My new-found patriotism @3QD

Here’s my latest 3QD article: Why I am a Patriot: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, and Project Apollo. The opening paragraphs:

Sometime in the past two weeks I found myself feeling patriotic in a way I don’t remember ever having felt before. I accounted for this feeling by invoking that old adage, “you don’t recognize what you have until you lose it.” The current federal administration has stolen my country from me. They’ve highjacked America. The America to which I pledged allegiance every morning in primary and secondary school, that America is being pillaged, plundered, and sold off for parts to greedy megalomaniacs and oligarchs.

Now that the nation is being destroyed, I realize that I’ve been bound to America my entire adult life. If I hadn’t felt those bonds before – except perhaps for a moment in the mid-1980s when I played “The Star Spangled Banner” for 25,000 bikers at Americade in Lake George, me alone on my trumpet, without the rest of the band – that’s because I’d taken the idea of America for granted. To invoke another cliché, just as the fish is oblivious to the water in which it swims, so I was not consciously aware of the freedom and dignity, of the liberty and justice for all, which made our national life possible.

I’d read our founding documents, The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States, decades ago. I knew about the Boston Tea Party, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, Washington at Valley Forge, all that and more, it was in my blood. And now...well, why don’t I just get on with it and tell my story.

Then the essay. I begin by pointing out that “patriotism” is an abstract thing:

You can’t see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or smell it. It is abstract, like gravity, the unconscious, evolution, or spirit. Just how abstract concepts are defined and how we come to understand them, that is not at all clear.

I then introduce a definition from Claude 3.7. It ends by asserting:

Different people express patriotism in different ways – from serving in the military to participating in democratic processes, engaging in constructive criticism of government policies, or working to uphold national ideals like freedom, equality, or justice.

The rest of the essay is about how I have experienced and expressed my patriotism at various points in my life. I start with the childhood, where I said the Pledge of Allegiance every day in school, pointing out that the abstract words in the pledge – allegiance, republic, liberty, justice – probably didn’t become meaningful until my adolescence. Before that, just word forms devoid of substantial meaning.

Then I have sections on becoming a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war, travelling to a Mennonite college, Goshen College, to talk about my book on music (Beethoven’s Anvil), finally on Project Apollo, the moon landing in 1969. That’s all about how I became attached to the abstract ideas on which the United States of America was founded. When I talk of attachment I mean, fundamentally, the biological mechanisms by which infants become attached to their mothers.

I learned about attachment when I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. I took a course in developmental psychology from Mary Ainsworth and then went on to do an independent study with her. Attachment was the subject. She was one of the co-founders of attachment theory. She’d worked with John Bowlby, the first founder, and then done field research in Uganda where she looked at how infants became attached to their mothers. She introduced me to Bowlby’s Attachment (1969) before the manuscript had been published and had me read some of the early ethological studies of primate behavior in the wild.

However, it is one thing for infants to become attached to their mothers, and mothers to their infants. That’s done by biological mechanisms. How then can those same mechanisms be directed toward abstract objects, like nations in the case of patriotism. As far as I can tell, not much is known about that, though there has been some work. Clearly extensive cultural mechanisms are involved.

My 3QD article isn’t about those mechanisms. Rather, it shows the kinds of behavior that are made possible through those mechanisms. If you want a glimpse of the mechanisms, I have a long and complex paper that examines how they operate in a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Talking with Nature in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”.