> This sounds like you're saying that it's not possible for a Chinese or Japanese person to love their own country more than they love other countries. If so, do you have any evidence that supports this belief?
Do you have evidence to the contrary? Why is the burden to disprove a "love" that has never been proven on me, how would the evidence you're asking for even look like?
I could assemble a set of information that is suggestive of it, but such things are inherently subjective so it could be rightly easily dismissed as inconclusive.
> Why is the burden to disprove a "love" that has never been proven on me
> The burden of proof is the obligation on a party in a dispute to provide sufficient warrant for their position (in this case: "I would say the person who loves just one nation over all others loves no nation").
Well yeah, it's hard to talk about proving love or disproving love either way. But if you have compassion to one person, do you not have, in theory, the capability of compassion towards all? If you can enjoy the quirks of one nation, and the landscape and the people and the language, why wouldn't that same capability extend to other nations, too? If you love no other nation, at all, what is the mechanism for loving your own nation, why is it incompatible with other nations?
I think it's not a huge stretch to extend this to nations:
> If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the "loved" person.
-- Erich Fromm
As George Orwell said, either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does... personally I can't wish well for my "own" country without also wishing well to others, too. Because by the same token that I have a "right" to wish well for myself and people close to me, others also have the right to be well.
> But if you have compassion to one person, do you not have, in theory, the capability of compassion towards all?
This seems like an example of this weird cognitive quirk that frequently appears in discussions on (and only on, as far as I can tell) certain identity-related topics: the apparent belief that because something is possible, therefore it is, always and everywhere.
Of course you can have passion/compassion/love for one person, but honestly, where did you pick up this idea that these feelings are some sort of a binary, that you either love all people and things identically, or you don't love anyone at all? The only thing I can think of that even remotely resembles this in observable nature is the behavior of dogs, and even there it seems mostly limited to interactions with humans and other dogs.
> If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the "loved" person.
I can see how people can be attracted by such prose, but if you look a bit more carefully, note the extremely unusual premise it is built upon, described in the first sentence: a person who loves only one other person, and is indifferent to all others. This is so uncommon, I suspect it would be considered some form of a mental illness.
> As George Orwell said, either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does
Lots of people says lots of things all the time. The question is whether they are true and practically meaningful. Mr. Orwell may enjoy defining the entire planet in terms of a binary of decent or not, utterly ignoring the fact that this has precisely no bearing on the actual experiences of most people, and may even draw people into certain ideologies by doing so, but even a small amount of critical thinking suggests this isn't a terribly useful or "true" idea.
> personally I can't wish well for my "own" country without also wishing well to others, too
Technically, I'm not sure if I can either, because it just so happens that I wish well for my own country and people in all others, and simultaneously, I am also a passionate Nationalist. That which others seem to consider literally impossible, is absolutely effortless to me.
> Because by the same token that I have a "right" to wish well for myself and people close to me, others also have the right to be well.
I wonder if this is a noteworthy difference in our thinking, this notion of "rights". I can agree that everyone has the right to wish themselves well (the pursuit of happiness), but who's obligation is it to fulfill the "right" of being well? (Did you notice you switched from wishing to being in that sentence? Do you personally draw a distinction between the two?)
Do you have evidence to the contrary? Why is the burden to disprove a "love" that has never been proven on me, how would the evidence you're asking for even look like?