What is Patriotism? describe in detail.

Since patriotism is a complex and dangerous word, we must give some care to definition. But not too much care, for like all the important political words, it cannot be protected against the vicissitudes of history and passion; and not the wrong kind of care either, for the word comes not from the laboratory but from universal meaning to it, but we can describe a nucleus of meanings.

At its core, patriotism means love of one’s home place, and of the familiar things and scenes associated with the home place. In this sense, patriotism is one of the basic human sentiments. If not a natural tendency in the species, it is at least a proclivity produced by realities basic to human life, for territoriality, along with family, has always been a primary associative bond. We become devoted to the people, places and ways that nurture us, and what is familiar and nurturing seems also natural and right. This is the root of patriotism.

Furthermore, we are an all subject to the immense power of habit, and patriotism has habit in its service. Even if we leave the home place for a larger world, finding delight in its variety and novelty, we delight as much in returning to familiar things. The theme-of homecoming is the central motif of patriotic discourse, as old and as deep as the return of Odysseus from Troy, and the feeling is always the same:

When we saw the top of the mountain from Albuquerque we wondered if it was our mountain, and we felt like talking to the ground, we loved it so and some of the old men and women cried with joy when they reached their homes.

The other side of the case is the melancholy figure of the lone wanderer, or of the Stoic whose “my home is everywhere” meant he had a home nowhere.

To be a patriot is to have a patrimony; or, perhaps more accurately, the patriot is one who is grateful for a legacy and recognizes that the legacy makes him a debtor. There is a whole way of being in the world, captured best by the word reverence, which defines life by its debts; one is what one owes, what one acknowledges as a rightful debt: or obligation. The patriot moves within that mentality. The gift of land, people, language, gods memories, and customs, which is the patrimony of the patriot, defines what he or she is. Patrimony is mixed with person; the two are barely separable. The very tone and rhythm of a life, the shapes of perception, the texture of its homes and fears come from membership in a territorially rooted group. The conscious patriot is one who feels deeply indebted for these gifts, grateful to the people and places through which they come, and determined to defend the legacy against enemies and pass it unspoiled to those who will come after.

But such primary experiences are nearly inaccessible to us. We are not taught to define our lives by our debts and legacies, but by our rights and opportunities. Robert Frost’s stark line, “This land was ours, before we were the land’s,” condenses the whole story of American patriotism. We do not and cannot love the land the way the Greek and Navaho loved theirs. The graves of some of our ancestors are here, to be sure, but most of us would be hard pressed to find them: name and locate the graves of your great-grandparents. The land was not granted to us in trust by a Great Spirit, nor are there in this land a thousand places sacred to lesser deities. Having purged ourselves of pantheism, we do not dwell in a realm alive with sacred groves and fountains.

We are all doctrinal monotheists and our only patriotic god is the god of battles. We took the land from others whom we regarded as of no account. The land itself we saw a resource for comfort and power available to all who had the strength to take it. Among us, only persons (artificial as well as natural) have rights. The homestead has none. We may buy, sell, and use it as we wish. It has no claims we need heed or even hear. Still today, and even in the ecology movement, the same attitude prevails: Save our Coast. Still possession, not union and stewardship.

Perhaps this lack of natural patriotism is some part of the explanation of American restlessness and rootessness. (4) When Europeans first came to this land they saw nothing but savages in a howling wilderness, both of which had to be conquered. Seeking neither welcome nor permission from those already here, they imposed their alien god and ways on the “new land”. That original act of conquest and sacrilege was repeated innumerable times as the wave rolled west, until now the very land accuses the intruders. There can be no experience of homecoming without welcome, and we shall not feel welcome here until we learn how to coming to understand this is one of the few hopeful signs for American patriotism.

Perhaps it is impossible to know whether the nature of the conquest helped produce American restlessness and rootless ness, but it is certain that the restlessness and rootless ness in their turn make a natural patriotism nearly impossible. The seeds of patriotism can germinate even on the stoniest ground, but they must have time to put down roots. We are a nation on the go, always moving, and always with somewhere left to move to. Many of us now even have mobile homes, with no roots in the earth at all. The purpose of life is to get ahead, and getting ahead means leaving others behind—an outlook, I think, which makes us distinctive among the nomadic peoples. There is little piety toward the past and the future is something to be conquered. Ages and generations of care are required for the nurturing of that primary patriotism of place which has been a treasured and defining experience of most humankind. In recent American letters, perhaps only William Faulkner, Robert Frost, and Edmund Wilson wrote in the language of natural patriotism—and Wilson became querulous toward the end. We are a people to whom the experience of displacement is so natural that we do not know we are displaced and it is hard for us to appreciate how desolating the experience can be for others. The following words were written by a Laotian poet pleading for a way of life now destroyed by American bombs:

Pity—our houses, rice-fields, inheritance—we must abandon. The rice-fields will grow jungles. They will become a wild place filled with tigers. Have pity; the lands, the ponds with fish, everything; pity the bathing hole where no one will come to swim and muddy the cool waters. Pity the crabs, fish, game, bamboo shoots; our kind of food. Sorrow for the fruit trees we planted in the garden and around the village, the clumps of large and small bamboo; have pity...The day does not exist, when we will forget.

Can we for whom “relocation” means moving elsewhere is the pursuit of income and opportunity understand this? Have we found satisfactory substitutes for it in batting averages, or color television or flights to the moon?

In sum, then, that kind of patriotism which Tocqueville called instinctive is not available to us. (7) There is no way to measure the weight of this loss, but if instinctive patriotism is the basic urge I think it is, then the loss is heavy. Surely, human beings can feel the lack of something they need even though they might never have had it. To feel the loss of something it is not necessary first to have had that thing. (Consider “love”, for example, which many psychologists say we all need, even though many of us have never had it.) The trouble is that when a deprivation is of this sort the victim may not interpret his condition correctly: people attempted all sorts of cures for goiter before they learned about iodine. Not knowing what it is one nee one mistake symptoms for the cause, and tries to fill the need through harmful substitutes for the real thing. Perhaps this is the case with us.

Just one step removed from land patriotism is patriotism of the city. Both center on the idea and sentiment of home and nurture. Both acknowledge that they foundation of life is debt. Both shape individual life by reference to the common and familiar things. Their only important difference is in the object of attachment. The city is the creation of human being and is in that obvious sense artificial the image of an ideal, while the land, even when altered by labour and love remains fundamentally the work of nature. The supreme expression of city patriotism is to be found in Pericles’ eulogy for the Athenian dead, and a study of that discourse will teach one all that can be learned about the subject.

Certainly city patriotism can be as intense as patriotism of the land. Machiavelli cared more for his city than for his own soul. And Fustel de Coulanges’ book on The Ancient City describes how much of human life could be founded on the city’s goods, exhibited in the city’s temples and public spaces, and protected by the city’s walls. Each family had its private home and hearth, but the city was a second home, made by all and common to all. City patriotism was profoundly “social” in its orientations: Socrates did not like to leave Athens for even a day in the country because he could not talk with trees.

City patriotism, then, is not profoundly different from land patriotism, though it is a step beyond it in the direction of the artificial and the ideal. Like land patriotism, it too is declining. In the times when cities were few, they were precious to the citizens by reason of their very artificiality. A small man-made thing protected by its walls from the vast wilderness without, the city nourished a life which was distinctively human. As time went on, the works of the humankind appeared everywhere, becoming less valuable as they became more common. That is true the world over. In the United States, in addition, cities have been from the beginning products largely of the impulse of profit and hustle, owing little to the sacred and the traditional. Hence, there is as little of city patriotism among us as there is of the ancient patriotism of place. Furthermore, the people and shapes, as well as the monuments and traditions, of our cities change so rapidly that citizens have no time to form solid and enduring attachments. Even the sports teams, closest modern equivalent to the gods of the ancient city, can be moved by a few million dollars.