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There is an ethical paradox in patriotism which defies every
but the most astute and sophisticated analysis. The paradox is that patriotism
transmutes individual unselfishness into national egoism. Loyalty to the nation
is a high form of altruism when compared with lesser loyalties and more
parochial interests. It therefore becomes the vehicle of all the altruistic
impulses and expresses itself, on occasion, with such fervor that the critical
attitude of the individual toward the nation and its enterprises is almost
completely destroyed. The unqualified character of this devotion is the very
basis of the nation's power and of the freedom to use the power without moral
restraint. Thus the unselfishness of individuals makes for the selfishness of
nations. That is why the hope of solving the larger social problems of mankind,
merely by extending the social sympathies of individuals, is so vain.
Altruistic passion is sluiced into the reservoirs of nationalism with great
ease, and is made to flow beyond them with great difficulty. What lies beyond
the nation, the community of mankind, is too vague to inspire devotion. The
lesser communities within the nation, religious, economic, racial and cultural,
have equal difficulty in competing with the nation for the loyalty of its
citizens. The church was able to do so when it had the prestige of a
universality it no longer possesses. Future developments may make the class
rather than the nation the community of primary loyalty. But for the present
the nation is still supreme. It not only possesses a police power, which other
communities lack, but it is able to avail itself of the most potent and vivid
symbols to impress its claims upon the consciousness of the individual. Since
it is impossible to become conscious of a large social group without adequate
symbolism this factor is extremely important. The nation possesses in its
organs of government, in the panoply and ritual of the state, in the impressive
display of its fighting services, and, very frequently, in the splendors of a
royal house, the symbols of unity and greatness, which inspire awe and
reverence in the citizen. Furthermore the love and pious attachment of a man to
his countryside, to familiar scenes, sights, and experiences, around which the
memories of youth have cast a halo of sanctity, all this flows into the
sentiment of patriotism; for a simple imagination transmutes the universal beneficences
of nature into symbols of the peculiar blessings which a benevolent nation
bestows upon its citizens. Thus the sentiment of patriotism achieves a potency
in the modern soul, so unqualified, that the nation is given carte blanche to use the power,
compounded of the devotion of individuals, for any purpose it desires. Thus, to
choose an example among hundreds, Mr. Lloyd George during the famous Agadir
Crisis in 1911 in which a European war became imminent, because marauding
nations would not allow a new robber to touch their spoils in Africa, could
declare in his Mansion House speech: "If a situation were to be forced
upon us in which peace could only be preserved by the surrender of the great
and beneficent position Britain has won by centuries of heroism and
achievement, by allowing Britain to be treated, when her interests were vitally
affected, as if she were of no account in the cabinet of nations, then I say
emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a
great country like ours to endure.” The very sensitive "honor" of
nations can always be appeased by the blood of its citizens and no national
ambition seems too base or petty to claim and to receive the support of a
majority of its patriots.
Unquestionably there is an alloy of projected self-interest
in patriotic altruism. The man in the street, with his lust for power and
prestige thwarted by his own limitations and the necessities of social life,
projects his ego upon his nation and indulges his anarchic lusts vicariously.
So the nation is at one and the same time a check upon, and a final vent for,
the expression of individual egoism. Sometimes it is economic interest, and
sometimes mere vanity, which thus expresses itself in the individual patriot.
Writing of his friend, Winston Churchill, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt said: "Like
most of them, it is the vanity of empire that affects him more than the
supposed profits or the necessities of trade, which he repudiates." The
cultural imperialism which disavows economic advantages, but gains a selfish
satisfaction in the aggrandisement of a national culture through imperialistic
power, may reveal itself in the most refined and generous souls. . . .
A combination of unselfishness and vicarious selfishness in
the individual thus gives a tremendous force to national egoism, which neither
religious nor rational idealism can ever completely check. The idealists, whose
patriotism has been qualified by more universal loyalties, must always remain a
minority group. In the past they have not been strong enough to affect the
actions of nations and have had to content themselves with a policy of
disassociation from the nation in times of crisis, when national ambitions were
in sharpest conflict with their moral ideals. Whether conscientious pacifism on
the part of two per cent of a national population could actually prevent future
wars, as Professor Einstein maintains, is a question which cannot be answered
affirmatively with any great degree of certainty. It is much more likely that the
power of modern nationalism will remain essentially unchecked, until class
loyalty offers it effective competition.
Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a
nation is its hypocrisy. We have noted that self-deception and hypocrisy is an
unvarying element in the moral life of all human beings. It is the tribute
which morality pays to immorality; or rather the device by which the lesser
self gains the consent of the larger self to indulge in impulses and ventures
which the rational self can approve only when they are disguised. One can never
be quite certain whether the disguise is meant only for the eye of the external
observer or whether, as may be usually the case, it deceives the self.
Naturally this defect in individuals becomes more apparent in the less moral
life of nations. Yet it might be supposed that nations, of whom so much less is
expected, would not be under the necessity of making moral pretensions for
their actions. There was probably a time when they were under no such necessity.
Their hypocrisy is both a tribute to the growing rationality of man and a proof
of the ease with which rational demands may be circumvented.
The dishonesty of nations is a necessity of political policy
if the nation is to gain the full benefit of its double claim upon the loyalty
and devotion of the individual, as his own special and unique community and as
a community which embodies universal values and ideals. The two claims, the one
touching the individual's emotions and the other appealing to his mind, are
incompatible with each other, and can be resolved only through dishonesty. This
is particularly evident in war-time. Nations do not really arrive at full
self-consciousness until they stand in vivid, usually bellicose, juxtaposition
to other nations. The social reality, comprehended in the existence of a
nation, is too large to make a vivid impression upon the imagination of the
citizen. He vaguely identifies it with his own little community and fireside
and usually accepts the mythos which attributes personality to his national
group. But the impression is not so vivid as to arouse him to any particular
fervor of devotion. This fervor is the unique product of the times of crisis,
when his nation is in conflict with other nations. It springs from the new
vividness with which the reality and the unity of his nation's discreet
existence is comprehended. In other words, it is just in the moments when the
nation is engaged in aggression or defense (and it is always able to interpret
the former in terms of the latter) that the reality of the nation's existence
becomes so sharply outlined as to arouse the citizen to the most passionate and
uncritical devotion toward it. But at such a time the nation's claim to
uniqueness also comes in sharpest conflict with the generally accepted
impression that the nation is the incarnation of universal values. This
conflict can be resolved only by deception. In the imagination of the simple
patriot the nation is not a society but Society. Though its values are relative
they appear, from his naive perspective, to be absolute. The religious instinct
for the absolute is no less potent in patriotic religion than in any other. The
nation is always endowed with an aura of the sacred, which is one reason why
religions, which claim universality, are so easily captured and tamed by
national sentiment, religion and patriotism merging in the process. . . .
Moralists who have observed and animadverted upon the
hypocrisy of nations have usually assumed that a more perfect social intelligence,
which could penetrate and analyse these evasions and deceptions, would make
them ultimately impossible. But here again they are counting on moral and
rational resources which will never be available. What was not possible in
1914-1918, when the world was submerged in dishonesties and hypocrisies (the
Treaty of Versailles, with its pledge of disarmament and the self-righteous
moral conviction of the vanquished by the victors, being the crowning example),
will hardly become possible in a decade or in a century, or in many centuries.
Nations will always find it more difficult than individuals to behold the beam
that is in their own eye while they observe the mote that is in their brother's
eye; and individuals find it difficult enough. A perennial weakness of the
moral life in individuals is simply raised to the nth degree in national life. Let a nation be accused of hypocrisy
and it shrinks back in pious horror at the charge. . . .
Perhaps the best that can be expected of nations is that
they should justify their hypocrisies by a slight measure of real international
achievement, and learn how to do justice to wider interests than their own,
while they pursue their own. England, which has frequently been accused by
continental nations of mastering the arts of national self-righteousness with
particular skill, may have accomplished this, partly because there is actually
a measure of genuine humanitarian interest in British policy. The Italian
statesman, Count Sforza, has recently paid a witty and deserved tribute to the
British art in politics. They have, he declares, "a precious gift bestowed
by divine grace upon the British people: the simultaneous action in those
islands, when a great British interest is at stake, of statesmen and diplomats
coolly working to obtain some concrete political advantage and on the other
side, and without previous base secret understanding, clergymen and writers
eloquently busy showing the highest moral reasons for supporting the diplomatic
action which is going on in Downing Street. Such was the case in the Belgian
Congo. Belgian rule had been in force there for years; but at a certain moment
gold was discovered in the Katanga, the Congolese province nearest to the
British South African possessions; and the bishops and other pious persons
started at once a violent press campaign to stigmatise the Belgian atrocities
against the Negroes. What is astonishing and really imperial is that those
bishops and other pious persons were inspired by the most perfect Christian
good faith, and that nobody was pulling the wires behind them." . . .
Obviously one method of making force morally redemptive is
to place it in the hands of a community, which transcends the conflicts of
interest between individual nations and has an impartial perspective upon them.
That method resolves many conflicts within national communities, and the
organisation of the League of Nations is ostensibly the extension of that
principle to international life. But if powerful classes in national societies
corrupt the impartiality of national courts, it may be taken for granted that a
community of nations, in which very powerful and very weak nations are bound
together, has even less hope of achieving impartiality. Furthermore the
prestige of the international community is not great enough, and it does not
sufficiently qualify the will-to-power of individual nations, to achieve a communal
spirit sufficiently unified, to discipline recalcitrant nations. Thus Japan was
able to violate her covenants in her conquest of Manchuria, because she
shrewdly assumed that the seeming solidarity of the League of Nations was not real,
and that it only thinly veiled without restraining the peculiar policies of
various great powers, which she would be able to tempt and exploit. Her assumption
proved correct, and she was able to win the quasi-support of France and to
weaken the British support of League policies. Her success in breaking her covenants
with impunity has thrown the weakness of our inchoate society of nations into
vivid light. This weakness, also revealed in the failure of the recent
Disarmament Conference and the abortive character of all efforts to resolve the
anarchy of national tariffs, justifies the pessimistic conclusion that there is
not yet a political force capable of bringing effective social restraint upon
the self-will of nations, at least not upon the powerful nations. Even if it
should be possible to maintain peace on the basis of the international status quo, there is no evidence that an
unjust peace can be adjusted by pacific means. A society of nations has not
really proved itself until it is able to grant justice to those who have been
worsted in battle without requiring them to engage in new wars to redress their
wrongs. . . .
Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral
Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1960 [first published in 1932]), 91-97, 106-09.
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Cited in Vibeke Schou Tjalve, Realist Strategies of Republican Peace: Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and the Politics of Patriotic Dissent (Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought, 2008), 1.
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Ten years later, in “In the Battle and Above It,” Niebuhr
struck a more optimistic note:
If we fully understand the precarious
as well as the precious character of even imperfect systems of justice, we will
know that they must be defended, even if their defense involves us in tragic
conflict. On the other hand, it is wrong for any Christian to be completely
engulfed in battle. To be in a battle means to defend a cause against its
peril, to protect a nation against its enemies, to strive for truth against
error, to defend justice against injustice. To be above the battle means that
we understand how imperfect the cause is we defend, that we contritely
acknowledge the sins of our own nations, that we recognize the common humanity
which binds us to even the most terrible foes, and that we know of our common
need of grace and forgiveness.
Cited in Vibeke Schou Tjalve, Realist Strategies of Republican Peace: Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and the Politics of Patriotic Dissent (Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought, 2008), 1.
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