Archard - Should We Teach Patriotism

Studies in Philosophy and Education18: 157–173, 1999.© 1999Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

157

Should We Teach Patriotism?

DAVID ARCHARDMoral Philosophy, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, Scotland KY16 9AL

Abstract. This article examines a particular debate between Eamonn Callan and William Galstonconcerning the need for a civic education which counters the divisive pull of pluralism by uniting thecitizenry in patriotic allegiance to a single national identity.

The article offers a preliminary understanding of nationalism and patriotism before setting outthe terms of the debate. It then critically evaluates the central idea of Callan that one might be underan obligation morally to improve one’s own patriotic inheritance, pointing to the ineliminable tensionbetween the valuation of one’s own patria by its own terms and a detached critical reason.

It concludes by suggesting that we are, in advance of our education, members of a particularpatria and that any education must be particularistic. Finally, the danger is noted of presuming that,in each case, there is a single, determinate national tradition.

Key words: civic education, patriotism, nationalism, pluralism, liberalism, tradition, patria, criticalreason

In 1916 ‘in connection with the observance of the national anniversary of StDavid’s Day’ the Welsh Department Board of Education issued a small pamphletwith the title,Patriotism. Suggestions to Local Education Authorities & Teachersin Wales Regarding the Teaching of Patriotism.1 The date of its publication is obvi-ously significant being ‘in the midst of the greatest war which the world has everknown’ and one which requires of the present generation that they be prepared tomake sacrifices to ‘retain what is most precious of all – the very soul of our nationallife’. In brief sections the pamphlet answers such questions as ‘what we mean by“our country” ’, ‘what our country has done for us’ and ‘how we can serve ourcountry’. The answers to these questions are followed by short notes suggestingsuitable supporting teaching material. Thus, as to ‘What our country has donefor us’ the pamphlet answers, Our fathers have worked and fought to give us ourliberty, our free institutions, our homes, and our security. A note adds: ‘It might bewell to illustrate the foregoing lesson by examples of “great names,” such as HenryVII, who first saw a vision of the British Empire; or Richard Wilson, who was oneof the first British artists to depict the wild beauty of the home-land; or each schoolmight take one of the great men of its own county. Thus, Montgomeryshire schoolsmight take Richard Roberts, the inventor, or Ann Griffiths, the hymn-writer, orRobert Owen, the apostle of labour’.

158 DAVID ARCHARD

The last section is particularly fine. Entitled ‘True Patriotism and False Patri-otism’ it includes the following wonderful passage: ‘Patriotism is very like loyaltyto our side in a school game. We do not feel proud of, and ought not to support,our side if it cheats or fouls the other side, or loses its temper and does not playa fair game. Wrongful actions by one’s country (and our country has not alwaysdone right) [are] just as despicable as foul play in a school game.. . . Any otherstandard of patriotic conduct [is] really unpatriotic because it does harm, not good,to our country and it injures its good name. Such a false standard would justify theGermans in their treatment of Belgium; in their making war (as they have done)on defenceless citizens; in sinking the “Lusitania,” a passenger ship full, not ofsoldiers, but of civilians – men, women, and children; in killing Nurse Cavell.’ Theteaching note adds – and it is hard to miss the tone of self-satisfied rectitude –‘To the older children it might be explained how false Patriotism takes the form ofMaterialism (counting a nation great by what it has rather than by what it is) andof Militarism (seeking to advance a nation’s ends by brute force)’.

What strikes one on reading this tract is the unabashed, self-confident andassured assertion of not just its patriotism – the unalloyed love of and deep respectfor one’s country and its heritage – but also of the evident rightness of teachingthis patriotism, of instilling in children that same uncomplicated love and respect.Moreover, this is British patriotism whose devotion to its cause lacks any doubtas to the appropriateness of such devotion, yet is gracious in its concession of theright of other less fortunate nations to exist. A patriotism whose country does nothave to cheat in order to succeed whilst others do, which is confident of victory buttemperate in enjoyment of its triumph, a country, in short, which both always playsby the rules and always wins.

It is clearly a patriotism of its time and, it will be added, that time is thank-fully no longer the present one. The belief in an Empire on which the sun neversets, guardian of a glorious past and protector of the values of civilisation againstTeutonic barbarism, is dated and passé. And so it should be. But is patriotism and itsteaching outmoded? Is there no place for it in our present world? I want to examinethe terms of a particular debate about the teaching of patriotism with a view togetting clearer about what pedagogic role there should be for patriotic identificationwith one’s nation. This is a debate between Eamonn Callan and William Galston.Both see the need for a civic education which, in uniting the citizenry in patrioticallegiance to a single national identity, counters the divisive pull of pluralism, ofvarious other attachments. Both worry about the tension between ‘critical reason’,as a regulative educational ideal, and the demands of a partial attachment to one’sown nation. It will be suggested that the proper educational goal is, consistent withcritical reason, clarification of a particular identity which has been acquired and isvalued independently of education. However such clarification cannot assume – asGalston and Callan appear to do – that there is a single identity. This means thatthe fact of pluralism may enter into the very form of any civic education. First, letme note the background to this debate.

SHOULD WE TEACH PATRIOTISM? 159

I

Political philosophy long neglected the topic of nationalism and nationality2 butthese ideas have now found sympathetic defenders. A number of writers – I amthinking here principally of David Miller and Yael Tamir, but also Allen Buchanan,Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer3 – have argued persuasively that there is a place,even if a limited and carefully constrained place, for a principle of national iden-tity that is consistent with liberal ideals. Previously liberalism and nationalismwere characterised as radically opposed contraries, the conflict between thembeing memorably defined by Ernest Gellner as ‘a tug of war between reason andpassion’.4

I do not want to enter here into the debate about nationalism. I want only todo two things: first, to offer some basis for a distinction between nationalism andpatriotism; second to provide the main relevant reason people have for thinkinga principle of national identity defensible. Patriotism is love of one’s country ornation, and this love is, in terms of the ideal, prescribed as a virtuous dispositionto act in certain, often self-denying and self-sacrificial, ways on behalf of one’scountry. Nationalism is, as a political theory, a normative claim about the properconsonance of nation and state; it claims that a nation should have independentsovereign statehood and that states are political communities which should bebound together by a single national identity: states should be nations and nationsshould be states. Nationalism, Gellner stated, is ‘primarily a principle which holdsthat the political and national unit should be congruent.’5

Nationalism and patriotism share a factual belief – that nations do exist andhave enjoyed continuous historical existence – and they share a moral view –that the existence of one’s own nation has moral significance, that the nation isworthy of one’s special attachment to it and action on its behalf. A nationalist isalso certain to be a patriot. ‘Loyalty to the nation-state overrides other loyalties’ isone of the seven propositions which A. D. Smith identifies as constiuting the coredoctrine of nationalism.6 A patriot is committed to thinking that her nation warrantsher devotion but she need not be a nationalist in the further sense of seeking thecongruence of nation and state. She need, as a patriot, have no further views abouther nation’s political status even if it is probable that she will.

Why is a principle of national identity thought defensible by its present-dayfriends in political philosophy? The defense has a negative and a positive half.Negatively nationalism is defended by showing that the familiar criticisms of it –that nations do not, as claimed, have real existence; that nations should not have anymoral significance – are misplaced. Positively nationalism is defended by arguingthat a principle of national identity has value. Most centrally it is claimed thatnationality can supply that sense of community – what Mill in hisConsiderationson Representative Governmentcalled ‘fellow-feeling’7 – which is essential to thesuccess of the liberal polity. It, and it alone, will sustain the acceptance by thecitizenry of the state’s constitutive principles of justice, will motivate their allegi-

160 DAVID ARCHARD

ance to its rule of law, and define the democratic public culture in which all mustparticipate.

It is alleged that Rawlsian liberalism in which the citizens are bound togetheronly by a shared acceptance of the state’s constitution is too ‘thin’. It could not,as Rawls and his defenders believe, display continuing ‘good order’, a phrasewhich means both the enduring stability of the polity and a general belief in itslegitimacy by the citizenry. Yael Tamir, for example, endorses Michael Sandel’scriticism of Rawls to the effect that general social acceptance of the differenceprinciple – which Rawls says amounts to a willingness to see one’s natural assetsas shared – illicitly presupposes a sense of community which Rawls’s own theorycannot provide. The liberal belief is that agreement on principles of justice can byand of itself provide the social support for the operation of these principles. Tamirthinks that such ‘agreement is too thin and . . . insufficient to ensure the continuedexistence of a closed community in which members care for each other’s welfare,as well as for the well-being of future generations’.8 She looks to the nation toprovide the essential terms of unity and membership within a clearly defined anddemarcated population. The unity of a ‘liberal national entity’ ‘rests not only on anoverlapping consensus about certain values essential to its functioning, but also ona distinct cultural foundation’.9

In a series of published articles which pre-datedOn NationalityDavid Millerargued that a shared sense of nationality could supply the grounds whereby a givenpopulation was motivated to accept, and live by, a set of principles of justice.10

In On Nationalityhe has argued, further, that the success of ‘deliberative democ-racy’ requires trust amongst those deliberating and a willingness to find agreedterms of social co-operation. Sharing a national identity provides that trust andwillingness.11 Miller and Tamir defend a principle of nationality from, respectively,socialist and liberal perspectives. Roger Scruton, from a conservative position, hassimilarly defended nationality and criticised Rawlsian liberalism for its inabilityto explain how and why citizens could make the sacrifices and undertake theconsiderable burdens which are entailed by civic membership of a successfulpolity.12

II

I turn now, against this background, to the particular debate about the teachingof patriotism which I want to explore. Its protagonists are William Galston andEamonn Callan. Both accept that liberalism has a problem of securing the condi-tions of its own success as a political project. The modern polity is beset by the factof pluralism, the various and divisive attachments its citizens have which subvertthe engagement needed if all are to participate in and support the maintenance ofits just institutions. Both see the need for a strategy of integration, of ensuring theattachment of citizens to the political institutions of the liberal society. And bothsee a civic education as essential to the achievement of that end. They both worry


about the corrosive powers of a detached critical reason. They differ about the forma civic education in the service of some form of liberal patriotism should take.

Let me first quote at length – as Callan does – the key passage from Galston:

On the practical level, very few individuals will come to embrace the corecommitments of liberal societies through a process of rational inquiry. Ifchildern are to be brought to accept these commitments as valid and binding,it can only be through a process that is far more rhetorical than rational. Forexample, rigorous historical research will almost certainly vindicate complex‘revisionist’ accounts of key figures in American history. Civic education,however, requires a more noble, moralizing history: a pantheon of heroeswho confer legitimacy on central institutions and constitute worthy objects ofemulation. It is unrealistic to believe that more than a few adults of liberalsocieties will ever move beyond the kind of civic commitment engendered bysuch a pedagogy.13

Callan dubs this non-revisionist moralising form of civic education ‘sentimental’where sentimentality involves a ‘sustaining fiction of moral purity’.14 A senti-mental civic education incurs three moral liablities: first, a ‘truncated historicalimagination’, a limiting of one’s ability to know and understand one’s owncommunal past; second, a ‘propensity to filter complex political problems througha network of mutually supportive moral fictions’, a general ‘coarsening of moralvision’ which comes in the wake of acquiring secondary falsehoods to protect theprimary lie of national purity; and, third, a ‘debased conservatism’ which regardsthe inherited political present as incapable of improvement.15

These liabilities are not just moral, they are also political for the ‘disposi-tions instilled through a sentimental political education can[not] be reconciledwith the virtues that underpin representative institutions’.16 A flourishing partici-patory liberal democracy requires that ‘civic virtues informed by critical reason. . . be widely and deeply diffused among the citizenry’.17 Galston’s ‘sentimentaleducation’ must of necessity work directly against the grain of such virtues andcapacities.

Callan wants a role for critical reason but he worries about the political oper-ation of such a reason when it assumes the form of an ‘implacable scepticism’,18

a detached view from nowhere which eschews all partialities and commitments toany particular community. We need both engagement in this, our, community and aproper role for rational scrutiny of that engagement. Callan’s own solution is to seecitizens as the inheritors of a certain political project or tradition who, at the sametime, are enjoined to ‘make the best of this tradition’. Our view upon our communallegacy is not a view from nowhere; it is the view vouchsafed to us as legatees. Ourview is given us in the light of the traditions of our particular inheritance, but itis not a vision so obscured as to be incapable of seeing what is better and what isworse in that inheritance: ‘our rootedness in history shapes but does not undermineour critical scrutiny of that history’.19 ‘Emotional generosity’ and ‘imagination’are the key virtues of this engaged criticism.

162 DAVID ARCHARD

Callan seeks to articulate a critical and optimising engagement with one’sown country’s project which represents a third way between a rootless, ‘alien-ated scepticism’ and Galston’s politically debilitating ‘sentimentalism’. How doeshis approach cash out in pedagogic terms? Callan takes the example of teachinghistory. Eric Hobsbawm, in another context, has argued that no serious historianof nations can himself be a nationalist: ‘Nationalism requires too much belief inwhat is patently not so’.20 In other words belief in the existence and worth of anation could not survive sustained examination from objective historical scholar-ship. Callan does think Galston ‘right to suppose that history in civic educationdiffers from historytout court’. He is wrong to think that the difference ‘corre-sponds to the difference between the construction of a pantheon of heroes and itsdemolition’.21

Callan’s own suggestion is literature rather than ‘conventional historical schol-arship’. He gives as an example a Eudora Welty short story in which a white racistkiller reflects on his murder of a civil rights activist in the 1960s. Callan suggeststhat one will understand this story, be ‘attuned to its emotional complexities’, onlyif one has a sensibility to the history of America and can appreciate the way inwhich the killer betrays the ideals of equality and freedom, ideals which he falselyinvokes in his pitiable self-justification, but which are constitutive of his, and theAmerican readers’, very own political tradition: ‘The story may be about the veryworst of America rather than the best, but its moral depth resides precisely in theway it tacitly draws on the best of the tradition to make sense of the worst’.22

III

This is deeply suggestive but I am not sure how far Callan’s alternative works. Histhought, to repeat, is that we can (and ought to) teach patriotism to the extent thatwe teach people to make the best of that tradition or project of which they are theinheritors. Let me try and explore the problems I think there are for this account byposing a number of questions.

A first set of problems derives from the apparent conflation of distinguishableterms: political community,patria, and tradition or project. Callan is defendingan ‘integrative strategy’ whereby patriotism secures an attachment to the politicalcommunity (and thereby contains or counteracts the divisive tendencies of plur-alism). In the first place this assumes that the political community is or must beco-extensive with thepatria. A nationalist, as we saw, demands this consonance;a patriot need not.Patria and political community can be and often are distinct. Itmight be possible for a patriot to repudiate the latter, just as someone might endorseonly the constitutive ideals of the community.23

Further, the national community, orpatria, is assumed to be constituted as a‘tradition’ or ‘project’. This thought owes much to Alasdair MacIntyre,24 but thereis a general tendency to see the national or political community as consisting of aculture of values or ideals. Thus Tamir defines a nation as a ‘community conscious


of its particularistic existence’, exhibiting ‘self-awareness of its distinctiveness’which is expressed in ‘culture’.25 Miller states that a ‘national identity requiresthat the people who share it should have in common. . . a commonpublic culture.’Such a culture ‘may be seen as a set of understandings about how a group of peopleis to conduct its life together’ including ‘political principles’, ‘social norms’ and‘cultural ideals’.26

The nation, orpatria, may be misleadingly characterised as a culture ofvalues.27 More generally a community may be sustained in the absence of anyshared culture or ‘tradition’. Members of a community may think of themselvesas belonging to and constituting a community without thinking of themselves asparticipating in a single culture or as being the inheritors of a tradition or ascontributing to a future ‘project’. Proper consideration of these important pointslies beyond the scope of this article. Let us assume, for the purposes of assessing thedistinctive account of Callan, that a political community can only be sustained bypatriotic identification with thepatria, and that thepatria is constituted, essentiallyor in the main, as an inherited tradition and project.

There are pressing questions. The first is, What grounds my engagement in aparticular tradition or project? That is, why do I find myself as the inheritor of thiscountry’s legacy? The seemingly obvious answer is that this is purely fortuitous.I am born with a particular national identity and I can no more repudiate thiscontingent brute fact about myself than I can deny that I was born to a particularset of parents. But of course whilst I cannot deny that these two personsare myparents I can repudiate themasmy parents in the sense of asserting that I do notcare about or value their lives, that I no longer look to them for parental guidance,that what happens to them is no concern of mine. Many a child sadly if understand-ably does that. Similarly whoever is born a Frenchman is not encumbered by hisbirthright; he can repudiate his Frenchness even whilst he is unable to deny that heis a Frenchman.

Three comments are in order. The first is that someone may be born andbrought up in circumstances such that he feels himself, with justice, to have noclear national identity or indeed to have a multiple identity. Consider someoneborn in France to English parents who is educated in France and yet retains hisEnglish, familial connections. Or again, someone may enjoy a peripatetic youthand, in virtue of living in several countries, consider himself rootless, a citizen ofno one particular country. Second it is not impossible that one should change one’snational identity. Someone, for instance, born in America may spend so long livingand working in United Kingdom, acquiring naturalised citizenship of that state, thatshe thinks of herself as having, in some sense, ceased to be American and becomeBritish. The point is that the identities acquired at birth are not changeable at willand remain, throughout our lives, importantly constitutive of who we are. Third, aswill become apparent later, it would be a mistake to assume that the identity oneacquires is a simple, homogeneous and unproblematic one, similarly shared by all

164 DAVID ARCHARD

who are born into a particular nationality. British Asians, for example, are unlikelyto think of themselves as British in the same way as other Britons.

Notwithstanding these qualifications, it is true that most of us find ourselves asthe inheritors of a particular national identity. A further question is then, why is oneunder an obligation to make the best of one’s tradition? This is not the same thingas asking, why make of something the best that it can be rather than the worst. Forto that question there seems to be too obvious a reply: it is better to improve thanto worsen. Rather the question is why one should make the best ofthis rather thanthat. The man who perfects his golf swing whilst neglecting his work and familyhas no defence in the assertion, ‘a better golf swing is preferable to a worse one’.Even if I am the inheritor of a tradition and recognise this fact about myself whyshould I not be indifferent to the tradition and choose to devote myself instead tomaking myself a better philosopher, a better friend, a better teacher, or a bettergolfer.

Grant that a national tradition or project can be improved and that it is better,all things considered, for that project to be improved. It is still an open questionwhether I, as someone who is in a position to improve it, am under an obligationto engage in that task of improvement rather than devoting my energies to otherameliorative tasks. I could redecorate my garden shed and it would be a bettergarden shed for being redecorated. It does not follow – so long as there are otherand possibly more important things I could improve – that shed redecoration isobligatory. Alasdair MacIntyre is perfectly right when he says that however much Imay admire all things French I cannot become a French patriot. ‘Only Frenchmencan be patriotic about France.’28 But what is also true is that not every Frenchmanhas to be patriotic about France. Callan has shown what it is to care for one’s owncountry. He has not shown why I should care. He has indicated what a constructivepatriotism might involve. He has not established that one needs to be a patriot.

One answer to this question of why one needs to be a patriot and care aboutone’s nation will not do. It may be the case – as both Callan and Galston think – thata liberal polity needs patriotic citizens. But that fact, even if true, cannot provide amotivation for individual citizens to be patriotic. I cannot love Britain simply andonly because I recognise that all Britons must love Britain if Britain is to displaygood liberal order. Similarly I do not support my football team, Dundee United,because I think it a good thing that Dundee United, like other football teams, hasloyal fans. I support Dundee United because it is the best if most unlucky teamin the Scottish Premier League being the victim of criminal refereeing decisionsand unfortunate injuries to key players, because of its particular sporting history,because it has the best fans in the world, and so on. There is here a philosophicallyfamiliar gap between the reason why it would be good for people to be motivatedin a certain way and the motivation itself which cannot be constituted by that veryreason.

I have argued that Callan has not shown why one should be a patriot evenif there is considerable merit in his characterisation of what it is to be a good


patriot.29 There is merit in his proposal for it avoids the otherwise sterile oppositionbetween a rootless cosmpolitan critical reason and Galston’s falsifying nationalsentimentalism. Concede that there is an answer to the question of why one shouldbe a patriot, grant that oneis under an obligation to make the best of one’s onetradition. There is a still further problem. How can one discharge this obligation,how does one make the best of one’s tradition?

At one point Callan comments that ‘Our ability to answer the question [‘whatis the best of this tradition?’] may be circumscribed by the critical resources of thetraditions of political thought and practice to which we have access. . . ’.30 Furtheron, he quotes Richard Rorty on the outrage liberal Americans feel at the hopelessand miserable lives led by young urban blacks. Callan glosses this as Rorty’s useof an American patriotism which is constituted as a ‘moral resource’, a patriotismdevoted to a ‘patria . . . in which justice must bedone’ despite the pull of racialor ethnic identity’.31 For Callan we must make the best of our tradition and doso within the terms of that tradition, that is by its own constitutive ideals, values,and aspirations. In the case of America those constitutive ideals are ones of justice,equality and liberty. American patriotism contains the moral resources to permitAmerican patriots to optimise their own legacy.

Yet this is purely serendipitous. If one’s own tradition or project had no suchmoral resources then one could not make the best of one’s own tradition. Or rather– and this is crucial – it would be possible to make the best of it only by the termsof that tradition, which need not be the best all things considered. If, for example,my tradition is one whose constitutive ‘ideals’ are those of natural hierarchy andauthority then, as a patriot, I can make the ‘best’ of it only by further refining thestructured inequality and submission to order which mypatria manifests. I canseek to make my feudal nation more perfectly feudal. But in making the best of myfeudal tradition I do not thereby make my nation better. I worsen it.

The point is this. Americans are not just lucky to have apatria whose idealsare a moral resource, which is a community in which ‘justice must be done’. Theirgood luck in being born American is judged good by standards which are not exclu-sively American. One does not have to be born American to recognise that equality,justice, and liberty are ideals which anypatria ought to have. One recognises thisby employing a critical reason which is independent of any particular tradition orresource of my own community to which I might have accesss. It is not as anAmerican that an American thinks himself lucky to have certain ideals constitutethe moral resource of the American tradition. It is as a moral reasoner.

Consider another example. John White has, in an article ‘Education andNationality’,32 defended a role for the teaching of our British national identity.Wary of endorsing all aspects of our Britishness he appeals to the idea that we might‘refashion’ our national identity, that Britishness might be ‘reconstituted’.33 At onepoint he says, ‘We . . . need toredefineBritishness in more acceptable terms’.34 Hecommends retaining, within our heritage, its emphasis upon freedom, individualityand autonomy, and its pronounced display of ‘decency’ towards outsiders.

166 DAVID ARCHARD

Now I leave to one side the very difficult question of who ‘we’ are who mightconstruct a new identity, redefine, reconstitute and refashion British identity. I alsoleave to one side the question ofhowthis might be possible, for it is moot just howmalleable national identities are. I leave these questions aside since John White’srecommendation is interesting in this present context for the fact that it presup-poses what is also at work in Eamonn Callan’s proposal, namely that there is anArchimedean point, outside traditions, identities, projects, and communities, fromwhich one can assess the constitutive elements of these traditions as worthy ideals,deserving to be promoted. To repeat, it is not as Britons that we know ourselveslucky to have decency and freedom as part of what it means to be British. It is asindividuals who have critical moral reason as our resource.

IV

The relevant critical points here should not be laboured. The basic claim is fairlysimple. There is an unhappy tension between the demand that patriotism be taughtand the recognition that critical reason is somehow corrosive of the conditions forthe possibility of that teaching. The view that it is good to be patriotic, that it is ofbenefit to have citizens who love their country, is one that is defensible by criticalreason. Yet that defence cannot itself motivate people to be patriots. We are patriotsby not reasoning on the merits of our being so. We are patriots because we do notquestion whether we should be or not. We are enjoined as patriots to make thebest of our own tradition. Yet we can recognise that it is a tradition which is worthimproving, and we have the means to assess how best it might be improved, not bybeing patriots but by being critical moral reasoners. Patriots make the best of theirown tradition but it is not as patriots that they know what is best.

Hobsbawm said that historians cannot be nationalists, for nationalism requirestoo much belief in what is not the case. Callan says that a history in civic, thatis patriotic education, cannot be objective history, ‘historytout court’. Galstonargues that, by contrast with historytout court, ‘a civic education requires amore noble, moralizing history’. If we are to teach in this way we must select,exaggerate, forget, mythologize, fictionalise, and lie. Yet the telos of educationis surely truth, its regulative ideals those of critical reason. An education whichconsciously teaches patriotism is arguably unworthy of its calling. An educationwhich is faifthful to the ideal of rootless critical reason cannot teach patriotism. Aneducation which forgets what it is doing when it teaches patriotism is arguably noeducation at all.

Is there no way beyond this dilemma? It certainly seems hard to survive in anyconscious awareness of the terms of the dilemma. In a recent piece Yael Tamir hastried to defend a compartmentalization of belief.35 Acknowledging that nationalidentities are, and need to be, sustained by historical myths and forgetfulness, Tamirargues that there may, nevertheless, be good reasons for taking steps to acquire (orretain) false beliefs. If it is rational to be a patriot it may be rational to accept some


things on less than rational grounds. Yet the success of this strategy requires thatone not recognise that one believes a falsehood. Moreover the ability to believewhat is not true must operate only in the area where holding and acting on suchbelief is functional. It must not be a general cognitive failing. The only way thiscan be done is by a ‘compartmentalization’ of belief. In some areas I should believewhat is rationally warranted; in others I should believe what is false because so tobelieve is functionally beneficial. Yet it seems evident that such compartmental-ization is inherently unstable. The false beliefs in one ‘compartment’ are likely toconflict with the true beliefs in the other. Any inspection of which beliefs oughtto be believed because true and which ought to be believed because, despite theirfalsehood, belief in them serves valued ends can only expose the latter as false anderode the grounds for holding them.

One might – to take another tack – argue that one can be faithful to one’s owntradition without betraying the terms of basic, universal human morality. Thus anAmerican can make the best of that which is Americanand realise ideals – ofequality and liberty – which transcend America. This is because a minimal, ‘thin’morality of universal scope is embedded in the maximal, ‘thick’, morality which isconstitutive of the American, British, French, or whatever national tradition. Thisis Michael Walzer’s claim.36 But it is also a pledge of faith in the capacity of allcultures, all locally constitutedpatriae, to display, in some form and to some extent,universal human values. Where that capacity is absent from a particular societyinternal criticism ofits morality, making the best ofits tradition, is exhausted beforethese minimal, universal values are or can be broached.37 Moreover the existenceof some kind of division between a universal and a particular morality provides thebasis for tension: By what standards is a tradition criticised, immanently by its ownor by those which are common to all traditions? Is a tradition the best instantiationof that universal morality or could it be improved?

V

The probem is this. The liberal polity, if it is to survive, requires that its citizenspatriotically identify with one another and with the project which that polity repre-sents. Yet, if we teach patriotism civic education betrays the ideals which, arguably,are constitutive of any proper education, chiefly a commitment to the standards ofcritical reason. Perhaps the way forward lies in recognising that we should notteach patriotism because we do not need to. Two facts are relevant here. The firstis that we are members of ourpatria in advance of our education. The second isthat any education must be particularistic in ways that, without explicitly teachingit, favour the acquisition of patriotism.

First, it is hard not to care about who we are and, in as much as our nationality isa constitutive part of our identity, we care about our nationality. David Miller thinksthat our nationality is ‘an essential part of our identity’,38 and Tamir also believesthat ‘membership in a nation is a constitutive factor of personal identity’.39 These

168 DAVID ARCHARD

are empirical claims. It is a further psychological fact about human beings that weseek to represent and understand what we are and have done in the best possiblelight. No one is capable of examining herself and her own history with ruthless,dispassionate and unremitting honesty. We do not see this as a defect of reasonbut rather as the endearing immodesty of fallible creatures who must survive in adifficult world. Enduring and systematic self-deception in respect of some majorpersonal failing, or a blindness to one’s own serious misdeeds, would rightly attractcriticism. But a failure to depict every wart in one’s own self-portrait should not.

Second it is true that in a very obvious sense every particular state-basededucation teaches a national, though not a nationalist, curriculum. Thus the educa-tion of British children teaches them about the history of Britain – the lives ofBritish people, the factors that shaped and made the present Britain, the variousconstitutive periods, key events and major figures of that history. It teaches them,in geography, about their particular environment, its distinctive characteristics andspatial configuration, natural resources, population distribution, and outstandingfeatures. It teaches them their language and its culture, its literary heritage and in sodoing, of course, introduces them to writers, artists and musicians who have them-selves celebrated, recorded, and reflected upon, that history and environment.40 Arestriction in scope as to what is taught is understandable and defensible inasmuchas one is teaching the members of this particular society, its future citizens. Such arestriction does not, of itself, amount to an unconditional or blinkered endorsement.One can teach the history or culture of a nation in a manner that is scrupulouslyhonest and dispassionate.

We care about who we are and any particular education tells us who we are.It is not that there is any problematic obligation to make the best of what is one’sown. Rather it is an understandable and brute fact about us that we do. Educationplays its proper part not in teaching us to be patriots but in teaching us what itis that we are, as we may be so inclined by our natures to be, patriotic about. Itdoes not commend our identity to us so much as clarify that identity for our ownextra-curricular commendation.

It is perhaps worth adding that education does not, here, do anything remark-able. Our assimilation of a particular national identity is accomplished by manymundane, quotidian factors in our environment. We are constantly reminded ofour Britishness by myriad daily occurrences and circumstances: what is reportedand given priority in our newspapers and television; the presumed identificationwith national sporting representatives; the prevalence of flags, symbols, and otheremblems of nationality in public spaces; the accepted and barely noticed rituals,events and ceremonies of Britishness. In this respect we live, breathe, and uncon-sciously practise a national identity which is ‘flagged’ in numerous ordinary waysevery day. Such nationalism is ‘banal’.41


VI

There are at least two problems with the suggested approach which need to beconsidered. The first is whether or not clarity about what is one’s own will not,at some point, lead one to disown one’spatria. It is, of course, consistent withbeing a patriot that one should regret or feel guilt for the actions of one’spatria.One is no less a lover of something for the recognition of the loved one’s errors.Indeed one cares more for the failings of something or someone one cares about.Yet Callan cites the recommendation that Americans honestly confront their pasthistory of racial brutality and degradation. He comments that the ‘unqualifiedrevulsion towards the past’ elicited by such a ‘morally critical approach’ is incon-sistent with the requirement that citizens feel themselves to be united in an ethicallyvaluable future project of national progress. Against a background of ‘history asmoral wasteland’ there can be no rational belief in such progress.42

Of course it is unlikely that any national history is an unrelieved moral waste-land. Against the background of general social failure there are stories to be toldof individual heroism and integrity. In such tales will be found the meagre butimportant resources for a celebration of what it is possible for a nation to be.Consider the many isolated, if by no means prevalent, instances of courageousassistance offered Jews by ordinary Germans during the Holocaust. Moreover,moral redemption is never beyond an individual. Nor should it be considered sofor a nation.

There are limits. We all live in the constant and unavoidable tension betweenwhat we are, have been, and can be, and what we ought to be. At the limit wemay recognise that this tension is unbearable and that we must abandon one ofthe elements which constitute it. Let me cite two examples where the teachingof history is at odds with the self-understanding of members of a tradition, thefirst from Northern Ireland and the second from South Africa. The Battle of theBoyne, 1689, is celebrated annually by Northern Ireland’s Unionist populationas the victory of religious liberty over Catholic, and alien, tyranny. In fact thevictorious William IV was backed by the Pope, and the war, in which the battlefigured, had more to do with European dynastic struggles than general politicalideals. There used to hang in Stormont, the site of the Northern Ireland Parliament,a painting believed to be by Van der Muelen showing William being blessed by anallegorical Pope. In the Thirties it was slashed by Protestants and removed to thevaults.43 In remarkably similar fashion Eugene Terreblanche and members of theneo-facist Afrikaans Resistance Movement disrupted a conference in March 1979at which a leading South African historian was about to deliver a paper sceptical ofclaims made concerning the Covenant, and tarred and feathered the speaker.44 The1838 Covenant is celebrated as a key emblematic moment of Afrikaner history, yetmany of the important claims made in celebration of it are false or exaggerated.

In these two instances the particular terms of an identity could only be preservedby the attempted literal destruction of the truth. A civic education should not

170 DAVID ARCHARD

sanitize or sentimentalise a national past for fear of provoking such reactions.Nor should it do so – to move to the other pole of the tension between truthand communal self-understanding – for fear that the truth will alienate, and thatindividuals will abandon theirpatria. Patriotism must have its limit, and that isgiven when making the best of one’s ownpatria is not good enough. Someonemay justifiably feel that she must renounce her own nation because it cannot beimproved or because such improvement as can be made is morally not worth theeffort. Education can and should play its honest part in making that possible.

The second problem with the approach suggested is one that does not appearto be acknowledged by either Galston or Callan. Their failure to do so is signalledby their continuous assumption that the tradition, project, history, or culture, whichmust be optimally represented or maximally improved, is singular. The talk is of‘a’ or ‘this’ tradition. Yet such an assumption is problematic for two importantand interrelated reasons. First, we all have several identities. We are members ofnations, but also members of racial, religious, cultural, regional, civic, economic,and other groupings. Our nationality is but one element of an heterogeneous iden-tity. It need not be the most important element, nor need it be consistent with theother elements. Second, a national identity may itself be multiple and fractured.Consider what it is to be South African or Northern Irish. A Black Briton conceivesof his identity in an essentially different way from a white Briton. As may a blackAmerican and a white American. In sum, our nature as individuals today is markedby a simultaneous fragmentation and proliferation of identities. As Michael Walzermarvellously expresses it, ‘There still are boundaries, but they are blurred by all thecrossings. We still know ourselves to be this or that, but the knowledge is uncertain,for we are also thisand that’.45

To be fair Callan sees the problem in part when he speaks of how African-Americans may feel alienated from a culture which appears to them as that oftheir privileged oppressors. He suggests that there are two responses, one a repu-diation of that culture, the other, more radical, the construction of an alternativeself-contained (Afrocentric) tradition and moral resource.46 He is critical of both,especially the latter, and insists that ‘what is best in the tradition is the rightfulinheritance of all children’.47 Yet that claim still presupposes that there is a single,homogeneous tradition of which all are legatees. The disaffection of African-Americans might be better expressed not as a rejection of ‘the’ inherited traditionor as the embracing of another tradition, but rather as internal to and divisive of‘the’ inheritance. Its nature is such that it represents a challenge to the very ideathat ‘the’ tradition is indeed unitary.

This problem has considerable educational import. For it undermines the simpleassumption that the curriculum can be constituted by a single unproblematichistory, or culture, or tradition. It has been argued that a civic education couldcontinue to be governed by the ideal of truth yet be truthful about the particularpatria in which the education is conducted. On this basis there would perhaps beno unresolvable tension between civic education and patriotism. Education could


recognise that people start out as the members of specific nations. Teaching anation’s future citizens about their nation need not of itself be a patriotic educationin the sense of being a blinkered or sentimental education. Education need notdispense with the standards of critical reason. Yet if education cannot presume thesingleness of the tradition it seeks to pass on then it cannot play the suggested role.This, to repeat, was not the patriotic commendation of a tradition but merely theclarification of a tradition whose members would, independently of that education,be disposed to care for.

Both Callan and Galston saw the need for civic education to be centrifugal, tosecure an integration of the citizenry in the face of pluralism, the centripetal anddivisive pull in the direction of the various attachments and identities citizens havein a modern society. If that pluralism does in fact infect the very terms of our sharedmembership of thepatria, the otherwise simple assumption of all being at least co-nationals, then the choices are stark. Either a civic education must teach, in theface of difference, that there is onepatria. Or it should accommodate differenceby representing thatpatria, its tradition, culture and history as multiple. This, ofcourse, could be accomplished by a literal separation of schooling or by importingheterogeneity into the common curriculum.

Whatever the choice made there can be no return to the simple pieties of thepamphlet from which I quoted at the outset. I remarked upon its unabashed confi-dence in the rightness both of its motivating patrioitsm and of the teaching of thispatriotism. That confidence is no longer with us. Nor can it now be recovered. Oncethe ground on which such patriotism, and its teaching, stood has been revealed asuneven, shifting, fractured by fault lines, it cannot simply be reconstituted. Or, atleast, education cannot play any part in doing so and remain true to its constitutiveideals of critical reason.

Notes1 Board of Education, Welsh Department: 1916,Patriotism. Suggestions to Local Education Author-ities & Teachers in Wales Regarding the Teaching of Patriotism, HMSO, London.2 Archard, David: 1995, ‘Political Philosophy and the Concept of the Nation’,Journal of ValueInquiry 29, 379–392.3 Miller, David: 1995,On Nationality, Clarendon Press, Oxford; Tamir, Yael: 1993,Liberal Nation-alism, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ; Buchanan, Allen: 1991,Secession, Westview Press,Boulder, Co.; Taylor, Charles: ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Amy Gutman (ed.),Multiculturalismand the “Politics of Recognition”, Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp. 25–73; Walzer, Michael:1983,Spheres of Justice, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, Chapter 2 ‘Membership’.4 Gellner, Ernest: 1964,Thought and Change, Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, London, p. 149.5 Gellner, Ernest: 1983,Nations and Nationalism, Oxford, p. 1.6 Smith, A. D.: 1971,Theories of Nationalism, Duckworth, London, p. 21.7 Considerations on Representative Governmentin John Stuart Mill,Three Essays, Oxford Univer-sity Press, Oxford, pp. 381–382.8 Liberal Nationalism, p. 118.9 Ibid., p. 163.10 ‘In What Sense Must Socialism be Communitarian?’Social Philosophy and Policy6 (1988), 51–

172 DAVID ARCHARD

73; ‘The Ethical Significance of Nationality’,Ethics98(1988), 647–662; ‘In Defence of Nationality’,Journal of Applied Philosophy10 (1993), 3–16.11 On Nationality, pp. 96–98.12 Scruton, Roger: 1990, ‘In Defence of the Nation’, in J.C.D. Clark (ed.),Ideas and Politics inModern Britain, Macmillan, London, pp. 53–86, and reprinted in hisThe Philosopher on DoverBeach, Carcanet, Manchester, 1990.13 Galston, William: 1991,Liberal Purposes: Goods. Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State,Cambridge, pp. 243–244.14 Callan, Eamonn: 1997,Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy, Oxford,p. 106.15 Ibid., pp. 105–108.16 Ibid., p. 111.17 Ibid., p. 112.18 Ibid., p. 113.19 Ibid., p. 119.20 Hobsbawm, E. J.: 1990,Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality,Cambridge, p. 12.21 Creating Citizens, p. 122.22 Ibid., p. 123.23 Jürgen Habermas has famously offered an influential defence, in the German context, of ‘consti-tutional patriotism’, loyalty to the liberal democratic principles of the postwar constitution; see his‘Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe’,Praxi International12 (1992), 1–19.24 See hisIs Patriotism a Virtue?, The Lindley Lecture, The University of Kansas, 1984.25 Liberal Nationalism, pp. 65 and 66.26 On Nationality, pp. 25–26.27 I argue this in my ‘Nationalism and political theory’, in Noel O’Sullivan (ed.),Political Theoryin Transition, UCL Press, London, forthcoming 1999.28 MacIntyre, Alasdair: 1984,Is Patriotism a Virtue?, The Lindley Lecture, The University ofKansas, p. 4.29 I endorse something very like his own ideal of making the best of one’s own tradition in my,‘Three Ways to be a Good Patriot’,Public Affairs Quarterly9(2) (April 1995), 101–113.30 Creating Citizens, p. 119.31 Ibid., pp. 130–131.32 White, John: 1996, ‘Education and Nationality’,Journal of Philosophy of Education30(3), 327–343.33 Ibid., pp. 336 and 337.34 Ibid., p. 335, my emphasis.35 Tamir, Yael: 1996, ‘Reconstructing the Landscape of Imagination’, in Simon Caney, DavidGeorge and Peter Jones (eds.),National Rights, International Obligations, Westview Press, Oxford,pp. 84–101, at pp. 94–98.36 Walzer, Michael: 1994,Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, University ofNotre Dame Press, Notre Dame.37 See Walzer’s much-cited discussion of Indian caste society in hisSpheres of Justice, A Defenceof Pluralism and Equality, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1983, pp. 312–316.38 Miller, On Nationality, p. 10.39 Tamir,Liberal Nationalism, p. 73.40 See, for instance, the sections on History and English inThe National Curriculum, Departmentof Education, HMSO, London.41 Billig, Michael: 1995,Banal Nationalism, Sage, London.42 Creating Citizens, p. 99.


43 The painting is reproduced, and story of its slashing recounted, besides an article by Roy Porteron the real and mythical significance of the Battle of the Boyne,The Observer, 12 July 1998, p. 31.44 Thompson, Leonard: 1985,The Political Mythology of Apartheid, Yale University Press, NewHaven and London, pp. 213–214.45 Walzer, Michael: 1997,On Toleration, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, p. 90.46 Creating Citzens, §36 ‘Whose Tradition?’47 Ibid., p. 125.

Documents

Archard - Should We Teach Patriotism