Three reasons to love your amazing & flawed country (yes, you)

If you consider yourself a citizen of the world, patriotism may seem quaint. Love of country made sense for your grandparents, but today it’s mostly for evangelical Christians and people in the heartland. Patriotism is like your varsity sports jacket from high school — best forgotten or stored in your parents’ basement. Why love your country when you’re so much bigger than that?

In this essay, I answer that question with three reasons: depolarizing politics, building collective will to face massive challenges, and maturing the citizenry.

1. Depolarizing politics

Today’s polarization isn’t about Left versus Right or Democrat versus Republican. It’s a clash of deeply held views about what it means to be human and live a good life. These worldviews, when held tightly — as they often are — make conversations about the future difficult, if not painful.

In Developmental Politics, Steve McIntosh describes three worldviews: the traditional, modern, and postmodern progressive.

• The traditional worldview, which is thousands of years old, holds heritage values, the “sense of being part of a nation that provides a moral example for the world.”
• The modern worldview holds liberal values around science, progress, freedom, and fairness. It arose through the Enlightenment a few hundred years ago.
• The postmodern progressive worldview, just decades old, holds caring values, stands up for history’s “victims,” and deconstructs the past.

To this list I’d add the warrior worldview, which arose before the traditional worldview. The warrior, lacking the capacity to take the perspective of others, uses unilateral power to force its will on the world.

All four worldviews exist today. All four are present and activated in American politics. If you look beneath the surface of major conflicts like vaccines, climate change, or abortion, you’ll find two or more worldviews clashing with great ferocity. That’s our polarization in a nutshell.

According to McIntosh, the way to depolarize politics is to help each worldview respect the virtues of the other worldviews. This isn’t easy, and it involves numerous tasks. One task is for people with primarily modern and postmodern worldviews to respect the positive parts of traditionalism. Not xenophobic patriotism, which is the negative pole of traditionalism, but healthy patriotism: providing a moral example for the world. (People with the warrior worldview can’t embrace traditionalism. As we’ll see, they need to grow into it).

In Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World, Lene Rachel Andersen makes a similar point. In place of worldviews, she speaks of cultural codes: “What the pre-modern [traditional] cultural code introduced and which we could never survive without today is the ability to unite in imagined communities, i.e. societies that are held together by a shared narrative, and through that, a sense of shared fate.” That’s why embracing traditionalism matters in any attempt to depolarize politics.

Yet doing this requires a bit of Aikido — blending with others for the sake of your future and theirs.

Returning to the metaphor of the varsity sports jacket, few adults feel excited about wearing theirs for a night out on the town. Similarly, modernists and postmodernists won’t agree to embrace the embarrassing parts of their grandparents’ traditionalism. But love of country is possible on their own terms.

Consider climate change. Modernists can champion the United States’s unique moral role in expanding clean technologies and investing in carbon tech. More audaciously, they might take a cue from Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future and persuade central banks to create a carbon coin that rewards Exxon and Shell for keeping oil in the ground and pay for it through cash created from “carbon quantitative easing.” Patriotic modernists can produce a lot of progress.

Meanwhile, progressives can shift into what Robert Kegan calls a reconstructive postmodernism around climate change. The first step is to acknowledge that their reverse patriotism (shame about American history and power) is a failed concept unlikely to heal anything. Then, they can take pride in the United States leading the way in caring for people of the future. Proponents of “longtermism” call this compassion for future generations. As Boston College professor David Storey suggests, patriotic progressives could call for compassion for future Americans. This is love of country, progressive style.

2. Building collective will to face massive challenges

The case of climate change illustrates an important point about depolarization. We don’t pursue it only for its own sake. We also do it because of what this can unleash: collective will for confronting massive challenges.

Learning to love your country on your own terms can produces results you care about. In particular, it helps you connect with the part of yourself that aims high. Life becomes not only about me, nor even about us: my family, my friends, my tribe. It expands to include all of us: my fellow citizens, even the ones I typically consider stupid or crazy. This worldcentric sensibility is the fuel that supports collective action on a large scale.

Loving your country on your terms makes ambitious ideas created by modern and postmodern thinkers palatable to a wider public. At the same time, it grounds those ideas in a deeper moral purpose that inspires the sense of goodness within everyone. In short, healthy patriotism creates more allies for a better future and puts a spring in everyone’s step.

3. Maturing the citizenry

As I’ve written elsewhere, preserving liberal democracy requires more than laws and policies. It also depends on citizens mature enough to manage political freedom responsibly. The January 6 attack on the Capitol was shocking but not surprising. When you combine demagogues, a Big Lie, and people captive to their emotions or following the crowd, this is what you get.

In the adult development field, we have names for the stages of maturity of the men and women who turned violent. Those who were subject to their emotions — who had no control of their anger and resentment — occupied a stage of maturity known as the self-sovereign mind or, to borrow Lene Rachel Andersen’s term, the Big Kid. Without this group, there is no mob and no violence. But those occupying the self-sovereign mind were not alone. Also present were people motivated by a tendency to conform. They weren’t subject to their emotions. They were subject to the opinions and values of people around them. These were socialized minds.

What was missing from the violent mob? People mature enough to neither get ruled by fury nor compelled by groupthink. We call these self-authorizing minds.

How does loving your country contribute to a more mature citizenry?

I can think of two ways. One concerns traditionalists, the other modernists and postmodern progressives.

Traditionalism, we’ve seen, contains positive and negative dimensions. The positive pole is a appreciation for your country’s virtues — healthy patriotism. The negative pole is xenophobia, rejection of science, and coerced conformity. One reason these negative dimensions are so widespread today is the the lack of support structures for healthy traditionalism. Teenagers spend more time looking at devices and fitting in socially than learning why it’s great to be an American. Moral education is rare outside of religious entities, and even there it doesn’t focus on the virtues of the nation. Meanwhile, Boys Scouts and Girls Scouts have been on the decline with nothing to fill their place. Instagram and Snap Chat do not a moral citizen make.

None of this is surprising given the leadership of the country. The people running most institutions, especially those responsible for investing societal resources, have predominantly modern and postmodern minds. They care about progress and social justice, not patriotism. Why invest in a worldview (traditionalism) you don’t value?

Things look much different when these modern and postmodern leaders start to love America — on their terms, publicly, and with pride. Now it makes sense to invest in young people learning the traditions, values, and virtues of their country. So they put time and money into inventing the scaffoldings, organizations, practices, scholarships, awards, narratives, and heroic journeys that build healthy traditional values.

As a result, when 15–25 year olds make their way through life, as always, with socialized minds, the values that they internalize shift, or at least broaden. Instead of merging with the latest teen fads, technologies, or progressive causes, they identify with America’s civic traditions, history, and culture (or, more likely, a bit of both). The democratic visions of Jefferson and Hamilton gain a foothold in these growing minds. So, too, do the efforts of Tubman and Douglass to close the gaps between these visions and reality. My country, warts and all — but also the dermatologist who burns those warts away. Hip hop is fine, but how about an immersion in America’s homegrown musical form, jazz? There are worse ways to spend young adulthood than learning from Ellington, Armstrong, and Vaughn how to respond to life’s miseries with resilience and elegance.

What I’ve just described, helping socialized minds socialize healthy patriotism, is one outcome of learning to love your country. A citizenry with positive traditional values is a more mature citizenry, one less likely to attack the Capitol than to honor the genius of the Constitution.

Then there are modernist and postmodernist minds. When they start loving their country, they also grow into more mature citizens. This maturity comes from developing a more complex mind.

Think about it. Over-identifying with a single worldview, while understandable and even predictable, is far from the height of human potential. A mind that is fixated on one set of values, whether modern or postmodern, lacks the capacity to put themselves in the shoes of the other without leaving their own shoes behind.

That’s the genius of the values integration that McIntosh and Andersen each propose in their own way. It forces an expansion of the mind. In McIntosh’s terms, the “transcendent purpose” of traditionalism is usually anathema to modern and postmodern minds. At the very minimum, it’s strange. Integrating this purpose into their own minds therefore expands their perspective taking. It takes what was strange and makes it familiar. This is the definition of putting yourself in another’s shoes and doing so without leaving yours behind. As McIntosh writes, “When faced with a positive-positive value polarity, the best way to advance the values of our preferred pole is to actually affirm the foundational values of the pole we oppose.” As I’ve just argued, it’s also a great way to grow your mind into a later stage of maturity.

Love isn’t free, so invest with others

Usually we say that love is free. But learning to love something that previously you despised or thought irrelevant, like a country, comes with a cost. What you surrender is a prior identity. The person who felt ashamed by America’s past or identified as a “global citizen” cannot survive this new love. It needs to be shed or, to use a different metaphor, demoted from core identity to subsidiary part.

Expanding your identity can also cost you relationships. The friends still subject to the perspectives you’ve made an object of awareness may feel threatened by the new you. This can be painful.

That’s why it’s important not to do this alone. Learning to love your country requires fellow travelers — people embracing similar purposes and experiencing similar pains. And it doesn’t hurt to have mentors and guides for the journey.

It takes a village to grow a patriot

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