Why Are We Patriotic?
And what does it say about us if we are not patriotic (anymore)?
We were standing shoulder to shoulder, clutching the plastic fabric of the Spanish flag in our fists, eyes enlarged, glued to the grand scale monitor set up in the park. We all opened our mouths at the same time to yell hurray! for the last goal scored, which made Spain the European football champion, that July Sunday evening, a few weeks ago.
We were an Irish, a Phillipino, a Ukrainian, a Romanian, a French and a few other foreigners. We were all rooting for Spain for one night, our adopted country. We were immersed into a sea of Spanish people and Spanish flags, and by extension we had become momentarily proud to… be Spanish? We were not sure, but the experience was exhilarating, it was a bonding moment between us and a sea of Spaniard strangers. Some of us, foreigners, even had the Spanish flag painted on our cheeks.
‘Hemos ganado!’ the Spaniards around were yelling happily. ‘We won!’, we the foreigners echoed them. Who was that ‘we’ we talked about?
Circus Maximus
After a summer of Paris Olympics, we also had the daily opportunity to feel the emotional rollercoaster of winning or losing, through the athletes born in the same country as us. Gymnastics, table tennis or artistic swimming, we felt exhilarated to be on top or crushed by a loss, going to work the next morning indignant. Newspapers ran daily rankings of countries and the medals “we” won. Comparison was easy, right under our collective eyes. The pride was palpable as that medal count went up, or wanting to throw the towel on the kitchen floor when the count remained frozen while another country overtook us.
To feel such strong emotions for the victory of those athletes, we must first feel we identify with and are proud to be of the same nationality.
And when the athletes lose, we feel disappointed in them.
Truly let down as if our significant other had cheated on us. The athlete did cheat. They cheated us of feeling pride and enhancing our own self-esteem.
When they lose, “they let us down”. The athletes themselves are aware of this and feel the pressure, reinforced by the media. Simone Biles’ words after losing a high-stakes competition were “I thought America hated me”.
They are performers, acting for our entertainment, they are the crutches that sustain all of us and our sometimes fragile sense of self-esteem. They are the Roman Empire Circus Maximus all over again. We rely on top performers to boost our image of ourselves, as borrowed from them.
The motivation
How come we are so invested in these athletes’ victories? And so devastated, frustrated and angry when they lose. Is it just national pride, or something more? Psychologists explain this phenomenon in two ways.
First, it’s about our mirror neurons. If the tennis player is angry and smashes their racket to the ground, we feel a surge of anger rising up inside our stomachs too. If the gymnast makes a perfect landing and smiles widely at the end of an exercise, we roar, feeling her own satisfaction explode in our hearts. We use our mirror neurons to feel and react just like they do.
And second, it’s about vicarious pride. We all said at least once to a friend “I’m living vicariously through you” when they went on an exciting adventure and shared photos from the journey. We don’t just enjoy another’s success, we feel proud for their success.
For a healthy self-esteem, we need to feel proud of ourselves. Our own achievements bring us a certain level of pride, but often they are incomparable to those of top athletes’. Their wins are so beyond our own achievements, that it’s like a shortcut to feeling pride faster and with less effort. That in turn boosts our own self-esteem.
We won! We beat them! We’ve done it! We borrow from the performers’ satisfaction and morale, and we drink from it. It starts to make sense how this is so motivational, how such large masses of people are invested in cheering for their favorite players.
But if it’s about vicarious pride and mirror neurons, why not root for any athlete that we like? Why do we often root for “our own”?
Enter the politics of patriotism.
The politics of patriotism
The neutral definition of patriotism is “feeling devotion and a sense of attachment to one’s country”.
But if we look beyond the surface, we see how patriotism is associated with positive individual qualities (devotion, passion, faithfulness). While the opposite, not being patriotic, is associated with individual negative qualities (disloyalty, falseness, treachery). And who wants to be seen as false and treacherous?! Being patriotic has evolved into being a good person. It’s as if the concept of patriotism were covered with a not-so-thin layer of propaganda.
Governments use patriotism as a model of how good citizens should behave. That is a big stretch from “feeling attachment to one’s country”.
Watching elite sports seems to combine the propaganda of patriotism with people’s need for vicarious pride. Patriotism means supporting every act and every person representing that country. And if we don’t, we’re not just not supporting them, we are disloyal traitors. It’s inconceivable that we do that. Can you imagine a British viewer supporting a French team?
Or maybe people root for the home team due to the sense of belonging to a group. It’s the in-group bias at play, where the public supports the elites who come from the same national group as them. I see it as an exquisite method for governments to rally people to feel that elusive “national pride”, very useful later when the same governments would invoke a duty from their fellow citizens to obey government mandates.
Eurovision: music but mostly politics
During the Eurovision, we seem to listen to music but then “countries compete”. Each song is voted up by fans from all participating countries, but their votes count only in part. A significant part of the vote comes from a professional jury. When you see the votes up on the screen and you know a little bit of history, it’s easy to see how politics has infiltrated entertainment.
“Cyprus, for instance, gave Greece the maximum 12 points 26 of the 31 times they voted. In contrast, Cyprus did not give a single point to Turkey until 2003. (Turkey participated for the first time in 1975, soon after invading Cyprus in 1974.)”
Moving beyond patriotism
And what happens with people who don’t feel they belong to their country of birth anymore, the famous third culture kids or long-time foreigners? Expats who don’t feel at home anywhere? Don’t they belong to any group of national sports aficionados?
Do they just attach to the closest in-group at hand? Or do they remain forever outsiders, both in sports preferences and in their communities?
I don’t have the answers, but maybe you do? Let’s chat in the comments.
When it comes to the Olympics, I think this an example of Americans having an opportunity to express a kind of unifying patriotism that isn’t weighed down by partisanship. That’s actually something that I appreciate about the Olympics; it is apolitical, a chance for all nations to compete under the banner of fair competition. You can cheer for your nation without being jingoistic, and there are ample opportunities to root for other countries with whom you have some kind of connection. In my case, as a French speaker and lifelong Francophile, I will always cheer on the French tricolor at the Olympics.
As a Brit I feel obliged to follow the Six Nations Rugby every year, though I'm not much of a sports spectator. It is played between national teams from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France and Italy, and is passionately followed by millions around the World.
As I live in France, was born in Wales, my father's family was from England and my mother's from Scotland, I can usually be assured to be a happy supporter of the winning side! 🙂
(Although I do suffer some mildly conflicted loyalties along the way!)