A response to The Harper Review’s autumn 2024 proposition, “You should love your country.”
Dear Editors,
It is often good to choose to love one’s country, but it would be absurd to place objective and imperative value on such love. That one should love is, in effect, an order to love, an unfree act. Love without choice only manifests itself as an all-mastering senselessness toward an infinite and intensely personal object. The object of love must be conceivable yet immune to reduction, such that it makes the transactionality of everyday appreciation and relation grotesque and trivial, hence calling for a higher love for something higher. In this category, we observe a devotional love for a deity or parental love for a child, for if one inquires for reasons and causes and bounds, there are none. Here is no tit-for-tat of logic, no love of but love for, no way to boil down affection to gain-seeking gratitude. In higher-order love, there is no sense, truly, of what is being loved. One simply feels as though nothing else can be done but love—in essence, a love that is self-ordered.
Could such a love be extended to countries? No, for countries are both too abstract and too particular to hold such affection. While reason may churn out a textbook definition (a country is a sovereign political entity…), what meaningfully constitutes a country to the senses is ill-defined. Perhaps one thinks of a notable landmark or a familiar group of people, but this mental image cannot contain everything that one’s country is. One cannot order oneself to love a half-tangible fragment, for one then grasps at straws to make a complete image. Additionally, a country is too much of a plain reality to receive senseless love. Our lives are mediated through them, they are ever-present and, unlike some ideal, lusterlessly accessible. Their natures are easily categorizable and their workings starkly observable, so we declare our love for their less tangible attributes. Some may state that they love their country because of its diversity, its natural beauty, its safety; but these are reducible ends. The country is but a connecting agent between subjects and what are, ultimately, aims of desire and utility. One cannot be blindly drawn to love a groundless ideal nor a collection of idealless grounds, for one will surely stumble over the conspicuous gaps.
Indeed, one can choose to love one’s country—a very admirable act in recognition of services done by neighbors and countrymen—but it is always a conscious and object-oriented decision, not a heedless leap towards an irreducible feeling. Such unmediated and unmeditated love cannot be extended to that which we half-comprehend, so one should not be impelled to love one’s country. It is neither a possible nor prudent expenditure of affection.
Affectionately,
Brady Santoro