I should move on to something more serious after last session.
Let’s talk about patriotism, nationalism, and possibly racism (since too often nationalism does lead to racism). I really do not believe in the reality of nations being homogeneous, ‘real’ entities that deserve loyalty. Perhaps it’s my own Buddhist perspective coming into play, but it’s impossible enough to pinpoint a true metaphysical self of a sentient person, let alone a nation. So when writers talk of a ‘nation’s courage’, or in Emerson’s words, ‘The look in its eyes” (he was writing about America) it makes me want to barf. Goethe once said that nationalistic feelings ‘are at their strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.’ And violent nationalistic feelings can be! As we read in AC Grayling:
Nationalists take certain unexceptionable desires and muddle them with unacceptable ones. We individually wish to run our own affairs; that is unexceptionable. Most of us value the culture which shaped our development and gave us our sense of personal and group identity; that too is unexceptionable. But the nationalist persuades us that the existence of other groups and cultures somehow puts these things at risk, and that the only way to protect them is to see ourselves as members of a distinct collective, defined by ethnicity, geography, or sameness of language or religion, and to build a wall around ourselves to keep out “foreigners”. It is not enough that the others are other; we have to see them as a threat at very least to “our way of life”, perhaps to our jobs, even to our daughters.
Personally, I feel no loyalty to any institution except those of a spiritual calling. I am hoping to find a spiritual grounding at a Buddhist temple called Bailin Temple in China in July/August this year. You could say that this is the only sort of institution I’ve ever been actively interested in. But even that can be fraught with difficulty. My dad goes a step further – as an anti-establishtarian, he holds no loyalty to spiritual institutions themselves!
I suppose in sport, patriotism/nationalism serve a purpose. But I’ve come across too many yobbos and bogens who are patriotic beyond reason.
Thanks for mentioning me being anti-establishmentarian, Raymond. It’s for the same reason (that I’m anti-establishmentarian, not that you made the mentioning – see, language can often be ambiguous) that I totally agree with what you wrote about nationalism. Some people might criticize me for not having tried to instill in you, during your grow-up process, patriotic feelings for the nations of Australia and China, to which you are affiliated for various secular reasons. Yet how you see this issue of ‘nationalism’ now as reflected in this post has convinced me that I did my part of parenting in the right way.