for Patriot's Day: a thank you to all who serve sp that government by the people should not perish from this earth.

Robert A. Heinlein, April 5, 1973:

Patriotism is as necessary a part of man’s evolutionary equipment as are his eyes, as useful to the race as eyes are to the individual.

A man who is NOT patriotic is an evolutionary dead end. This is not sentiment but the hardest of logic.

To prove that patriotism is a necessity we must go back to fundamentals. Take any breed of animal − for example, Tyrannosaurus rex. What is the most basic thing about him? The answer is that Tyrannosaurus rex is dead, gone, extinct.

Which brings us to the second fundamental question: Will Homo sapiens stay alive? Will he survive?

We can answer part of that at once: Individually H. sapiens will NOT survive. Very well, as individuals we all die. This brings us to the second half of the question: Does Homo sapiens AS A BREED have to die? The answer is: No, it is NOT unavoidable.

We have two situations, mutually exclusive: Mankind surviving, and mankind extinct. With respect to morality, the second situation is a null class. An extinct breed has NO behavior, moral or otherwise.

Since survival is the sine qua non, I now define “moral behavior” as “behavior that tends toward survival.” I won’t argue with philosophers or theologians who choose to use the word “moral” to mean something else, but I do not think anyone can define behavior that tends toward extinction as being “moral” without stretching the word “moral” all out of shape.

We are now ready to observe the hierarchy of moral behavior from its lowest level to its highest.

The simplest form of moral behavior occurs when a man or other animal fights for his own survival. Do not belittle such behavior as being merely selfish. Of course it is selfish. But selfishness is the bedrock on which all moral behavior starts and it can be immoral only when it conflicts with a higher moral imperative. An animal so poor in spirit that he won’t even fight on his own behalf is already an evolutionary dead end; the best he can do for his breed is to crawl off and die, and not pass on his defective genes.

The next higher level is to work, fight, and sometimes die for your own immediate family. This is the level at which six pounds of mother cat can be so fierce that she’ll drive off a police dog. It is the level at which a father takes a moonlighting job to keep his kids in college − and the level at which a mother or father dives into a flood to save a drowning child, and it is still moral behavior even when it fails.

The next higher level is to work, fight, and sometimes die for a group larger that the unit family − an extended family, a herd, a tribe − and take another look at that baboon on watch; he’s at that moral level. (On the ground a leopard can catch a baboon, but if a baboon is warned in time to reach the trees, he can out-climb a leopard. The lookout is a young male assigned to that duty and there he will stay, until the bull of the herd sends up another male to relieve him.) I don’t think baboon language is complex enough to permit them to discuss such abstract notions as “morality” or “duty” or “loyalty” − but it is evident that baboons DO operate morally and DO exhibit the traits of duty and loyalty; we see them in action. Call it “instinct” if you like − but remember that assigning a name to a phenomenon does not explain it.

The next level in moral behavior higher than that exhibited by the baboon is that in which duty and loyalty are shown toward a group of your kind too large for an individual to know all of them. We have a name for that. It is called “patriotism.”