Often treated as an unquestioned virtue, patriotism can easily slide into nationalism, exclusion and hostility towards others.

These days, patriotism is everywhere you look. It’s not as positive a thing as many believe, and we should be more worried about where it can lead than we are. It is often “over the top.”

Bob Wurth’s book _1942: Australia’s greatest peril_ (2008) is about how Japan eyed Australia during World War II. In it, Wurth recounts an anecdote about a Japanese student visitor decades afterwards: she was shown the inscription on the memorial at Caloundra to the hospital ship Centaur, which was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine off the Sunshine Coast with much loss of Australian life. “That’s a lie,” the young woman said angrily on reading the inscription, and stormed off. Her love of her country made it impossible for her to accept as real an event which made her countrymen appear flawed. The facts made for an inconvenient truth, and they failed to trump her sense of patriotism.

Patriotism can condition behaviour, too, and in far-reaching ways. There were the kamikaze pilots and those who manned the mini-submarines, young men infused with love and obedience towards an emperor who embodied the Japanese nation and its people. Indoctrinated into believing that spectacular death in the service of their emperor and their country was heroic, they crashed their planes into American ships and embarked knowingly on one-way trips in hostile waters to fire torpedoes at enemy ships and targets on land. Theirs were literally acts of suicide.

Or take the scenes in the US Congress late last month during Donald Trump’s State of the Nation address – Republicans rising over and over to their feet and enthusiastically, even manically, shouting “USA! USA! USA!” at the President’s every claim about the greatness of their nation and the initiatives he was pursuing to promote its interests. It brought to mind the common American chant of the Vietnam era: “My country, right or wrong.” Not long ago, when Trump re-named the Gulf of Mexico as the ‘Gulf of America’, many in his country applauded. To Trump those people were patriots. From him that was high praise.

Sometimes patriotism takes on a distinctly sinister air. When the Iranian women’s football team at the Asia Cup refused to sing their national anthem before their opening match, they were called “war-time traitors” on state-run Iranian television for ostentatiously refusing to show their love of country. Severe punishment was suggested, and the threat to the players’ safety on returning home was obvious. And in large swathes of the US it has long been dangerous to oppose any aspect of US foreign policy. To do that is to be instantly labelled as hostile to the nation, a huge sin.

No country, including Australia, is immune from expressions of patriotic fervour. Who can forget the chant of “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi, Oi, Oi!” which was born during the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000, or the flag-draping habits more recently of Pauline Hanson and those who marched “for Australia” in rejecting what they called “mass immigration.” In Hansen’s statements and in the marches, racism was clearly involved: unmistakeably, certain ethnicities were being targeted.

The eighteenth century English writer Samuel Johnson called patriotism “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” He never really spelled out what he meant by that statement but his biographer, James Boswell, argued that what Johnson decried was the form of patriotism that served the self and political self-interest, not any simple, quiet and under-stated love of country. Johnson hated the aggressive nationalism he saw around him. He would hate what exists in today’s world.

Yet patriotism today is taken by many to be an unbridled good, something that is by its nature worthy and should not be questioned. Its precise value is too seldom discussed. It has become for some a cloak for racist, anti-‘other’ thinking, legitimising and elevating in the national consciousness a negative view of some migrants and some origins of migrants. To fail to show patriotism as defined by those of a certain view is to invite their antagonism.

This is fundamental to the populist movements which are beginning to roil political life in much of the western world.

What patriotism threatens is a morality which is separate from and not underpinned by nationalist considerations. “My country, right or wrong” made it possible to ignore what national policy in America was about. Adherence to the national benefit, as defined by those who supported the war in Vietnam, was all that mattered. Vietnam suffered greatly from America convincing itself for a time of the righteousness of a war that in due course became untenable.

The problem is that patriotism too easily takes on tones of, indeed morphs into, jingoism and xenophobia.

At times, the group-think behind the slogans of patriotism (“Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi!” for example) can seem harmlessly mindless, but at worst it is dangerous and a threat to the cohesiveness of society. Whether mindless or dangerous, it makes not thinking justifiable and it defines ‘us’ and ‘them’ as being opposed. This is legitimate in sporting contexts, up to a point and when friendliness and respect in competition are not lost, but it can easily become bothersome in other situations especially when prejudice and hate are invoked. Allied to some causes, patriotism can enhance the likelihood of conflict. We should reject it and call it out for what it stands for when this happens. We need more internationalism and less nationalism, more cohesion and less division.

Dialling down patriotism, or ensuring it is expressed in a benign manner and not unhealthily imbued with negativity toward people of other countries, would surely be good things. But there is not much sign that this will happen while patriotism is widely regarded as a positive in human affairs and not to be questioned. It is at the very least over-rated.