Amor Patriae
Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters (an eight-issue series from DC that re-launches a classic cast of World War Two characters including Phantom Lady, The Human Bomb, Doll Man, and the Ray, among others) has me thinking about on differences between “patriotism” and, well, something BETTER than patriotism.
“Patriotism” has become an almost unredeemable term. The way people use this word, and the meanings associated with it, are unrecoverable in their brute violence. Patriotism is commonly defined as the love of one’s country, but in practice it has nothing to do with love - it is about dividing up “us” and “them” in order to identify “them” as traitors or enemies (often also slackers and homosexuals). It’s also about status - patriotism is a virtue that people display, a performance that signifies national identity, an invocation of a sacred aura that allows one to self-identify as “part” of something (in contrast to others who are “unpatriotic,” ungrateful, not part of the family, gay, etc.)
R.D. Laing (a radical psychiatrist famous during the 1960s) talks about the violence of family psychology in a way that illuminates these negative aspects of patriotism:
“A united ‘family’ exists only as long as each person acts in terms of its existence. Each person may then act on the other person to coerce him (by sympathy, blackmail, indebtedness, guilt, gratitude, or naked violence) into maintaining his interiorization of the group unchanged . . . If there is no external danger, then danger and terror have to be invented and maintained. Each person has to act on the others to maintain the nexus in them” (The Politics of Experience 87).
Laing’s argument is that a sense of “us” (among small or large social groups) is only established when each person experiences a sense of kinship with others, and also senses that others experience a similar sense of kinship as well. I may be able to call you my “brother,” but that doesn’t make us family - we become family (“us”) when you call me “brother” (or sister, or whatever) in return, when you can sense that I experience to you as kin, and vice versa. When there is a feedback loop of our mutual experience of “kinship,” we become “us.”
Laing also argues, however, that many social groups act to produce “us” through coercion. It sucks to feel isolated and alone - we like to feel like we’re part of groups, families, societies, and nations. Kinship eases isolation. Plus, it can be embarrassing (for both parties) to call someone “brother” when they do not feel brotherhood or kinship with you. (It becomes harder, somehow, to avoid giving change to a homeless person when he or she calls you “brother” or “sister,” right? Because suddenly, with the invocation of that word, NOT giving your change is a statement that you do NOT feel kinship, that you are overtly distancing yourself from brotherhood with another human being, rather than having the comfort to do so quietly and implicitly, as we do every day).
Many modes of manipulation can be deployed to force others to experience kinship, or to “maintain the interiorization of the group,” and these forms of violence define contemporary patriotism. Sympathy (although we have nothing in common, the person who died in that attack is an American, just like me), blackmail (if you’re really an American, you’ll turn over that list of communist sympathizers, if not, we’ll blacklist you), indebtedness and guilt (think of all the Americans who have given their lives to give you the freedom you take for granted), gratitude (I’m thankful to live in a society that lets me have freedom of speech, aren’t you?) and naked violence (if you speak out against the administration, you’ll lose your job, even if you are one of the best attorneys in the Justice Department). (That last one is pretty mild as “naked violence” goes, but you get the idea.) The point is that when confronted with any of these terror tactics, one must perform some affirmation in order to signify kinship, or you are “unpatriotic,” “an-American,” or simply “ungrateful,” all pathways which lead to excommunication or expulsion from the group.
Patriotism: You are not one of “us” anymore if you refuse to show me that you are part of the group when I demand it from you. Let freedom ring! And when there is no real “external” danger to unify us (communists, immigrants, terrorists), then “danger and terror have to be invented and maintained” (communists, immigrants, terrorists!)
How can this be called the “love” of one’s country? Where exactly is the “love” located in these forms of ideological violence? Again from Laing:
“Love and violence, properly speaking, are polar opposites. Love lets the other be, but with affection and concern. Violence attempts to constrain the other’s freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other’s existence or destiny. We are effectively destroying ourselves with violence masquerading as love.”
Is that what we call patriotism? Violence masquerading as love? Isn’t there some other option, some better form of patriotism that aspires to something greater than this?
I’ve started contrasting the term “patriotism” with the counter-notion of “amor patriae,” literally “the love of one’s country.” Ernst Kantorowicz notes that this concept emerges from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when “the love of country was not really tied to any country’s institutions or even national identity.” Hardt and Negri summarize his position:
“When Kantorowicz scratches beneath the surface of the notion of love of one’s country, he does not find nationalism but rather republican caritas or sympathetic-fellow-feeling, which transmutes into amor humanitatis, a love of humanity, exceeding any and all nations. Nationalism and - even more - the glorification of nationalist militarism is thus a distortion of this tradition of patriotic sentiments, a distortion that finds its logical culmination in the fascist regimes of the twentieth century” (Multitude 50).
Hardt and Negri then suggest that we should renew and regenerate the notion of “amor patriae” today, and that we must imagine new kinds of patriotic heroes who can “throw the surplus of their knowledges and skills into the construction of a common struggle against imperial power” (51).
Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters is a graphic fiction that literalizes the metaphorical struggle between patriotism and amor patriae. In the series, Uncle Sam (who is the embodiment of the “collective unconsciousness” of America) rises from the waters of the Mississippi River to reclaim the “story” of America from the “mathematicians of the anti-life equation” who are determined to manipulate and corrupt notions such as “freedom” and “liberty” and “security” in order to cultivate death and tyranny.
It’s a brilliant story.
On one level, the conflict is a fight between Sam and his Freedom Fighters against a mad android called Gonzo the Mechanical Bastard who has been elected President of the United States while masquerading as a popular Republican senator. The conflict, however, isn’t over money or petty power; it’s an ideological struggle over the “meaning” of America. Gonzo serves corporate and political special interests (and the anti-life equation, a fictional personification of the “fascism” H+N talk discuss above), and if he wins, “America” will become a force for “violence masquerading as love” (subjugation presented as freedom, imperialism presented as the spread of democracy, authoritarianism presented as security, etc.) Uncle Sam fights to make it possible for America to “mean” something else.
It’s a much better story than Civil War, because it grapples with the same themes and questions (including a metahuman registration act), but it follows through on the exploration of those themes with much greater depth and intelligence. When Sam says “you can’t arrest the Spirit of America” in issue #2, it has the kind of impact that it Captain America’s statements SHOULD have when he says the same kinds of things in Civil War. (In short, Uncle Sam is everything Captain America should be, if the Marvel writers could give him adequate depth of portrayal and motivation!)
I have more to say, but I need to switch over to my professional writing for the day! Maybe I’ll dig closer in another post…
“Patriotism” has become an almost unredeemable term. The way people use this word, and the meanings associated with it, are unrecoverable in their brute violence. Patriotism is commonly defined as the love of one’s country, but in practice it has nothing to do with love - it is about dividing up “us” and “them” in order to identify “them” as traitors or enemies (often also slackers and homosexuals). It’s also about status - patriotism is a virtue that people display, a performance that signifies national identity, an invocation of a sacred aura that allows one to self-identify as “part” of something (in contrast to others who are “unpatriotic,” ungrateful, not part of the family, gay, etc.)
R.D. Laing (a radical psychiatrist famous during the 1960s) talks about the violence of family psychology in a way that illuminates these negative aspects of patriotism:
“A united ‘family’ exists only as long as each person acts in terms of its existence. Each person may then act on the other person to coerce him (by sympathy, blackmail, indebtedness, guilt, gratitude, or naked violence) into maintaining his interiorization of the group unchanged . . . If there is no external danger, then danger and terror have to be invented and maintained. Each person has to act on the others to maintain the nexus in them” (The Politics of Experience 87).
Laing’s argument is that a sense of “us” (among small or large social groups) is only established when each person experiences a sense of kinship with others, and also senses that others experience a similar sense of kinship as well. I may be able to call you my “brother,” but that doesn’t make us family - we become family (“us”) when you call me “brother” (or sister, or whatever) in return, when you can sense that I experience to you as kin, and vice versa. When there is a feedback loop of our mutual experience of “kinship,” we become “us.”
Laing also argues, however, that many social groups act to produce “us” through coercion. It sucks to feel isolated and alone - we like to feel like we’re part of groups, families, societies, and nations. Kinship eases isolation. Plus, it can be embarrassing (for both parties) to call someone “brother” when they do not feel brotherhood or kinship with you. (It becomes harder, somehow, to avoid giving change to a homeless person when he or she calls you “brother” or “sister,” right? Because suddenly, with the invocation of that word, NOT giving your change is a statement that you do NOT feel kinship, that you are overtly distancing yourself from brotherhood with another human being, rather than having the comfort to do so quietly and implicitly, as we do every day).
Many modes of manipulation can be deployed to force others to experience kinship, or to “maintain the interiorization of the group,” and these forms of violence define contemporary patriotism. Sympathy (although we have nothing in common, the person who died in that attack is an American, just like me), blackmail (if you’re really an American, you’ll turn over that list of communist sympathizers, if not, we’ll blacklist you), indebtedness and guilt (think of all the Americans who have given their lives to give you the freedom you take for granted), gratitude (I’m thankful to live in a society that lets me have freedom of speech, aren’t you?) and naked violence (if you speak out against the administration, you’ll lose your job, even if you are one of the best attorneys in the Justice Department). (That last one is pretty mild as “naked violence” goes, but you get the idea.) The point is that when confronted with any of these terror tactics, one must perform some affirmation in order to signify kinship, or you are “unpatriotic,” “an-American,” or simply “ungrateful,” all pathways which lead to excommunication or expulsion from the group.
Patriotism: You are not one of “us” anymore if you refuse to show me that you are part of the group when I demand it from you. Let freedom ring! And when there is no real “external” danger to unify us (communists, immigrants, terrorists), then “danger and terror have to be invented and maintained” (communists, immigrants, terrorists!)
How can this be called the “love” of one’s country? Where exactly is the “love” located in these forms of ideological violence? Again from Laing:
“Love and violence, properly speaking, are polar opposites. Love lets the other be, but with affection and concern. Violence attempts to constrain the other’s freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other’s existence or destiny. We are effectively destroying ourselves with violence masquerading as love.”
Is that what we call patriotism? Violence masquerading as love? Isn’t there some other option, some better form of patriotism that aspires to something greater than this?
I’ve started contrasting the term “patriotism” with the counter-notion of “amor patriae,” literally “the love of one’s country.” Ernst Kantorowicz notes that this concept emerges from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when “the love of country was not really tied to any country’s institutions or even national identity.” Hardt and Negri summarize his position:
“When Kantorowicz scratches beneath the surface of the notion of love of one’s country, he does not find nationalism but rather republican caritas or sympathetic-fellow-feeling, which transmutes into amor humanitatis, a love of humanity, exceeding any and all nations. Nationalism and - even more - the glorification of nationalist militarism is thus a distortion of this tradition of patriotic sentiments, a distortion that finds its logical culmination in the fascist regimes of the twentieth century” (Multitude 50).
Hardt and Negri then suggest that we should renew and regenerate the notion of “amor patriae” today, and that we must imagine new kinds of patriotic heroes who can “throw the surplus of their knowledges and skills into the construction of a common struggle against imperial power” (51).
Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters is a graphic fiction that literalizes the metaphorical struggle between patriotism and amor patriae. In the series, Uncle Sam (who is the embodiment of the “collective unconsciousness” of America) rises from the waters of the Mississippi River to reclaim the “story” of America from the “mathematicians of the anti-life equation” who are determined to manipulate and corrupt notions such as “freedom” and “liberty” and “security” in order to cultivate death and tyranny.
It’s a brilliant story.
On one level, the conflict is a fight between Sam and his Freedom Fighters against a mad android called Gonzo the Mechanical Bastard who has been elected President of the United States while masquerading as a popular Republican senator. The conflict, however, isn’t over money or petty power; it’s an ideological struggle over the “meaning” of America. Gonzo serves corporate and political special interests (and the anti-life equation, a fictional personification of the “fascism” H+N talk discuss above), and if he wins, “America” will become a force for “violence masquerading as love” (subjugation presented as freedom, imperialism presented as the spread of democracy, authoritarianism presented as security, etc.) Uncle Sam fights to make it possible for America to “mean” something else.
It’s a much better story than Civil War, because it grapples with the same themes and questions (including a metahuman registration act), but it follows through on the exploration of those themes with much greater depth and intelligence. When Sam says “you can’t arrest the Spirit of America” in issue #2, it has the kind of impact that it Captain America’s statements SHOULD have when he says the same kinds of things in Civil War. (In short, Uncle Sam is everything Captain America should be, if the Marvel writers could give him adequate depth of portrayal and motivation!)
I have more to say, but I need to switch over to my professional writing for the day! Maybe I’ll dig closer in another post…