Chesterton on patriotism

In his classic book Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton famously said that the doctrine of original sin is the part of Christian theology that can really be proved.  What he had in mind, I think, is the part of that doctrine that holds that as a result of the Fall, our capacity to obey even the most obvious precepts of natural law has been gravely impaired.  I think this impairment is indeed obviously real.  One illustration would be the way people find it so difficult, in one area of human life after another, to adhere to the virtuous middle ground between opposite extreme vices.  When we aren’t gluttonous, we tend to become overly fixated on dieting and healthful eating.  When we aren’t drunkards, we often become prigs who scold even those who drink in moderation.  And so on.  Worse, those in thrall to one vice often suppose that the only alternative is the opposite extreme vice.  Sober moderation eludes us.

One area where this particular form of irrationality is especially evident today concerns our attitude toward our country.  The sober middle ground here is patriotism, and in previous articles I have discussed what Socrates, St. Thomas Aquinas and Pope St. John Paul II had to say about it.  Chesterton too had something to say about it, in his essay “A Defence of Patriotism.”

One vicious extreme here is what is today sometimes called “oikophobia,” which means a hostility to one’s own home or country.  It is manifest in those who seem to see in their country and its culture and history only undiluted evil – “systemic racism,” colonialist oppression, and so forth.  The point is not that racial hatreds, colonial injustices, and the like have never existed.  Of course they have.  The point is that the oikophobe sees in his country nothing but such evils.  He sees them even where they do not exist, ignores or puts a negative spin on the positive aspects of his country, and so on.

The injustice and ingratitude of such a mentality are repulsive, but in reacting against it, many fall into an opposite extreme vice.  Chesterton saw this opposite extreme in the England of his day, and characterized it as “a deaf and raucous Jingoism.”  It was a patriotism of “fists and… boots” that manifested itself in a “lust of territory,” celebrated “comparatively material and trivial” achievements such as “trade, physical force, a skirmish at a remote frontier, a squabble in a remote continent,” “fail[ed] to appreciate other nations,” and showed a “lack of any generosity or delicacy” and a “boasted indifference to the ethics of a national war.”

This sort of crude chauvinism is exactly what too many who rightly object to woke oikophobia have fallen into today.  We see it in those who cheer on the bullying of allies like Greenland and Canada, in the war fever of those who rationalize poorly thought out and morally dubious military adventures in Venezuela and Iran, and in those whose interest in securing our borders reflects, not a concern with law and order, but an obsession with ethnicity.  It is as if these jingoists want to confirm rather than refute the caricatures of the woke oikophobes.

Chesterton argued that this low form of patriotism arises when people have not been given something higher to celebrate.  In the case of England, he suggested, the educational system should teach children to celebrate the nation’s achievements in areas such as “literature, science, philosophy, and political eloquence,” rather than economic and military power.  It is “this vast heritage of intellectual glory” that ought to be “the chief boast of a people who have Shakespeare, Newton, Burke, and Darwin to boast of.”

Chesterton is usually insightful, but here I think he falls flat.  One problem with his diagnosis is that many nations lack higher cultural achievements of the kind he cites, yet their people nevertheless do and ought to love their country just as much as Chesterton rightly thought Englishmen should love theirs.  Moreover, while it is no doubt true that someone might love his country more fervently because of its cultural achievements, it is arguably likelier that he loves those cultural achievements because they are his country’s achievements.  That is to say, patriotism is more the cause, rather than the effect, of the celebration of one’s own country’s culture.

This is natural and proper.  For a nation is like an extended family.  With nations with greater ethnic homogeneity the family analogy is more obvious, but even those nations with greater ethnic diversity exhibit the same spirit, with different ethnicities making up one national family by adoption, as it were.  And the main reason you love your family is that it is your family.  When a family celebrates some achievement (the success of a family business, say, or the number of its children who have gone to college or done well professionally), it is not that its members love the family because of these achievements.  Rather, they call attention to these achievements because they love their family.  Nations are like that.  Their peoples celebrate what they celebrate – not only the country’s military and economic achievements, but also its higher cultural achievements – because they love their country.

This brings us to another problem with Chesterton’s analysis, which is that the distortion of patriotism that is jingoism or chauvinism can also manifest itself in celebrations of a country’s higher cultural achievements.  This happens, for example, when the emphasis is less on the actual content of a nation’s literary, artistic, philosophical, or scientific achievements, than on how inferior other nations are in this connection.  Certainly one can imagine a jingoist of Chesterton’s day being quite happy to boast of Shakespeare, Newton, Burke, and Darwin, not because he understood or cared about their ideas, but rather simply because it afforded an opportunity to put down nations who did not have similar figures to boast of.

Contrary to what Chesterton suggests, then, the problem is not primarily with what a nation’s people are taught to celebrate, but with the spirit in which they celebrate it.  And the trouble with jingoism is that it distorts proper love of country into what St. Augustine called the libido dominandi or lust for domination.

The family analogy helps us to see what true patriotism looks like.  People naturally and rightly have a special love for their own families, but normally this does not lead them to despise or want to lord it over other families.  This is precisely why different families can take an attitude of solidarity toward one another and see themselves as part of the larger whole that is the nation.  In the same way, people naturally and rightly have a special love for their own country, but this need not and should not lead them to despise and want to lord it over other countries.  Rather, countries can and should take an attitude of solidarity toward one another, as parts of what Pope Leo XIV calls the single “family of peoples” that is the human race as a whole.