Clumps Of Soil

Perhaps not surprisingly, I find the idea that patriotism is somehow a “petty” loyalty, in particular a “petty loyalty to clumps of soil,” to be very wrong, insofar as this description is intended to describe this loyalty as somehow base or mean or limited, and therefore the cause of greater evils.  It seems to me that the great evils that Kukathas and Kateb attach to patriotism do not derive from “petty loyalty to clumps of soil,” but from abstract loyalties to ludicrous lists of universal rights that must be realised no matter how much blood is spilled in the effort or to national ambitions that have no relationship to reality.  The petty-soil-clump-lovers are not the cause of the great calamities of mass slaughter and destruction that so disillusion the learned contributors to the Cato debate, but are, on the contrary, the only alternative to the destructive ideologies that promote the killing of others for their own benefit.