The Life of Reason by George Santayana (i have read the book TXT) π
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- Author: George Santayana
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Meantime a double dislocation is possible here: patriotism may be wholly identified with personal loyalty to the sovereign, while the sovereign himself, instead of making public interests his own, may direct his policy so as to satisfy his private passions. The first confusion leads to a conflict between tradition and reason; the second to the ruin of either the state or the monarchy. In a word, a symbol needs to remain transparent and to become adequate; failing in either respect, it misses its function.
The feudal system offers perhaps the best illustration of a patriotism wholly submerged in loyalty. The sense of mutual obligation and service was very clear in this case; the vassal in swearing fealty knew perfectly well what sort of a bargain he was striking. A feudal government, while it lasted, was accordingly highly responsive and responsible. If false to its calling, it could be readily disowned, for it is easy to break an oath and to make new military associations, especially where territorial units are small and their links accidental. But this personal, conscious, and jealous subordination of man to man constituted a government of insignificant scope. Military functions were alone considered and the rest was allowed to shift for itself. Feudalism could have been possible only in a barbarous age when the arts existed on sufferance and lived on by little tentative resurrections. The feudal lord was a genuine representative of a very small part of his vassal's interests. This slight bond sufficed, however, to give him a great prestige and to stimulate in him all the habits and virtues of a responsible master; so that in England, where vestiges of feudalism abound to this day, there is an aristocracy not merely titular.
A highly concentrated monarchy presents the exactly opposite phenomenon. Here subordination is involuntary and mutual responsibility largely unconscious. On the other hand, the scope of representation is very wide and the monarch may well embody the whole life of the nation. A great court, with officers of state and a standing army, is sensitive to nothing so much as to general appearances and general results. The invisible forces of industry, morality, and personal ambition that really sustain the state are not studied or fomented by such a government; so that when these resources begin to fail, the ensuing catastrophes are a mystery to everybody. The king and his ministers never cease wondering how they can be so constantly unfortunate.
So long, however, as the nation's vital force is unspent and taxes and soldiers are available in plenty, a great monarchy tends to turn those resources to notable results. The arts and sciences are encouraged by the patronage of men of breeding and affairs; they are disciplined into a certain firmness and amplitude which artists and scholars, if left to themselves, are commonly incapable of. Life is refined; religion itself, unless fanaticism be too hopelessly in the ascendant, is co-ordinated with other public interests and compelled to serve mankind; a liberal life is made possible; the imagination is stimulated and set free by that same brilliant concentration of all human energies which defeats practical liberty. At the same time luxury and all manner of conceits are part and parcel of such a courtly civilisation, and its best products are the first to be lost; so that very likely the dumb forces of societyβhunger, conscience, and maliceβwill not do any great harm when they destroy those treacherous institutions which, after giving the spirit a momentary expression, had become an offence to both spirit and flesh. Observers at the time may lament the collapse of so much elegance and greatness; but nature has no memory and brushes away without a qualm her card-castle of yesterday, if a new constructive impulse possesses her to-day.
Where no suitable persons are found to embody the state's unity, other symbols have to be chosen. Besides the gods and their temples, there are the laws which may, as among the Jews and Mohammedans, become as much a fetich as any monarch, and one more long-lived; or else some traditional policy of revenge or conquest, or even the country's name or flag, may serve this symbolic purpose. A trivial emblem, which no thinking man can substitute for the thing signified, is not so great an advantage as at first sight it might seem; for in the first place men are often thoughtless and adore words and symbols with a terrible earnestness; while, on the other hand, an abstract token, because of its natural insipidity, can be made to stand for anything; so that patriotism, when it uses pompous words alone for its stimulus, is very apt to be a cloak for private interests, which the speaker may sincerely conceive to be the only interests in question.
The essence of patriotism is thus annulled, for patriotism does not consist in considering the private and sordid interests of others as well as one's own, by a kind of sympathy which is merely vicarious or epidemic selfishness; patriotism consists rather in being sensitive to a set of interests which no one could have had if he had lived in isolation, but which accrue to men conscious of living in society, and in a society having the scope and history of a nation. It was the vice of liberalism to believe that common interests covered nothing but the sum of those objects which each individual might pursue alone; whereby science, religion, art, language, and nationality itself would cease to be matters of public concern and would appeal to the individual merely as instruments. The welfare of a flock of sheep is secured if each is well fed and watered, but the welfare of a human society involves the partial withdrawal of every member from such pursuits to attend instead to memory and to ideal possessions; these involve a certain conscious continuity and organisation in the state not necessary for animal existence. It is not for man's interest to live unless he can live in the spirit, because his spiritual capacity, when unused, will lacerate and derange even his physical life. The brutal individualist falls into the same error into which despots fall when they declare war out of personal pique or tax the people to build themselves a pyramid, not discerning their country's interests, which they might have appropriated, from interests of their own which no one else can share.
Democracies, too, are full of patriots of this lordly stripe, men whose patriotism consists in joy at their personal possessions and in desire to increase them. The resultant of general selfishness might conceivably be a general order; but though intelligent selfishness, if universal, might suffice for good government, it could not suffice for nationality. Patriotism is an imaginative passion, and imagination is ingenuous. The value of patriotism is not utilitarian, but ideal. It belongs to the free forms of society and ennobles a man not so much because it nerves him to work or to die, which the basest passions may also do, but because it associates him, in working or dying, with an immortal and friendly companion, the spirit of his race. This he received from his ancestors tempered by their achievements, and may transmit to posterity qualified by his own.
CHAPTER VIIIIDEAL SOCIETY
To many beingsβto almost all that people the earth and skyβeach soul is not attached by any practical interest. Some are too distant to be perceived; the proximity of others passes unnoticed. It is far from requisite, in pursuing safety, that every strange animal be regarded as either a friend or an enemy. Wanton hostilities would waste ammunition and idle attachments would waste time. Yet it often happens that some of these beings, having something in common with creatures we are wont to notice, since we stand to them in sexual, parental, or hostile relations, cannot well go unobserved. Their presence fills us with a vague general emotion, the arrested possibility at once of sexual, of parental, and of hostile actions. This emotion is gregarious or impersonally social. The flock it commonly regards may be described as an aggregate in which parents and children have been submerged, in which mates are not yet selected, and enemies not yet descried.
Gregarious sentiment is passive, watchful, expectant, at once powerful and indistinct, troubled and fascinated by things merely possible. It renders solitude terrible without making society particularly delightful. A dull feeling of familiarity and comfort is all we can reasonably attribute to uninterrupted trooping together. Yet banishment from an accustomed society is often unbearable. A creature separated from his group finds all his social instincts bereft of objects and of possible exercise; the sexual, if by chance the sexual be at the time active; the parental, with all its extensions; and the combative, with all its supports. He is helpless and idle, deprived of all resource and employment. Yet when restored to his tribe, he merely resumes a normal existence. All particular feats and opportunities are still to seek. Company is not occupation. Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
Similar beings herding together in the same places are naturally subject to simultaneous reactions, and the sense of this common reaction makes possible the conception of many minds having a common experience. The elements of this experience they express to one another by signs. For when spontaneous reactions occur together in many animals, each, knowing well his own emotion, will inevitably take the perceived attitude and gesture of his fellows for its expressionβfor his own attitude and gesture he knows nothing of; and he will thus possess, without further instruction, the outward sign for his inner experience.
It is see how a moral world can grow out of these primary intuitions. Knowing, for instance, the expression of anger, a man may come to find anger directed against himself; together with physical fear in the presence of attack, he will feel the contagion of his enemy's passion, especially if his enemy be the whole group whose reactions he is wont to share, and something in him will strive to be angry together with the rest of the world. He will perfectly understand that indignation against himself which in fact he instinctively shares. This self-condemning emotion will be his sense of shame and his conscience. Words soon come to give definition to such a feeling, which without expression in language would have but little stability. For when a man is attracted to an act, even if it be condemned by others, he views it as delightful and eligible in itself; but when he is forced, by the conventional use of words, to attach to that act an opprobrious epithet, an epithet which he himself has always applied with scorn, he finds himself unable to suppress the emotion connoted
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