Clumps Of Soil
Posted on March 15th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Perhaps not surprisingly, I find the idea that patriotism is somehow a “petty” loyalty, in particular a “petty loyalty to clumps of soil,” to be very wrong, insofar as this description is intended to describe this loyalty as somehow base or mean or limited, and therefore the cause of greater evils. It seems to me that the great evils that Kukathas and Kateb attach to patriotism do not derive from “petty loyalty to clumps of soil,” but from abstract loyalties to ludicrous lists of universal rights that must be realised no matter how much blood is spilled in the effort or to national ambitions that have no relationship to reality. The petty-soil-clump-lovers are not the cause of the great calamities of mass slaughter and destruction that so disillusion the learned contributors to the Cato debate, but are, on the contrary, the only alternative to the destructive ideologies that promote the killing of others for their own benefit.
Filed under: politics
I pity those folks who don’t have a deep, abiding affection for their soil. It suggests a terrible rootlessness that I cannot begin to comprehend, coming from a family that scraped its very existence from the rocky earth of Rhode Island and Massachusetts since the beginning. As I always say: America may come and go — will come and go — but there will always be New England, with her cold coastal waters, her granite cliffs and endless trees, forrests, hills.
Also, tell me I’m not the only one who has noted the sad irony of deriding patriotism in a forum that traces its very namesake back to a fierce patriot — Cato the Younger.
One weird thing about the dismissal of normal patriotism as “love of mud” is that most of our patriotic songs appeal to exactly that, particularly to the way our country’s vastness, unspoiled beauty, and diversity match its enduring appeal to pioneering spirits, productive work, possibilities for the future, and our historical freedoms. For people that talk often of a “civic religion” of American patriotism, the neoconservatives arbitrarily dismiss our historical patriotic symbols and rituals.
Consider the opening stanzas of America the Beautiful:
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
Or America:
My country, ’tis of Thee,
Sweet Land of Liberty
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims’ pride,
From every mountain side
Let Freedom ring.
My native country, thee,
Land of the noble free,
Thy name I love;
I love thy rocks and rills,
Thy woods and templed hills,
My heart with rapture thrills
Like that above.
Let music swell the breeze,
And ring from all the trees
Sweet Freedom’s song;
Let mortal tongues awake;
Let all that breathe partake;
Let rocks their silence break,
The sound prolong.
Or consider the chorus of This Land is Your Land:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land is made for you and me.
As I was walking, a ribbon of highway
I saw above me, an endless skyway
I saw below me, a golden valley
This land was made for you and me.
A less intellectual discussion of patriotism here.
Will Wilkinson said at his site once that he’s willing to die in a war to defend Libertarianism.
I suppose it’s somewhat natural for a society that is both post-industrial and post-agrarian (not that such bases don’t exist, just that they aren’t a particularly emphasized cultural reference) to lose its attachment to country, that word used in all of its sense but especially the physical, literal sense. Many — most? — Americans no longer realize the connection between their luxury and the land’s bounty, and so they have no sense of rootedness, no gratitude for the actual earth or its citizen stewards, no commitment or sense of fraternity with the people who populate its woods and plains and associate with one another for mutual benefit and appreciation of shared passions and interests.
[...] Recently I caught a bit of a discussion going on among Daniel Larison, Ross Douthat, and some loony libertarians from the Cato Institute and Reason, in which the libertarians had ridiculed patriotism as “petty loyalties to clumps of soil”. The ubiquity of the libertarian opinion here strikes me as encapsulating much of what’s wrong with America. Too many Americans cannot even comprehend why anyone would want to care about “clumps of soil”. One can be an American anywhere, they say, and in fact it’s better if one doesn’t have any attachment to place, which might interfere with something “real” like making more money. Heck, if there is some ancestral “home”, it’s probably a hokey place anyway, given over to those few flunkies, simpletons, and sentimental old farts who might have stayed there past the area’s economic heyday. However, if there is no place we will stick up for, we can only expect to be dumped in whatever ”Indian reservations” – if any – the globalists see fit to leave for us. [...]