Today’s excerpt is from Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness:
How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.
Peter Singer sometimes talks about a model of human psychology, dating back to Hierocles, that sees moral concern as divided into categories of nearness that overlap like concentric circles. The closest circle — experiencing the strongest pull of our moral attitudes — includes our family. Outside that there’s another circle encompassing our friends and acquaintances, and otuside that another circle encompassing our local community. Moving on we reach larger and larger circles that represent our country, our culture, humanity as a whole, and eventually all sentient life.
The hope of many, inclduing myself, is that the moral circle for any given individual is expanding over time — encompassing a wider and wider range of people, who may be more and more unlike ourselves.
But I’m often reminded that we still have a long way to go — for example, when I see both political parties in the United States appealing to voters by swearing to lock down the border and pursue stronger isolationaist policies. I love America, but policing access to it primarily on the basis of descent — the lottery of birth — is something that I hope will one day be seen as an artifact of a moment in history when our moral circles were particularly small.