The inevitable fate: National character, decline, and the pathologies of stagnation

“ The facile generalisations with which we so often season the study of dry historic fact; the habits of political discussion which induce us to catalogue for purposes of debate the outward signs that distinguish (as we are prone to think) the standing from the falling state, hide the obscurer, but more potent, forces which silently prepare the fate of empires. National character is subtle and elusive ”

“ Here, the identity of the nation means the characteristic nature of the nation, as the source of emotional unification of the nation, which is formed by the composite expression of history, experience, culture, politics, economy, power structure and spiritual symbols, and so forth, of its people. ”

“ An able writer in The North American Review for October says: 'It may be said, in general, to be the sum of the differences, geographical, historical, political, and moral, which separate a people as a community from every other—of those differences which modify the character of each individual, and the results of which are combined in the traits of national character. The consciousness of its existence is developed slowly, and it is long before the sentiment of Nationality—the true foundation of patriotism—gains force over the hearts and convictions of a people. ”

“ Our destiny is manifest—our glory is inevitable. It is pleasant to talk thus, and it is unpleasant to talk otherwise. Yet we ought to desire to see and know the truth. Self-flattery is an odious folly. Is our destiny, then, manifest? Is our glory inevitable? Has God so conspicuously favored us that he cannot but continue to bless? Ah! It is our self-flattery and odious folly to think so.
We need not look again to our history or our prospects, to gather evidences of a different destiny, although such evidences might not be wanting. ”

“ That there exists in this country an intense sentiment of nationality; a cherished energetic feeling and consciousness of our independent and separate national existence; a feeling that we have a transcendent destiny to fulfil, which we mean to fulfil; a great work to do, which we know how to do, and are able to do; a career to run, up which we hope to ascend, till we stand on the steadfast and glittering summits of the world ”

“ Our national life is the gift of God. No other hand could gather out of other lands millions of people of different tongues and kindred, and mold these into one mighty nation that shall receive into itself the men of every clime, and stamp on them its own mark of individuality, teaching them its language, making them its kin, and binding them as one household under its own constitution and laws. ”

“ Nations, like individuals, have their stages of existence—their infancy, their manhood, and their decline; some fall into premature decrepitude and dissolution, and leave but the memory of evil deeds behind them; whilst others sink in glorious maturity, under the weight of years and honours, leaving the fruits of a well-spent life behind them, to be embalmed for ever in the hearts of a grateful posterity. ”

“ So much of the future becomes then read into the present that (for example) altogether divergent elements in national life will be emphasised if that life be on the highway toward success, or hovering on the brink of calamity, or a cross section only of progress towards a national decay. ”

“ I contend that each nationality constitutes a particular stream of the great unity, but no nation can fulfil itself until it becomes itself and at the same time realises its identity with Humanity. The whole problem of nationalism is therefore to find that stream and to face the destiny. If you find the current and establish a continuity with the past, then the process of self-expression has begun, and nothing can stop the growth of nationality. ”

“ The sum of the matter is that nationality is a fluid and changing entity; and its intrinsic nature and its history appear to point to the conclusion that it is a necessary stage in the evolution of human society, by which the caveman is to become at last a citizen of the world. There is nothing to justify the expectation that present national characters and national frontiers will remain as permanent factors in the life of the world. ”

“ The Swiss are one nation, yet speak some of them French, others German, others Italian.
Occupation of the same territory is not essential to nationality. Not only may a nation be scattered,—its parts dwelling in several lands,—as in the case of the Jews, but a nation may migrate in a body and preserve its national character in transit, or it may have no fixed territorial abode whatever. The Tartars and the Arabs [Pg 7] are nations ever in motion, and held but the most loosely by any tenure of soil.
And even citizenship under the same government, does not of itself exhaust the idea of a nation. ”

“ Yet the ideas of race, language, country and government, all enter into, and with greater or less distinctness, and to a greater or less extent, constitute the general idea of a nation. The French have in general the same origin: they speak the same language: they possess a definite territory: they live under one government. ”

“ In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages,
is one in which the religion of the soil can scarcely be dissevered from national life. Of course it is essential to the perpetuity of this sentiment that the nation should be homogeneous. The Turks have not inherited the fame of Justinian and his generals by over-running their empire; and if by some industrial migration Germans, Polish Jews, and other even more alien races were to supersede the English labourer to any great extent, the new England would be weaker than the old by all the links of tradition. ”

“ The historians say of ancient Greece, with her ever-jealous autonomies, cities, and states, that the only positive unity she ever own'd or receiv'd, was the sad unity of a common subjection, at the last, to foreign conquerors. Subjection, aggregation of that sort, is impossible to America; but the fear of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors, and the lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts me. Or, if it does not, nothing is plainer than the need, a long period to come, of a fusion of the States into the only reliable identity, the moral and artistic one. ”

“ Indeed, what most needs fostering through the hundred years to come, in all parts of the United States, north, south, Mississippi valley, and Atlantic and Pacific coasts, is this fused and fervent identity of the individual, whoever he or she may be, and wherever the place, with the idea and fact of AMERICAN TOTALITY, and with what is meant by the Flag, the stars and stripes. We need this conviction of nationality as a faith, to be absorb'd in the blood and belief of the People everywhere, south, north, west, east, to emanate in their life, and in native literature and art. ”

“ In other instances, nations were born as a result of voluntary political acts: the United States, the nations declared independent after the fall of the Soviet Union, Croatia, Macedonia, some of the Arab countries, and a number of African nation-states, once colonial powers could no longer afford to resist the force of change. As with everything pertaining to politics, national politics entails expectations corresponding to past phases (the basic passions that once made up tribal solidarity) , to instances of human interaction well overhauled by the new realities of the integrated world. ”

“ I proclaim the inevitable advent of the universal republic. Not the transient backslidings, nor the darkness and the dread, nor the tragic difficulty of uplifting the world everywhere at once will prevent the fulfillment of international truth. ”

“ Character, literature, a society worthy the name, are yet to be establish'd, through a nationality of noblest spiritual, heroic and democratic attributes—not one of which at present definitely exists—entirely different from the past, though unerringly founded on it, and to justify it.
To that composite American identity of the future, Spanish character will supply some of the most needed parts. No stock shows a grander historic retrospect—grander in religiousness and loyalty, or for patriotism, courage, decorum, gravity and honor. ”

“ We have examples of countries where millions of men have succeeded one another for generations, even for centuries, and produced nothing more than a few competent administrators without statesmanship, soldiers without strategy, and literary men without the power to originate. Civilisation, such as is the outgrowth of populous communities, appears to guarantee little more at best than a wise habit of municipal administration, some energy and deftness of commerce, and certain gracious formalities in human intercourse. ”

“ The remarkable point is that even in modern society, when population is so much larger, when thought is comparatively unshackled, when burning questions are in the air, when the public is a better Maecenas than Martial prayed for, there are periods in the life of large communities which seem almost as sterile as the later centuries of the Roman Empire. Whom did England produce between Swift and Byron, outside of politics, who will be read for either power or beauty of form as an imaginative writer? ”

“ Public spirit has fallen into such a lethargic slumber as to make one fear its complete collapse. Our successes or our failures excite neither uneasiness nor pleasure.51136 It seems, on reading the accounts of battles, as if it were the history of another people. The changes that take place within our borders no longer excite any emotion; one asks out of curiosity, one is answered without any interest, one learns with indifference. ”

“ If it be true, as is so often confessed around us, that we have suffered a marked decline in political morality and in our political administration, let it not be assumed that the defect is in our system of government, or that the blame lies wholly with those who are faithless or incompetent. Here no citizen is voiceless, and none can claim exemption from just responsibility for evils in the body politic. Ours is, in fact as well as in theory, a government of the people; and its administration is neither better nor worse than the people themselves. ”

“ All principles are swallowed up in the absorbing desire for gain; national honour, permanent security, the ordinary rules of society, law, the constitution, and every thing that is usually so dear to men, are forgotten, or are perverted, in order to sustain this unnatural condition of things. ”

“ But, since the State thrives on what it expropriates, the general decline in production which it induces by its avarice foretells its own doom. Its source of income dries up. Thus, in pulling Society down it pulls itself down. Its ultimate collapse is usually occasioned by a disastrous war, but preceding that event is a history of increasing and discouraging levies on the market place, causing a decline in the aspirations, hopes and self-esteem of its victims. ”

“ That America is beyond the reach of conquest, is a fact which experience has shown and time confirmed, and this admitted, what, I ask, is now the object of contention? If there be any honor in pursuing self-destruction with inflexible passion- if national suicide be the perfection of national glory, you may, with all the pride of criminal happiness, expire unenvied and unrivalled. ”

“ When the resources have been depleted, a precipitous collapse of the economic system will result, manifested in massive unemployment, decreased food production, and a decline in population as the death rate soars. ”

“ When climate-related effects overwhelm a state’s capacity to respond or recover, its authority can be so undermined as to lead to large-scale political instability. Countries with weak political institutions, poor economic conditions, or where other risk factors for political strife are already present will be the most vulnerable to climate-linked instability. ”

“ If you drift along in your torpor and your heedlessness, all the evils of slavery await you—deprivations, humiliations, the scorn and arrogance of the conqueror; you will be pushed about from pillar to post, because you have never found your proper niche, until, through the sacrifice of your nationality and of your language, you slip into some subordinate place where your nation shall sink its identity. ”

“ The eager and impetuous element that has hitherto found an outlet in new communities, will be pent up in the overpeopled countries of Europe. Either the growth of population will be arrested, as in France, or the State will have to concern itself, much more actively than English economists will like, with the organisation of labour. Now the history of the English colonies in Australia and New Zealand is particularly instructive, because it shows what the English race naturally attempts when it is freed from the limitations of English tradition. ”

“ The sailors and explorers achieved impossible adventures; the poets and thinkers were of more than mortal stature. The new England which does incomparably more for its people than the Elizabethan England did, commands less and indeed scarcely any gratitude, because the Englishman has a choice of fatherlands in which he may preserve the English nationality. He transfers himself without a pang to America or Australia. If, however, the world is filling up, as seems probable ”

“ With civilisation equally diffused, the most populous country must ultimately be the most powerful; and the preponderance of China over any rival—even over the United States of America—is likely to be overwhelming.
Let us conceive the leading European nations to be stationary, while the Black and Yellow Belt, including China, Malaysia, India, Central Africa, and Tropical America is all teeming with life, developed by industrial enterprise, fairly well administered by native governments, and owning the better part of the carrying trade of the world. ”

“ The present situation presents the spectacle of the breakdown of the whole philosophy of Nationalism, political, racial and cultural. It is by the accident of position rather than any virtue of our own that we are not sharers in the present demonstration of failure. We have borrowed the older philosophy of isolated national sovereignty and have lived upon it in a more or less half-hearted way. In our internal constitution we are actually interracial and international. ”

“ The dynamics of change in the world is characterized by the acknowledged need of many countries to be integrated in the global economy while preserving or requiring a token of national identity. State sovereignty is self-delusive in the context of commercial, financial, or industrial autonomy that is impossible to achieve. Self- determination, always to the detriment of some other ethnic group, echoes those tribal instincts that make the ideal of constitutional government an exercise in futility. ”

“ The advocates of Church authority and of individual lawlessness unite to denounce as violations of freedom every fresh act of that impassive, ever-dilating power which rends asunder the unrighteous contract between employer and servant, between landlord and tenant, which protects the child from degradation and rescues the woman from misuse; but the trust of citizens in the justice of human society grows stronger as the powers of the State are enlarged. ”

“ Summing up, then, we seem to find that we are slowly but demonstrably approaching what we may regard as the age of reason or of a sublimated humanity; and that this will give us a great deal that we are expecting from it—well-ordered polities, security to labour, education, freedom from gross superstitions, improved health and longer life, the destruction of privilege in society and of caprice in family life, better guarantees for the peace of the world, and enhanced regard for life and property when war unfortunately breaks out. ”