"But if the men of the masses do not experience the sentiment of
patriotism, this is due to the fact that they have not yet reached
that exalted sentiment, which is characteristic of every cultured
man. If they do not experience this exalted sentiment, it has to be
educated in them. It is this that the government is doing."
Thus generally speak the men of the ruling classes, with such full
confidence that patriotism is an exalted sentiment, that the naïve
men of the masses, who do not experience it, consider themselves at
fault, because they do not experience this sentiment, and try to
assure themselves that they experience it, or at least pretend that
they do.
But what is this exalted sentiment, which, in the opinion of the
ruling classes, ought to be educated in the nations?
This sentiment is in its most precise definition nothing but a
preference shown to one's own state or nation in comparison with any
other state or nation, a sentiment which is fully expressed in the
German patriotic song, "_Deutschland, Deutschland über alles_," in
which we need only substitute _Russland_, _Frankreich_, _Italien_,
or any other state for _Deutschland_, and we shall get the clearest
formula of the exalted sentiment of patriotism. It may be that this
sentiment is very desirable and useful for the governments and the
integrity of the state, but one cannot help but observe that this
sentiment is not at all exalted, but, on the contrary, very stupid
and very immoral: stupid, because, if every state will consider
itself better than any other, it is obvious that they will all be
in the wrong; and immoral, because it inevitably leads every man
who experiences the feeling to try to obtain advantages for his own
state and nation, at the expense of other states and nations--a
tendency which is directly opposed to the fundamental moral law
recognized by all men: not to do unto another what we do not wish to
have done to ourselves.
Patriotism may have been a virtue in the ancient world, when it
demanded of man that he serve the highest ideal accessible to him
at the time,--the ideal of his country. But how can patriotism
be a virtue in our time, when it demands of men what is directly
opposed to what forms the ideal of our religion and morality,--not
the recognition of the equality and brotherhood of all men, but the
recognition of one state and nationality as predominating over all
the others. This sentiment is in our time not only not a virtue, but
unquestionably a vice; no such sentiment of patriotism in its true
sense does or can exist in our time, because the material and moral
foundations for it are lacking.
Patriotism could have some sense in the ancient world, when every
nation, more or less homogeneous in its structure, professing one
and the same state religion, and submitting to the same unlimited
power of its supreme, deified ruler, appeared to itself as an island
in the ocean of the barbarians, which ever threatened to inundate it.
We can see how with such a state of affairs, patriotism, that is,
the desire to ward off the attacks of the barbarians, who were not
only prepared to destroy the social order, but who also threatened
wholesale plundering and murder, with the enslavement of men and
the rape of women, was a natural feeling, and we can see why a man,
to free himself and his compatriots from such calamities, could
have preferred his nation to all the others, and could experience a
hostile feeling toward the barbarians around him, and could kill
them, in order to protect his nation.
But what significance can this sentiment have in our Christian
time? On what ground and for what purpose can a man of our time, a
Russian, go and kill Frenchmen or Germans, or a Frenchman Germans,
when he knows full well, no matter how little educated he may be,
that the men of the other state and nation, against which they are
rousing his patriotic hostility, are not barbarians, but just such
Christians as he, frequently of the same faith and profession with
him, desiring like him nothing but peace and a peaceful exchange of
labour, and that, besides, they are for the most part united with
him either by the interests of common labour, or by commercial or
spiritual interests, or by all together? Thus frequently the men of
another country are nearer and more indispensable to a man than his
own countrymen, as is the case with labourers who are connected with
employers of other nationalities, and as is the case with commercial
people, and especially with scholars and artists.
Besides, the conditions of life themselves have so changed now that
what we call our country, what we are supposed to distinguish from
everything else, has ceased to be something clearly defined, as it
was with the ancients, where the men forming one country belonged
to one nationality, one state, and one faith. We can understand
the patriotism of an Egyptian, a Jew, a Greek, who, defending
his country, was at the same time defending his faith, and his
nationality, and his home, and his state.
But in what way will in our time be expressed the patriotism of an
Irishman in the United States, who by his faith belongs to Rome, by
his nationality to Ireland, by his state allegiance to the United
States? In the same condition are a Bohemian in Austria, a Pole in
Russia, Prussia, and Austria, a Hindoo in England, a Tartar and
an Armenian in Russia and in Turkey. But, even leaving out these
men of the separate conquered nationalities, the men of the most
homogeneous states, such as are Russia, France, Prussia, can no
longer experience that sentiment of patriotism, which was peculiar
to the ancients, because frequently all the chief interests of their
life (sometimes their domestic ones,--they are married to women
of another nation; the economic ones,--their capital is abroad;
their spiritual, scientific, or artistic ones) are not in their own
country, but outside it, in that state against which the government
is rousing his patriotic hatred.
But most of all is patriotism impossible in our time, because, no
matter how much we have tried for eighteen hundred years to conceal
the meaning of Christianity, it has none the less trickled through
into our life, and is guiding it in such a way that the coarsest and
most stupid of men cannot help but see the absolute incompatibility
of patriotism with those moral rules by which they live.