Soon or late the day is coming,
Tyrant Man shall be o’erthrown,
And the fruitful fields of England
Shall be trod by beasts alone.

Rings will vanish from our noses,
And the harnesses from our back,
Bit and spur shall rust forever,
And cruel whips no more shall crack.

Riches more than mind can picture,
Wheat and barley, oats and hay,
Clover, beans, and mangel-wurzels
Shall be ours upon that day.

Bright will shine the fields of England,
Purer shall its waters be,
Sweeter yet shall blow its breezes
On the day that sets us free.

For that day we all must labour,
Though we die before it break;
Cows and horses, geese and turkeys,
All must toil for our freedom’s sake.

Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland,
Beasts of every land and clime,
Hearken well and spread my tidings
Of the golden future time.

George Orwell, Animal Farm

No more traditions’ chains shall bind us
Arise ye workers no more in thrall
The earth shall rise on new foundations
We are naught but we shall be all.

Then comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale
Unites the human race.

No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we’ll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They’ll break ranks and fight no more

And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We’ll shoot the generals on our own side.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply some super-loyal allegiance to a nation-state.

I meant something more like a love of the land and the laws that secure your freedom – inclusive of the social organizations you mention.

I don’t think France in the 1400s even comes close to being a “nation state” as currently understood. For a start, the French language was spoken by a distinct minority. But more fundamentally, the logic of the nation state is that it demands a relationship of loyalty between the individual and the state, without any subsidiary mediating institutions or overlapping loyalties. In medieval Europe, overlapping loyalties were the norm. No, I think Joan’s mission was to drive out a corrupt foreign invader (that was supported by mant local rulers), not to build up a French nation state. Of course, later nationalists employed Joan in that cause.

It is true that it would be absurd to denounce one’s own inheritance in its entirety.

That said, I would want to express two reservations about this post:

1) The best resources for criticizing America are not within the American tradition, but the Biblical tradition. The greatest American documents — and I do NOT minimize their authority — take for granted an individualist anthropology that is not Biblical.

2) I am not sure you can assert that the flag is a sign of country and not of State. It appeared during the revolution which led, briefly, to a confederation and then, very quickly, to a Federalist State. And that State IS connected to many of the crimes that you deplore. The current global system arose after WWII — but America was laying the groundwork for it during WWI, during the imperial adventures of the middle to late 19th century, and during the Civil War.

The flexible local-federal framework that you praise (rightly) is implicated deeply in the mechanisms of American expansion and consolidation. One could even say that American federalism is a weak substitute for real Catholic subsidiarity.

The West, and in particular, the United States, has not, by and large, learnt the lesson of Lear. The USA is a nation that tends to find failure shameful, mortifying or even downright sinful. What distiguishes its culture is its buoyancy, its robust exuberance, its dogged refusal to cave in, cop out or say “can’t”…No group uses the word dream so often, except for psychoanalysts. American culture is deeply hostile to the idea of limit, and therefore to human biology.
———
In such a culture, there can be no real tragedy, whatever terrifying events may occur from time to time. The United States is a profoundly anti-tragic society which is now having to confront what may well prove the most terrible epoch of its history.
———-
What is immortal in the United States, what refuses to lie down and die, is precisely the will. Like desire, there’s always more will where taht came from. But whereas desire is hard to dominate, the will is dominion itself. It is a terrifyingly uncompromising drive, one which knows no faltering or bridling, irony or self-doubt. It is so greedy for the world that it is at risk of pounding it to pieces in its sublimest fury, cramming it into its insatiable maw. This will is apparently in love with all it sees, but is secretly in love with itself. It is not surprising that it often takes a military form, since the death drive lurks within it. Its virile vigour conceals a panic stricken disavowal of death. It has the hubris of all claims to self-sufficiency.
————-
“To be self-willed,” writes St> Augustine in his Confessions, is “to be in in self in the sense to please oneself, {which} is not to be wholly nothing but to be approaching nothingness.” To exist independently is to be a kind of cypher. The self-willed have the emptiness of a tautology. They make the mistake of imagining that to act according to laws outside of the self is to be something less than the authr of one’s own being.

Terry Eagleton, After Theory. New York: Basic Books, 2003. pp. 185-9

If power had a body, it would be forced to abdicate. It is because it is fleshless that it fails to feel the misery that it inflicts. What blunts the senses (amongst other depravities) is surplus of material property. If it has no body of its own, it nevertheless has a kind of surrogate flesh, a thick fat-like swaddling of material possessions, which insulate it against compassion:

Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man
That slaves your ordinance, that dose not see
Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly:
so distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough.

If our sympathy for others were not so sensuously depleted, we would be moved by their deprivation to share with them the very goods which prevent us from feelinfg their wretchedness. The problem would thus become the solution.

Terry Eagleton, 2003

A well thought, well written post — likewise, thanks.

Darwin: I also found the following essay What is Patriotism by Fr. Stephen J. Brown, S.J. helpful as well.

Once upon a time I wrote a post in which I asserted that God really doesn’t deal with countries, only with persons — that while we owe an earthly loyalty to the patria, it has no meaning at the deepest level. Someone asked me, “Then how do you explain why God called Joan of Arc to save France?” I didn’t have a good answer to that.

There are elements of “nationalism” that are new, but there is a very strong identification with country which goes back much further that you are suggesting. The French of the 1400s did indeed see a very real value to France as a distinct entity — even though the English court was still French-speaking. Italians of Dante’s time had a very clear sense of Italy as a thing which over-arched the rivalries between city states, and longed for a true Italian kingdom. The Roman empire held a loyalty so deep that Westerners considered themselves Roman long after the empire ceased to exist.

Clearly, there can be expressions of national feeling which set the patria up as an idol, but the way you are going on about it, one would think that _any_ expressed love of country constituted a disordered nationalism. Do not be so quick to assume that anyone with a “God Bless America” on his lips is some sort of raving nationalist. Part of charity is assuming the best of others — even others who differ from oneself.

Is nationalism worse elsewhere? Sure, it is particularly odious in China. And yes, other countries are guilty of mixing the faith and nationalism at times– I’m thinking of Poland here. But there is something about how Americans see America that goes beyond how most (specifically western) countries see themselves. It is less pride in a place, a history, a culture than love of an ideal, a pseudo-religion, one based on the false belief that America stands apart from other countries in upholding “freedom”– a false notion of freedom at that.

“God, famil, country”: you commit the primary error of nationalism. You forget that the nation state is a relatively modern invention and it wipes out all competing and overlapping loyalties that were once considered important. Your division totally violates subsidiarity. So I would say: God, family, kin, community, guild, region.. and so on, with country coming last.