First, there is love of home, of the place we grew up in or
the places, perhaps many, which have been our homes; and of all places fairly
near these and fairly like them; love of old acquaintances, of familiar sights,
sounds and smells. Note that at its largest this is, for us, a love of
for beer and tea and open fires, trains with compartments in
them and an unarmed police force and all the rest of it; for the local dialect
and (a shade less) for our native language. As Chesterton says, a man's reasons
for not wanting his country to be ruled by foreigners are very like his reasons
for not wanting his house to be burned down; because he "could not even
begin'* to enumerate all the things he would miss.
It would be hard to find any legitimate point of view from
which this feeling could be condemned. As the family offers us the first step
beyond self-love, so this offers us the first step beyond family selfishness.
Of course it is not pure charity; it involves love of our neighbours
in the local, not of our Neighbour, in the Dominical, sense. But those who do
not love the fellow-villagers or fellow-townsmen whom they have seen are not
likely to have got very far towards loving "Man" whom they have not.
All natural affections, including this, can become rivals to spiritual love: but they can also be preparatory imitations of it, training (so to speak) of the spiritual muscles which Grace may later put to a higher service; as women nurse dolls in childhood and later nurse children. There may come an occasion for renouncing this love…
All natural affections, including this, can become rivals to spiritual love: but they can also be preparatory imitations of it, training (so to speak) of the spiritual muscles which Grace may later put to a higher service; as women nurse dolls in childhood and later nurse children. There may come an occasion for renouncing this love…
Of course patriotism of this kind is not in the least aggressive.
It asks only to be let alone. It becomes militant only to protect what it
loves. In any mind which has a pennyworth of imagination it produces a good
attitude towards foreigners. How can I love my home without coming to realise
that other men, no less rightly,, love theirs? Once you have realised that the
Frenchmen like cafe complet just as we like bacon and eggs why, good luck to
them and let them have it. The last thing we want is to make everywhere else
just like our own home. It would not be home unless it were different.
The second ingredient is a particular attitude to our
country's past. I mean to that past as it lives in popular imagination; the
great deeds of our ancestors. Remember Marathon .
Remember Waterloo .
"We must be free or die who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spoke."
This past is felt both to impose an obligation and to hold out an assurance; we
must not fall below the standard our fathers set us, and because we are their
sons there is good hope we shall not.
This feeling has not quite such good credentials as the
sheer love of home. The actual history of every country is full of shabby and
even shameful doings.
The heroic stories, if taken to be typical, give a false impression
of it and are often themselves open to serious historical criticism. Hence a
patriotism based on our glorious past is fair game for the debunker. As knowledge
increases it may snap and be converted into disillusioned cynicism, or may be
maintained by a voluntary shutting of the eyes. But who can condemn what
clearly makes many people, at many important moments, behave so much better
than they could have done without its help?
I think it is possible to be strengthened by the image of
the past without being either deceived or puffed up. The image becomes
dangerous in the precise degree to which it is mistaken, or substituted, for serious
and systematic historical study. The stories are best when they are handed on
and accepted as stories. I do not mean by this that they should be handed on as
mere fictions (some of them are after all true) . But the emphasis should be on
the tale as such, on the picture which fires the imagination, the example that
strengthens the will.
What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of
patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated
adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false
or biased history the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact. With
this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their
heroes; perhaps even the belief surely it is very bad biology that we can
literally "inherit" a tradition.
This third thing is not a sentiment but a belief: a firm,
even prosaic belief that our own nation, in sober fact, has long been, and
still is markedly superior to all others. I once ventured to say to an old
clergyman who was voicing this sort of patriotism, "But, sir, aren't we
told that every people thinks its own men the bravest and its own women the
fairest in the world?" He replied with total gravity he could not have
been graver if he had been saying the Creed at the altar "Yes, but in England
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