Ethics and the Professional Patriots

Abstract

The professional patriot has existed in every age. He is characterized by a tendency to repeat endlessly his own claim to patriotic virtue, not infrequently hiding ulterior ends (economic gain, for example, or personal power) behind his slogans. More often than not, he has a conspiratorial view of history, associates patriotism with the waging of war, and con centrates his ideological attack on a central enemy. In modern American life, that foe is communism, the crusade against which is often used to condemn any basic social change. The profes sional tends to associate free enterprise with the "true Ameri can way" and frequently mixes together religious, economic, and patriotic slogans. The goals of the professional patriot can hardly be approved by those who reject the supreme value of the nation-state and who look forward to greater human solidarity. A conscientious human being, moreover, cannot promise unqualified loyalty to any organization or person, but only to the right as he sees it. Methods often used by the pro fessional patriot are widely condemned, and rightly so. But the repudiation tends to be merely verbal, for in fact those methods—prevarication, distortion, and ethnocentrism in inter national morals—are in considerable degree approved in prac tice. Although the professional may represent unethical means in their more blatant forms, he is not alone in adhering to them.