Re: Patriotism

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Mar 12 2003 - 17:01:19 MST

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    On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 05:54:07PM -0500, Technotranscendence wrote:
    > No, I'm not going to give my take on Mishima here! (How many will get
    > that reference here without resorting to google?:)

    The nerdy student on the first row raises his hand. :-)

    > Instead I want to ask a general question:
    >
    > Is patriotism an Extropic value?
    >
    > Related to this is nationalism an Extropic value?

    Hmm, what would make anything an extropic value? As I see it,
    the thing would have to lead to greater personal extropy and
    possibly also greater extropy for others (I wouldn't use the
    term for something that decreased my extropy while helping
    others, or something that increased my extropy but decreased it
    for others).

    Clearly helping out one's group can be such a win-win
    situation: we get gratitude, reciprocal altruism, our shared
    values are supported and so on. But how far can this group be
    extended while still keeping it win-win? In some situations
    this seems to be doable almost to any degree, like in science.
    But we are far more limited in other aspects. We are usually
    happy to help family members and friends, relatively helpful to
    people similar to ourselves or part of our community, less
    supportive of remotely linked people and even less supportive
    for people we do not know or feel we have any kinship (genetic,
    social, mental) with. While I might agree with my close friends
    to hire a brawny guy to protect us and our shared interests, in
    a much larger group there is a diffusion of responsibility and
    the marginal cost I am willing to pay for hiring protection
    goes down.

    I would say patriotism is the virtue of supporting and
    promoting one's group, one's true patria, so to say. Clearly
    extropian if it is reciprocal as above and the group is
    something that could be called extropian. But that is separate
    from the issue of where one draws the line around it (or even
    how many groups one belongs to and how they are nested - am I a
    transhumanist, a Swede, an European, an intellectual, a human
    or person living in Hagalund foremost?). One common answer to
    that is that one should regard one's nation as one's primary
    group. That is what I would call nationalism. But as it is
    commonly stated it is not obviously extropian or even rational;
    nations can be defined in many arbitrary ways, are often very
    large groupings defined more by a shared administrative
    hegemony than any real similarity and the goals of the nation
    group are often not win-win with one's own goals. So my answer
    would be that in general, patriotism is extropian, but
    nationalism is not.

    People with a more altruist bent might want to include even
    cooperation with one's group when one does not benefit but the
    group does. But the same reasoning seems to hold; unless there
    happens to be a congruence between one's own values and
    identifications and one's nation, nationalism doesn't seem
    extropic.

    Of course, my definition of patriotism might be seen as too
    narrow. But the common definition that is more close to
    nationalism ("Love of ones country; the passion which aims to
    serve ones country, either in defending it from invasion, or
    protecting its rights and maintaining its laws and institutions
    in vigor or purity") often simply seems to merge with it. I
    prefer to distinguish between the virtue of loyalty and how
    wide group gains this primary loyalty.

    -- 
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
    asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
    GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
    


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