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Friends, Foes & Countrymen
Michael E. Bailey on the Problem of Patriotism
My subject is an embarrassing one for the educated and sophisticated, people like professors, college administrators, the editors and writers of the major magazines and newspapers, and those who produce our movies. It takes more courage among the sophisticated in the Academy and elsewhere to state without qualification that you love America than to declare yourself friendly to the United Nations, the idea of world government, or the ideals of socialism.
The key words here are, of course, "without qualification." It is perfectly acceptable to praise America—even in the Academy—as long as you make absolutely clear that what you are praising is not America as she presently is but America as she can be. Praising the idea and ideals of America, in fact, requires that we temper our love of America as she presently is.
Sophisticated Lovers
Why is this? Why are sophisticated people so uneasy about loving their nation? For Christians, skepticism about patriotism is sometimes rooted in the legacy of Christian thought. Scripture reminds followers of Christ that their deepest citizenship is in heaven, not in any earthly nation. We can never place our full confidence in this world, because even the most awesome products of human greatness and labor may be reduced to ashes with relative ease.
Somehow I suspect that most of the unease in the academy—the part of the world of the sophisticated I know best—is not explained by rampant Augustinianism. Its unease may reflect its intellectual biases—and pretensions.
Professors in the hard sciences enjoy more-or-less clear and universally accepted standards for measuring success in their fields, but professors in the liberal arts—where opposition to patriotism is strongest—do not have them. Absent clear markers for judging progress in their fields—and therefore their pecking order in the Academy—many professors in the liberal arts fall to posturing and pompousness.
More importantly, professors in the liberal arts aspire to an intellectual vantage point that transcends the claims of authority, including the authorities and allegiances of one's time and place. Therefore, an oft-stated goal of a liberal arts education is to liberate oneself from the biases and limitations of one's cultural inheritance. Too warm an embrace of America indicates backward provincialism.
Ironically, the Academy's embrace of some deeply American commitments also contributes to its uneasy patriotism. The Declaration of Independence begins with a pre-political understanding of freedom and states explicitly that it is our right, even our duty, to make government respect the pre-political rights of individuals. And what is the fundamental right as Americans understand it? The right to pursue our happiness.
Much experience, however, demonstrates that the vigorous and self-conscious pursuit of happiness rarely terminates in genuine happiness. For one thing, you can always have just a little bit more of whatever makes you happiest. And so Americans are invited by their founding document to view their situation as they actually live it as unsatisfying and even intolerable. To say that what we have today is really good, or even good enough, is to reveal an unacceptable and un-American complacency about the existing order of things.
Michael E. Bailey is Associate Professor of Government at Berry College in Mount Berry, Georgia. He serves as Deacon at First Presbyterian Church in Rome, Georgia, and is married and has three daughters.
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