So I read the other day my friend Sam Goldman’s review of Yoram Hazony’s book on nationalism. Sam has this characteristically interesting observation to make:
Where “nationalism” evokes the familial circumstances of birth—in Latin, natio—“patriotism” emphasizes its location—the patria or fatherland.
When I first read this, I thought, it seems right! But my second thought was that it’s quite strange: Nation does come from natality & birth, which means focusing on mothers, but as Sam says, patria means the things of the father. Why is that not family? Moreover, are we not even more familiar with the word motherland than fatherland—that’s just as political! Sam says, patriotism is about location, on the understanding that what we inherit is first of all land, not a teaching. Since communities have always fought over land, that makes sense. The father is accordingly involved in turning geography into politics, people might say today. The implicit answer to the problem of patriotism, shockingly impolite for the liberal authorities in our public life, is that mothers are private & fathers are public. You owe your moral education at home, in your childhood, to your mother, & so the generations have continuity. The cause of all this is politics, of course, which still defines our complaints about the human condition & its predicament. Nowadays, our liberal friends talk of toxic masculinity & feminists used to talk about the male patriarchal structure of oppression—the cause of all evil. Authoritative blame used to work the other way around: Genesis teaches that a woman was first to sin & tempted the man to sin; a man made the first city; & patriarchy is the way of life. Homer tells us that the Achaeans went to war against the Trojans because of a woman, Helen, who was most beautiful & accordingly a good test of the reliability of marriage, & therefore the separation between private & public life depended on that war. Or put otherwise, Zeus guarantees justice, but he is not the only god—love has its own power & leads to much lawlessness. We need not go into the many Biblical & tragic stories about love… Anyway, our liberal politics presupposes & tries to enforce a gender-neutral society to put all that behind us; this attempt is a historical first, but we are for the time being stuck with remnants of the old ways. Back in the bad old days of stereotypes & xenophobia, people knew that the Irish, Scotch, & Russian had patronyms, just like Homeric heroes—children named for their fathers, not because the family needed to know them, but because the broader community did. Matronyms are almost unheard of—writing on substack, I can tell you that the autocorrect recognizes the word patronym, but not matronym, which it underlines in red as a mistake, a sad testimony to the grammatical side of the patriarchal structure of oppression, which our computers will soon fix; unless you wish to say that nicknames, endearing names, diminutives are matronyms; we learn from Tolstoy’s War & Peace that Russians like to speak that way to each other in private, although in public they showed their Enlightenment superiority by speaking in French & the ironic solution to this political-psychological drama was, of course, a French invasion of Russia by Napoleon, the self-made man…
Sam goes on to liken Hazony’s view of nationalism with Roman piety, of which the most bewildering example is Aeneas in the poem of Virgil. What Romans feel for Rome is what Aeneas felt for his father Anchises—one worrisome problem here is that Aeneas was not born in Rome, he didn’t even found it: His bloodline, his descendants did, but matrilineally, through the mother of Romulus & Remus. The founding of Rome, according to the various accounts that have come down to us, is tied with multiple crimes in the family of Romulus, various conflicting political attempts to take control of the bloodline, as though family got in the way of being who we are. It could be called tragic, but to summarize the problem, the poetry of piety suggests that the politics of piety is impossible. To go back to Virgil: If the ancestors of the Romans were not autochthonous, but Asian invaders of Europe, then they might be savage & imperialistic; to say the least, as Trojans, they send us back to Homer’s Iliad, which doesn’t much praise Trojan justice or wisdom. The Aeneas of Virgil seems to put together what Homer kept apart—the fighting prowess of Achilles, a conqueror of enemy cities, & the wandering of Odysseus, who saw the minds & cities of men, but Virgil reveals at length, Aeneas is neither one. This nationalism, as we now say, or patriotism, as the ancients could have said, is manly & takes over however many families it can, limited only by how many women men could conquer. It starts with the freedom of Rome & ends with slavery for everyone in the Roman empire—thus Virgil’s unenthusiastic history of Rome.
So if we have learned anything, it’s that the ancient wisdom we learn from books suggests that what we call nationalism is what we call an ideology. It corresponds to our fondest wishes, but not to our political beliefs, which are not only less exalted, but they also easily tend to angry war, not to beautiful poetry. What we call nationalism is an attempt to provide a founding in speech when we are dissatisfied with the way things are: This attempt to found ourselves is obviously impossible—we already are what we are, there are very serious limits to what we can do—we cannot help but be ashamed of ourselves when we look at ourselves, & this makes it very difficult to remember how good we have it, or what confidence we have in ourselves. Perhaps the only sure way to face our shame politically & to overcome it is war, since our identification with our enemies in a contest never precludes our desire to defeat them: Enmity presupposes vulnerability, but promises victory.
As for modern wisdom concerning the Enlightenment, we have learned that liberal ideology, in attempting to end war, forgets that we have families, mothers & fathers, & makes us strangers everywhere. This modern patriotism that is supposed to be opposed to a modern nationalism is very feminine without any longer having to do with birth, remembered in the word nation. This is why it can be a kind of imperialism, just as surely as the manly variety we used to know much better. In order to avoid telling us that we are all the children of one father or one mother, our latter-day liberalism makes us all orphans. We call this modernity. On the one hand, in stealing our names, it attempts to prevent the shame of disappointing our fathers & the competition to prove ourselves worthy, even eminent. On the other hand, out of a fear of repeating the bad old things from the past, it shames us into forgetting how we were brought up by our mothers, because the habits & the beliefs that make us who we are separate us from other people: We cannot help loving what is familiar to us, we cannot avoid feeling that what is near is dear, so it is a moral imperative that we create new identities. Liberalism may be said to have noticed that we identify with our names, although we didn’t choose them & they are not rational concepts, & then concluded that the liberal thing to do is to name ourselves anew. Social media may be said therefore to be the latest enterprise of Enlightenment, a kind of rationalism, for it allows each of us to be his own father; & the science of medicine that transforms our sexual identities allows each of us to be his own mother, yet more Enlightenment.
It’s obvious that there’s something phony in the idea that Julius Caesar was a god, that he was descended from a god through Aeneas, &c., but it’s telling: The piety of Aeneas degenerated into something shocking; it’s maybe shocking to say, but Virgil thinks it’s lost irretrievably. What then? Caesar’s astonishing power was not greater than mortality, nor was the empire he left behind him obviously good. It’s also obvious now that Napoleon was not History on horseback, Enlightening people one conquest after another; anyone can tell he might have been killed in any one of those astonishing battles—eventually, he lost his battles & his empire, like every other conqueror. Of course, Tolstoy doesn’t mean that the French Revolution was reversed, Enlightenment lost, & it’s back to medieval piety, either, but the belief in Progress is tarnished once the epitome of modern power turns to madness. The most obvious conclusion from this entire drama is that man is destined for greatness & misery, that we cannot help becoming self-destructive. Whether this is correct & why it should be so is very hard to say, or perhaps impossible. But this seems to be why neither ancient nor modern empires could suppress what we call religion for any length of time; religion at least gives confidence that empires, too, must fall, precisely because their rationalism is hubristic.
So then patriotism in the old sense, which is now hated as nationalism by distinctly ungrateful inheritors of colonial empires, & nationalism in the old sense, which is now disguised as an acceptable, but bland patriotism, need each other like father & mother. Politics needs religion to fend off the catastrophic possibilities opened up by violence. We are perpetually tempted to turn justice into an ideology that deifies our acquisitiveness or our cowardice. When it degenerates, liberalism itself looks like a combination of acquisitiveness & cowardice. The attempt to solve this problem, to avoid empire & anarchy, leads Hazony to Israel as a political model of a nation & a political vision of a world of nation-states.
Of course, that brings us to war & the possibility that nation-states cannot long endure in any configuration, & might even disappear—nation-states have certainly been rare & none have endured long—but that’s another idea. Read Sam’s essay & Hazony’s book!