True Patriot Love (2 page)

To be a patriot in the modern age is to be in a perpetual argument with cosmopolitans. The best argument on the cosmopolitan side is that no allegiance—certainly no national identity—ought to claim all of a person. A true patriot should learn from these arguments. The frontiers of a country should never be the frontiers of a person’s world. Those unwilling to learn from languages, cultures and traditions beyond the boundaries of their own are in prison, even if they may not notice the bars. From a moral point of view, the strength of the cosmopolitan view is its
association with the universal, as opposed to the merely national. The claim of one’s country should never be total. A true patriot can always admit the limitations of home. A true patriot can always see the place for what it is.

The best argument on the patriot’s side is that cosmopolitan attachments depend on the security countries provide. Cosmopolitanism is the privilege of those with a passport, the luxury enjoyed by those with a country of their own. Those who don’t think they need a country, those who believe they are beyond the local attachments of a national state, ought to visit a refugee camp. There they will discover people dying, sometimes literally, to get into a country they can call their own. Statelessness is the very definition of modern hell. Just ask illegal immigrants or people without papers what they want. They want a country.

Countries not only protect us; they provide us with legitimate order. Tyrannies provide the order without the legitimacy. Democracies engender love—and therefore legitimacy—because they ask their citizens to participate in public affairs. The rituals of political participation— voting, campaigning, raising money, standing as a candidate—ought to leave us feeling that we live in a public world that, however imperfectly, reflects the popular sovereignty we exercise with others.

We may not like the decisions that are made in our name, but we know we have a way to change them, and we know who can be held responsible for the mistakes made
in our name. The people who make the decisions are no better and no worse than we are. When we feel that the authority exercised in our name is legitimate, we can live with the assurance that the country will cohere and survive into the future. Countries provide us with public meaning, with continuity in time.

To love anyone is to feel responsible for them, to want to watch over and keep them from harm. To love a country is to feel the same, to feel responsible for public affairs, to feel angry when things are going badly, to feel good when things are going well and, above all, to feel that you have some small role in shaping the course of public affairs.

Those who shelter in the protection of their country, those who benefit from legitimate authority, have no obligation to love their country. Attempts have been made to compel people to display their patriotism. The result has been tyranny. Like all forms of love, love of country must be free, or it is nothing but a sham.

All the same, those who freely love their country often feel themselves to be in a retrograde minority. In the face of all the people who believe love of country old-fashioned, or downright dangerous, patriots have to stand up for their convictions. If you are a patriot in the modern world, you have some explaining to do.

You also should be ready to laugh at yourself. There is much, after all, that is ridiculous about patriotism. Parodies of patriotism—Mounties singing “I’m a lumber-jack
and I’m okay”—sometimes have more life in them than the national anthem. Then there is the embarrassment of standing at attention with fellow citizens you neither like nor trust. You can almost hear them thinking the country would be a better place if it had fewer people like you in it. Yet you stand together, side by side. Solidarity always entails moments like these. Love of country can’t endure unless it sees the ironic side of itself.

Yet only so much irony is possible, because love of country is a sentimental and sincere emotion—one that can’t afford to be too complicated before it just falls apart. With love of country, you have to keep it simple. You love what you love, and that’s good enough for you.

Still, you may also know a lot of things about your country that you have trouble admitting. Patriotism can be expressed in the conditional. If only we had decent leadership. If only we could dig ourselves out of our debts. If only we could extricate ourselves from this war.

People love their country despite a lot of things, despite the president, despite the prime minister, despite some recent scandal, embarrassment, war, famine, conflict, economic disaster. They love it because they haven’t given up on it. They love it because of its unrealized possibilities.

We love our country not because we think it is perfect or even satisfactory, but because we think it can change for the better. Love of country requires us to be forgiving of the way things are. Leaders come and go. The people who
speak on behalf of the country sometimes let us down. The country itself changes all the time, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, yet the potential for its redemption endures. This same potential endures in each of us.

A country’s past is rarely always glorious, and a true patriot is obliged to be truthful, to acknowledge the dark with the light. The morality of patriotism turns on being both truthful and hopeful at the same time: truthful about the dark passages, hopeful that the light passages promise better days in the future.

We never love a country just for what it is. We love it for what it might yet become. The same is true for the love we bear ourselves. Love is always rooted in hope.

This is a romantic view of love of country. Sociological accounts of what a country is miss out on the passion that holds countries together and inspires their moments of greatness. This passion is fundamentally a faith in the country’s future. In the romantic view, the country that actually exists is a shadow of what it could be. The real country, the object of love and longing, is an imagined place on the horizon that we hope to reach one day, if we can marshal sufficient courage, faith and determination. From this idea of love comes a romantic idea of politics.
According to this idea, the purpose of our political life as a people is to narrow the gap between the land we live in and the land we dream of.

The country in question for me has always been Canada. It is an invented place, created by political leaders one hundred and forty odd years ago, rather than emerging out of the common soil of a shared language and single ethnic origin. Since everything about Canada was invented, everything about it must be reimagined over and over again, lest its founding myths lose their hold on loyalty and faith.

The fundamental challenge of being Canadian is to believe in ourselves. We look in the mirror and see an uncertain and diminished reflection. The story we tell about ourselves is cast in terms of survival and endurance, not triumph. We feel we are lucky to be still here. Given how rich and spacious our land is, given how gently the forces of history have dealt with us, our sense of uncertainty is a puzzle even to ourselves.

We have trouble believing in ourselves because we live next door to a country that has mythic dimensions. It is also an invented country, but its act of self-invention has proven to be the most stupendously successful in history. Canadians can only envy the scriptural sublime of America’s Founding Fathers and the self-confidence that the American faith seems to engender in every citizen. In our neighbours’ infuriating sense of self-importance, Canadians glimpse how love of country penetrates the souls of its citizens, how
profoundly it shapes the character of a people. We wonder why such faith does not inhabit our own souls.

Next to the American experiment, Canada’s very identity can appear to be nothing more than what Sigmund Freud once called the narcissism of minor difference. After all, we look like them. We buy the same cars. We dress and talk the same way. We holiday in the same places. We root for the same baseball and football teams. Our differences appear minor and our emphasis upon their importance can seem self-absorbed and trivial. We care more than we should about the distinctive vowel sounds that mark out a Canadian speaking in an American crowd. We care more than we like to admit about beating the Americans at hockey. We know these are small things, but we invest them with defining significance.

We are right to do so. While some of our differences count as minor, others are major indeed. They rebelled against the British. We stayed loyal. They founded a republic. We sought responsible government within the empire. We speak French. They don’t.

We owe the Americans much—it’s hard to imagine how we could have remained either free or independent had they not too been a free and independent people. But our freedom is different, both in general and in detail: no right to bear arms, north of the 49th, and no capital punishment either. They had the Wild West. We had the Mounties. Rights that are still being fought for south of the border—public
health care, for example—have been ours for a generation. A woman’s right to choose is secure here; there it remains contested ground. These differences are major, and the struggle to maintain them, while pursuing ever deeper integration with their richer economy, is the enduring challenge, not just of our identity but of our statecraft.

Establishing a uniting national myth beside a nation as powerful and as supremely gifted at myth making as the United States is never going to be easy. The country that gave us Hollywood and Disneyland casts a glare that makes it hard to see the Canadian shape in the snow.

Besides, we cannot create a single myth, like the United States, because we have three competing ones, English Canadian, French Canadian and Aboriginal. Three peoples share a state without sharing the same sense of the country at all. It is small wonder, then, that we have never been sure we can continue to imagine a common future.

Nearly twenty percent of our citizens are also foreign born, from every country under the sun. Only Australia counts as many foreign-born nationals among her citizens. These Canadians frequently hold passports from other countries and import the attachments, passions and, occasionally, the ethnic and religious rivalries of their nations of birth. The loyalties of new Canadians are complex, transitional, sometimes divided. When granting them citizenship, their new country does not ask them to choose
Canada and renounce all others. Even so, new Canadians have turned out to be among the most devoted citizens in the country. Why? Because we remain a land of hope and opportunity, and new Canadians see in our unfinished destiny an image of their own unfinished destinies.

Despite these challenges, or because of them, most of us are quietly but intensely patriotic. Our nationalism exemplifies the paradox that feeling for a country increases with the difficulty of imagining it as a country at all.

Imagining what we share is not easy. Imagining this land is never just to imagine it as it appears to you alone. It is to imagine it as an Inuit person might see it, a vast white place where the only sign of Canada is the Mountie detachment in the snow-girt command post at the edge of the settlement. To imagine it as a citizen is to imagine it as a resident of Yellow Quill reservation in Saskatchewan would have had to imagine it, this Canada where two half-naked children died in a snow-covered field in the sub-Arctic darkness because their father tried to take the sick little girls to his parents and never made it, and all you can hope is that death was as mercilessly quick as the cold can make it. What does a resident of Yellow Quill imagine, what do we Canadians imagine our country to be, the morning we learn that children have perished in this way? It is surely more than just a tragic story of one family. It is a story about us.

To imagine Canada, you have to walk a mile in the moccasins of others. In other countries, where language, ethnicity and myths of origin are shared, less empathy is required and more simple identification, one citizen to the other, may be possible. Not with us. To imagine Canada as a citizen requires that you enter into the mind of someone who does not believe what you believe or share what matters to you.

You have to imagine the country as a Québécois might see it, a Québécois who never felt attachment to the flag, to Parliament, to the memories of sacrifice that move you, sometimes, to tears. This is a fellow citizen who voted
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in referendums in 1980 and 1995 to break up the country, or, as it was presented at the time, to negotiate a new relationship between a sovereign Quebec and the rest of Canada. These referendums were the defining crisis of our recent history. We came within an inch of dissolution. We are still absorbing the lessons of a near-death experience.

One of these lessons is that to survive as a country, we have to imagine what we have trouble understanding. We have no choice. A contract of mutual indifference between French and English will only defer the evil day. We must learn to live together now. The Québécois who lost the two referendums remain fellow citizens of Canada. They may not want to be here at all, and may still dream of independence one day. Yet we must all work together, if only until the next moment of rupture. Those Québécois will
have to understand the intensity of an attachment to Canada they do not feel themselves. We all have to understand, if not respect, the dream they live for. To be a citizen of Canada is to imagine the feelings of those who do not believe what we believe. We have to enter into these feelings if we want to keep the country together.

Imagining the feelings of those who disagree with you is one of the duties of citizenship we speak about least. Without the constant effort of imagining the world from the vantage point of races, languages and religions different from our own, we could not identify any common purposes as a country. Political deliberation would become a dialogue of the deaf. It’s hard to see how divided societies like ours could have survived without our shared ability to imagine our differences.

In Canada, empathy has to encompass thirty-three million people, with competing and conflicting myths of origin, spread across six time zones, in five distinct economic regions, speaking, at least at home, almost every language spoken in the world and, in public, two official languages. In spite of everything, we have managed to keep this project in being for one hundred and forty years. This is no mean feat and, in a world ravaged by difference, it is our example to the world.