Patriotism as I use the word is a virtue, combining love of one's homeland and willingness to make sacrifices for it. Then there is nationalism, the view that one's culture and nation are superior to others, and jingoism, the hatred of other nations.
As usual and by design, dictionaries lose these distinctions in the process of avoiding prescription and just providing description of how the words are often used.
You've drawn a clean and useful set of distinctions here:
Patriotism — love of and loyalty to one's homeland, including a willingness to sacrifice for it. Essentially an attachment and devotion, not a comparative judgment.
Nationalism — the belief that one's own nation or culture is superior to others. It adds a ranking, a hierarchy of worth between peoples.
Jingoism — active hostility toward other nations, often bellicose and aggressive. It goes beyond superiority claims into animus.
These form a natural progression of moral intensity: affection → superiority → hatred.
Your complaint about dictionaries is well-founded. The descriptivist stance serves important purposes — documenting actual usage, avoiding elitism about language — but it has a real cost when applied to terms that carry genuine moral weight. When a dictionary blurs patriotism into nationalism because many speakers conflate them, it doesn't just record a fact about usage; it launders the conflation, making it harder to think clearly about the underlying distinctions.
George Orwell made a similar point in his 1945 essay "Notes on Nationalism," where he insisted on separating patriotism (defensive, place-based) from nationalism (aggressive, power-seeking) — and complained that the words were being muddled in exactly the way you describe. His argument was that the muddle wasn't innocent: calling nationalism by the softer name "patriotism" made aggressive ideology easier to sell.
The broader issue is that prescriptivism vs. descriptivism is often treated as a binary, but there's a strong case for a middle position: dictionaries should record common usage while also flagging when a word is contested or when distinctions between near-synonyms carry genuine philosophical or moral significance. That's not prescription — it's just being honest about the full state of the language.
"Nationalism" carries another meaning, the desire of a people for home rule. This is an unfortunate but real confusion, so authors have to pay attention to which they mean.
A very good catch. That second sense of "nationalism" is not only common but historically primary in many contexts — the nationalism of subject peoples seeking self-determination: Irish nationalism, Indian nationalism, Zionist nationalism, Kurdish nationalism. In these uses the word carries no implication of superiority over others, only the aspiration to govern oneself rather than be governed by outsiders.
The two senses can even pull in opposite moral directions. A 19th-century British imperialist might have combined contempt for "inferior" peoples (nationalism in your first sense) with fierce opposition to their "nationalism" in the second sense — denying subject peoples the very right to self-rule that the imperialist took for granted at home. While a liberal who rejects all claims of cultural superiority might warmly support nationalist independence movements as expressions of human dignity and self-determination.
So the word "nationalism" alone tells you almost nothing without context. You have to know whether the author means:
- Supremacist nationalism — we are better than others
- Separatist or self-determination nationalism — we wish to rule ourselves
These are logically independent. A movement can hold one without the other, and writers who don't flag which they mean create real confusion — sometimes, one suspects, deliberately, since calling an independence movement "nationalist" in the supremacist sense is a common rhetorical move to discredit it.
The terminological situation is genuinely unfortunate because there's no clean alternative word waiting to do either job unambiguously. "Separatism" captures part of the self-determination sense but has its own baggage. The reader is left dependent on authorial care, which is not always forthcoming.
No comments:
Post a Comment