Clarence Reidenbach

“ Patriotism is the sentiment of attachment to one’s national group.
The quality of the sentiment impresses one. Patriotism is not merely consciousness of nationality. It is more active and explosive than that. It is not even such an emotion as that of thankfulness for the country. Thankfulness or joy, is the feeling of returning soldiers as they land back upon American shores. Is that feeling of satisfaction with the homeland at getting back, patriotism? A kind of love of country it may be said to be. But ask the man in the street if it is patriotism, and he will hesitate. ”

“ Imperialism grows out of this temper. And once a country is embarked on a career of imperialism, it is hardly to be satisfied short of dominion over the world. Even then it will sigh for new worlds to conquer. And this characteristic of an insatiable lust for glory should not be lost sight of when we are considering the taming of an enemy by nonresistance.
The patriotism that feeds upon the country’s glory is jealous of the national prestige. Prestige is glory. And a nation cannot continue to glory either at home or abroad if it suffers its prestige to be lowered. ”

“ Mazzini hit the truth when he said that mankind had been placed in groups or nuclei upon the face of the earth. The community is an irreducible minimum of association among mankind. It is a permanent association, and the sentiments that grow out of it will be permanent. There is true reason why one of the fundamental virtues is that of being a good neighbor. And Veblen was right in saying, “Even with no patriotism, love of country, and use and wont as it runs in one’s home area and among one’s own people, would not pass.” ”

“ An insult has been offered, and injured pride does not enjoy itself until it reaps revenge. Of course the crime is that the insult is a public one. “The act that, more certainly than any other, provokes vengeful emotion is the public insult, which, if not immediately resented, lowers one in the eyes of one’s fellows. Such an insult calls out one’s positive self-feeling, with its impulse to assert oneself and to make good one’s value and power in the public eye.” ”

“ It is often argued that while patriotism has done and does what is claimed for it, it has in large measure outlived its usefulness, and is a prolific source of the world’s greatest troubles at the present time in that it makes for jealousy, conflict, and war. Patriotism is said to be divisive, when thought of in world terms. Hasn’t it, therefore, outlived its usefulness, and isn’t it time to entrust the keeping of the coöperation of men to a still larger institution that shall be worldwide, and thus avoid the conflicts of the present? ”

“ It does not seem to be fair, at any rate, to say that patriotism is a disintegrating factor in world affairs. There is no larger unit of cooperation that it is breaking up. And patriotism can claim for itself that it has come in as a force making for larger groupings of men. If patriotism were at one sudden blow stricken out of the world, we should be set backward rather than forward in the process of winning the conditions of world peace. ”

“ Mazzini understood that the unity of a country rested upon a sense of oneness in the minds of the people: “Country is not a mere zone of territory. The true country is the Idea to which it gives birth; it is the thought of love, the sense of communion which unites in one all the sons of that territory.” [180] Here we get a suggestion regarding the unity of Switzerland. It is, in large part, a unity in idea. That is not saying that it has no objective basis. The Swiss have a common land and other bonds of oneness. But the strongest bond seems to be that of a conception of common welfare. ”

“ And so, a cause is good, not only for me, but for mankind, in so far as it is essentially a loyalty to loyalty, that is, is an aid and a furtherance of loyalty in my fellows.” [134] And Royce, in his last book, made the application to patriotism: “Let us, with all our might, with whatever moral influence we possess, with our own honor, with our lives if necessary, be ready, if ever and whenever the call comes to our people, to sacrifice for mankind as Belgium has sacrificed; to hazard all, as Belgium has hazarded all, for the truer union of mankind and for the future of human brotherhood”. ”

“ Patriotism is a will to be nationally significant. It is national pride. It is national ambition, a will to self-respect and the respect of others, a will to national standing, greatness, distinction, importance, power. The existence of this will to be significant is why nations are so sensitive on points of honor and prestige. Their national significance is lowered if they allow, let us say, a public insult to go unavenged. It is a reason why nations cannot back down in a war when it once gets started, and why they can all be for peace after the war, but not while it is being waged. ”

“ It is therefore not completely out of harmony with the cause of world coöperation that a state should sometimes go to war. And the nation itself has rights and duties. It would not be any more morally good for a country to consent to its extinction or the serious crippling of its individuality than it would be for the human individual to commit suicide or incapacitate himself. ”

“ The critic makes the charge that the coöperation that has been gained in patriotism is an obstruction in the way of attaining a larger coöperation. Patriotism, in other words, is not a proper force for saving the world. For one thing, it contents a man with his own country; the patriot doesn’t strive for any higher organization of men, and so the spirit of progress is deadened. Moreover, so the critic sometimes says, patriotism is simply a coöperation for conflict. It is setting men at each other’s throats. ”

“ The love of the country as one’s objectified self coincides with the desire for attachment. Man, in other words, wants to objectify himself. He is not satisfied with solipcism. He wants a world, and a world that somehow represents himself. Without that he is a lost soul. “The man without a country” is pathetic because he has no attachment, no fixed world that he can call his own. The country provides a satisfying object of attachment, in which the patriot’s soul can be at rest.
Patriotism is devotion to a cause, and the cause is one’s own. The patriot has made it his by his own choice. ”

“ The patriot ought, however, to remember that unity does not mean solidarity, and that a true individual is not one which has to be maintained by the suppression of all differences. The patriot insists so strongly upon unity, no doubt, because he believes that to act as one is the only way in which the national individuality can be preserved. But he should remember, as some one has remarked, that “a solid front does not necessitate a solid head.” The unity of patriotism is one of will, and moreover is one of good will. There cannot be national unity on any basis that ignores that fact. ”

“ The second element is an organization, an institution, in other words, a state. The Poles have a common language, customs, traditions, and land, but they have no government of their own, and do not form a nation. A nation comes into being when a state is formed by a people. The state, if a true one, grows out of the life of the people, and is to the people what the body is to the soul. The state and the people form a unity. Moreover, the institution is just as real as the people and their desires, and with the people forms the objective basis of a nation. ”

“ There can, then, be no true integration where significant differences are ignored. And there will be no just organization of all the peoples of the world where the individuality of some of the parts is disregarded. Within the nation, we demand that the individuality of each unit be respected. The pacifist makes that demand for himself. And it is just as much right that the individuality of each nation should be respected in the community of which it is a part. The nation occupies the same position with regard to the world that the individual occupies with regard to the country. ”

“ We learn the mores as unconsciously as we learn to walk and eat and breathe. The masses never learn how we walk, and eat, and breathe, and they never know any reason why the mores are what they are. The justification of them is that when we wake to consciousness of life we find them facts which already hold us in the bonds of tradition, custom, and habit.... The most important fact about the mores is their dominion over the individual. ”