Ed Davey: "We are a caring country, not a country of thuggery"

An open letter organised by Together With Refugees and signed by more than 200 refugee groups, charities and trade unions called on party leaders to end the pernicious currents of hatred that are fuelling anti-migrant protests.

Ed Davey closed his reply with the words:

That is who we are: a caring country, not a country of thuggery. A nation of laws and decency, not hate and lawlessness. And we must insure this is who we remain.

My first thought was that this was a pretty generous reading of our history, but then I thought of one of my favourite philosophers, the late Richard Rorty.

Carol Nicholson discussed Rorty's account of patriotism in a 2003 article for Philosophy Now:

In Achieving Our Country Rorty applies these views of knowledge and truth to the issue of patriotism. National pride, he argues, is analogous to self-respect and is as necessary for self-improvement. 

Both self-respect and patriotism are virtues found in an Aristotelian Golden Mean between the vices of excess and deficiency. Just as too much self-respect results in arrogance, and too little can lead to moral cowardice, an excess of patriotism can produce imperialism and bellicosity, and a lack of patriotism prohibits imaginative and effective political debate and deliberation about national policy. 

Patriotism is instilled by means of inspirational images and stories about a nation’s past, which help citizens to form a sense of moral identity. Given Rorty’s pragmatic theory of truth, he does not view any of these stories as the ‘objective’ or ‘right’ one. We must make a choice among them based upon the kind of moral identity we want to create, rather than on the basis of correspondence with a pre-existing Reality.

Other than a popular simple-minded militarism, Rorty sees very few stories in contemporary American culture that might inspire patriotism. The academic left today lacks a vision of national pride, and it exhibits a kind of fashionable hopelessness, which Rorty attributes to the breakdown of the alliance between the intellectuals and the unions in the Sixties, the influence of postmodern theory, and the impact of the Vietnam War. 

An autobiographical section of one of the essays about growing up as a “red-diaper anticommunist baby” in the Thirties and Forties gives insight into why he is so dismayed by both the current U.S. administration and the opposition to it.

And that, I think, is a lesson for all Liberals: we must resist fashionable hopelessness.