I've been working through a stack of academic articles I picked up in October last year; I'm behind in my reading this quarter, but today, oddly enough, the top article in my stack is "Towards a globally sensitive patriotism," written by Martha Nussbaum and published last summer in Daedalus. In the article, Nussbaum compares patriotism as it is expressed in several famous addresses. Normally, I wouldn't stray so far off the archaeological topic, but it just seems too fortuitous to pass up, as today is the inaugural day for the first African-American president, Barack Obama.
I do believe that the best of politics and patriotism is rooted in the past and looks to the future, and we as people who are drawn to the past shouldn't use it to look away from today's issues.
Nussbaum looks primarily at four politicians who at crisis points in their countries used patriotism as a underlying support for global justice. Among the addresses Nussbaum looks at are Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (1863: "...we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure"), and his Second Inaugural Address (1865: "With malice towards none, with charity towards all"); Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech (1963: "We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation"); Jawaharlal Nehru's "Tryst with Destiny" speech (1947: "Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart"). She doesn't quote from any Mohandas K. Gandhi speeches, but cites him, saying that the potency of Gandhi's patriotism is found in his actions, as for example, when in ending his famous fast in 1947, he turned to a Muslim cleric to ask for juice and bread.
Nussbaum notes that all of the orators used a call to patriotism to underpin a deep striving for global justice and an end to political strife.
Nussbaum concludes that a nation that "pursues goals that require self-interest needs to be able to appeal to patriotism, to draw on symbol and rhetoric, emotional memory and history... This is all the more true when a nation pursues not only internal justice but the goal of global justice as well."
The addresses are, thanks to the Internet, online—you can even listen to King and Nehru. Good reading today.
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