John Locke Essay Competition: Should anyone be ashamed of their nation's history? Should anyone be proud of it?

History is not ours and yet we inherit it. Engaging with national history in most forms, we are often confronted with narratives that insist that we must either take pride in or feel shame about our collective past. This presents a moral dichotomy: the nation is either an emblem of glory or buried under guilt; its citizens either heirs to triumph or accomplices to guilt. Such framing of national histories is not only reductive but intellectually unsustainable and ethically volatile by replacing inquiry with identity. In this essay, I argue that we should adopt a stance of critical dispassion toward national history. Dispassion here does not mean indifference, but the refusal to let inherited emotion distort historical judgment. Martha Nussbaum states that “shame” is an “unreliable basis for moral judgement. What we need,” she argues, “is a rational ethical attitude” that seeks projection. Pride is, I contend, another unreliable base for moral judgement. Both shame and pride, thus, become different sides of the same coin that are used to avoid critical engagement and encourage acceptance of identity-based emotion. Through this, national history has turned into something performative rather than something that allows room for recognition, responsibility and reform. If history is to be meaningful, it must be examined, not absorbed. Dispassion, then, is not the death of moral energy, but its disciplining. It channels outrage into reform and grief into inquiry, not performance.

At root, the questions of national pride and shame are questions about moral responsibility. The philosopher, Thomas Nagel, argues in his essay on “moral luck” that much of what we are morally judged for lies outside our control: our birth, circumstances, nationality.To feel pride or shame about sheer luck is to indulge in a fantasy of control. If our moral responsibility is bounded by agency, then shame and pride in the context of national history are deeply suspect. One cannot deserve shame for being born into a post-genocidal state any more than one can deserve pride for having ancestors who abolished slavery. Karl Jaspers extends this reasoning in The Question of German Guilt, where he distinguishes between criminal guilt, political responsibility, and metaphysical guilt. His conception of “collective responsibility” argues that we may inherit political or historical responsibility without inheriting guilt or pride as emotional entitlements. When applied to national history, this means we are implicated in the consequences of our nation's past, but not necessarily morally guilty due to it. This is a crucial distinction as we are not morally obligated to feel personal shame or pride for what lies outside our control, but we may still be obligated to reckon with its legacy. Nagel, therefore, talks of moral judgment in individual agency, while Jaspers widens the lens to include collective responsibility. Taken together, they suggest that while we may not be guilty for inherited crimes, we are responsible for how we respond to them

Still, identity is not easily severed from inheritance. In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that we are “story-telling animals” whose lives are embedded in histories not of our own making. Our national past forms the narrative context in which identities develop, creating a tension between agency and inheritance. This tension demands that we acknowledge our embeddedness without blindly assuming the moral weight of what we inherit. Furthermore, Charles Taylor writes that “to know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand.” Identity, he argues, is forged in moral space that is in relation to where one stands. The danger is not in standing somewhere, thus, but in refusing to move. MacIntyre’s insight helps us understand why the emotional pull of national history is so strong but it does not justify surrendering to it. We are tempted to derive self-worth or self-loathing from these inherited narratives, which often slip into unexamined pride or performative shame. That is why the capacity for rational moral engagement must interrupt the flow of narrative inheritance. Dispassion, then, becomes a method of moral clarity. It does not require detachment from history, but insists on examining it without collapsing into either sentimentalism or denial. Emotions, when detached from critical inquiry, become symbolic attachments in the form of flags, anthems, apologies rather than moral convictions born out of reason. Therefore by acknowledging that we are shaped by historical forces without feeling automatic shame or pride leads us to the only intellectual defensible position: critical distance

Furthermore, the moral ambiguity of national emotion becomes clearer when we consider how history itself is constructed. Anderson’s concept of nations as “imagined communities” reveals that nations are stories that we choose to believe and not natural entities. What becomes a proud or shameful moment depends heavily on which version of history one inherits. The British Empire is celebrated in certain classrooms as a source of railways and governance but condemned for famine and exploitations in others. This becomes the precise reason why ‘who’ tells history and ‘how’ it is told becomes important. Zinn adds to this argument by exemplifying how changing the lens can change the entire moral frame. If history centers on indigenous genocide or slavery, pride is difficult to sustain and ethically fraught, which is precisely the point: who gets to decide which stories define a nation and which are left untold? In most cases, it is the state. Hobsbawm adds more weight to this argument with his belief of how “invented traditions” such as national days, anthems and monuments are not neutral but a state's manufactured attempt to create coherent identity. Such traditions do not educate so much as they emote. This leads to feeling pride or shame without questioning the history one has inherited, leading to participation in a political project instead of a moral one. Nietzsche describes such dangers of being “possessed” by history; when national memory turns into shrines or shackles, it obscures our responsibility to the present. The real business of history is not in monuments but in sitting with uncomfortable facts and saying: “This happened. Now what shall we do with it?”

For instance, Germany is often praised for their own confrontation of their past and recognising the danger of national emotions. The Holocaust Memorial stands in the heart of Berlin. German schoolchildren are required to study the history of the Third Reich in detail.Yet what makes this response notable is not the presence of shame, but its purpose; it is what philosopher Avishai Margalit calls a “moral memory community,” one committed to remembering wrongs in order to avoid their repetition. Shame here is functional and not directed toward despair but vigilance. German remembrance is not national self-loathing, but national self-discipline or as Margalit puts it, their institution’s focus on remembrance is not humiliation to wallow in, “but to prevent their return.” By contrast, Japan offers a case where historical memory has been politically constrained. Textbooks have been criticized for minimizing the Nanjing Massacre or omitting mentions of wartime atrocities such as the use of comfort women. This is not the absence of shame but the active erasure of the conditions that might prompt it. Such refusal to engage critically with moral failure compromises not just international trust, but the moral development of its own citizens — a phenomenon visible in diminished civic responsibility and rising nationalism among youth. 

The United States, on the other hand, offers a revealing contradiction: pride in the revolution sits uneasily beside the shame of slavery and segregation. Debates over confederate statues or critical race theory show that pride and shame are less moral positions than ideological ones. “I love America,” James Baldwin wrote, “...and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticise her perpetually.” His love rejects both sentiments, replacing them with ethical engagement that is unsentimental and necessary. Similarly, India, too, warns against sentimental history. Pride in Gandhi and the independence movement often takes away from the memory of caste violence or the 1984 anti-Sikh killings. Here, by using pride to excuse forgetting and making shame taboo, both are flattened into slogans that leave no room for critical thought. Thapar warns the world against this, stating that the danger of rewriting history to serve the present “silences not just facts but the moral imagination.”

Additionally, one might argue that shame and pride are necessary for moral motivation. Without some shame, how can we confront injustice? Without some pride, how do we foster civic responsibility? One could argue that collective shame sparked South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission or that pride in civil rights victories sustains Black American identity. This view, however, mistakes emotions for ethics. Similar to Baldwin’s warning of sentiment poisoning blood due to its “self-indulgence,” history that leans too hard on emotion forgets that it’s purpose is to illuminate, not to absolve or celebrate. Even in the cases stated above, emotion was transformed by discipline. Shame led to testimony. Pride led to vigilance. The danger lies not in feeling, but in feeling without form and without the structures of justice, education, or reform to hold it accountable.

Nietzsche states that too much reverence for history can pause action. Similarly, even postcolonial thinkers like Fanon and Said, whose writings reflect moral intensity, urge us to move beyond feeling toward transformation. If shame leads only to guilt, it becomes performative. If pride leads only to nationalism, it becomes dangerous. Thus dispassion offers the only reliable ground to approach national history from. It allows us to acknowledge both achievements and atrocities by studying history as method rather than myth and rejecting inherited emotion for reasoned responsibility. It is only meaningful to feel ashamed if it prompts moral inquiry. Similarly, to feel proud is only justified if it goes along with actual moral progress. Without dispassion, we lack the clarity to differentiate between what deserves critique and what deserves celebration and it is this very clarity that prevents pride from hardening into nationalism, and shame from turning into fatalism, historical denialism or collective self-contempt.

Therefore, to adopt critical dispassion is not to retreat into academic detachment, but to reimagine how nations teach, commemorate, and legislate their pasts. In education, this means curriculums that do not seek to instil pride or guilt, but understanding. Instead of closed narratives, textbooks should present history to be filled with contradictions, perspectives, and unresolved moral questions. A dispassionate remembrance might involve forums for ongoing public reflection, like Germany’s Stolpersteine or South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation hearings along with memorials to victims. In governance, critical dispassion could look like transparent archival policies and the institutionalisation of moral memory without myth-making. The aim is not moral numbness, but civic maturity where a population is capable of reckoning with its past without being consumed or consoled by it.

In conclusion, neither pride nor shame, as inherited responses to national history, can be defended on philosophical or moral grounds. They are emotions that bind us to narratives, not principles. It is the discipline of reason over reflex, of examination over emotion. The past belongs to us not so we may feel for it, but so we may think through it. The right question is not whether we should be ashamed or proud, but whether we are willing to examine the past clearly, act justly in the present, and refuse the comfort of myths in place of moral clarity. What replaces inherited emotion is not apathy, but attention. It is, as Bell Hooks said, treating love, even for a nation, as “an action, never simply a feeling.” If we care, we critique. If we believe in change, we begin not with slogans but with study. Let us, therefore, if we can, sit and turn pages of the past with a mind not full of feeling but full of care. Let the curriculums teach the students not national shame nor celebrate national conquest but the complexity of truth. Let them come away, not prideful nor shameful, but with understanding. Let them — and us —  be dispassionate. 

Bibliography

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