Wednesday 5 October 2016

Patriotism

Is it possible to be patriotic without being nationalistic? As far as I can see the modern left/liberal consensus seems to be no. If you are one then you are almost inevitably going to be the other because the two are basically the same. But I think that's because the left takes a deformed version of the thing, the thing gone wrong, for the thing itself. Why is this? Could they be seeing what they want to see to justify a pre-conceived idea? I think that could well be so and the reason behind it is that they are primarily motivated by hate*. I don't say all, or even most, people tending to this belief system are like that but there are a number of people committed to the ideological left who are.  That is why they caricature love of one's country as antagonism towards other countries. This leads me to ask what their hatred is fundamentally of, and the most obvious answer seems to be that at root it is hatred of God. That, in fact, may be what the whole left wing project is based on.  I am sure there were originally nobler impulses at work, and there probably still are in the mix in many cases, but all the evidence from the French revolution onwards points to the fact that the prime motivation of the left, as in the dominating force behind it, is to banish God from the world.

I have put this to people on the left and most of them deny it while at the same time dismissing the idea of God as nonsense for children. Some even claim they would love for there to be a God and would gladly welcome evidence for it if there were any. But I find this disingenuous since there is plenty of evidence for God if one wants to find it. These people don't want to find it because they don't want there to be a God, and they don't want this because of what that would imply to their egos which are all important to them. They are rebels against truth because they cannot abide the idea that they are created beings with a duty to their Creator.

Patriotism means no more and no less than love of one's country. This includes its landscape, its people, its culture and its history but also something more, an indefinable spirit that nevertheless is clearly intuited by any real patriot. It is a natural and good human feeling. The man that does not love his country is not to be trusted because it is highly unlikely he can love anything. You may recognise certain things are wrong with the country but you do not fundamentally want to change it. It's the same as with a person. If you want to completely change a person you purport to love then you don't actually love that person at all. The patriot may hope for certain things to change but a root and branch transformation is the last thing he wants. When the left now claim to love England or America or wherever but want to radically transform them, or show no sign of concern that they are being radically transformed, you can bet your last dollar that they don't love those countries at all. What they want (love doesn't come into it) is an England or an America bent to the shape of their ideology because they are not concerned with real things but with abstractions and ideas. But this wouldn't be England or America any more because the result would be the same as in every other country on which they have imposed the same pattern, robbing each one of its innate individuality. Does love want to destroy the thing it loves?

This gives us a clue to what patriotism is. It is a concern with individuality. Many on the left don't seem to like real individuals but God does. He created us like that after all. Now, countries are not people but a true country does have this quality of individuality, and what patriotism is is a recognition of this quality and a desire to cherish it. Not to see it lost or trampled underfoot in the name of some so called higher uniformity. The fact that the true patriot, or I could just say the true person, loves his country does not mean that he looks down on other countries. In fact, I think that one true patriot would salute another, recognising a like minded individual. If I love my wife it doesn't mean I look down on you and your wife or dismiss the quality of your relationship. It's more likely I will respect that.

None of this means that patriotism cannot descend into nationalism but it is by no means a given. When love of one thing leads to hatred of another that's a corruption not a consequence. But then nor does it mean that all countries are necessarily equal. All are presumably valid on their own terms but some may be, at certain historical times, of more importance than others in the context of human development. I don't see how anyone could honestly deny this. But then patriotism is not about how important your country is. You love it for itself not for its achievements though you may well be proud of these and reasonably so.

I've written this piece in stream of consciousness mode and without an edit button switched on. It probably shows. But I hope the point I am trying to make comes through. Since this blog is by virtue of its subject fundamentally patriotic I thought I would attempt a brief and necessarily incomplete description of why patriotism is a good thing, and one that makes us more human not less so.


*I'm not happy about using this word but can't think of a better. What I really mean is 'againstness' or antipathy towards. Fundamentally it is that in a person which causes him to rebel against truth.

9 comments:

Bruce Charlton said...

@William. I feel the same way about this matter. Orwell was writing about this antipatriotic aspect of the Left back in the 1930s (the essay Inside the Whale, I think). And Solzhenitsyn wrote memorably about the roots of the Left as follows:

http://www.roca.org/OA/36/36h.htm

William Wildblood said...

Very interesting link, Bruce. Thanks for pointing it out.

By the way, someone has suggested to me that in the more enlightened person love of country is superseded by love of humanity but I don’t go along with this at all. Of course, love of humanity is something anyone acknowledging the reality of God and the teachings of Jesus should regard as essential but what does it really mean? I would say if you don’t love the particular how can you love the general? I think love of humanity is often used as an excuse specifically to reject love of the particular and hence any kind of real love at all.

Anonymous said...

Something I'd like to reread on this, is Johan Huizinga's “Patriotism and Nationalism in European History” (of which I've read the Dutch original). While not getting around to rereading it yet, I have read something that seems to complement it in some ways, Pieter Geyl's The Revolt of the Netherlands, 1555–1609 (1932). And now I've had the good hap to get another complementary work by Huizinga, a long paper from 1911 the title of which might be translated as 'From the Prehistory of Our National Consciousness' and which is about Burgundian history (I don't know if this has ever been translated into English, though there appears to have been a 1930 adaption of it by him in French). I've just reached a fascinating section about 'a sense of solidarity, which could yet not be called a national consciousness' related to heraldry and mottos!

Your saying "Patriotism means no more and no less than love of one's country. This includes its landscape" made me think of David Jones's volume of poetry, The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments (1974).

David Llewellyn Dodds

Bruce Charlton said...

@David - I would regard Huizinga as a brilliant writer (even in translation - ie the English Waning of the Middle Ages which is first rate prose) - but he is 'on the wrong side' - which is a problem!

Anonymous said...

Hmm... This is my eighth book of his (if memory serves me correctly) - with the Waning (read in Dutch) the finest so far - I have not got to Homo Ludens or In de schaduwen van morgen (1935: translated by his son Jacob Herman Huizinga as In the Shadow of Tomorrow), of both of which I've heard very good things - but I haven't got any clear sense "he is 'on the wrong side'", yet (though I'm not sure what his 'limitations' may be, either).

David Llewellyn Dodds

Bruce Charlton said...

@David - This feeling is based on The Waning... which was an important book for me as a youth. Re-reading it now, ir seems like a secular liberal dismantling of the essence of the middle ages - an attack on what was best about it; implicitly cntrasted with a supposed progression in the early modern/ Renaissance era.

But in most ways the truth seems to be the opposite - the raw cruelty of the Tudor period, its greed, its superstition and fascination with magic, and the emerging attitude of exploitation seems far more evident later than earlier; yet these are supposedly medieval. I suppose I got this from later, pro-medieval writers like Chesterton and Lewis - but the facts seem to back them.

In sum, there is a quality of the smug modern 'humanist' condescendingly looking-down on the middle ages.

Anonymous said...

A passage caught my eye in Huizinga's Burgundian paper: of the historians at the Court, he says (my translation), "The dependence on the House occupies for them the place of a general patriotism. Now, such a conception of dynastic loyalty is eminently suited to make the transition to a sense of a national state, to be filled with a new, higher content." This does not seem condescending, it seems to combine historical analysis - that Burgundy did not go beyond using 'patria' in the plural, even in the thought on its observant, engaged contemporary historians - with the conclusion that to proceed to a 'general patriotism' would be something not only new but 'higher', but that this was not some sort of eventual progressive inevitability - nor was its not happening something grossly 'primitive'. He sees continuity and change - rather as Eric Voegelin uses the imagery of compactness and differentiation while he stresses there can also be regression (which can present itself as 'progress').

As to 'nation states', to combine Huizinga and Geyl, here, they seem to see multiple modernities - one 'modern' tendency was to absolutistic centralized states, another was actually 'more mediaeval' in holding on to diverse existing laws and rights and privileges, yet in fact both better and more novel in combining this in a developing consciousness of general patriotism which was opposed to that centralizing, uniformitarian absolute striving of others.

David Llewellyn Dodds

Anonymous said...

I just ran into something interesting in the late Leonidas Donskis's recent essay (now online), "Forms of Hatred":

"A passionate collision took place between Orwell and the Left in Great Britain over nationality, a supposedly bourgeois and reactionary concept. The Left always favored deracination as a sign of personal liberty and dignity, yet Orwell tried to reconcile natural patriotic feelings with other modern sensibilities, first and foremost with individual freedom, dignity, equality, and fellowship. He believed that our existential need for roots and a home, if neglected or, worse, despised, may make an awkward comeback in the form of symbolic compensation, such as a fierce attachment to the doctrine or ideology that becomes our symbolic home. As Karl Marx would have put it, a genuine proletarian does not have a home, for his home is socialism."

He goes on to recommend Orwell's essay, "Notes on Nationalism".

(My first impression is that his analysis of forms of hatred is not convincing, but I have not tried to think about it carefully (yet).)

David Llewellyn Dodds

William Wildblood said...

So for intellectuals of the left the real is dismissed for the ideological and truth replaced by theory. That makes sense.