An Analysis Of Patriotism

Because today is the Fourth of July, otherwise known as Independence Day in my country of America, I wanted to explain the basis for legitimate commitment and love for one's country.  Today (and the surrounding few days by extension) represents a time where many of my fellow Americans may display a particularly generous amount of affection and devotion to their country--a phenomenon known as patriotism.  But if patriotism is good, what makes it so?  Is it always a moral good?

If someone loves his or her country simply for the sake of loving that country, he or she has done nothing but live according to a subjective preference, an arbitrary, intellectually bankrupt philosophy.  No one can defend this belief except through circular reasoning, emotion, and begging the question.  The great irony of this is that a person who believes in such fallacious patriotism may not share the sentiments of a person from a different country with the same attitude towards his or her own nation.  Whether or not the universe has any meaning within it, such a philosophy is inherently pointless, intellectually unjustifiable, and fallacious.  However, if someone loves his or her country because that country has aligned itself with objectively good and correct values, then the belief is both sound and meaningful.

No nation can claim any actual significance except by standing for ideologies and values that are objectively true and good.  This is sometimes lost on patriots, who may exhibit a blind and emotion or tradition-based loyalty to their birth nations instead of a loyalty based on reason, morality, and truth.  Signs of this erroneous type of loyalty may include refusal to acknowledge faults in their respective nation's past or present, disdain for people who were born in or reside in other nations, and harsh responses to criticism of their country.  Of course, there is also plain old stupidity, which is responsible for a great deal of errors, so intentional hyperpatriotism alone may not be the source of these behaviors.

As an American, I have seen examples of both types of patriotism--one senseless and without justification or boundary, the other inspired by virtue and reason.  I neither care for my country simply by virtue of being a member of it nor am seized by bouts of passion for it.  To the extent that America aligns with objective goodness, I will cherish it.  To the extent that it deviates from that goodness, I will loathe it.  And I will not support the irrelevant bias that people with blind inclinations towards patriotism must inevitably rely on.