Simple (and skewed) social assumptions arising from knowing personally only a single social context
Allow me to introduce myself by explaining what I discovered about the fact of my being an American … when I was a student at the University of Geneva in Switzerland back in the beginning of the 1960s. It was a marvelous time of self-discovery, finding myself deeply involved in friendships with a variety of non-American friends … most of them German but in fact from all around the world … though here too, mostly European.
What I discovered in these awesome friendships was what an American I truly happened to be … something I previously really could not get a grasp on, growing up in America (in fact, in a small town in Illinois) … where everybody else was of course also “American.” At home in America, there was really nothing to compare with in order to see what made me (and the world immediately around me) distinctly “American.”
Actually it had been quite natural for me to suppose that the way I and my friends back home went at life was simply the way everyone everywhere went at life … unless there was something terribly wrong and dangerous if others didn’t go at life this same way. To us, the goals and rules of society that we lived by in our America (which I will eventually come to term “Middle America”) were presumably some kind of exemplary social universal – well-proven as such in the way America stood at the top of the global summit economically … and presumably also politically and socially.
But this simplistic understanding of life and its dynamics would come under deep challenge the summer of 1960, which I spent traveling in Europe with my parents and sister … and had engaged in conversations wherever I could with the locals. I found being in the varied cultures of Europe to be quite exciting … and obviously very different from my American world in the way they directed the lives of the various European national communities.
Consequently, I wanted to know as much as possible as to how these Europeans went at life. I could see the vital differences – which of course worked well for them – and it stirred deeply my desire to dig deeper into this matter.
Thus it was that I came to realize that in merely sitting at home in America (which was certainly a pleasant enough experience!) I would simply continue to understand the world and its human social dynamics only from the single “American” viewpoint. But this would provide me only a form of limited understanding of the more complex causes of human social behavior … anywhere and everywhere else in the world. I wanted to reach well beyond this American intellectual boundary that seemed to so easily offer itself as the universal answer to life … which I was coming to realize was not the only way to go at life.
The Geneva experience
Thus it was that I made a purposeful return to Europe for the school year of 1961-1962 … to be able to dig more deeply into this matter of why our national identities made us the distinct nationals that we all happened to be in this 20th century … when nationalism was the driving force of world politics. Specifically, I wanted to understand exactly what were the sources or causes of these differences … and what made them such effective (or sometimes not so effective – or even disastrous) approaches to life.
I shared a large studio apartment with four other guys (Swiss, Hungarian, Bulgarian, French) and learned a lot from them … about life on both sides of the Iron Curtain (the Hungarian was a strongly anti-Communist refugee and the Bulgarian was a more loyal Soviet-supported Bulgarian) and also what the French grand irritation with the Americans (summed up in De Gaulle’s larger anti-Anglo attitudes) was all about. But it was mostly from my German friends, that were my closest companions, that I understood the way that life could go in such very different directions.
They were all about my same age … and thus had started out life with World War Two well underway … their towns and homes under constant bombardment from American and British bombers. And then they experienced the ultimate humiliation of the loss of the war and the subsequent division and occupation of their country by their former enemies, which included Americans, of course. Then they went through the national self-examination in the years that followed … hearing of their monstrous treatment of their neighboring nations … but especially of the Jews, wherever they could find them. They thus came to understand their German parents to have been monsters rather than glorious examples.
Now that was quite a social inheritance to grow up with. But I found them to be energetic (very adventuresome, in fact), quite happy, and fairly normal in the way (in a German way, of course) that they went at daily life. Politics was of no interest to them. They found their thoughts anchored elsewhere … simply in the challenges of daily life – both at work and at play (they were not university students but young technicians living and working in Geneva).
Thankfully, I was fluent in German as well as French … so I was not just getting some kind of carefully calculated pro-American “self-presentation” coming from them … but instead the opportunity to get in the very middle of the way they went at things on a daily basis.
Patriotism does not need to come at a social cost to others
Now here is probably the most important point of this whole experience. Not only did I learn about how there were other ways to go at life – but I also discovered how very much an “American” I truly happened to be … and how that was just fine! I loved being an American. In a sense I guess you can say I was proud to be an American … finding out how deeply I loved the world I was born and grew up in. It was majorly influential in shaping the person I happened to be.
But I learned that such “patriotism” came at no cost to my own respect and admiration of other nations and their peoples – and their own spirit of patriotism. In short, being patriotic was not some kind of social sin. I learned that you could love yourself and the world you came from … without losing any love for others and the world they came from.
Patriotism did not need to be a zero-sum game in which the weight and extent of one’s own spirit of patriotism came at the expense of one’s regard for the weight and extent of the national spirit of others. In no ways did diminishing the national spirit of others enhance our own.
The sad tragedy of believing that national self-humiliation somehow elevates a person morally and socially.
I also realized at the same time that the diminishing of our own national spirit did not in any way increase or enhance the national spirit of anyone else … or “humbly” increase or enhance our own standing as moral angels.
I point this out, because this is a huge problem today in America … where many Americans loudly proclaim that any demonstration of a spirit of patriotism is actually horrible Fascism in poor disguise. That “brilliant” insight into social dynamics is not only stupid in the extreme … it is majorly destructive of any healthy social order. Societies cannot survive on self-humiliation, much less self-hatred.
Again … there is no shame in loving the nation, the culture, that you grew up in. It comes at no cost to others … unless you make it such a cause – as incredibly stupid and self-destructive national wars fought in the 20th century certainly happened to be.
And it was here that my German friends showed me that you did not need to get caught up in hostile national antagonisms in order to prove yourself to be the proud national that you were. My friends were quite German, proud (though certainly not haughty) to be so … but at no cost to those around them, Swiss, French … or even American! We got along beautifully, they being fully German and I being fully American. In fact, we laughed about it quite a lot … the social-cultural differences at times being most amusing.
Love is key
This then became for me a lesson I would never forget. Love of country can be a very noble thing … if it comes with the understanding that it is equally noble for others to possess that same love of their own social inheritance and social structure. We can all live very peaceable on this planet if we would remember to keep that spirit of mutual respect for the differing ways that we have been taught to go at the larger world.
That’s how God himself intended for us to go at life … clearly outlined as such by the love his Son Jesus brought to our world through his own shining example.
In short, self-love ‒ both personal and social ‒ is not categorically a sin … but instead can be ‒ even should be ‒ a source of strength offering us the quiet confidence and self-security necessary to be able to extend freely that same love to others.