There is a statement from Arthur Schopenhauer. What is your opinion?
"The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen. The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before hies eyes. But every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority."
I think he is overstating things a bit. It's entirely possible for accomplished people to have a healthy pride in their country.
That said, he is right that there exists an ugly, aggressive, intolerant species of nationalism prevalent among lowest-common-denominator types. Unfortunately, there has been a surge in the number of these mouth-breathing, chest-thumping yahoos in recent years, to the point that they threaten peace and stability in democracies.
In Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, HMS Pinafore, the idea of national pride is satirized in a song. The character, Ralph, says proudly:
I am an Englishman! Behold!
And the chorus immediately chimes in:
He is an Englishman!
For he himself has said it,
And it’s greatly to his credit,
That he is an Englishman!
For he might have been a Roosian,
A French, or Turk, or Proosian,
Or perhaps Itali-an!
But in spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations,
He remains an Englishman!
The point, of course, is that there is not anything admirable simply in his being an Englishman--he didn't choose his nationality, it was just a pure accident of birth.
To put it another way, a naturalized citizen who voluntarily chooses his nationality possibly has a right to national pride, but not a native-born citizen who has not made any choices at all.
I don’t understand why some people think you can’t be proud of an accomplishment that’s not your own. When someone you know accomplishes something, what do you say? “I’m proud of you.”
Pride is a feeling of celebrating the accomplishments of someone in your life, whether that person is a friend, a family member, or a member of your culture—these are all human in-groups, social organizations to which we belong.
Let's be honest, real pride is for something you achieve, not something that you have no choice about,..
whether that's where you were born, what your sexuality is, how tall you are or whatever.
National pride, though, doesn't mean being proud to be British, it means being proud of what fellow British people have achieved, which makes some sense at least.
