Tolstoy & Patriotism

"Patriotism is stupid and immoral."

- Leo Tolstoy

We briefly touched upon this quote during our class discussion regarding patriotism, however, I wanted to bring it up again simply because I agree with this quote.

People should care for every country. If you only care about your country, you do not care about the world, but if you care about the world, you care about every country, including your own. Patriotism requires special affection towards your country, a sense of personal identification for your country, and a special concern for the well being of the country, but what happens if you care for another country as well? Are you also patriotic towards that country? Say you are from America, born and raised, and you also care for England. Are you an English Patriot? 

Going off of the same example, if you supported two countries, and both of those countries go to war, who do you support?

Needless to say, Tolstoy was right. 

Nature vs. Nurture.

On the topic concerning nature vs. nurture, I believe that both factor into the equation, however, I always find myself leaning more towards nature. For example, think of child prodigies. You can't teach them to be a genius, it's all in their DNA. You cannot nurture a child to have brown hair and blue eyes. DNA is something that we cannot escape, or change. 

However, I was reading an article online, and a person was arguing that DNA (nature), gives us a lot of our basics in life, (hair colour, eye colour, intelligence, etc.), and nurture allows us to build on those givens. 

Needless to say, although I read that article, I still think that most of who we are comes from nature, everything else is merely just a factor.