{"id":1370,"date":"2007-03-15T05:03:57","date_gmt":"2007-03-15T05:03:57","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2007-03-15T05:09:21","modified_gmt":"2007-03-15T05:09:21","slug":"the_300_rorscha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1370","title":{"rendered":"The ‘300’ Rorschach Test Redux"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matt Yglesias leverages the film ‘the 300’<\/a> to explain that it’s based on our sympathy for all people who fight invading empires. <\/p>\n

When you see it in a movie that aims to make the defenders out to be heroes, everyone sympathizes with this attitude. It’s called “patriotism,” it’s called “nationalism” and it’s the deadly enemy of empire-builders everywhere. People, simply put, don’t enjoy submitting to foreign domination, even to foreign domination that presents itself as well-intentioned — even to foreign domination that is in fact well-intentioned. Bush says America is merely midwifing the birth of a world of liberty, that “freedom is the Almighty God’s gift to each man and woman in this world,” and American power merely God’s servant. Xerxes makes it simpler and says he literally is a God. The movie even gives him a more-than-human voice to prove the point.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I probably would have let this pass except for the scare quotes around “patriotism” and “nationalism”, and my belief that this is a handy hook to hang an important point from. Yglesias actually makes a useful (and nuanced) point, and his post is worth reading – I’ll try and write about it tomorrow when I talk more about Tom Friedman – but he’s someone who seems incapable of saying patriotism without scare quotes, and without making the followup point that there are other patriotisms and that – like being a fan of a NFL team – they are equivalent.
\nWhat’s missing from Matt’s (actually nuanced) argument is one simple point; the Spartans are us – they are, literally, among the ancestors of this rickety enterprise we all know as Western Civilization, and so – beyond our affinity for their heroism, or their connection to the notion of freedom (for landowning nobles, at least) – we owe them a debt of patrimony.<\/p>\n

Schaar from “On Patriotism<\/a>” (yes, I know, I keep coming back to him..)<\/p>\n

To be a patriot is to have a patrimony; or, perhaps more accurately, the patriot is one who is grateful for a legacy and recognizes that the legacy makes him a debtor. There is a whole way of being in the world, captured best by the word reverence, which defines life by its debts; one is what one owes, what one acknowledges as a rightful debt or obligation. The patriot moves within that mentality. The gift of land, people, language, gods memories, and customs, which is the patrimony of the patriot, defines what he or she is. Patrimony is mixed with person; the two are barely separable. The very tone and rhythm of a life, the shapes of perception, the texture of its homes and fears come from membership in a territorially rooted group. The conscious patriot is one who feels deeply indebted for these gifts, grateful to the people and places through which they come, and determined to defend the legacy against enemies and pass it unspoiled to those who will come after.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The reality is that the Persian Wars were one of the critical – and arguably the earliest recorded – ‘crossroads’ that were passed to bring us to this place. And that the battle of Thermopylae was a critical battle in winning that war. And so we owe them.<\/p>\n

This notion of debt is personalized pretty neatly in Bruce Webster’s neat post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And because of that I think that it’s – charitably – lame to criticize the notion that we should identify closely with the Spartans.<\/p>\n

And not by virtue of a ‘Blut und Volk’ notion of ancestry, but because the cultural and political edifice we belong to had its roots in Greece, and I believe in Lincoln’s expression of the unique American patriotism that attaches us not to land or ancestry, but to that culture and political enterprise.<\/p>\n

And on that note, I’ll suggest that Yglesias, who once set out his views on the American Revolution<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The real point, though, is this: Not be an left-wing America-hater about it all, or to deny that our Founders had some legitimate grievances* but in retrospect wouldn’t America and the world both be better off if the USA had remained more closely associated with the British Empire and her Commonwealth? After all, if the erstwhile “greatest generation” had gotten in on the Hitler-fighting action at the same time as Canada and Australia did, a whole lot of trouble could have been avoided. See also World War One.<\/p>\n

\nIn that light, it seems to me that while the Revolution should not be condemned, it is something to be regretted: a failure of Imperial policy and an inability of leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to work out some thorny governance and burden-sharing issues. Not much of an occasion for fireworks.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…predictably believes that the US can’t operate outside the structures of international agreements and laws.<\/p>\n

Part of me is frustrated by this, and another has to acknowledge that he has something.<\/p>\n

I just finished Thomas Friedman’s collection of columns – Longitudes and Attitudes<\/a> – on the plane coming back from Las Vegas, and I’ll have to confess myself an unabashed Friedmanite (not enough to pay the New York Times…), and to acknowledge that my thinly-spread discomfort with Bush’s political eptitude is fully expressed in Friedman’s columns, and that Friedman anticipated that the long, arduous nation-building exercise in Iraq would require international legitimacy.<\/p>\n

More on this later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Armed Liberal talks about the film ‘300’ and patriotism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1370"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1370\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}