The scene was late October - midterm essays handed in, enjoying a respite from schoolwork at the more upscale of the three campus bars with my fellow philosophy students.
This was a good group: senior students in the Honors seminar, who had just gotten out of the Friday lecture in our Kant class. In saying it was a good group I mean it was a smart group: people who did the readings, thought about it deeply, and all had particular quirks I had learned to identify as their “thinking hard about this … give me a minute” tell. We’ve all gone our separate ways, and I’m not in touch with any of them anymore, but I wish them all well.1
At the second round of beers, for whatever reason, the discussion turned to patriotism. No one in the group, made up of Canadians and a few Americans, would own up to being patriotic. I questioned this, and did what any good philosopher student did. I asked, “what do you mean by patriotism?”
My friends responses were strikingly similar to Plato’s early dialogues - examples of the concept rather than an inclusive definition of the thing itself. And everyone’s examples were the stereotypes of “patriotism” - people who literally walk around wrapped in giant flags, grownups who paint Canada flags on their faces on Canada Day, Americans who shout “U-S-A! U-S-A!” at any opportunity. I pointed out that what they were doing was declaring themselves to not be part of a class of people: people who were from different, lower socioeconomic class, or from the socioeconomic class they were attending university to try to leave.
Around the third beer the insight came to me, and I spoke it out loud: “Patriotism is actually a dispositional thing. None of us actually know whether we are patriotic, just like none of us really know we are courageous or just or wise, until some particular moment calls for it, and then we either are that, or we aren’t … and that moment has not come for any of us yet.”
This produced a gratifying silence. People sipped their beers quietly for a few minutes, checked text messages on their flip phones, sorted things in their backpacks. Then someone brought up a new subject, the conversation carried on, and the evening sun dimmed outside.
And the moment still has not come.
And I pray that it won’t, for any of us.
My disappointment with graduate school, and why I left with a Masters rather than a full PhD (in addition to innate good sense…) was that I found almost no one who felt the same way. Almost everyone I met was a careerist, concerned only about how to get a recommendation letter to a particular program, how to get a particular summer residency, how to get a paper entered at a conference. Almost no one wanted to discuss the topics of our classes outside of class - it was just work.