"patriotism" is a way of saying "women and children first"

More food for thought on the Fourth of July: This isn't critical in the same way as my other "holiday" entries. This is from a speech called "The Pragmatics of Patriotism" by Robert Heinlein (yes the science fiction author) and he actually gives a really thoughtful way to think about these moral questions. :

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.

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.

Evolution is a process that never stops. Baboons who fail to exhibit moral behavior do not survive; they wind up as meat for leopards.

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 own kind too large for an individual to know all of them. We have a name for that. It is called "patriotism."

Behaving on a still higher moral level were the astronauts who went to the Moon, for their actions tend toward the survival of the entire race of mankind.

[...]

Men are expendable; women and children are not. A tribe or a nation can lose a high percentage of its men and still pick up the pieces and go on… as long as the women and children are saved. But if you fail to save the women and children, you've had it, you're done, you're through! You join Tyrannosaurus Rex, one more breed that bilged its final test.

I first read this speech many many years ago but his way of grounding even very altruistic acts of sacrifice on survival of the fittest is rather compelling and its something that I've found myself thinking about over and over again. An interesting consequence is that even sacrifices made for Pan-Latino, Pan-African, Islamic causes would be considered "patriotism" under Heinlein's definition. The important thing is to make efforts for a cause larger than yourself.