C.S. Lewis on Patriotism

In his book The Four Loves, published in 1960, three years before he died in 1963, the Irish/Englishman C.S. Lewis says that, although goodness itself cannot turn bad, things that we associate with goodness and that even have trended toward goodness can turn bad.

The titular four loves are affection, friendship, eros, and charity. The first three are each a love between humans; he calls them “the human loves.” Charity is a love between human and God and may keep the three human loves (affection, friendship, and eros) from turning bad. Charity cannot turn bad, for, if a purported love between human and God were bad, it would not be charity.

Lewis tells us that the sure mark of a thing’s evilness is that only by being terrible does it avoid being comic. Faced with something that we rightly recognize as wicked, we may see-saw between hating it for its terribleness and laughing at it. The trenchant critic of evil is often a satirist.

Before Lewis gets to the four loves, he treats “[t]wo forms of love for what is not personal,” namely, “love of nature” and “the love of one’s country” or patriotism. These two loves are “loves for the sub-human,” because, as entities, nature and country are lesser than the human being: Neither is a soul or an anima; neither feels or can feel love towards you.

Lewis uses “natural loves” to cover the loves for sub-human objects and the human loves. The natural loves do not include charity.

Lewis seems to imply that the love between humans and God requires a culture that confers or enables understanding of God—a single, universally benevolent, providential deity—and hence is something that develops only once human understanding has gotten beyond its more primitive or, in that sense, natural states. That does not make charity unnatural but more than merely natural.

Lewis imparts lessons about the natural loves, the main lesson being that “natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves.” Each natural love can go bad. Charity can help to whittle away the pretentions and conceits of the natural loves. A higher love whittles away the arrogant or “inordinate” claims of lower loves.

The lessons go further, and one is expressed repeatedly: “The highest does not stand without the lowest” (from The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis). What gets whittled away in the movement toward the higher are the natural loves’ pretentions and conceits, not their goodness. Their goodness may continue to stand, even the better. It is not as if higher displaces lower, “as if we had to throw away our silver to make room for the gold.” Rather, the “natural loves are summoned to become modes of Charity while also remaining the natural loves they were.” Both highest and lowest stand the better when they stand together.

Including the love of one’s country, or patriotism.

Lewis’s audience

The things that “behave internationally,” Lewis notes, are not nations but rulers. Rulers will find it easier to act wickedly if their subjects harbor “[d]emoniac patriotism.” When rulers are “wicked they may by propaganda encourage a demoniac condition of our sentiments in order to secure our acquiescence in their wickedness.” Conversely, a “healthy patriotism may make it harder” for rulers to act wickedly. Thus, “we private persons should keep a wary eye on the health or disease of our own love for our country.” Lewis says he addresses the governed, not the governors: “I write only for subjects.”

Love of our country instantiates love of our affiliation, our part

Lewis also notes that, in describing the love of one’s country, he treats “the sort of love… [that] can be for something other than a country: for a school, a regiment, a great family, or a class.” He then adds “for a Church or (alas) a party in a Church, or for a religious order.” Thus, the good and bad of patriotism are paralleled in a love felt for any of one’s affiliations. Lewis does not mention political factions and affiliations. Given the way Lewis speaks of natural loves waywardly becoming “gods,” perhaps he would locate political demons under “party in a Church” or “religious order.”

Ingredients of patriotism

To explore the good and bad of patriotism, Lewis considers several ingredients, including love of home, love of our country’s past, and a nationalistic feeling of superiority. That feeling of superiority especially leads to the poisoning of patriotism, often by swelling to claims of duties and rights. Lewis helps us whittle away inordinate claims.

Love of home

“First, there is love of home, of the place we grew up in or the places, perhaps many, which have been our homes; and of all places fairly near these and fairly like them.”

“With this love for the place there goes a love for the way of life.” Lewis speaks of the love for features of England’s way of life, for “beer and tea and open fires, trains with compartments in them and an unarmed police force…; for the local dialect and (a shade less) for our native language.” The sample points up a problem today, with features growing less distinctive and the spread of the English language: “The last thing we want is to make everywhere else just like our own home. It would not be home unless it were different.”

The way that things of home have come to fit us, or we them, lead us to pronounce them, “in a momentarily God-like sense, ‘very good’” (21). Our regard for them rises from like to love. Paintings by Carl Larsson express a Swede’s love of domesticity.

A patriotism centered on love of home “is not in the least aggressive. It asks only to be let alone. It becomes militant only to protect what it loves.”

Lewis queries: “How can I love my home without coming to realise that other men, no less rightly, love theirs?” Thus, a patriotism centered on love of home “produces a good attitude towards foreigners.” “Frenchmen like café complet just as we like bacon and eggs.”

Lewis suggests a series of steps, up from self to family and beyond. “[T]he family offers us the first step beyond self-love,” and love-of-home patriotism a step “beyond family selfishness” or clannishness. The steps continue through focal affiliations such as village and country. Lewis writes: “[T]hose who do not love the fellow-villagers or fellow-townsmen whom they have seen are not likely to have got very far towards loving ‘Man’ whom they have not.” Each natural love can be a “preparatory imitation” of a higher love, as in Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” passage. Again, we do not throw away the silver to make room for the gold. The highest does not stand without the lowest.

Love of one’s country’s past

“The second ingredient [of patriotism],” Lewis writes, “is a particular attitude to our country’s past. I mean to that past as it lives in popular imagination: the great deeds of our ancestors. Remember Marathon.”

The virtue here is to appreciate the goodness in the great deeds, to discern in them worthy standards of conduct. Such appreciation may instill in us the feeling that “we must not fall below the standard our fathers set us.” Such a feeling “makes many people, at many important moments, behave so much better than they could have done without its help.”

A virtue is straddled by a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess. The deficiency could be a lazy ignorance and indifference towards our country’s past. Worse, it could be downright detraction, focused on our country’s “shabby and shameful doings.” Today, we are familiar with a lust to discredit our country’s past, producing “disillusioned cynicism.”

Lewis objects to “indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history,” but in discussing the over-glorification the country’s past—the vice of excess. Writing not long after the end of World War II, and at a time when Britain still clung to many of its colonies, Lewis was perhaps especially critical of “the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact.”

Both detraction and over-glorification can operate together, each speaking of different threads of the past. To rewrite a country’s history, the rewriter demolishes the old heroes of the old story while raising new heroes of the new story.

Lewis encourages us “to be strengthened by the image of the past without being either deceived or puffed up.” To preserve worthy standards “our fathers set us,” we must not let our image be “mistaken, or substituted, for serious and systematic historical study.” Face what is shabby and shameful in our country’s past. But that does not preclude the handing down of meaningful stories. The boy “who hears them should dimly feel…that he is hearing saga”—not because the stories are “mere fictions (some of them are after all true),” but because they convey, even amidst historical sobriety, glimpses of goodness in our ancestors, who, at the least, made it possible for us to exist and reflect critically on their doings. A saga doesn’t quite finish. It calls to be continued, perhaps by trying partially to redeem, as Burke wrote, that partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

Just patriotism

The two ingredients we have considered— the love of home and the love of one’s country’s past—figure into a healthy patriotism. Before we move on to further ingredients, I note that Adam Smith would endorse Lewis’s healthy patriotism. Although Smith preached working to align with universal benevolence, he also taught us something about thusly aligning. As Erik Matson exposits Smith, ought implies can, and can implies effectiveness, which depends on knowledge and influence. Knowledge and influence exist especially close to home, where natural relationships exist—relationships that provide continual updates and continual calls to tend the garden. Thus, the limits of our knowledge, affection, and influence spell limits to the effectiveness of our efforts to serve the good of the whole. Smith, therefore, morally authorizes us to focus our efforts where they are most effective, close to home. This moral authorization Matson dubs focalism. It is quite proper that each tends to his or her part, because that is how that part is best tended to. If all the parts are thusly well tended to, each without harming adjacent parts, the whole is apt to be well tended to.

Matson uses his analysis of Smith’s moral authorization in ascribing to Smith (and Josiah Tucker) a healthy kind of patriotism, which Matson calls the patriotism of partnership. Each part maintains an “Our-Part First” attitude, but each accords like attitudes to the other parts and peacefully partners with them to mutual advantage. Internationally, this partnership would respect respective national interests, including security interests, and the equality of sovereignty.

Lewis, we saw, said the love of home “becomes militant only to protect what it loves.” Smith encourages healthy attachment to local affiliations, “zealous to defend them against the encroachments of every other order or society.” “This partiality…checks the spirit of innovation. It…contributes in reality to the stability and permanency of the whole system.” The moral clarity—the focality—of “Our-Part First” can provide the basis for the patriotism of partnership between countries. A frank, reciprocal, and lawful “Our-Part First” may lend a sort of grammar to social affairs. Ownership furnishes an analogy for sovereignty.

Lewis expresses some of these Smithian teachings in Mere Christianity: “patriotism… is, of course, far better than individual selfishness, but… inferior to universal charity and should always give way to universal charity when the two conflict.”

A feeling of superiority

Lewis shares words from a conversation with an old clergyman who believed the English to be superior. Lewis pointed out to him “that every people thinks its own men the bravest and its own women the fairest in the world.” The “lovable old ass,” as Lewis calls him, gravely replied, “Yes, but in England it’s true.”

That conviction of superiority may bring with it further ingredients of patriotism: the claiming of rights against the inferiors of other countries, as well as the vaunting of duties—the “white man’s burden”—supposedly rendered to the needy inferiors of other countries.

Lewis explains the ethos of vain duties: “What we called natives were our wards and we their self-appointed guardians… [O]ur habits of talking as if England’s motives for acquiring an empire…had been mainly altruistic nauseated the world.”

Even worse, he explains, comes when the self-appointed superiors claim rights against the “natives.” “[S]ome foreigners were so bad that one had the right to exterminate them. Others, fitted only to be hewers of wood and drawers of water to the chosen people.” It is here that Lewis notes the “sure mark” of evil and adds: “If there were no broken treaties with Redskins, no extermination of the Tasmanians, no gas-chambers and no Belsen, no Amritsar, Black and Tans or Apartheid, the pomposity of [the false claims of superiority] would be roaring farce.”

Lewis, who also authored The Abolition of Man, continues: “Finally we reach the stage where patriotism in its demonic form unconsciously denies itself.” Here, patriotism morphs into something else. The morph is wrought by the rulers and their clients and affiliates (“the Conditioners,” in Lewis’ The Abolition of Man), but remember, Lewis is here, in The Four Loves, speaking to the governed, so as to help them whittle away inordinate claims, the better to check the viciousness of governors. In demonic form, patriotism still waves flags but now is dressed in something that presents “every international conflict in a purely ethical light.” The people are assured that their sweat and blood are being spent “for justice, or civilization, or humanity.” Today, one hears assurances of protecting “democratic institutions” and “European values.”

“This is a step down, not up,” Lewis explains. The simpler and more honest patriotism did not “disregard ethics,” for “[g]ood men needed to be convinced that their country’s cause was just.” A civilized “Our-Part First” attitude can be frank, reciprocal, and, as Hugo Grotius suggested, rather lawful.

Lewis writes: “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 blackened his eye purely on moral grounds—wholly indifferent to the fact that the house in question is mine—I become insufferable.”

The highest does not stand without the lowest

Lewis’s The Four Loves advances to charity, but the journey passes through the human loves (affection, friendship, and eros) and, near the start of the book, other natural loves, including patriotism. Lewis helps us whittle away the inordinate claims of patriotism and other lower loves, so that they may better stand with the highest.

 

This piece was originally featured on Imaginative Conservative.