Irving Babbitt and the Crisis of Nationalism, 1915

For Irving Babbitt, a saving remnant of those who possess a humane understanding of the West and its great men and great ideas existed—one that could counter the nationalists and internationalists and those promoting either leviathan or the superman.

In the 1910s, one of America’s greatest humanists, Irving Babbitt (1865-1933), surprisingly decided to dive into the realm of political theory and, to a lesser degree, practical politics in his many writings. Up to this decade, Babbitt had written literary and cultural criticism, defenses of the liberal arts, and explorations of Chinese philosophy and religion, but little to no politics. This changed with the advent of World War I, and Babbitt decided to apply all that he had done prior to the decade to the political philosophies of Nietzsche, of internationalism, and, especially, of nationalism. In a series of articles in The Nation in 1915, Babbitt perceptively analyzed the world, its recent past, and its most likely future. Indeed, if anything, Babbitt’s words were deeply prophetic and should have been heeded by all.

All modern European history began, Babbitt declared, with the French Revolution. Though it had proclaimed a sort of radical internationalism, it had devolved very quickly into a brutal and violent nationalism, with “Viva la nation!” becoming its unholy war cry.

Infected by the ideologies and “isms” first propounded by the French, modern Europe had, too, devolved into particular chaoses of national units. “Europe is to-day less cosmopolitan in any genuine sense of the word than it was at almost any period in the Middle Ages. Moreover, the type of internationalism that has broken down so disastrously, as well as the type of nationalism that has overthrown it, are both of comparatively recent origin. ‘The sentiment of nationalities,’ says Renan, ‘is not a hundred years old.’ And, he adds that this sentiment was created in the world by the French Revolution,” Babbitt explained. The so-called brotherhood of the Jacobins, Babbitt reminded his readers, was not so much one of universal love, but rather an alliances of “Cains, men whose hands were stained with blood and who looked on one another with incurable distrust.” The French, Babbitt continued, moved from universalism to particularism to “bestiality.”

How did all this infect Europe? Mostly, the great humanist claimed, because of the rise of a romantic and mushy humanitarianism, one that desired the individual to throw off the so-called shackles of tradition, custom, mores, and norms, to revolt against the fathers and mothers and against all that one inherited. By doing so, the humanitarians had desired the liberation of the “beautiful souls” but, in reality unleashed a form of Promethean individualism. “Not having to reform himself, the beautiful soul can devote himself entirely to reforming society; and this he hopes to do, according as his temper is rationalistic or emotional, either by improving its machinery or by diffusing the spirit of brotherhood.” Both utilitarianism and sentimentalism become his tools.

In general, such universalism was flabby in its understanding of the world. With it, “men are not governed by cool reflection as to what pays, but buy their passions and imagination [a word Babbitt held in the highest regard, except when employed poorly]; and the appeal that the emotional pacifist can make to their passions and imagination in the name fo humanity at large, turns out to be pale and unsubstantial compared with the appeal of nationality.” Internationalism, thus, would rather inevitably become nationalism.

Critically, Babbitt feared, one could readily (perhaps inevitably) transfer the idea of the beautiful soul from the individual to the nation. “Now, nothing is easier than to transfer this conception of free expansion, without the need of either inner or outer check, from the temperament of the individual to the national temperament.”  Though the French may have begun all this with their failed revolution, it was the Germans, Babbitt believed, who adopted the idea—through their mythic Teutonic insanities—and placed it upon the German character. It was, he believed, one of the most “monstrous flatteries” in modern history, and it infected everything the Germans did and believed. Even Babbitt’s beloved Goethe had helped moved the Germans in such a fatal direction.

And, yet, this begged the question. Did the modern world allow only a choice between a brutal Hobbesian leviathan and a muscular superman? Or, perhaps, as many in the modern world seemed to desire, would all come down to the “worship of the god Whirl”?

For Babbitt, a saving remnant of those who possess a humane understanding of the West and its great men and great ideas existed, one that could—should it decides to wield its not-inconsiderable influence, promote an America, and thus a western conception of the Good, to the world—counter the nationalists and internationalists and those promoting either leviathan or the superman. Its numbers meant that the remnant was “an infinitesimal minority” in the world, but that, because of the positions held in academia and elsewhere, might make itself vitally heard.

Here, Babbitt labeled his allies humanists. He is worth quoting at length:

“Humanism, on the other hand, always implies faith in a special law for human nature as opposed to the natural law. It would have men impose on their ordinary selves the yoke of this human law—and so become moderate and sensible and decent. As to the best way of acquiring humanistic discipline under present circumstances, we may still turn with profit to that permanent model of the critic and humanist, Socrates. Do not cream of an impossible return to the past, Socrates said in substance. Do not, on the other hand, become a votary of the god Whirl. Retain the disciplinary virtues, but put them on a positive and critical basis. Conduct thus founded is plainly something higher than obedience to a mere set of traditional taboos. But that this putting of conduct on a positive and critical basis is not an altogether easy task we may infer from the fact that Greece failed to achieve it. As a whole, the Greeks chose to follow not their honest thinkers, but their demagogues and sophists, and so were swept, as the Romans were to be later, toward the abyss of a decadent imperialism.”

This, too, is the great threat for America: to embrace wholly democracy—in theory and in practice—and, thus, lose whatever vital restraints had long ago been placed into the very constitution (literal and symbolic) of the American republic. History demonstrates, repeatedly for Babbitt, that all democracies decay into imperialisms.

Given the year and the moment—1915—Babbitt warned, America’s choice—toward humanism or toward something else—might very well “determine our whole destiny.”

This essay draws upon Irving Babbitt, “The Breakdown of Internationalism,” The Nation (June 17, 1915), 677-680; and (June 24, 1915), 704-706.

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The featured image is ” Rocky Mountain Landscape” (1870), by Albert Bierstadt, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.