Walter Berns: Making Patriots. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 40, Number 2, January/February 2003.
A scholar writing on patriotism, and not to debunk it: Will wonders never cease? After all, isn’t patriotism a bit of an intellectual embarrassment? How can the love of country, pledging allegiance to the American flag, possibly interest anyone with an education beyond grammar school? Emotion aside—even a Ph. D. might feel something for the old sod—how could patriotism have sufficient rational content to interest a human mind?
Yet highly intelligent men have found American patriotism intellectually engaging: Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Lincoln. “There was not then,” Berns writes, “as there is now, a division between intellectuals and politicians,” a division that now results in politicians knowing (perhaps blissfully) “nothing about what is goin on in the world of political theory,” and in theorists refusing “to believe it part of their job to promote the cause of republican government” (135). Thoroughly ‘politicized,’ too many intellectuals have no realistic sense of the political. What happened between, say, the Civil War and today, to make this so?
For a model of what thoroughgoing politicization really means, Berns points to Sparta, where there were no intellectuals. Philosophy in Athens and Christianity in Europe compromised the whole-heartedly political way of life in the West, but in time the combination of philosophic precision and Christian devotion led to schisms and wars. The American Founders solved this problem by rejecting religious establishment in favor of allegiance to the American flag, to the republic for which it stands, and, ultimately, to the principle of unalienable human rights that they designed that republic to protect. That is, the Founders invited their fellow citizens to defend a country, a particular place ruled by a particular regime, for the sake of a universal principle, a quality shared by all human beings whether or not they were Americans. As Americans, this group of human beings dedicated itself to the duty of securing universal rights for themselves and their posterity.
In so solving the problem of the tension between particular attachments and universal rights and duties, Americans brought on a new set of problems. How shall these agreed-upon, self-evident rights be secured in practice? (For example, what should be the relation between the one general government and the many small ones?) How far shall America go in defending its republican regime in a world of nations often uncongenial to republicanism? (The French went conquering in the name of universal rights, provoking the extreme particularity of nationalist politics, thereby rendering the French nation’s condition precarious, intermittently, for the next 150 years.) In the last century, America had to face down two tyrannies infected by virulent combinations of the particular and the universal. And in the 21st century Americans must consider how to defend natural-rights republicanism from countries understandably suspicious of what the powerful victor in those confrontations with tyranny might do. If American established itself as a sort of worldwide church militant for natural rights, the defense of natural right might suffer as much as Christianity did, when politicized too heavy-handedly.
Berns writes seven succinct chapters, the first on the thoroughgoing patriotism of antiquity; the second on the division of human devotion introduced by Christianity; the third on the division of human energies introduced by commercialism; the fourth on the educational needs caused by these three phenomena; the fifth on the patriotic poetry of Lincoln, which combined the intellectual grasp of the American principle with the emotional resonance of words fitly spoken; the sixth on the special problem that race-based slavery posed to American patriots; the seventh on the problem of patriotism and the law, especially constitutional law, with respect to the symbolic object of American patriotism, the American flag. Patriotism turns out to be thought-provoking, in part because it provokes. Thinking about patriotism requires us to come to terms with the spirited part of our souls, the part that holds the near dear, and finds the universal in the near, making the near all the more with fighting for.
Contrasting ancient Greece with America, Berns observes that patriotism requires education, and that the Spartans coordinated “every detail” of theirs to the inculcation of patriotic sentiment—even to the extent of suppressing questions concerning the right and wrong of the city’s conduct. Even Athens, whose philosophers did conspicuously raise such questions, never separated something called ‘civil society’ from another thing called ‘the state,’ never separated ‘church’ from ‘state,’ and (in)famously executed the annoying questioner, Socrates. For Athenians, love of country came to mean love of empire and the glory attendant to empire. “The institutions of both Athens and Sparta were ordered with a view to war” (17) to a degree that the institutions of American commercial republicanism never were. American patriotism might decline into individual and family self-interest. Tocqueville worried that it might. In America, the political community cannot be made to seem all-encompassing, and so patriotism will remain limited.
Disestablished, religion moved away from ‘the state’ and was restricted to ‘civil society.’ “[B]y separating the spiritual from the temporal, Jesus not only provided the basis for the separation of church and state, he made it impossible for a Christian to be a patriotic citizen in the ancient sense” (24). For a Christian, God’s City inspires the fullest loyalty, not Rome. No prophetic religion makes a good civil religion; attempts to do so run afoul of confusion between ‘temporal and eternal’—the misattribution (for example) of the vices of the French Old Regime and its visible church to Christianity itself. Americans met this problem not by inventing a new civil religion, as the French tried so implausibly to do, but by making religion civil; by transforming laws against blasphemy into violations not of dogma but of the public peace. By removing religion as a gateway to political power, Americans retained it as a guardian of morals and sundered its dangerous association with the jealous, angry passions ambition arouses. Here, Berns goes too far in claiming that the God of the Declaration of Independence is “Nature’s God,” the god of the philosophers, only. The plain language of the Declaration also refers to the Creator-God, the God of Judgment, and the God of Providence. ‘God and country’ has been an American motto; if patriotism here centers on a particular defense of universal rights, and if those rights are endowed by the Creator of men, there need be no contradiction between patriotism and philosophy, or between patriotism and religion.
What if religion, now at liberty in civil society, meets commercial life, equally at liberty there, and fails to balance this countervailing tendency toward materialism and selfishness? Will not patriotism too dissolve in those solvents? Jefferson supposed so, consequently preferring gun-bearing farmers to the bankers who collected farmers’ debts. And as farm populations decline and the populations of bankers, stockbrokers, and shopkeepers increase, what then? A standing army to replace yeoman militia, to be sure, but a standing army needs citizen support. Berns devotes his central chapter to citizen education.
Jefferson wanted public education controlled locally by parents who in this way would participate (as he put it) “in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day” (65). Participation in government will foster love of the public things, making them one’s own. Given the predominantly religious persuasion of Americans, local control meant religious instruction, the strengthening of moral conduct pointing beyond the self and, under the American regime, toward the self-risking defense of the natural-rights principles the regime defends. “[N]othing in the First Amendment was then understood to prohibit the states from providing religious instruction in the schools,” and nothing did until the 1940s—that is, when the American national state began routinely to overbear local self-government. Berns laments, “Not one of the [1940] Supreme Court jutices gave any thought, any thought whatsoever, to the role of religion in republican government, specifically, the possibility of a connection between religious training and the sort of citizen required by a self-governing republic” (75). Berns associates this self-governing virtue with the modern (specifically Montesquieuian) redefinition of virtue not s the classical moral quadrivium (courage, moderation, prudence, justice) but as the self-sacrificing love of country. It would be more accurate to say that the Founders—Washington being the highest example—esteemed all of those virtues, classical and modern, but Berns’s basic point is sound: Schools wrested from parental control and handed over to secularizing bureaucrats who teach moral relativism may rot the foundations of patriotism. They have not done so, yet, but Berns might argue that our patriotism, though ardent, could be more thoughtful and principled than it is. And if it is not very thoughtful and principled, how distinctively American can it be said to be?
“[D]evotion to a principle requires an understanding of its terms,” and “that understanding cannot be taken for granted” (83). For understanding, one needs, so to speak, Madison first, Madison Avenue second. Among statesmen who understand both the American principles and how to convey that understanding, Lincoln has no equal. The Founders knew that the truths of the Declaration of Independence respecting natural right were self-evident to Americans but not to everyone; they never expected George III to nod soberly in concurrence with his colonists’ strictures and repent. Lincoln saw that the sovereign people themselves might become blinded by the same tyrannical passions, obscuring truths in a desire to maintain slavery or studiously to overlook it. In his wartime rhetoric Lincoln set the sentiments of shared guilt and forgiveness against those evil passions. the new birth of freedom, freedom for every American regardless of race, could result from the new glimpse of natural right that Lincoln’s cleansing and healing rhetoric made possible.
Slave emancipation only began this new life; emancipation was precisely a new birth of an infant liberty, long from being nourished and educated to maturity. Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address as encouragement to the first steps in that education, what would have been Lincolnian reconstruction. That reconstruction aimed at again reconciling natural right with consent; the assassination ended it, and the dynamic of Southern resistance and Northern force continued for a hundred years, ending only when a recognizable modern state, unintended by Lincoln or any other Civil War-era American, an entity needing minimum local consent, moved on the South with Hobbesian rigor. This did secure rights for the descendants of slaves, but the absence of consent did little to enhance patriotic feeling on the other side, instead recasting some of that sentiment into the now-familiar ‘pro-government’ versus ‘anti-government’ struggle.
Insofar as they are formed by the moral-relativist ethos of bureaucratic public schools and by the impassionating appeals of entertainment and advertising, Americans begin to resemble their antebellum forbears in one respect: They begin not to see the natural rights they once held to be self-evident. This time, however, it is not the passion to enslave others but passions of self-enslavement that rightly trouble Berns. Without expecting to see a new Lincoln, one can still provide the materials with which resistance to such passions might be buttressed.
Berns therefore concludes his argument by discussing the Constitutional debate over the American flag—specifically, the Supreme Court’s rulings holding laws that prohibit flag defilement unconstitutional. Emptied of intellectual content by the claim that the legal right to free speech trumps the natural rights that free speech and all other constitutional guarantees are intended to secure, “the flag stands for nothing in particular” (137), except maybe free speech itself. Logically that means that if free ‘speech’ includes flag defilement, free speech is entitled to put n end to free speech—that natural right re alienable by majority (or even Supreme Court-based) fiat. If freedom and/or the will of the Supreme Court trumps logic itself, then speech is chatter, and chatter cannot be desecrated. To this, Berns replies that the flag stands not only for free speech—understood as real, human speech, deliberation, not the mindless expression of the impassioned ‘self’—but for all the natural rights defended by those who live and fight under the flag, and the republic for which it stands. Those natural right are not opinion but truth. Those truths frame free ‘expression,’ not the other way around. The other way confuses libertinism with liberty.
‘Public intellectuals’ are a dime a dozen. Their publicity is an advertisement for themselves, their intellect often ignorant of the conditions needed for a life of the mind. In his long career as a public intellectual of a more sober sort, Walter Berns has called his more celebrated colleagues to greater thoughtfulness. They have preferred to bask in their celebrity. But others have listened, and maybe they have had some good effect, a bit removed from the limelight.
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