The Mystery of Patriotism

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The Mystery of Patriotism

G.K. Chesterton

The following Chesterton article was first published in the January 19, 1902 issue of The Commonwealth, the journal of the Anglican Christian Social Union to which the young Chesterton belonged. This uncollected piece throws light on Chesterton’s developing ideas concerning nationalism, ideas that he was about to explore further in his first novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill, published in 1904.

The idea of patriotism, like all ideas that have entered into practical politics, like all ideas that have materialized themselves in practical institutions, like all ideas that have conquered in the rough-and-tumble of actual competition, is a mystical idea. The practical man and the mystic are much akin, because mysticism and common sense are nearly akin as to be almost identical. Mysticism and common sense both represent those certainties which always come off worse in argument and best in life. Logic may show by some trick of words that life is evil, that death is good, and leaves are grey in spring-time, and that a donkey has five legs. But whatever empty victories may have won by words the mystic still believes that existence is holy, and the man of common sense still believes that a donkey’s legs are numerically confined to four. Patriotism is an idea of this character. It rests upon the conception that an attachment felt by the inhabitants of a certain area for that area is not a thing which it is necessary to describe as expedient or wise, or even good: it is simply a thing that will happen. The idea of nationality is like almost all the ideas that have practically affected humanity, an idea of sanctity. It has root first as every religion has its root in the ultimate conception of the Noli me Tangere. One of the most ridiculous ideas that has ever been ventilated amongst men is the idea that men have moved chiefly towards the thing that they had weighed and found sufficient. Men have in almost all cases moved towards the things they had not and could not have weighed. The keynote of actual life is always sanctity of life – never, perhaps, was there a less rationalistic idea, in a certain sense a less rational idea than the idea of the sanctity of the life of a man. It may have happened to anyone of us who travel daily in a railway train with a particular man. He is rich, probably heavily dressed, weighted with jewels, solemn, sensual, respectable. We see him perhaps every day, and from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, there is not one atom of evidence that the world would not go on with a slightly increased cheerfulness if we broke his head with a pickaxe.

The conception that restrains us from killing this individual is certainly not any idea of his utility. Every button on his body, rationalistically interpreted, asserts that he would be more moral and comfortable if he were dead. What restrains us is the mystical idea, chiefly the product of Christianity, the idea of the sanctity of an individual life. Now the same idea arose with the rise of Liberalism in connection with the individual life of a nation. Across that also was written the tremendous "Noli me Tangere." It was felt that taking away the life of a characteristic people was like taking away the life of a man. The Spoliator was taking away something that he could not give. If we killed a man we might give half a hundred admirable justifications of the action, but we could not get away from the impression that at a single blow we had killed a score of unknown friendships, a heap of nameless loves, a million jokes, a million adventures, a thousands pleasant evenings. In the same way Liberalism set an iron fence round the young and underdeveloped nation. Nationality, in the eyes of Liberalism, had the highest of all earthly sanctities; it was with child. There is no nation so atheistic that it does not attribute that it does not attribute a sanctity to two gods, the dead man and the woman in travail.

How about the respect which is to be paid to nationality? There has in our day arisen a great deal of difficulty. The reverence due to the national identity of other States has been found to be inconvenient, it is said, in the struggle for existence in the modern world. This clearly should have been the great trial and triumph of the idea of the sanctity of patriotism. Like all other sanctities it ought to have begun for all practical purposes to exist at the moment when it was defied. Of what conceivable value is a sanctity if it is not to be pitted against the idle shocks of circumstance? The sanctity of patriotic feeling is not alone in this respect. Most of us, for example, believe in the sanctity of liberty of speech. But it is only at the precise moment in which we are forced to listen to a brutal imbecile perverting the mental attitude of millions; it is only in connection with so outrageous a piece of intellectual insolence that we really discover that we believe in liberty of speech, or on the other hand that we do not. Similarly, it is only when we meet our hypothetical friend in the train, whom it would appear at first sight to be an act of moral delicacy to murder, that we understand the sanctity of human life. We should feel the same genial obduracy in supporting the claims of all patriotic peoples if we really believed in patriotism today. If we believe in patriotism we should talk less of our readiness to run the Empire as a business-like concern, and more of a readiness to stand by it even in the day when it is bankrupt. The false patriot will boast of all the things that he can gain out of association with England: the true patriot will boast of all the things he will lost by association with her. To the false patriot England will be at best a sanity: to the true patriot she will be a sanctity. The false patriot will boast about the constant increase of England and sing songs about the accident of her prosperity. The true patriot will boast of her last battle and sing the song of her heroic fall.