The poverty of patriotism
It is interesting how often the poorest people in a country tend to be the most patriotic. There are, of course, many reasons why some people become nationalistic, but poverty seems to have its own discrete influence. To get a sense of this phenomenon one need only visit an English council estate and note the preponderance of national flags dangling from bedroom windows and makeshift flagpoles or witness the number of Stars and Stripes hanging outside decrepit homes and shotgun shacks in the southern United States.
As an example, soon after my arrival in North Carolina from a smart part of West London, I met a guy called Billy. Billy was about fifty years-old but looked a lot older. He didn’t have many teeth and the ones he had retained were badly decayed. His family had a dysfunctional history marred by addiction, disease, divorce and death. Billy had not worked for years and survived on food stamps, welfare and occasional farm laboring. His house, which he shared with his brother, Petey, looked like an abandoned woodshed or small barn sitting behind trees on the edge of a busy road. Billy once said to me, without shame, uncertainty or irony; “I bet you’re glad that you’ve come to live in the greatest country in the world. I thank God every day that I’m an American.”
The interaction has stayed with me ever since, proving insightful into the United States specifically as well as the human condition more broadly. It also triggered an exploration the reasons why some people who have lived difficult lives harbor such deference, and often adoration, for the societies that have so often failed them. How could Billy, a man so unhappy, unhealthy and abject maintain such admiration for his country? I’m not suggesting that Billy should have no affection or respect for where he was born and raised; everyone loves their home and it forms part of every person’s personality and identity. However, Billy was more than someone who simply loved his home, he was an ardent nationalist with patriotic tattoos all over his body. Rather than merely loving his country for what it was — his home — he actually eulogized and elevated it, particularly in comparison to other countries (of which he knew nothing, as we will discuss below). I came to realize that Billy’s paradoxical perspective was not unusual, but actually relatively common in many countries and across many cultures. Of course, patriotism is different to nationalism but in the context of poverty and this essay they are merely separate sides of the same coin; both represent a seemingly undeserved and unwarranted opinion of, and devotion to, a country. With this in mind, it seems that there are four main reasons why poverty fosters a culture of excessive patriotism and nationalism. These four reasons are not mutually exclusive but inform, interact with and feed each other.
Firstly, the poorer members of society are usually less educated than those who are better off. This means that they have not had the opportunity to learn about other countries and cultures, as well as broader subject areas that impact the concept of nationhood such as history, sociology and international relations. The individual is effectively intellectually and mentally monopolized by their country. It is all they know.
Secondly, the poor are less likely to have traveled extensively, if at all, and explored other countries. They are generally chained to their home environment with little experience of anything beyond their immediate environs and cultural milieu. From this position, even nearby cities and other parts of the country are perceived as alien and strange. Whilst a lack of education restricts knowledge of others, the lack of travel prevents experience of others. The untraveled have never had the chance to witness, understand, appreciate or fall in love with other places, people, cultures and countries. Conversely, those who have spent a significant amount of time abroad tend to embrace cultural differences and alternative social models whilst simultaneously acknowledging the profound commonalities and similarities shared by all nations and peoples. They realize that everyday life for most people, wherever they live, is filled with the exact same routines and elements, such as family, work, friends, school, faith, food, and the passing of time. However, the untraveled individual is unaware of any of this, being hermetically sealed into a single cultural experience and oblivious to the contrived and perhaps fallacious nature of nation states. Such limited horizons ensure that the untraveled person is completely consumed by and dependent on their own parochial identity and afflicted by cultural myopia and national monomania.
Thirdly, and related to the first two reasons, if a person has no real knowledge or experience of other countries then the only information they have about the world is gleaned through the news and popular culture. This is problematic. The news by its very nature is negative, with reporting generally restricted to subject areas such as natural and manmade disasters, war, disease, crime, social and political strife. Other countries are therefore without fail presented in a bad light and as the source and center of awful things and events. And popular culture unfailingly portrays other countries and their people through pejorative framing or denigrating and often ludicrous stereotypes. Examples include Africans living in mud huts and dying of starvation; America as a land of fat, stupid people in Stetsons who shoot each other; the French as cheese-eating, beret-wearing surrender monkeys; and the British as chinless aristocrats sipping afternoon tea. Therefore, if a person’s only experience of other countries is through the news and popular culture, then that individual will tend to perceive those places very negatively. Other countries become nothing more than places to sneer at, laugh at, fear, condemn, pity, ignore or hate.
Relying on the news and popular culture for their knowledge of other countries will also result in the individual viewing their own country in a far more favorable light. This is because the media not only portrays other nations disparagingly but always presents their own country in a positive, superior, self-righteous and self-congratulatory way. Furthermore, stereotypes of the home nation are always overly-flattering, often forming an idealized version of the country and, as Benjamin Silliman noted about the United States, incorporating and claiming for their own nation “every attribute of freedom, heroism, intelligence and virtue.” Thus, with the negative news reporting and derogatory stereotypes of other countries combined with a complimentary portrayal of one’s own nation, the untraveled and uneducated individual will develop a particular perception of their country, however distorted, consequently considering it as the only safe, sane, secure, successful, righteous and decent nation on the planet. Cast your mind back to Billy.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, penury often creates a feeling of personal helplessness, irrelevance and impotence. Individuals will therefore seek to identify themselves with, and attach themselves to, something greater than themselves in order to vicariously enhance their feelings of self-worth. This could be as a fan of a sports team or a member of a religious or civil organization, though in a world where the nation-state still reigns supreme it can often be as a flag-waving patriot. Suddenly, the nation’s successes become the individual’s successes, the nation’s power becomes the individual’s power and the nation’s greatness becomes the individual’s greatness, even if their personal contribution to any of the above is effectively non-existent. The country allows the individual to experience a sense of belonging, connection, empowerment and pride which are conspicuously absent in other aspects of their everyday life. In some ways this might seem helpful, but ultimately the nation is merely acting as a psychological crutch and surrogate for the individual’s own frustrated or failed hopes and aspirations. Here, the flags, t-shirts and tattoos of the ardent patriot become much more than simply the contrived, puerile, arguably meaningless, symbols of a political-administrative territory but morph into symbols of the individual’s core identity.
