A response to The Harper Review’s autumn 2024 proposition, “You should love your country.”
Dear editors,
You should not love your country—you should love its people.
In his 1940 essay of the same name, Martin Buber warns about the danger of “false prophets” using a biblical case from Jeremiah. The false prophet Hananiah ben Azzur predicts that an end to the Babylonian exile is imminent and that peace will prevail in Jerusalem between the Kingdom of Judah and the Babylonians. The prophet Jeremiah warns against this prophecy, saying that Hananiah may be misleading the people about God’s will.
Buber uses this passage to highlight the difference between false prophets, like Hananiah, and true ones, like Jeremiah. False prophets transpose their knowledge of the past onto a similar—yet never identical—moment in the present to make prophecies about the future. Hananiah did not make his prophecy by listening to the word of God. Instead, according to Buber, Hananiah based his prophecy on one made by the prophet Isaiah for a similar situation in the past. Despite their knowledge, false prophets do not know “truth” because they do not recognize the complexities that arrive with the current moment, Buber explained. In contrast, he argued that the true prophets are those who knew that “history is a dynamic process, and history means that one hour is never like the one that has gone before.”
A line might also be drawn between false and true prophets using Svetlana Boym’s description of restorative and reflective nostalgia in her 2001 book The Future of Nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia attempts to reconstruct the past, while reflective nostalgia longs for the past, without trying to bring about its total rebirth, according to Boym. The former loves flags and a coat of arms; the latter “loves details, not symbols.”
Hananiah was a restorative nostalgic, and according to Buber, a “forthright patriot” who loved his homeland as a “political concept.” Hananiah believed that his prophecy would strengthen his people, when he was only strengthening “an illusion” that would eventually backfire and weaken them. Jeremiah, a reflective nostalgic, never let his love deceive him. He felt a love for his country as a “land inhabited by human beings, a settlement that was alive and mortal.”
It is with these human beings in mind that Jeremiah made his prophecies. Loving a country, as Hananiah did, made him blind to the needs of its citizens.
Like all historical junctures, ours is filled with false prophets, supported by growing federations of others just like themselves. They tell us what our country is, what it once was, and what it can be again, if only we make it so. They have knowledge, but they have no truth.
Our historical juncture is also a world of nation-states. Amid competing nationalisms, lacking a nation might make a people feel defenseless. They may seek the protection of a nation even if that nation harms its own people and others. The promise of nationalism itself can be a false prophecy.
To love only one’s country is to love a choir without the living, mortal voices that create its harmonies of consonance and dissonance. This artificial love prioritizes an abstract idea of a nation over the freedom, security, and rights of its people.
Truthfully,
Elena Eisenstadt