Pledge Allegiance to Myself
By Anne Morse
August 19, 2002
The 'Lost Territory' of Patriotism
And I'm proud to be an American
Where at least I know I'm free
And I won't forget the men who died
To give that right to me
And I gladly stand up next to you
And defend her still today
'Cause there ain't no doubt I love this land
God bless the USA.
—Lee Greenwood
We're not about causes here. We're about individualism.
—New York University student, explaining why he had no interest in going to war against those who had just immolated three thousand of his fellow citizens a few blocks from campus
******
"They are from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, the Pacific Islands, the Caribbean," began the Washington Post. "They are all ages, all races, all colors. They are Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians. And now they are also Americans."
In an Independence Day ceremony at Monticello—the verdant Virginia home of America's third president—eighty-two aliens became Americans. These men, women and children, who only moments before had been citizens of other lands, swore to bear arms against attacks on America "from all enemies foreign and domestic" and to renounce forever allegiance to foreign "princes or potentates."
Which is more than some of their fellow citizens would do.
For more than two hundred years, citizens from every country on earth have made a life-changing moral judgment with their feet. The fortunate arrive legally and safely in jets. The desperate arrive illegally, in rickety boats and in the backs of trucks. The huddled masses are still coming every day, willing to endure any hardship to escape their own countries, desperate to have what some here don't even bother to take for granted: to make a decent living, to worship God freely, or to simply be safe.
Yet for decades now, allegiance to America has been deemed unfashionable among sophisticates—especially within academia. Their haughty, intellectual haute couture has given rise to a cheap, knock-off brand of anti-American sentiment that's become especially popular among students, even though many of them have a difficult time defending it.
Bill Bennett, for one, is revolted. In his book Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism, the former education secretary describes what happened in New York—the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century—when a reporter asked a clutch of New York University students if they would consider taking up arms to defend their country "against those who, only two and a half weeks earlier, had incinerated to death thousands of their fellow Americans. Each, in his own way, demurred," Bennett writes. "One said he was unwilling to endanger his personal hopes of becoming a filmmaker," and noted that, in any case, "There are [plenty of] people who are more willing to fight who have the mind-set of killing." Summed up another: "This is all [America's] fault anyway."
While Bennett found their glibness grotesque—charred human remains were, after all, still being dug out of the smoking rubble of the World Trade Center Towers—he realized that they were simply repeating the arguments that whirl endlessly (and, some would argue, mindlessly) around our creaking cultural merry-go-round. On television, in newspapers, on the Internet, and in magazines, today's collegians—like Pavlov's dogs—have been conditioned to be "skeptical if not disdainful of American purposes in the world and reflectively unprepared to rally to America's side," Bennett notes.
The problem, as Bennett sees it, is not that Americans are not patriotic, but that those who are unpatriotic are most influential among them. And nowhere are they more influential than on the American college campus.
A group snapshot of the result is offered by a May survey of collegiate attitudes, conducted by the Luntz Research Companies. As World magazine reported, 71 percent "disagree with the statement that U.S. values are superior to the values of other[s]." In other words, there's no moral difference between a nation that refuses to bomb enemy combatants if the cost in civilian lives is too high, and combatants who gleefully murder as many innocents as they possibly can.
If anything, American values may be inferior: In a classic case of blaming the victim, 57 percent of those polled say U.S. policies are "at least somewhat responsible" for the September 11 attacks. On the other hand, 79 percent believe America "has the right to overthrow Saddam Hussein." Yet an incredible 37 percent of students say they would be "likely to try to evade the draft"—leaving the reader to wonder just who it is they expect to attack Hussein while they go off to make thoughtful films.
But here's the answer that made me grit my teeth: Sixty percent of students believe that "developing a better understanding of the values and history of other cultures and nations that dislike us is a better approach to preventing terrorism than investing in a strong military." (Some of us already understand their values, which is why we prefer to keep our military as strong as possible).
To sum up the survey's findings: Our values may not be superior to those of other nations—they may even be inferior—but they're superior enough to allow us to bomb Iraq back to the stone age if we want to. Right after we study their values and history.
Clearly, collegians are in a muddle even when their instincts are right—as they quite often are.
Witness the "My Turn" column in Newsweek last December written by Yale University student Alison Hornstein. Hornstein outlines her fourteen years of public schooling—an education long on multicultural relativism and short on moral clarity. But this judge-not-because-we're-all-alike-anyway curriculum "created a deficiency in my generation's ability to make moral judgments," Hornstein writes. The reaction of her fellow students to the terrorist attacks "made it apparent," she concludes, "that my generation is uncomfortable assessing, or even asking, whether a moral wrong has taken place."
Exactly, Bennett says: Following the terror attacks, college students exhibited "either a reluctance or an inability to find words, ideas, arguments, rhetoric, or models adequate to the gravity of the crisis and to the heroic scale of commitment that was needed to face and overcome it." He quotes journalist David Brooks, who visited an Ivy League campus a month after the terror attacks to find frustrated students "wrapped in a haze of relativism. There were words and jargon and ideas everywhere, but nothing solid that would enable a person to climb from one idea to the next. These students were trying to form judgments, yet were blocked by the accumulated habits of nonjudgmentalism."
Culture, church, and family have too often added insult to moral injury by failing to act as correctives to cockeyed classroom teachings. In fact, some families do just the opposite. "My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window," sniffs poet Katha Pollitt in the Nation. "Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war." (The idea that it also stands for her right to publicly body-slam her own country evidently never occurred to her.)
Contrast Pollitt's view with the schoolhouse lessons of the 1960s, when I grew up. As my grade-school classmates and I celebrated Washington's birthday by tracing his profile onto construction paper and gluing on cotton balls to represent his wig, we learned that America—like Washington himself—stood for freedom and honor, compassion and courage. Back then, the contents of the national melting pot did, to a great extent, really melt. Not so today: Now, the promoters of identity politics tell us to climb out of the pot and stand solidly with our own little group—white or black, gay or straight, feminist or fundamentalist—and stay there. As Bennett writes, today's children are "routinely taught to believe that America represents but one of many cultures . . . that there is no such thing as a better or worse society, that cultural values different from our own need to be understood and accepted in a spirit of sympathetic tolerance, and that . . . we ourselves have at least as much to answer for as to be proud of. At the college level, one looks mostly in vain for correctives to this teaching."
Especially at the University of New Mexico, where an associate professor of history, Richard Berthold, earned his place in the Stupid Professor Tricks Hall of Fame by cheerfully telling his freshmen that "anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote." Right next to his plaque sits that of Lorraine Lees, an associate history professor at Virginia's Old Dominion University, who said she finds the idea of teaching patriotism in the classroom "a scary thought."
Nor is this attitude unusual: At Williams College, a Pledge of Allegiance ceremony held five days after the terror attacks produced two hundred students, the school's president, employees from the cafeteria and maintenance departments, and one professor.
Where were the rest of them?
Bennett blames the lack of patriotism among professors on the "relativist claptrap" so beloved by the Left. It teaches that there is no truth—that "what is true for me is not necessarily true for you," which means we have "no basis for judging other people and other cultures, and certainly no basis for declaring some countries better than others, let alone 'good' or 'evil.'
If we really believe that we should not judge other cultures, then why do millions of Americans spend so much time fighting sex trafficking in India, slavery in Sudan, and forced abortions in China? (Ironically, even the most relativistic professor becomes a fiery absolutist when it comes to issues like secondhand smoke or toilets that use too much water. God forbid Americans should be allowed to relieve themselves into a high-flow toilet: That would be wrong.)
If hypocritical professors don't unwittingly expose the silliness of relativism, our own hearts will. God has written the knowledge of right and wrong, good and evil, across every human heart (Romans 1). And if He has given us this knowledge, then we should not be afraid of calling evil by its proper name—and doing everything we can to annihilate it.
The flip side, of course, is that we should not be afraid of calling good by its right name; nor should we be afraid to celebrate the good that America is, and try, even at this late date, to develop a healthy, clear-eyed patriotism.
Does patriotism mean defending America, right or wrong? Of course not. Christians of all people know that sin is abroad in the world, in every country, in every village, in every human heart. This means no nation is or ever can be perfect. Certainly not America, a country that has tolerated the violent murder of some 40 million unborn babies. Yet striving to follow the ideals upon which our country was founded has brought us far closer to a standard of righteousness than many—probably most—other countries. Besides, Bennett dryly notes, "We need hardly claim that our justice is perfect in order to claim, and to show that [that of the terrorists] is criminal and vile."
Just how do we go about taking back what Bennett calls the "lost territory" of patriotism? As Yale historian Donald Kegan put it, patriotism "does not require us to hate, condemn, denigrate, or attack any other country, nor does it require us to admire our own uncritically." What it does require, Bennett explains, "is what we have systematically denied our young: a common educational effort to absorb and to transmit" America's vision "of a free, democratic republic" and its ongoing struggle to achieve that vision.
As Bill Bennett writes, our instincts are healthy. But we have been badly mistaught; our sense of moral clarity is muddled. It may be that we will relearn patriotism from the people who know firsthand that good and evil exist, and that some cultures and countries are far better places in which to live than others—and worth fighting and even dying for.
Just ask those newly minted citizens at Monticello—red and yellow, black and white, Christian, Muslim, and Jew—who all swore to die, if necessary, to defend the ideal that is America.
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