Patriotism, Nationalism, Ordo Amoris

 

Two themes today that are interconnected in my mind, but I can't sort them out completely. The distinction between a kind of patriotism that is still in line with the Good and Christian agape on the one hand, and nationalism, which I abhor, on the other. And the Catholic doctrine of Ordo Amoris on the one hand, and the universality of Christian love and indeed morality on the other. These two themes are deeply connected How?  So the thought I want to explore is that the distinction between patriotism and nationalism turns on the same question that arises in the doctrine of ordo amoris: how can love be both particular and universal?  Particular loves seem to be in tension with universal love / morality.  A child naturally loves his mother more than a stranger. A man naturally loves his wife in very different ways than he can (or should) another woman. One loves one's friends, neighbors, hometown, language, and country in ways one does not love humanity in general.

     The Christian tradition as embodied in Thomas Aquinas never regarded this as a defect. Christian love – caritas (Greek: agape): willing the Good of the other – is not in tension with particular loves for Thomas. The goal is lucid loving and right ordering. Thomas argues that love (caritas) extends to all human beings, but not equally in every respect. We owe different duties to different people because we stand in different relationships to them. I am responsible for my children in a way that I am not responsible for every child on earth. We are creature, that means finite. Love is first expressed in the concrete relationships into which I have been placed. This is ordo amoris, the order of love.

     This builds on what Augustine wrote about love. For him, sin is not primarily loving bad things. More often, it is loving good things in the wrong way, i.e. corruptions of love. The love of family becomes clan loyalty. The love of country becomes nationalism. The love of oneself becomes narcissism. The love of justice becomes cruelty. Etc. The objects (family, country, oneself, justice) are good. The disorder lies in its elevation above the Good itself. It is not a matter of whether I should love my family or country but how I love these goods.

    Patriotism, at its best, resembles filial piety. One loves one's country because it is one's own. Not because it is superior. One is grateful for what one has received through it: language, customs, memories, landscapes, ancestors, institutions, stories. For me the paradigm is  Wendell Berry's love for Kentucky. Or of the affection that many people feel for a village church, a local river, or a familiar landscape. We belong to it, it has nurtured us, blessed us if we are lucky. Therefore, I owe it gratitude and care. Patriotism is fundamentally an attitude of stewardship, rooted in gratitude. Like love of family, it does not require comparison. I need not prove that my mother is superior to all other mothers in the world to love her. [Berry's patriotism begins not with the nation-state but with the beloved particulars of place: the farms, woods, rivers, families, and communities of Kentucky. Yet this local loyalty places him in tension with the larger American economic order, which he often portrays as sacrificing the health of actual places and people to the abstractions of growth, efficiency, and profit. I share this ambivalence. In other words, Berry's love of country is rooted in gratitude for a concrete homeland rather than devotion to a national project. Consequently, his deepest acts of patriotism often take the form of criticism, as he judges the nation and its economy by the extent to which they preserve or destroy the people, land, and traditions he loves. Kentucky became something like a colony of the national economy. But that is a long story.]

    Nationalism begins when gratitude becomes self-exaltation. The nationalist needs to feel his country is superior – mostly in the service of making themselves feel superior, perhaps compensating for feelings of personal inadequacy. Thus the “national interest” comes to override what is decent and good. [Slaughtering a school full of young girls to control the flow of oil and promote Netanyahu’s agenda, for example (again, concerning Iran, my sympathies are with the women fighting for their dignity against the “morality police,” but that is not relevant to my condemning a war that led to the bombing of a girl’s school among countless other horrors).] But for the nationalist, other peoples matter only insofar as they serve their agenda. Nationalism therefore violates both caritas and justice. Nationalism turns a country into an idol (“the greatest country on earth!”), an absolute. It is a kind of blasphemy in theological terms. The nation ceases to be a good among goods and becomes the supreme good. Thus nationalism displays quasi-religious features, which is a normal part of American “patriotism.”  Sacred myths that cannot be challenged by truthful history or inconvenient facts; martyrs; rituals; chosen-people narratives; demands for unquestioning obedience; mixing up state and religion. The nation becomes what only God should be.

     Nationalism is spiritually ugly, repulsive. It constricts the moral horizon. The face of the foreigner ceases to matter and the suffering of outsiders counts for less. America privately and officially mourned the 2,977 human beings murdered on 9/11, as was right and proper. Few in America mourned the estimated 408,749 to 432,000 direct civilian deaths from its wars of revenge and hegemonic control, the estimated 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths due to war-related causes. Collateral Damage.] The nation becomes a circle beyond which concern weakens or disappears.

     By contrast, Christianity insists that every human being bears the image of God. The Samaritan is the paradigm because he crosses tribal boundaries. The command is not to love tribe but to love your neighbor. And the truly shocking element of the parable is that the neighbor turns out not to be a member of one's own group. Many evangelicals, who profess to interpret scripture literally, are also nationalists, showing that nationalism also corrupts reason.

     The other danger is an abstract universalism or cosmopolitanism. This is something both Simone Weil and Wendell Berry worried about. One begins speaking endlessly of humanity while loving no actual people. One advocates for distant populations while neglecting parents, children, neighbors, and local communities. Thomas would regard this as another disordering of love. Human beings cannot really love "humanity" directly. We can only love concrete persons and places. The road to universal love runs through particular loves, not around them. For me my children are precious and so it is perfectly intelligible to me that for other parents – in America, Germany, Iraq, or Iran, in Israel and Gaza – their children are precious to them. This is not rocket science. I cannot imagine losing a child to violence, it would destroy my soul; what could be more soul-destroying? How can I be indifferent about other parents losing their innocent children to nationalist violence?

 

    I would conclude by putting the thought in Platonic terms. Patriotism loves one's country through the Good. Nationalism loves the country instead of the Good. The patriot remains capable of judging his country, indeed as a duty to do so as part of a duty to make it better. Indeed, he may criticize it precisely because he loves it. The nationalist cannot. The nation itself becomes the standard. Nationalism treats the nation as goodness itself.

      Christianity does not force a choice between universal love and particular love. It teaches us to love particulars in light of universals. The father loves his own children especially. The Christian recognizes that every child is precious. The patriot loves his own country especially. The Christian recognizes that every people stands equally before God. To borrow a thought that is in both Aquinas and Simone Weil: Grace does not abolish natural attachments; it saves them from becoming idols. That is the deepest meaning of ordo amoris. It is not a ranking of who matters and who does not. It is the art of loving each thing according to its reality, so that finite goods are cherished as gifts, but never mistaken for the source of all goodness. Thus patriotism becomes possible without nationalism, and particular loyalties become compatible with universal love (willing the good of the other, no warm sentimental feelings). They are no longer rivals. They become different expressions of the same love rightly ordered toward the Good.

p.s. 

Nationalism is also a political instrument through which elites preserve power and deflect criticism. By encouraging citizens to identify above all with the nation, political leaders redirect attention away from internal conflicts and injustices. Questions about economic inequality, political corruption, social fragmentation, or the concentration of power are displaced by concerns about national greatness, national unity, or external and internal enemies. Nationalism makes the nation itself the object of ultimate loyalty, rendering criticism suspect and allowing existing power structures to present themselves as the embodiment of the national interest.

    The history of twentieth-century Europe provides plenty of examples. In Germany, nationalist myths surrounding the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles (well, not entirely myth) and the "stab-in-the-back" legend redirected public anger away from domestic institutions and toward alleged enemies of the nation. Industrial, military, and political elites often found such nationalism useful because it transformed social and economic tensions into questions of national destiny and racial struggle. In Fascist Italy, Mussolini claimed to transcend class conflict by uniting workers, employers, and the state within a single national community. In both cases, nationalism functioned not simply as a distorted love of country but as an ideology that discouraged scrutiny of internal inequalities and subordinated moral and political criticism to the demands of national unity. These examples seem almost sophisticated compared to the crudity of the way Trump and his billionaire supporters use nationalism to neutralize the very people most screwed over by the economic system that benefits these elites.

       And again I think of Wendell Berry regarding contemporary America. He argues that citizens are often encouraged to identify with an abstract image of national prosperity, military power, or economic growth while the concrete places that constitute their actual homeland – local communities, farms, landscapes, and traditions – are neglected or destroyed. Nationalist rhetoric therefore conceals the erosion of the very goods that make a country worth loving. From the perspective of Augustine's and Aquinas's ordo amoris, this is a disordering of love: the nation is elevated above truth, justice, and the common good. Genuine patriotism, by contrast, remains capable of criticizing the nation when it betrays the people, places, and moral goods to which patriotic love is properly directed.