An old friend, the television creator Norman Lear, called about twenty years ago to tell me he’d just bought a copy of the Declaration of Independence for $8 million.
I told him he overpaid. I got mine for $4.95. He laughed as a friend would. He had purchased one of the originals printed on July 4, 1776 to be read throughout the colonies. He asked me to write something about its ideals for our time.
So I authored a small book that was privately printed in 2002 to accompany Norman’s Dunlap Broadside on a national road trip. One man bought 3,000 copies of my little book then, and several months ago asked whether I’d consider rewriting it for the challenges we face now. I did, and on this July 4, the new version of “The Everyday Patriot: How to be a Great American Now” went public.
The immediate reaction has been deeply gratifying — with early readers insisting that every American ought to read the book, and urging that it should be taught in our schools.
The premise is simple. By following the trail of ideas presented in our nation’s birth certificate, we can reclaim a new and needed sense of citizenship and patriotism for our day. I draw on Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and many other great thinkers to explain citizenship as a moral status rather than just a legal fact, and patriotism as a moral calling connecting us all with a concern for the common good.
There are several main ideas in the book. First of all, patriotism isn’t essentially adversarial in any way. There’s nothing inherently militaristic, xenophobic, or jingoistic about it. And it’s not a smug, self-celebratory or self-focused narcissistic nationalism. By contrast, the core of any healthy and proper understanding of patriotism can be captured by commonplace images:
Gardens: I like to think of us all as gardeners tending our own little metaphorical plots of land. Patriotism is about loving our country enough to seek to make our personal gardens as good, beautiful, and productive as they can be, for the sake of others as well as ourselves.
The implication is then straightforward: Don’t be a weed! And not even a prize petunia. Be the best horticulturalist you can. Good gardeners don’t fight each other, but tend to be mutually helpful instead. The ancient philosophers saw all our governance as beginning at home. In fact, in his massively influential “Republic,” Plato gave hints of how inner governance in our souls should be the foundation for outer politics. He represents Socrates as thinking we all have positive roles to play in a good society. And that starts within.
Partnerships: A few years ago, I was sitting in a private dining room at New York’s Battery Park Ritz Carlton, with the Statue of Liberty gleaming in the morning sun just outside, having breakfast with a group of C-Suite leaders from Fortune 50 companies and talking philosophy. The topic of politics arose and I said that Aristotle viewed politics as an immensely noble enterprise about how best we can live well together. The whole group erupted in such raucous laughter I thought they were going to choke on their rolls and coffee. One guy said, “How did we fall so far?” And that led to a great conversation. Aristotle, it turned out, saw the best human good as coming from a simple formula: People in Partnership for a shared Purpose. And a later philosopher had a vivid image for how that can work.
Circles: The ancient Roman philosopher Hierocles imagined our lives as described by a number of concentric circles of concern. First there is self-care; then the next circle is one of family, then neighborhood, friends and work, the overall community, and then the state and the nation, and the world. Patriotism is about starting where we are and together making each circle the best it can be, offering that excellence up to the next circle out, and so on. Good people make for good families, which make good neighborhoods, good countries, and a good world.
Votes: This inner circle principle can help us with our garden metaphor. Patriotism is “voting every day” with our time, attention, and energy to make our gardens great within each circle, in support of what’s broader, and the larger circles are to support their inner circles as well. In the book, I draw on my own life stories and give practical examples of how we can live out our citizenship with a renewed practical patriotism in our time, in each of our circles, as partners cultivating our gardens well.
Tom Morris was a Morehead-Cain Scholar at UNC Chapel Hill and holds a double PhD from Yale University. He is a public philosopher and author of over 30 books, including his new book “The Everyday Patriot: How to be a Great American Now” available on Amazon and through all bookstores.