Love of country, for good and ill

We can have too much of a good thing: nationalism becomes militant and dangerous. Legitimate love for our country is rightly tempered by respect for others.

Sometimes it seems we live in a world where every virtue is twisted and perverted into vice. Love for country is one such virtue, for it is one element which provides for a healthy identity and a basis for those moral sentiments which bind us together as a voluntary community against adversity, both everyday and existential.

Display RAF Red Arrows Hawk on Downing Street, a proud symbol of the UK.

A modest, gentle and usually automatic love for our own country has been for too long condemned as wickedness and held in contempt: that is itself a wicked vice which has done no end of harm, not least in fomenting an equal and opposite reaction. I feel little need to be generous to those “progressives” who so stripped many of pride in our history, mixed as it inevitably is. But perhaps they were motivated by the other notorious perversion of gentle and unassuming patriotism: a militant nationalism which seeks to condemn and dominate others.

We should make no mistake: in the first half of the twentieth century, the rise of totalitarianism, particularly Nazism, was a consequence of economic interventionism combined with militant nationalism.

That is why so many are so shocked that the former East Germany has handed second place and 151 seats in the Bundestag to far-right¹ Alternative for Germany (AfD). The crimes of Germany during the Second World War still drive a deep rift into that country’s history and national psyche. That Germans should have voted for a party of nationalism is a fearful thing for anyone who has studied the causes of that tyranny.

A grand coalition between conservatives and social democrats now seems probable to keep AfD out of power. That will inevitably create correspondingly grand problems as ideological opponents struggle to govern together to deny the politics of their worst fears: nationalists once again in power in Germany.

Meanwhile in the UK, “National Conservatism” is promoted and Karl Popper’s open society is demonised as the cause of our difficulties. Yet Popper did not reject the nation state or love of country: his open society is fundamentally a rejection of totalitarianism through insisting society must tolerate the questioning of taboos – surely the necessary antidote to cancel culture today…

For many, the return of patriotism is an unalloyed good to be rejoiced over. Others will fear the return of aggressive nationalism, militarism, racism and persecution. Certainly there is a growing impatience with social institutions which are now plainly unravelling and a yearning for authoritarian solutions founded on the nation state and against immigrants². In the context of ideas and history, these are worrying times.

Many of our problems I blame on our corrupting system of money but what is the right approach to love of country?

Bitcoin, gold and the Bank of England