The Moral Irrelevance Of Patriotism

Patriotism, in many cases, is lived out as nothing but an emotionalistic attachment to a person's country in spite of whatever sins that country may be guilty of.  This does not have to be what all expressions of patriotism reduce down to, but the manner in which patriotism tends to be asserted even in the face of injustices means that this is usually the case.  The more stubborn but positive assumptions a person makes about the moral state of their country, the more likely they are to be patriotic.

The intellectually and morally hollow nature of patriotism in most instances renders the love of one's country pointless outside of a very specific context.  That context is not times of national distress when strangers benefit from emotional connections with each other, for it has nothing to do with personal appreciation, collective utilitarian gain, or any sort of survival value at all.  The presence of these things is empty if the one condition that gives patriotism meaning is not found.

A country can have significance that transcends the subjective--in order to do so, it must be in alignment with values that are objective in nature.  However, many people immersed in patriotism are not primarily or ultimately concerned with whether their country is truly just or consistently upright.  They are simply concerned with feeling an arbitrary, personal sense of pride over living in a country they subjectively admire.  Beyond this, it is impossible for the reported moral ideologies of every culture to be correct given how they so thoroughy conflict with each other, and thus patriotism cannot be a universal good in the first place.

Even when one's country is in a morally sound condition, the love of one's country is a fundamentally lesser love than the love of morality itself.  It is not that no country is capable of deserving praise or respect, but that a country only deserves that respect based upon how well it matches the external criteria of morality.  When one loves righteousness for its own sake regardless of whether it has been practiced in a country that has one's affections, patriotism might be easily regarded as irrelevant.