Are patriotic? Really?

As the General Election draws closer, I am hearing (and reading) a whole lot of terms flying about all over the place. One that I find most interesting is “patriot”. One friend asked if he is less of a patriot if he chose to work overseas. A few others, accused each other of non-patriotic because they did not support each other’s political party. A few who are even further gone accused other of not being patriotic because they were not screaming their lungs out when the Malaysian football team was playing. It seemed to me that they were all using different definitions of the word patriot. So, I visited www.etymonline.com my favourite etymological reference.

The term itself finds its origin in the 1590s with more than one source:

a) Modern French – patriote

b) Latin – patriota (fellow countryman)

c) Greek – patriots (fellow countryman), patrios (of one’s father), patris (fatherland – from pater – father).

The question then is being patriotic a good thing or a bad thing? Apparently, ‘patriot’ was not always described as a good thing but it has always been used to describe the state or the condition of the person in question. Around the 1600s, being a patriot was being a "loyal and disinterested supporter of one's country” and then it around the mid-1800s it became “an ironic term of ridicule or abuse”. Johnson, at first defined it as "one whose ruling passion is the love of his country," but in his later writings he added, "It is sometimes used for a factious disturber of the government". So, a patriot was a trouble-maker. Horace Walpole around the 1744s made it a by-word of derision, “…when he said that ... the most popular declaration which a candidate could make on the hustings was that he had never been and never would be a patriot” (Macaulay, "Horace Walpole," 1833).

The American English, for some reason, always had a more positive meaning for the term but during WWI & II the term ‘patrioteer’ became used to describe those who were “phony and rascally” (1928). Oriana Fallaci ["The Rage and the Pride," 2002] writes that “ the Americans [were] so fond of patriotic, patriot, and patriotism, lack the root noun and are content to express the idea of patria by cumbersome compounds such as homeland”. Other writers like Joyce, Shaw, and H.G. Wells all used patria as an English word in the early 20^th century but they failed to make it stick. The positive meaning for patriots however continued in America when Patriots’ Day (April 19) was establish to celebrate the anniversary of the 1775 skirmishes at Lexington and Concord Bridge and it became a legal holiday in Maine and Massachusetts from 1894. Since then, patriot’s positive meaning stuck to this day.

Inevitably, a patriot needs a country to which he or she is loyal: they need a nation. Nation came in the 1300s from Old French, ‘nacion’ and from Latin ‘nationem’ which referred to "nation, stock, race," but that is where things get a little more confusing because ‘natus’ means "that which has been born," and ‘nasci’ is "be born" both coming from Old Latin ‘gnasci’ which was related to genus. Then politics came into the picture when the American Indian nations in the 1640s began to mean "large groups of people with common ancestry". Then in 1907, “Nation-building” came into the picture.

When we have politics coming into the picture, we inevitably get complexity lurking just around the corner. A state is not a nation because a state is a "political organization of a country, supreme civil power, government” (1530s), etymonline says that “this sense grew out of the meaning ‘condition of a country’ with regard to government, prosperity, etc in the late 13^th century” and we find Latin phrases like “status rei public” meant ‘condition of the republic’. After that, we find ideas like the separation of church and state in Western politics around 1580s and some time after that someone aspirin.

The invention of aspirin would have been a welcomed development but it did not come early enough because in 1856 the Americans used it to mean "semi-independent political entity under a federal authority" but the British North American colonies were “occasionally were called states as far back as 1630s”. The Americans used “The States” to mean "the United States of America" since 1777 and “stateside” (1944) was a World War II U.S. military slang. The U.S. also started to talk about ‘State rights’ in 1798 and the states rights was first recorded in 1858.

Now here is the problem. A patriot is loyal to the fatherland because the word comes from the Latin word for father. He (applies to she as well but I prefer to use he, okay?) feels a strong link to those who are from same nation because he thinks that he shares something important with them. He does not, however, necessarily, need to be loyal to the state because the state is what governs the nation and he may feel that others would form a better state. On the other hand, if he believes in the fundamentals that formed the basis of his nation, then he should support the state as long as it is set up following the said fundamentals. Ok, that is as far as we can go without needing to start reviewing the political theories that we learnt beginning from Macchiavelli, or for some, the theories we learnt at the local kedai kopi.