Blogging has been impeded lately by real life – and also by the fact that it’s not much fun to take swings at a lifeless dummy like the Obama Administration. In time, all but the most infatuated acolytes of The One will come to realize that his only sound and valuable policy is the one that they most dislike, namely, escalation of the campaign in Afghanistan. Granted that his heart may not be in it, and his advocacy may be uninspiring (vide the analyses by Rich Lowry and Fred Barnes), but, as Rich says – and Don Rumsfeld might have said – you go to war with the President you have.
Some on the Right will, I fear, fall into despair and call for quitting because the commander-in-chief is so obviously out of his depth. In fact, some already have. Let’s not forget, though, that a less than ideal strategy directed by a less than superb commander doesn’t foredoom us to defeat. The Taliban are no Wehrmacht. We chased them out of Kabul easily the last time they occupied it, and our Armed Forces are more experienced and deadly now than they were then. Nobody ever made a lot of money betting against America in a war. As long as we don’t give up, we can win. While the struggle is ongoing, I’ll gladly cheer President Obama, even at the risk of embarrassing him.
What impelled me to write this post, however, was not Afghanistan but a slightly related matter: a couple of long posts by libertarian law professor Ilya Somin, in which he denounces nationalism and patriotism. His argument, stripped to its essence, is that love of one’s country, except in the trivial sense of loving it when it promotes good causes, can lead to all kinds of evils, from protectionism to mass murder.
There’s no doubt that some mass murderers are fervent nationalists. It’s also true that many murders and other atrocities have been motivated by love of family or by friendship or by devotion to abstract ideological propositions like the obsolescence of the nation-state. For that matter, serial killers are often notable for their lack of any evident passions at all. Murder finds many excuses, and sometimes needs none. Were nationalism and patriotism to be expunged from the human heart, I doubt that a single human life would be saved.
Trying to expunge love of country is in any case an undertaking that can lead only to the opposite of the result that Professor Somin desires. C. S. Lewis (no rabid nationalist) summed up the reasons why in The Four Loves:
Patriotism has, then, many faces. Those who would reject it entirely do not seem to have considered what will certainly step—has already begin to step—into its place. For a long time yet, or perhaps forever, nations will live in danger. Rulers must somehow nerve their subjects to defend them or at least prepare for their defence.
Where the sentiment of patriotism has been destroyed this can be done only by presenting every international conflict in a purely ethical light. If people will spend neither sweat nor blood for “their country” they must be made to feel that they are spending them for justice or civilization, or humanity. This is a step down, not up. Patriotic sentiment did not of course need to disregard ethics. Good men needed to be convinced that their county’s cause was just; but it was still their country’s cause, not the cause of justice as such. The difference seems to me important. I may without self-righteousness or hypocrisy think it just to defend my house by force against a burglar; but if I start pretending that I blacked his eye purely on moral grounds—wholly indifferent to the fact that the house in question was mine—I become insufferable. The pretence that when England’s is just we are on England’s side—as some neutral Don Quixote might be—for that reason alone, is equally spurious. And nonsense draws evil after it. If our country’s cause is the cause of God, wars be wars of annihilation. A false transcendence is given to things which are very much of this world.
The glory of the old sentiment was that while it could steel men to the utmost endeavour, it still knew itself to be a sentiment. Wars could be heroic without pretending to be Holy Wars. The hero’s death was not confused with the martyr’s. And (delightfully) the same sentiment which could be so serious in a rear-guard action could also take itself as lightly as all happy loves often do. It could laugh at itself. Our older patriotic songs cannot be sung without a twinkle in the eye; later ones sound more like hymns. Give me “The British Grenadiers” (with a tow-row-row-row) any day rather than “Land of Hope and Glory”.
Because men like Professor Somin (he is hardly alone) sneer at patriotism, the war against Islamofascism must be cast as something closer to a crusade than a “mere” defense of our own country’s interests. There is, of course, a strong moral case for fighting the mufsidun, but wouldn’t we be closer to defeating them if we could count on patriotic sentiment to buoy the war effort?