The Challenge of American Patriotism in the 21st Century

Thanks to feverish cosmopolitanism and globalism, many Americans have grown up rootless and hyper-mobile, so they have little in the way of local “patria” with which to connect. The American patriot increasingly looks like the Atlantean or Trojan patriot, forced to carry within himself whatever residual sense of home and connection to place and people he retains.

If there is one distinctly modern pathology which needs more attention from conservatives no less than liberals, that pathology is hypermobility, rootlessness, what the late philosopher Roger Scruton dubbed oikophobia. As Scruton explained, oikophobia is “the repudiation of home,” “the turning away from the claims and attachments that identify an inherited first-person plural.” Put more concretely, the oikophobic tendency is “to transplant people from place to place, to abolish local attachments, to shift boundaries and customs in accordance with the inexorable tide of political need or economic progress.”

As a Catholic much of my own writing has documented how the modern turn toward oikophobia has been implicitly or explicitly condemned by authoritative Church figures and documents, from the Fourth Commandment to the Apostle Paul, from Joan of Arc and Aquinas to Pius X. Although not a teaching authority himself, the great Hilaire Belloc eloquently and concisely summarizes what I take to be the authentically Catholic position (emphasis added):

Patriotism has always existed, and always will, so long as men are bound in societies. One may feel that emotion of loyalty towards a tribe or a town, a tiny district, a feudal group and lord, a large nation or a whole vast culture; but it is always present and always must be present. For if it were not, society could not hold together […] One may go much further and say that in sound morals patriotism must not only be present in every society, but should be strong; because the absence of it is inhuman and unnatural.

To repudiate patriotism is to repudiate natural law, then. And to redefine it as mere devotion to Equality or Democracy or Human Rights – as many establishment conservatives have sought to do – is to pervert natural law, in much the same way as would those who try to redefine marriage.

To clarify the proper definition we can turn to “What Is Patriotism?” by Father Stephen Brown, S.J. Patriotism is in part “attachment to one’s native land,” Fr. Brown declared,

in all its concrete reality, the actual territory within which a man has  been born and has grown to manhood. What the precise boundaries of that territory are matters but little. Those of Ireland have always been the same – the four seas of Eire. Those of France have varied from age to age. The notion of precise frontiers has little to do with patriotism, at least till one’s country is threatened with invasion. However frontiers may vary it is at bottom the same land that Irishmen or Romans, Alsatians or Poles, French or Germans, Englishmen or Russians call and have always called their country, Vaterland, patrie.

This geographic component cannot be glossed over, continues Father Brown, because our homeland’s “skies, its weather, its woods and fields and hills, its towns and villages all have colored our imagination and become part of our inmost being. After all, this land of ours is our home, in a sense it is part of us and we of it.”

If one element of patriotism pertains to geography, another pertains to demographics, for the patria is not only the land of our forefathers, but

is felt to be the common possession of the people to which we belong, of our race and nation. Their country for the Hebrews of old was the people of Israel no less than the Promised Land. The Greeks in their nobler moments thought not only of Athens or Sparta or any other of the city states of ancient Greece but of the Hellenes wherever their home might be. The Romans thought not only of Rome but of the Senatus populusque Romanus, just as Irish poets wrote not only of Banba or Eire but of the Children of Gael.

For the benefit of the hypersensitive, here it may be worth noting that up until the latter half of the Twentieth Century the word race had a more complex meaning than it does today, and in this case points to something more like “nationality.” For example, a few decades ago it would have sounded perfectly unexceptional to speak of the English race, or the Polish, or the Cherokee.

In any event, in Fr. Brown’s assessment the people and place are incomplete without an intangible heritage, which includes

the national language which has come to us from past generations impregnated with the spirit of one’s people, a precious heritage indeed. There is the national literature and the national art in which the genius of the race has expressed itself. There is the national religion, national, it is to be hoped, not because the product of the nation but because the nation is its product and has been shaped and molded by it. There is the national history, a treasury of sad and glorious memories.

To be sure, in trying to identify a national heritage there is always a danger of ideological oversimplification, a temptation to take one thread of an historical narrative and present it as the whole. The thoughtful approach will add nuance, not displace old, key chapters of the national epic. On the one hand, for example, there is a reason why the U.S. Constitution, “America the Beautiful,” and Neil Armstrong’s “one small step” line are all expressed in English, as all four of America’s core identities are British, as per Sir David Hackett Fischer’s magisterial Albion’s Seed. On the other hand, there is no hope whatsoever of relating to America without acknowledging (at least implicitly) the French, Spanish, Germanic, and African contributions to the American story.

Then again, a serious case can be made that what TV journalists refer to as “America” has long since devolved into a multinational imperial regime masquerading as a country. Honest souls may doubt whether the fragmented, disconnected, humungous Babylonian territory inhabited by various rival cultural and religious groups still meets Belloc’s criteria for “a whole vast culture,” much less a unified nation. The American patriot increasingly looks like the Atlantean or Trojan patriot, forced to carry within himself what remains of his patria. Going further, we can even set aside mass immigration’s radical impact upon American identity. Thanks to feverish cosmopolitanism and globalism, many native Americans have, in some cases through no fault of their own, grown up rootless and hypermobile. So they have little in the way of local patria with which to connect. Many of those of us suffering from oikophobia come by it honestly, so to speak.

Yet whatever our situation, we are still bound by piety, and still have an obligation to cultivate whatever residual sense of home and connection to place and people we do retain. We also have an obligation to push back against oikophobia whenever possible. If the conventional wisdom is that only losers stick to their hometowns, then that conventional wisdom is, to borrow from Belloc, “inhuman and unnatural.” If a man has no gut loyalty to his kin, neighborhood, town, state, or region, it is perverse and absurd to expect from him loyalty to a diverse territory larger than that of either the Roman Empire or European Union. Even more perverse and absurd would it be to expect such an alienated, rootless man to have loyalty toward the whole human race.

Of course, perversity and absurdity are the very hallmarks of post-America.

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