, its prosperity, its governmental forms, its religious demographics, etc., etc.

If we're talking about something like a ship, you can replace all the boards and such while it remains the same ship because it has the same design form.

The trouble with doing the same thing to the ship of state is that the ship of state is made up of _people_ who may not fit into their new roles well, may need time to adjust to them, may never adjust to them, etc., so if you recklessly replace all the pieces of the ship of state, or replace too many, or add too many, all at once, you can end up warping it from its designed form.

The Preamble to the Constitution is very far from being a Lockean document. The Six Purposes laid out there do not resemble any Lockean notion of the objects of politics.

But I guess citing the Preamble to a document amounts to an "attempt to torture the words of the Founders."

American Revolution constituted not merely regime change, but the most radical break with previous political tradition in human history.

What an absurd statement. Within twenty years there was a revolution in France a thousand times more radical. American religion was basically untouched by our Revolution; French religion was uprooted and murdered. American legislative bodies were merely adjusted, while France went through four tyrannical regimes in ten years.

A strong work ethic, a tendency towards deferred gratification and assiduous labour, including self-reliance, is neither constitutive of American identity, nor unique to America, in any way whatsoever. This cultural tendency is pronounced among Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indians, Lebanese, not to mention most of the Russians, Frenchmen, and Englishmen I know, whether in this country or overseas. Hence, this instinct, while seemingly irresistible in the case of indolent New Orleans natives and industrious Vietnamese immigrants, is not only reductive, but false to what we actually know of other cultures.

In other words, the Protestant ethic is not the only sociological factor that can explain a strong work ethic; hell, most of the Chinese I've encountered in America are even more severe than the joyless accumulators of Weber's analysis. And a member of the African-American urban proletariat is still more an American than an illegal immigrant, even when the former is shiftless and the latter works a 16-hour day - because Americanness is a matter of culture, belonging, a commonality of history and ties (and American history is nothing if not intimately bound together with the black experience of America), language and reference. I realize that you probably don't disagree all that much with this, and I have personal experiences that lend themselves to just the sort of judgment to which you refer - diligent Vietnamese employees (legal immigrants and naturalized Americans), lazy Americans - but I believe that this has to be characterized properly.

Well, of course a strong work ethic isn't unique to Americans by any means. I agree. But any culture with its particularities will be made up at least in part of individual features found in other cultures as well, and there's no getting around the fact that a strong work ethic--combined with a hope for making things better for oneself thereby--has been an important feature of the American self-concept and of American traditions. And a good one, IMO. And it's also true that some of the statements that have angered you most come from people who are emphasizing this aspect of American culture, or of what we might call ideal American culture. This does seem to me to counterexample the claim that propositionalists emphasize the worst aspects of the American character, creed, or self-image, those that "translated back" into practice bring only mess and ruination.

Of course, the national character is something concrete, something embodied in practices, traditions, habits, mentalities, and, most importantly, actual Americans. The propositionalists may be emphasizing something positive about America in this instance, but they are deforming and defiling even this good thing, by reducing it to an ideological postulate, something that, by virtue of its presence in non-Americans, gives them a claim upon American identity and residence. I couldn't care less whether, on average, Chinese were still more diligent than Americans; America would cease to be American if it were majority Chinese, period. And this is not to mention the invidious purposes to which the meme is put: those foreigners are better Americans than group x, because the latter refuse to toil for substandard wages and express infinite gratitude for the privilege. The comparison is made in order to legitimate replacing the American people, and this in the name of a plutocratic deformation of our tradition.

America would cease to be American if it were majority Chinese, period

Because only someone of European descent can be a true American?

Because culture correlates with descent, and because a nation is a community of memory and hope, which binds together ancestors, the present generations, and descendants, those yet to be born. If American were to become majority Chinese, or majority Latin, the link in the historical and communal chain would be severed, irrevocably.

Maximos, what if the change were to come about gradually and in such a fashion that the culture were retained by being adopted gradually by a carefully assimilated group of Chinese immigrants?

Now, I totally admit that this isn't what is being proposed and that this is enormously unlikely to happen. For one thing, the immigration go-getters haven't the prudence to do things gradually. For another, it's enormously unlikely that most features of culture would remain exceedingly similar, no matter how slowly the assimilation took place.

But I'm asking a question that is both literal and theoretical, though it may have no practical implications: Are you saying that it is in principle impossible that people of Chinese descent rather than European descent could in the very long run constitute the majority of Americans while America remained America?

If American were to become majority Chinese, or majority Latin, the link in the historical and communal chain would be severed, irrevocably.

The lineage is always changing. Englishmen founded the United States, but it was not limited to Englishmen. In the 19th century there were immigrants from Ireland and Germany, which was quite foreign to America at the time. The early 20th century was the height of Italian immigration, which was also foreign to America. The Italian language and Catholicism were very different from the Protestant and English roots of America. The United States has always adopted new members into the family. My great grand parents were born in Italy, so my lineage does not trace back to the Pilgrims or even to the Founders, yet I believe I am just as American as any descendant of Thomas Jefferson. I wonder how immigration was ever possible based on such an idea.

For another, it's enormously unlikely that most features of culture would remain exceedingly similar, no matter how slowly the assimilation took place.

For this reason alone, it is impossible, in principle, in this world, or any possible world arising from this one. It is not conceivable save as a thought-experiment so rarefied, so divorced from the relevant existential factors, that it cannot demonstrate anything of practical import. It is no more possible than it is possible for me to divorce my wife, allow her to take the children, marry another woman, claim her children as mine, and then assert that the family is identical. You cannot get away from blood and soil, and the only qualification of this is a minority phenomenon of adoption.

Though I am a product of that great wave of early-twentieth-century immigration, I think rather than it demonstrates my own thesis: America changed irrevocably as a consequence of that immigration, a consideration most evident in our political and social histories. That immigration imported a more corporatist political climate, a feature evident in the political consensus that evolved in the 1930s. For the record, I don't regard all of this as negative; but that wave of immigration did create a different America, just as the present immigration tidal wave is creating a different America.

Oh, yes, my Irish and Polish peasant ancestors, with only some exceedingly minor nobility on the Irish side far back in the mists of mediaeval times, were quite different from the Englishmen who originally settled America. There is a great deal of cultural distance between an Englishman and a Polish peasant.

Well, no, I deny the analogy to "marriage" between women, because marriage is a natural kind, ordained by God in the beginning of the world, which the essence of America (insofar as there is such a thing) is not.

Nations are natural kinds. America being what it is, and this being different from what other nations are, is a natural phenomenon. Whether one regards the story of Babel as a literal historical record, or as a profound myth, a true story, concerning the nature of this mortal sphere, at some point, and for some reason, God ordained the nations.

For the record, I don't regard all of this as negative; but that wave of immigration did create a different America, just as the present immigration tidal wave is creating a different America.

America is always changing in this sense. It is impossible to freeze the present or go back to a time long gone. What we can do is try to make a better America and I can agree that unlimited immigration on a mass scale is probably not a good thing for America. I do not believe, however, that someone with no blood ties to past Americans cannot be a good American.

No one said that they could not. All I have claimed is that an America comprised of a majority of such persons would not be the America we know.

No one said that they could not. All I have claimed is that an America comprised of a majority of such persons would not be the America we know.

My apologies for misunderstanding you then.

Now, analogously, it could in theory happen by gradual change (though I don't think it will) that the United States of America became majority non-white, populated in the majority by the descendants of immigrants who, say, came here after 1980, while retaining its cultural character, its prosperity, its governmental forms, its religious demographics, etc., etc.
It could, over centuries. It will not happen in the thirty years between now and when America finally does become majority non-white, nor do the architects of this demographic change desire that it do so. The break with American history is a feature, not a bug.
The propositionalists may be emphasizing something positive about America in this instance, but they are deforming and defiling even this good thing, by reducing it to an ideological postulate, something that, by virtue of its presence in non-Americans, gives them a claim upon American identity and residence.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but this works in the other direction. It gives Americans a claim on the loyalties and persons of those, and indeed all (if only they would see the error of their ways!), non-Americans, thereby justifying any manner of interventionist mischief. As the Colonel in Full Metal Jacket put it: "We are here to help the Vietnamese because inside every **** is an American, waiting to get out!"

There is nothing intrinsically American about justice, thrift, diligence, or any other virtue. That Vietnamese in New Orleans have rebuilt their neighborhoods without assistance does not make them more American than natives who have not. It may make them more virtuous, but does not make them more American. It is meet and right that our state and people should strive to be good and just, but it is rank blasphemy and idolatry to so muddle the ends of God with our own that we lose sight of Him and our dependence on Him, and end up worshipping ourselves. God is not an American, any more than He was an Englishman, and confusing His glory with ours, or worse yet, dispensing with Him entirely as most of our ruling class seems to have done, will not end well. Pride goeth before destruction.

Well, no, I deny the analogy to "marriage" between women, because marriage is a natural kind, ordained by God in the beginning of the world, which the essence of America (insofar as there is such a thing) is not.

Well, there you go. It comes down, once again, to existential realism (if that is the right terminology) versus positivism or its precursor nominalism. To the positivist certain things - the things with respect to which one is a positivist, in this case America - are nothing but formal constructions with no substantive existence (or no "relevant" substantive existence) independent of that formal construction. And once again I'll point out that at least in my understanding this isn't true even in that most formal of all domains, mathematics, let alone in the case of actually existing nations. To deny that there is an existential essence to America beyond some constructed abstract principles is to deny the reality of America: it is to erase America from Being.

I'd like to point out that even artificially made things have existential essences; this is implied in the word "thing". If I make a chair in my workshop it still has a nature quite independent of any assertion or positive construction of my will: it isn't whatever I arbitrarily will it to be just because I shaped it from raw materials, and it doesn't as an actual object reduce to some list of abstract propositions defining "chairhood". It doesn't become not-a-chair just because it becomes worn or requires repairs or gets painted a different color. It can be destroyed, but destroying it doesn't mean that it wasn't a chair before it was destroyed. And most of all it doesn't become not-a-chair, not that chair, just because I assert with my will that it is not a chair (though I have no doubt that some modern "artist" has at some time attempted to make a contrary point by building a chair and labeling it "not a chair").

It is Plato versus Ockham. Or something like that. These kinds of discussions go all the way down to where the turtles start.

Dang it, Zippy. It's turtles all the way down!

It is Plato versus Ockham. Or something like that.

And, obviously, I side more with Plato, hating Ockhamism with a perfect hatred.

To deny that there is an existential essence to America beyond some constructed abstract principles is to deny the reality of America

What is America's existential essence and where does it come from?

"Whether one regards the story of Babel as a literal historical record, or as a profound myth, a true story, concerning the nature of this mortal sphere, at some point, and for some reason, God ordained the nations."

But there was no America at the time of Babel, even if Babel was historical. So God didn't personally make America and personally give her her essence. If you're an essentialist w.r.t. America, you're not going to be able to say that God ordained it to be just this way and no other, to have this amount of thriftiness (or corporatism, or individualism, or whatever), no more and no less, whereas God made Italians to be easy-going, etc. I mean, we have to acknowledge--in fact, I gather y'all glory in--the fact that these traits are the result of a whole slew of human contingent choices. Surely marriage has a higher and more specific status. I'd hope even ol' Zippy the Platonist would admit that.

X says:

"I do not believe, however, that someone with no blood ties to past Americans cannot be a good American."

Maximos says:

"All I have claimed is that an America comprised of a majority of such persons would not be the America we know."

Now, "such persons," from X's quote, means "persons with no blood ties to past Americans." But think about this: How far past do we have to go? Is it now the case that a majority of Americans have blood ties to people who were here in 1776? For how long has that _not_ been the case? (I'm pretty sure, for a while.) And if there were a change to a majority non-white America, and if you acknowledged that the first generations in this process--who would presumably be here when America was still majority white--were "Americans," then by the time their descendents were the majority, those descendents _would_ have blood ties to "past Americans." Just not the Americans on the Mayflower or the Americans of the 13 original states. More recent past Americans. But isn't the same true of most of us now? Why is this a problem?

"It could, over centuries. It will not happen in the thirty years between now and when America finally does become majority non-white, nor do the architects of this demographic change desire that it do so. The break with American history is a feature, not a bug."

I agree with much of this comment of Cyrus's with the one caveat that I think there may be architects and architects. I'm pretty certain that plenty of people woolly-headed on the immigration issue are just misguided idealists, not calculating folks out to change American culture.

But I want to take off on this comment and say that since the issue, or part of the issue, is maintaining continuity and desirable cultural traits, it seems to me that it shd. be possible to reason with (some of) the "propositionalists" about the immigration aspects of their position. This would, however, involve articulating the desirable aspects of American culture that one justly kfears will be lost with the present level of immigration. Does this involve a certain degree of abstraction? I suppose so. But is that necessarily bad? No. I think we ought to be able to say what the problem is in some terms other than, "I don't want a bunch of people here who aren't descended from people who were here a hundred years ago" or even "America is more than propositions" or whatever, which, I'm sorry, just sound like slogans.

As Aristotle points out, the city is NOT like a family in part because citizens are ultimately MADE, not born since the first inhabitants or founders of a regime cannot be born of parents who are citizens. This is why he cites Gorgias, who said that just as mortars are made by mortar-makers, so Larisaeans are made by magistrates (for it is their trade to make Larisaeans). Lydia's analogy of a ship whose materials change but whose form remains the same is exactly what Aristotle is getting at when he suggests that a city's regime remains the same despite the fact that generations are constantly passing away and being born like the water in springs and rivers. Now making citizens is certainly not as easy a task as making mortars or ships, so prudence indeed would dictate that open borders is a bad idea.


Mr. Cella, you are indeed trying to torture the words of the Framers if you deny that they grounded the right to form a constitution in Lockean principles:

Federalist 28 (Hamilton): If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government.

Federalist 43 (Madison): 1. On what principle the [Articles of] Confederation, which stands in the solemn form of a compact among the States, can be superseded without the unanimous consent of the parties to it?... The first question is answered at once by recurring to the absolute necessity of the case; to the great principle of self-preservation; to the transcendent law of nature and of nature's God, which declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim, and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed.

And, of course, the Framers went to extraordinary lengths to show how the new Constitution would provide additional security "to the preservation of that species of government [republican], to liberty, and to property," which are fully republicanized Lockean ends.

Finally, allow me to quote Harry Jaffa:

However mild or moderate the American Revolution may now appear, as compared with subsequent revolutions in France, Russia, China, Cuba, or elsewhere, it nonetheless embodied the greatest attempt at [political] innovation that human history had recorded. It remains the most radical attempt to establish a regime of liberty that the world has yet seen.


It is a problem if one believes that the political and cultural changes wrought by our transition away from being a primarily Anglo-European society have been deleterious. The case can be made - and has - that absent that late-nineteenth, early-twentieth century immigration flow, America would have been much less likely to embark upon the course of Progressivism and bureaucratization that characterized the middle of the last century.

As regards a hypothetical non-white majority America, all I can say at this moment is that culture correlates, and that at a high degree, with ethnicity, and moreover, that diversity of the sort that is being, and will continue to be, inflicted upon America will lead to strife and discord - because the lesson of history is that it always does. And suggestions to the effect that, in some hypothetical possible world, this might be unproblematic, strike me as naive; the thought that my children will dwell in that world, which only a malign madman would ordain for them, gets my Irish up right quick. The future non-white majority America will not only be an America in which their culture and heritage are disfavoured, even if "informally", but where they will be subject to all of the glories of minority status in a nation in which the minority holds the majority of the wealth, and the majority seethes with resentment at its materially inferior status. Y'all probably think that I'm nuts for contemplating the fates of my children and grandchildren, but the notion that this is a matter to approach with utter ambivalence is, quite literally, insane. Market-dominant minorities fare exceedingly poorly in the annals of history, and American exceptionalism will not obtain in those days.

America is a development of European civilization, and a dis/replacement of that civilizational stock will effectively abolish that civilization in the territory formerly known as America.

Surely marriage has a higher and more specific status. I'd hope even ol' Zippy the Platonist would admit that.

Marriage is more universal, to be sure, and it is a different kind of thing from a country. But that doesn't mean that either can be abstracted to the point where all that remains is propositions.

Well, fine, then, let's talk about the cultural features that are likely to be a problem. Might that not _appeal_ to someone with "propositionalist" leanings, in the sense that one could cast it in terms of concrete advantages and disadvantages? E.g. We are likely to become a much poorer country at the present rate of immigration with the present groups. The various racial/ethnic groups will not be integrated well with one another and will not form a harmonious country. This is unwise. Etc.

It does not seem to me that a recognition of any of that is incompatible with seeing a certain type of government as extremely important to the nature of our country and with seeing a particular set of beliefs and commitment to those beliefs as central or core. Why not recognize the importance of both propositions and culture, and indeed of culture to the maintenance of forms of government and commitment to some sort of "American creed," as well as to...well, people's getting along well with one another? In other words, encourage a modified form of "propositionalism."

By the way, I realize this is dragging back in something you said earlier: I do rather wish you hadn't said that about abortion as "an injustice that does not touch [my children] personally" or words to that effect. I think that's tending to minimize the importance of the issue rather. Even from the point of view of what "touches" us or hurts us directly and personally (and if innocent children are being horribly slain in our own country completely legally, is this really the central consideration?), the truth is that almost anyone can be "touched" by abortion. If your grandchild is led astray into sin and then taken by the other person involved to get a secret abortion that slaughters your great-grandchild, it will touch your child--that child's parent--very deeply indeed.

I realize this may seem like beating a dead horse, but really it seems important to me to keep that issue at its proper level of urgency.

Professor Jaffa is a wise man, but his notion of the unparalleled radicalism of the American Revolution is quite mistaken.

Equally mistaken is the conventional wisdom giving John Locke primary authorship of American constitutionalism. Locke was influential alright, but his influence has been exaggerated. It is, in particular, in the commonly acknowledged tension between the Declaration and the Constitution where we discern his diminishing influence. We see it even in that grand phrase at the end of the Declaration, where the Framers pledge their Lives, Fortunes and their Sacred Honor to the cause of American independence. Lockeanism knows nothing of "sacred honor"; I noted recently that even in the famed Straussian "purple bible" -- History of Political Philosophy -- considerable emphasis is placed in this deficiency in Locke.

There is no discussion [in Locke] of the bonds that grow up among fellow countrymen. He speaks often of societies, rarely of countries ... When he speaks of Englishmen, he does not speak of their love of England, but of their "love of their just natural rights." ... The preservation of ... society may explain very well the right of the general to command; but why must the soldier obey desperate orders? From Locke's words only one reason emerges: if he disobeys, the general may hang him ... Locke [does not] explain the basis for a soldier's duty to give his life for his country.

The same entry refers to words like honor, gallantry, duty and valor as "un-Lockean." (p. 508-9)

So the most Lockean of all American documents, the Declaration, is signed and seal with a pledge perfectly alien to Locke. And the very subject under consideration here -- patriotism -- is outside his purview.

Forgive me if remain dubious about this theory of Lockean America.

What is America's existential essence and where does it come from?

America is not a story in a book, and it is not propositions that can be expressed on paper. It is a country, a nation, an actual thing in the world which transcends any description we can use to point to it. Just as each person in this discussion is not existentially identical to his or her name or description or resume, a country is not its form of government or a set of propositions or descriptions of characteristics. Your name is not you; descriptions of you are not you; abstract properties that are true of you are not you. If I burn your resume I haven't killed you, unless I am a positivist voodoo priest and you are identical to some abstract description of you.

The "propositional nation" idea is political voodoo, confusing certain signs signifying certain present abstract properties of a thing with the thing itself.

Ladies and gentlemen, Zippy is en fuego.

Locke does tend to be overemphasized. He was a significant influence, but hardly the sole or even preponderant one. Cicero, Livy, Plutarch, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and so forth were all important influences, and many others could be named as well. The general intellectual climate owed much to the tradition of post-English Civil War low church protestantism. It is a mistake to see the revolutionaries, or even more narrowly, the writers of the Constitution, as Lockean partisans, waving little red copies of the Treatises on Government.

Jaffa is reappropriating history to his own present-day ends.

P.S. Isn't Jaffa a Straussian, and didn't Strauss have a rather jaundiced opinion of Locke?

Lydia wrote: It does not seem to me that a recognition of any of that is incompatible with seeing a certain type of government as extremely important to the nature of our country and with seeing a particular set of beliefs and commitment to those beliefs as central or core. Why not recognize the importance of both propositions and culture, and indeed of culture to the maintenance of forms of government and commitment to some sort of "American creed," as well as to...well, people's getting along well with one another? In other words, encourage a modified form of "propositionalism."
A culture carries and practices certain propositions in its traditions and common assumptions. The "American creed" is something else, a substitution of a few supposedly universal axioms for a culture, since an American culture no longer serves as an instrument of unity in an explicitly and designedly multi-cultural state. With its universal claims that purportedly transcend religion, it sacralizes the state, and unlike monarchies or the later Roman Empire where the ruler was at least thought subject to God, the propositional state is subject to nothing but its own propositions.

Commenters are failing miserably and swooning into abject nihilism, for not expressing that the minimum meaning of the nation is loyalty to fellow nationals, at the very least when foreigners increase the aggression on citizens within the borders. Anything additional to that, as specific to the nation, is meaningful and possible ONLY if the minimum condition of this basic loyalty be met. This is the command of the nation, before which no pacificistic or internationalistic claims of conscience count in the least. Prove that you can add something extra and definitive of the nation, without this basic loyalty. When loyalty is absent from the determination of what the nation means, nihilistic disloyalism may be inferred.

"There is nothing intrinsically American about justice, thrift, diligence, or any other virtue. That Vietnamese in New Orleans have rebuilt their neighborhoods without assistance does not make them more American than natives who have not. It may make them more virtuous, but does not make them more American. It is meet and right that our state and people should strive to be good and just, but it is rank blasphemy and idolatry to so muddle the ends of God with our own that we lose sight of Him and our dependence on Him, and end up worshipping ourselves."

I may be guilty in what follows of mixing Cyrus with everyone else, but for the sake of the argument I'll assume that I'm arguing with a more or less unified group of people.

Now: On the one hand, I'm being told that America has an essence that is unchanging (is this right?) or at least should not change, and that I'm an objectionable positivist if I deny this. On the other hand, when I try to bring up particular virtues that have often been taken to be characteristic of the American character, I'm being told that there is _nothing_ particularly American about these virtues, because other cultures have them, not all Americans do have them, and so forth.

I find this confusing. If American culture has an essence, surely this essence _must_ contain at least some properties that not all individual Americans have and that are possessed by some people in other countries. If you include in the American essence only virtues possessed by all and only Americans, you're not going to have any virtues to include.

Isn't it "positivist" (though I hate to use that word) to jump on somebody who tries to generalize about thrift, industry, and so forth and the American character on the grounds that lots of non-Americans have these virtues and not all Americans do? Isn't it going to be of the essence of _any_ generalization about American culture or American essence that it is not exemplified equally in all Americans? And if we do allow such generalizations, then what's so bad about saying that people--yea, even recent immigrants--are being "good Americans" by demonstrating thrift, industry, rugged individualism (which I seem to recall having heard lauded up-thread), self-reliance, and the like?

To tie this to the main subject of the post, it seems to me that part of patriotism is very much thinking proudly of a particular set of virtues as having some sort of connection to one's own country. If this is idolatry rather than patriotism, and if one is also not supposed to include a joyful pride in the wisdom of one's founders in setting up a particular form of government, then I'm beginning to think that the brand of patriotism being promoted here has nothing to do with pride in one's country *at all*, which to my mind would be a strange form of patriotism.

I agree that there are non-Lockean principles in the Founding that supplemented those of Locke. For example, Trenchard & Gordon's Cato's Letters (which was very popular in America), while essentially Lockean, nonetheless seems to have recognized the apparent deficiency in Locke's thinking with its discussion of the need for Publick Spirit, which "takes in Parents, Kindred, Friends, Neighbours, and every Thing dear to Mankind; it is the highest Virtue, and contains in it almost all others; Stedfastness to good Purposes, Fidelity to one's Trust, Resolution in Difficulties, Defiance of Danger, Contempt of Death, and impartial Benevolence to all Mankind."

I also agree that the ideas of Locke were less influential in the creation of the Constitution, but that is mainly because the purpose of the Constitution is the eminently practical task of structuring a government, not laying down fundamental principles as found in the Declaration and Locke's Two Treatises (Locke himself affirmed this distinction: "Politics contains two parts very different from one another, the one containing the original of societies and the rise and extent of political power, the other, the art of governing men in society.") Hence other writers such as Montesquieu, Hume, etc. figure more prominently as intellectual influences in discussions about the Constitution.

GO LYDIA GO! It boggles the mind for people to ground patriotism in the most arbitrary, contingent, and particular things of one's country. Sure, these sorts of things are elements of it and are politically useful, but there needs to be a proper hierarchy that puts principles and virtue (which are accessible to human beings qua human beings) at the top of any notion of patriotism.

P.S. Yes, Jaffa is a Straussian, and Strauss took a dim view of the esoteric Locke.

Perseus, what if a man has no mind for political abstractions? This may shock you, but a taste for philosophical debate, which most of us here share, is not the universal patrimony of man. Some men, even men of considerable intelligence and wisdom, enter that world only with the greatest awkwardness and reluctance.

But you say to such men that unless they have read and understood Locke, and absorbed how his teaching impacted the development of American politics, they cannot be American patriots.

Your's is patriotism fit for only philosophers, not statesmen. If men cannot love their country because she is, in fact, their country, then there is no such thing as patriotism. We might as well say a man can only love his mother if he can simultaneously abstract from her traits and set them in the hierarchy of "motherliness."

there needs to be a proper hierarchy that puts principles and virtue at the top of any notion of patriotism.

I would say, rather, that there needs to be a proper hierarchy that puts patriotism in its proper place. It is not at the top.

I would say, rather, that there needs to be a proper hierarchy that puts patriotism in its proper place. It is not at the top.

Exactly. Equating patriotism (or any tribal or family loyalty for that matter) to virtue -qua- virtue is a manifest category error in my view. It nullifies patriotism by taking something entirely different which every man should possess - virtue - and attempting to make it equivalent to patriotism. Thus patriotism itself is made into nothing. Patriotism is a virtue: a virtue of tribal loyalty just where nature demands such virtue, in fact. But this category error is pernicious: if we were to equate the Fourth Commandment to virtue as such it would erase all the other commandments and make nothing of the fourth commandment itself.

I think this positivist notion, that in defining the virtue of patriotism America is whatever the Founders assert it to be, is pretty ironic: the founders don't seem to have asserted the notion themselves. Even if they did though that would just mean that the Founders had asserted an error. There is a shock to the conservative disposition: some human beings, politicians no less, made an error at some point in the middle of the country's history. How earthshaking.

Well, but isn't the non-philosophical man also implicitly loving certain virtues which he associates with his country? I think he often is. He needn't be a philosopher of any sort. In fact, I would bet the non-philosophical sort of man would be _more_ inclined than the philosophical sort to say the sorts of things that make Jeff so angry to the effect that this or that non-European recent immigrant or resident is a "better American" than some shiftless and ill-behaved native.

So too with civil rights, freedoms, and forms of government of which the ordinary man might be proud. I wd. bet you could find plenty of non-philosophical people--many a motor mechanic, for example--who would be ticked off as heck to be told that he couldn't say this or that. "This is America! This is a free country! I'll say whatever the *!@#$^*(& I like!" It's the more nuanced philosophical type of man who is going to point out that this is an overstatement, that we need to have some limitations on free speech, etc., etc.

It is reasonable to assert that a particular form of government is integral with the American self-conception, but when we do this, we are referring to a body of concrete social practices: we are concerned to assert that the actual practice of republicanism is critical to the American identity, and not that the mere idea of republicanism - which, by the nature of such abstractions, can encompass multifarious political formations - is critical to that identity. I fear that in eliding this distinction, we are discussing matters at a confused and obfuscatory meta-level.

As regards abortion, well, I made those statements that affront you for two reasons. First, the harms which will be inflicted upon my children and descendants, by mass immigration, multiculturalism, and minority status, are not merely hypothetical or possible; they are as certain as it is possible for any judgments in the social sciences to be. Abortion, even in the scenario you paint - as horrific as that would be - is merely possible. Second, too often I have been subjected to the arguments of socially-conservative enthusiasts for mass immigration, to the effect that, because abortion is a greater evil, in objective terms, than mass immigration is, on my analysis, I should acquiesce in their dreams of instantiating a culture of life by importing tens of millions of those "socially conservative" Hispanics. Even were the putative social conservatism actual, as opposed to being merely a propagandistic figment - another "What's the Matter With Kansas" boob-bait strategem of the plutocracy, to enlist the social conservatives as foot soldiers in the plutocratic jihad against the American standard of living - I would reject it, without hesitation. I am being asked, whether directly, or indirectly - as regards my choice of political allies - to countenance the imposition of specifiably harmful circumstances upon my children, for the sake of removing what is for them a mere possibility. Notwithstanding the question of incommensurability, I have duties towards my children, duties that are prior to any duties I have towards other children, or children-in-general; and I say this as someone made physically ill by the thought of abortion.

Finally, hypothetically, it might make some sense for a propositionalist to contemplate a balance of benefits and harms; but they never undertake such a weighing of consequences, because propositionalism is articulated precisely so as to render invisible all of these considerations, or, so as to render them essential features of propositionalist policies, which exist to subserve a managerialist, corporatist empire.

"...because propositionalism is articulated precisely so as to render invisible all of these considerations, or, so as to render them essential features of propositionalist policies, which exist to subserve a managerialist, corporatist empire."

I don't really understand the second part of this. As regards the first, I guess it depends on whom you are talking to. I bet I could find off-the-cuff "propositionalists" just having conversations and asking leading questions amongst a bunch of perfectly ordinary people who aren't articulating it for _any_ particular purpose. And even among the intellectual types, we've had a couple of people (not counting myself) on this very thread who have some real problems with "blood and soil patriotism" but are freely acknowledging the prudential issues involved in immigration.

Among the politicized advocates of propositionalism, these considerations are effaced, which is why neoconservatives generally decline to acknowledge them, and hurl obloquies upon all those with the temerity to drag them into the light of discourse.

As to the second part, many of these consequences are features, in the minds of some propositionalists, inasmuch as they really do dream of a multicultural, non-white, universal-nation America, and do believe - as mystifying as this may seem - that this is actually profitable for them and their interests. In any event, there exists a reciprocal relationship between the propositionalist dogma and the post-national America that is aborning: post-national America requires a doctrine which both explicates and legitimates this reality, and the doctrine legitimates - warrants - the expansion of the post-national order. Hence, all of that glib talk of democratization, of the inexorable forces of history and economics, and so forth. And if one inquires as to the reason for any of this, the ultimate reason - well, the ideological one, as opposed to the "This makes (some of) us really, really rich" ones - will be that bounded, "blood and soil" nations entail the Holocaust, and because it is unjust for us to have been so wealthy relative to the remainder of the world. At some profound level, we are doing this to ourselves because we still fell guilty over the World Wars, and particularly the more atrocious aspects of the second one.

Hitler's poisoned gift.

Another aspect of that, noticing that smears are used in the place where a rational argument was rightly to be expected, is to observe that no rational argument ever is given as to why the loyalty to nation is lacking in sovereignty. Loyalty and patriotism have to be smeared as magical blood and soil, because the higher law of the idealization of the stateless person posesses not one attribute of sovereignty. One doesn't have believe that patriotism is the highest virtue or the source of values, how is that more than an attempted smear, and one that all too conveniently covers up for the lack of good argument as to why we do not owe loyalty to fellow nationals over aggresive foreigners. The loyalty to fellow nationals inthat ocntext of foreign aggression large and small, is a virtue among others, but distinct in that it may be commanded from the national sovereignty. Christianity by weakening into a pacifist faith which tries to avoid acknowledging the need of loyalty to fellow nationals as a matter of sovereignty, no longer can call forth even the smallest army, but exhaustedly leads its flock into supine dhimmi status to the moslem, than which there is no less dignified position for pastors in their function. All of this intensely catalyzes the islamic aggression, as they say look, the Christians have no loyalty to each other through their nations, they capitulate and betray their fellows.

We might as well say a man can only love his mother if he can simultaneously abstract from her traits and set them in the hierarchy of "motherliness."

Don't we do that? We love our mothers because they take care of us, feed us, guide us and do all the things a mother is supposed to do. We do not love our mothers because of the biological fact that they happened to give birth to us. Having a biological connection may make that love more special, but who is going to love an abusive and uncaring mother? This strikes me as very unmotherly.

America is not a story in a book, and it is not propositions that can be expressed on paper. It is a country, a nation, an actual thing in the world which transcends any description we can use to point to it.

I agree that a country or an individual is not simply an abstract set of beliefs or principles. Both a country and an individual are real physical objects. I am, evidently, my past, because my past is the actual life I have lived. However, the beliefs and principles I have shaped the person I was and the person I will become. I am not a mindless robot, but an individual who tries to act on certain held beliefs. Of course certain aspects of life are done on instinct. I do not generally try to rationalize with some proposition why I eat or sleep. I eat because I have a natural desire to do so. However, there are certain beliefs, such as that I should remain healthy, that guide what I eat. I do not believe I can be reduced to a set of beliefs, but the beliefs I hold, such as Christianity, will ultimately shape the person I am and will become.

I think the same is true for America. America is its culture and history and the principles of the country shape the culture and history. If the Founders had written a different Constitution based on a different set of propositions, the history of the country would have been vastly different. If instead of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, the Founders held “from each according to his ability to each according to his need”, I think America would be unrecognizable. It is a fact that America was a slave owning nation, but there was something about slavery that did not mesh with the principle of liberty that America was based on. It was because of this principle that it was argued that America should be something other than it is. Would you disagree with the idea that slavery is anti-American? Is it possible for the country to act contrary to how America should act or is America only defined by how it does act or did act? If the latter is true, how was it ever possible to abolish slavery or give women the right to vote without being unpatriotic?

This may shock you, but a taste for philosophical debate, which most of us here share, is not the universal patrimony of man.

No, it's not shocking at all. As a professor, I deal with bored, apathetic students every day.

But you say to such men that unless they have read and understood Locke, and absorbed how his teaching impacted the development of American politics, they cannot be American patriots.

I say nothing of the sort. I do say that an American patriot is dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and does his best to treat his fellow citizens accordingly in his everyday private life and especially via the Constitution. This does not require any deep philosophical reflection or knowledge of the Founding (though I do want statesmen to learn about the Founding). In Aristotlean terms, right opinion (as opposed to philosophical knowledge) will suffice. And yes, an American patriot will ground his love of country in more mundane things, but, as Lydia suggests, your average non-philosophic American seems to have a more lofty notion of what it takes to be an American patriot than you do.

Equating patriotism (or any tribal or family loyalty for that matter) to virtue -qua- virtue is a manifest category error in my view.

Agreed. What I was getting at was how we should go about grounding patriotism (i.e. what are the things that citizens can and should become loyal to). Patriotism grounded mainly in blood and soil is the patriotism of beasts.

So why not give rational arguments against patriotic loyalty to fellow nationals over against foreigners within the borders, foreigners who increase the aggression on fellow citizens, instead of repeating smears? The smears are developed from equivocation slippery slope projections and false dilemma. The patriot does not have to prove that his loyalty will become superstitious blood and soil doctrines, nor that the sovereign aspects of national loyalty make patriotism into a value set above others. 'Grounding' patriotism in anti-national universals will be an exercise in internationalism and anti-patriotism; it has to be a loyalty to specific people, in a specific territory. Equality as an ideal that you can't have too much of, would yield the bestial Cambodian Reds. If one were to use the smear approach against Equality, the way it's used against loyalty to and through the nation, one would say prove that you're not the Khmer Rouge, slippery slopes only have to be asserted, and it's for you to prove that we're not on a really slick one, and all dilemmas even: egalitarian x=egalitarian y, regardless, are assumed true .

Patriotism grounded mainly in blood and soil is the patriotism of beasts.

I would say that a patriotism which doesn't subject itself to the moral law is a patriotism of beasts. But the moral law is extrinsic to patriotism, which is itself loyalty to one's own country and people. Patriotism is not infallible or unbreakable: no tribal loyalty is infallible or unbreakable. As Paul has stated many times, patriotism is the virtue, whereas nationalism is the error which elevates patriotism above other virtues.

So again, this idea that patriotism of blood and soil is the patriotism of beasts is really the erasure of patriotism.

I'm runnin' off this morning, but I do think it's important to acknowledge that Perseus and I have both pointed to a type of patriotism that is neither *merely* tribal loyalty *nor* the silly belief that a nation just is a set of propositions. (People do believe tom-fool things, but this one seems pretty bizarre to me.) Nor does this require deep philosophical reflection. No doubt some of the interlocutors on this thread will shudder at this, but I know of a decent (if somewhat too Protestant) history curriculum that teaches third-grade children to love their country because of such things as freedom of religion, freeom of speech, etc. I have done so myself. They get it. This seems to me a good thing, not a bad thing.

Judging by the sanguinary history of the Twentieth Century, any sort of patriotism grounded in ideological abstractions, fantasies, and fugues, pace this assertion regarding "blood and soil" patriotism, must be a patriotism of bloodied beasts. A man who merely loves his homeland will defend that land from would-be conquerors; a man who loves ideological dreams of the world reborn will slaughter in order to instantiate his idea.

Lydia, this notion still fails to capture that instinctive sense of loyalty to place and people to which some of us refer: am I to understand that, on your conception, I would be warranted in loving my country less were it to restrict religious liberty, or impose certain limitations upon the freedom of speech? This places the proverbial cart before the horse; I do not love my country because it permits me to speak my mind; I love it because it is mine, and if its regime should lay constraints upon my ability to speak my mind, I will struggle to remove those constraints, not because I now hate my country, or love it less, but because I yet love it, and wish to reinstate its native tradition. In other words, phenomenologically, the origin of discontent with ostensibly positive policies is simply a substrate of patriotic affection for the nation and its concrete traditions.

I'm sorry, but this all just seems to me like big-time overgeneralizations. People have killed one another over all sorts of things since long before the 20th century. People have killed one another for pure nationalism, they have done so for pure conquest. People have killed one another over religion. The Guelfs and the Ghibellines (not to mention the Black and White Guelfs) fought over whether emperor or pope should have more power in government. Maud's and Stephen's adherents fought over whether a woman could inherit the throne of England. And on and on and on. There has never been a period in history when all men could escape from the need to make choices into the mere level of "fighting for my country" and consider that that answered all moral questions that confronted them about fighting. And, as I brought up on another thread on this topic, the German under Hitler was in quite a fix. I don't think his only duty was to "defend his land from would-be conquerors" where the allies are conceived as such conquerors and where Hitler was making a jolly good try at conquering everybody else.

To portray the patriot who holds his country to no sort of standard as the good guy and the patriot who *at least in part* loves his country for her virtues and asks her to live up to those virtues as the bad guy is simply to do sloppy history of ideas, sloppy history, and sloppy thinking.

I posted my second before seeing your second, Maximos:

To me that's a matter of terminology, not of basic concept. You can say that what you love in terms of freedom of speech is your country's traditions. That's fine. I don't mind your putting it that way. But the fact of the matter is that increasingly as your country changes for the worse, what you will be loving in loving your country's now increasingly lost traditions will be something that does not presently exist. Hence, from my perspective, you will be loving and standing for ideas of freedoms that your country used to stand for and that you want her to stand for again. _I_ have no problem with this, but I think that it does rather undermine the whole idea that we ought merely to "love our country just because she is ours."

My statement concerning the slaughters perpetrated by ideological enthusiasts in the Twentieth century is merely a corollary of the oft-repeated truism that the atheist regimes of the past century claimed more bodies for their sacralized states and man-gods than all of the religious wars of history, the wars to which freethinkers still point as "refutations" of religion. Certainly, past "blood and soil", "crown and cross" wars have claimed their victims, but the body counts don't match those of the ideologues of the century just past.

I understand well your point concerning an 'idea of what a nation once was'; but this remains a memory of tangible aspects of a real country; it is radically distinct from, say, a progressive's fantasy of transforming America into a Scandinavian-style welfare state, a communist's dream of a global proletarian revolution, or a neoconservative's delusion of a global democratic capitalist order, with a North American Union to boot. This is not merely a contrast between futurity and a sense of the past; it is the difference between a cherished memory, lovingly preserved, and a fiction.

To "xkvsxe", regarding your post of September 21 at 12:19 AM

In my experience, and in that of my friends and acquaintances in this generation of children of often-multiple divorces and self-absorbed Boomer parents, children love their abusive parents, too. It is the absent ones, usually fathers, whom they do not, but even then, biology, or perhaps merely the expectations surrounding it, make the absence felt. Love of one's parents or children is not simply reciprocity of love for care given, or more philosophically for the manifestation of the virtues the familial role. I'll say no more of that.

To Lydia, regarding your post of September 20 at 7:20 PM:

You may just be guilty of conflating my views, which I confess I have struggled to articulate to my own satisfaction, with those of others. While I'm busy confessing, I'll add that I'm not well-versed enough in the various controversies over positivism and nominalism to engage in that discussion with any confidence.

You are right to say that, if there is such a thing as an American culture, all its attributes will not be shared by all persons in the same proportion, or necessarily at all. None of us would deny that. But because Americans, or the ideal type of an American, partakes in them does not make those qualities American. Gelernter elides this distinction. America becomes in some sense a final revelation of "History," the American state its incarnation, the creed its inherent attributes.

To tie this to the main subject of the post, it seems to me that part of patriotism is very much thinking proudly of a particular set of virtues as having some sort of connection to one's own country. If this is idolatry rather than patriotism, and if one is also not supposed to include a joyful pride in the wisdom of one's founders in setting up a particular form of government, then I'm beginning to think that the brand of patriotism being promoted here has nothing to do with pride in one's country *at all*, which to my mind would be a strange form of patriotism.
One might think his country well-ruled, and with an elegantly devised state. Or he might not. A patriotism that privileges assent not only to a particular form of government, but to a very narrow interpretation thereof - one might even call it partisan - over affection, birth, and history is a rather odd duck. It is reminiscent of nothing so much as the Soviet Union, actually. I am, according to a strict propositionalist, no American at all because I think propositionalism is dangerous at the very best, despite having ancestors on this continent going back many generations, and black New Orleansians are not Americans either, even though their ancestors came here in the 18th century or earlier. I am offended by that. Yes, I realize you are not saying it, but David Frum and Zmirak's unnamed interlocutor did. If there's one thing that gets this particular American's dander up, it's being lectured on the proper content of American patriotism by foreigners.

Well, but my dander got up in the other thread when Gintas said I was no American patriot because I would feel less of a connection to America if it became Communist. Yet that just seems to me a commonsensical position. So the "blood and soil" folks are just as capable of telling people they view as "too propositionalist" that their patriotism is insufficiently unconditional for them to be "real American patriots."

It seems to me we can have reductivism on both sides, here. There is to me something very reductive in saying that patriotism must be only love of your country because she's your country, period, end of story. I know that's not all there is to my love of my country. Nor, it seems to me, should it be.

I agree, Lydia. The type and character of the state is not irrelevant to patriotism. It can not be the sole criterion of patriotism or worse still of proper citizenship.

There is to me something very reductive in saying that patriotism must be only love of your country because she's your country, period, end of story. I know that's not all there is to my love of my country. Nor, it seems to me, should it be.

I agree. I want to touch on something you stated before about this kind of patriotism, where you stated that it means that a true patriot holds his or her country to no standards (my country right or wrong). I think maybe we need a proper understanding of what it means to love something. Does it mean you always defend it and support it? Or does it mean you care enough about it to improve it? If to love your country means to give it unconditional support, then I would have to disagree. If my country does wrong, then I cannot defend it, at least where it is wrong. If my country says something that is not true, then I cannot defend it. Does any of this mean that I cannot love it?

I think due to the criticism of Hiroshima and the Iraq war by some authors here, that it illustrates that one can harshly criticize their country and still love it dearly.

There is to me something very reductive in saying that patriotism must be only love of your country because she's your country, period, end of story.

Well, it may just be semantics. If one has a brave, just, hardworking father one may love him in part because of those things and even associate him as iconic of those things, and one's worldly love of one's father may be diminished if one's father loses those things. One may end up opposing one's own father implacably on particular things where one's father has failed in virtue. But it is still odd and perhaps metaphysically backward to say that (e.g.) hardworkingness is the metaphysical essence of the father one loves.

Maybe part of the problem is that various participants in the discussion do not want to consider the possibility that patriotism may die: that patriotism may quite legitimately come to an end as a matter of relation to an immanent nation if one's own polity becomes irremediably wicked, and that the object of patriotism in such a case can at best be a love for an historical country that has been lost. The notion of patriotism-of-ideas may be motivated in part by a desire to make patriotism immanently immortal even though nations and peoples are mortal.

Actually, I see it just the other way: That patriotism-of-soil is motivated in part by a desire to make patriotism unchangeable and immortal, so that patriotism could never die so long as the piece of soil remained, no matter how irremediably wicked the polity became. In fact, that was the crux of my disagreement with Gintas.

Well, I see people arguing it both ways. I disagree with Gintas and also John Bolton (assuming I've grokked their positions correctly) that patriotism is some trump card that stands above all else: to me that is just an attempt to make blood and soil into an inviolable universal principle. But I also disagree that abstract principles are constitutive of the "object" (that is, the thing loved, in this case America) of patriotism.

There is plenty to find objectionable in the abuse of concepts on both sides. But as a dispassionate matter I think creedal patriotism amounts to the erasure of patriotism. Patriotism just is the virtue of loving one's actual homeland and people and acknowedging one's duties directed toward the good of one's homeland as (ceterus paribus) greater than one's duties toward the good of foreign lands. Other things can and sometimes should override patriotism, but this is just what patriotism is.

But in that case how could patriotism ever die?

That's where the analogy to loving one's mother seems to me incorrect. For example, you could love your mother no matter if she'd become a drug addict or something incredibly debased. But you wouldn't be proud of her anymore. You'd be grieved over her and try to help her, but that's different. It seems to me that patriotism includes both loving one's homeland and being proud of it.

But in that case how could patriotism ever die?

Well, there is a sense in which it cannot and a sense in which it can. The sense in which it can seems to be the important one: if one's own country embarked on a course so abominable that one simply had to become an exile, for example. And patriotism is not even the highest priority of the "blood and soil" tribal loyalties, it seems to me. On the one hand I think there is in fact something morally wrong with abandoning one's home country merely for the sake of economic betterment; but for the survival of one's family it is surely licit, and in between lies prudence.

Maybe this has teased out an issue. I don't think that citizenship of a country is a strictly voluntary association: it cannot be, and it should not be. The country has duties to citizens and vice versa, and those duties cannot be abrogated by either in an act of the will. Someone who emigrates to another country and abandons his homeland strictly in the pursuit of discretionary personal wealth is doing moral evil, in my view. One has a duty to make things better at home, to the extent one can, and this positive duty is not capricious: it may only be abandoned when there are grave reasons to abandon it.

So for example even a Christian born in a Muslim country has some duty - within the bounds of prudence - to try to make things better at home before abandoning his home and going into exile. First generation immigrants are always in a kind of exile, whether self-imposed or otherwise and whether for good reason or not, it seems to me.

You seem to want to make patriotism into an emotional disposition toward one's home country, or to make emotional disposition into a dispositive aspect of patriotism. I don't think that works. As with any form of love and loyalty there is always more to it than mere emotional pride.

Well, yes, there's more to it. But that's compatible with pride's being an aspect. And I would think that just as one's country could become more or less wicked, so one could be more or less proud of it, and more or less hopeful about making things better. And even if one had little or no hope, there might be no place better to which to emigrate. So I suppose patriotism could die or close-to-die while one did not emigrate.

It seems to me that, off at the end, propositionalism will mean the death of patriotism.

For instance, the good Professor Perseus states: "I do say that an American patriot is dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and does his best to treat his fellow citizens accordingly in his everyday private life and especially via the Constitution."

I have no great dispute with this statement (except that I'm not sure I can sort out that last point about "via the Constitution"), but here is the thing: There is no necessary connection between being dedicated to a proposition about equality, and actually living a life of what a Christian would call charity toward one's fellow citizens. Dedication to a proposition is a matter of the intellect; it can only be lived out, actuated, by means of a tradition of life. The abstraction need not impel the action. Men live with charity toward one another not because of the propositions to which they are dedicated, but because they have been raised up in a way of life with inculcates charity: because they have been shown how to love, why it must be done even when it is hard. No proposition will ever show you how to love a man (your neighbor, let us say) whose every word or action grates your nerves.

Returning to my original post, this was the grave error of Marcion: to strip Christianity of its exemplars, its narrative history; to reduce it to propositions only.

Likewise, the effect of the propositionalists would be, for instance, to reduce Lincoln only to his great rhetoric, stripping away his life, who he was, how he struggled with melancholy, how he swung an ax, how his mysterious struggle with God shaped him. We would never know that "Lincoln magic," as Shelby Foote calls it -- because our propositionalism flattens him into a mere dispenser of wisdom, not a man and an American.

"Men live with charity toward one another not because of the propositions to which they are dedicated, but because they have been raised up in a way of life with inculcates charity..."

This seems to me to create a fight between propositions and life where none need exist, a false dichotomy, in fact.

When I grew up in the Baptist church, we were often being told that we needed to live as if we believed the things we said we believed. And we'd be told that we were acting (for example) like we really didn't believe that God existed, or like we really didn't believe that our fellow men were headed to hell without Jesus, and so forth. I think there's a lot of wisdom in that. The person who really believes that the poor man has as much value in the sight of God as the rich man--who really believes that in the pertinent sense "all men are created equal"--will behave differently from the man who says he believes it but doesn't. Certainly, being shown how to act rightly and charitably is important, but it seems to me that this is a matter of "working out one's faith." Making that faith explicit is not bad, but good, just as teaching children that God exists is important along with (say) teaching them to kneel down when the family says its prayers.

The two complement one another. It seems to me there's no reason for the anti-propositionalist to play St. James to the propositionalist's Martin Luther. Faith without works is dead. But works without faith has problems of its own.

But works without faith has problems of its own.

I agree. Patriotism without moral virtue has problems too. But we don't call works "faith": we don't treat faith and works as interchangeable and synonymous concepts. A virtuous man will be patriotic, and a truly patriotic man will be virtuous: thus, far above in this thread I allowed for a modal relationship. But faith and works do not become identically the same thing in virtue of their modal relationship.

I'm not sure I can sort out that last point about "via the Constitution"

All I meant was that following the Constitution is the concrete political way of behaving in accordance with the ideas of equality and republicanism. But it is the ideas of equality and republicanism that motivated the Founders to create the Constitution in the first place. (And it might be noted that the Founders did employ that abstract term "republicanism." E.g., Federalist 84: "The [U.S. Constitution's] establishment of the writ of habeas corpus, the prohibition of ex-post-facto laws, and of TITLES OF NOBILITY, to which we have no corresponding provision in our [New York] Constitution, are perhaps greater securities to liberty and republicanism than any it contains.")

Making that faith explicit is not bad

No one said otherwise, Lydia. I love the creeds. I love reciting them together in church. I love reading and absorbing the American founding documents.

My concern is that the propositionalists carry us toward the error that the creeds are the faith, or that the principles of the American founding documents are America.

Well, first, I don't think Perseus believes that.

And second, I was thinking about this whole question of whether one behaves rightly because one has been shown by example in culture or because one believes a proposition. And what's interesting to me is how plausible it is that one should sometimes do the latter rather than the former. Suppose some kid has been taught to treat black people badly and disdainfully, taught that by example in his home. Then later someone "preaches" to him, perhaps at college, that all men are created equal. He realizes the faults of his upbringing through something very near pure propositional exhortation and thereafter makes a sincere effort for the rest of his life to change his ways. One could imagine case after case of this sort where someone really was taught what I can only call American principles, but not chiefly by example, adopted them, and then tried to act according to that.

What does that have to do with patriotism-qua-patriotism though? Nothing, as far as I can tell. If it had something to do with patriotism-qua-patriotism the implication would be that nobody other than Americans have ever been patriotic or could be patriotic. I consider that a reductio of the idea that adherence to some bundle of propositions per se is in any way constitutive of patriotism. Rather propositionalism represents an attempt to coopt patriotism, destroy it, and replace it with something different: loyalty to some bundle of disembodied propositions as opposed to loyalty to one's actual home country.

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