Patriotism vs. Nationalism?

The historian John Lukacs wrote on interesting history book on the subject of 80 days of intellectual, tactical military leadership dueling between Churchill and Hitler in 1940 that fundamentally decided the future of the world. In his particular history investigations Mr. Lukacs is quite a good author.

I wish to examine two or three philosophical topics Mr. Lukacs raised that I take exception to. It is almost always useful when someone writes well enough to suggest a topic of philosophical interest, even if the topic is within the philosophy of history.

Mr. Lukacs seems to have felt that nationalism is a bad thing. Perhaps that is a consequence of his generation of scholars and their bad experience with one or two particularly bad and aggressive nations that prosecuted world wars. Nations are simply political districts though-even if one nation were to encompass the entire world. If a nation works badly it is because of the people in them-not the nation paradigm of political boundaries intrinsically.

I disagree that nationalism is a bad thing. A nation is just a particular polity that is ‘owned’ by its citizens. Nations are necessary for the existence of democracy. A democracy without a nation is like a subject without a predicate; meaningless for conveying meaning.

Winston Churchill was half American. Winston Churchill was also simultaneously 100% British and we Americans wouldn't have wanted a half-American in the White House to implement policy entirely of advantage to the Brits even during the war lest we be required to genuflect on her majesty (even if the present queen of England is quite a nice individual). That sort of thing is for the beknighted Elton Johns of teh world.

Citizens must have some land to control; not just their own, but the public lands too. Human beings all require air and land space to travel through and would be unhappy with a lifetime of house arrest. For the public democracy to have any meaning it requires a specific, real land or ocean to live within that it controls through its elections and representatives-and through laws the public supports.

Patriotism may be a kind of male shepherding of a people that may also be a nation. Mr. Lukacs interpreted Dr. Johnson’s famous phrase as ‘patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel’ as instead applying to nationalism. Though historical times change and meanings and concepts do change it is difficult to imagine that citizens of a representative democracy advocating for their well being through elections are scoundrels.

Nations do not require aggression or injustice to survive. Maybe the alternative though is a kind of imperialism and globalism over democratic, national particularism.

In some small nations with unsustainable economic methods it is easy to understand that some political leaders have sought to invade other nations to gain economic resources. Human leaders also have invaded simple to gain more power. Napoleon invaded Europe and Africa to expand France’s political power as the new Imperial Realm in contest with the Russian, Hapsburg and British Imperial powers.

Mr. Lukacs also wrote that parliamentary democracy was in decline and unpopular in the 20 years after the end of the first world war, yet I felt he misunderstood the reasons why the Balkan countries, Greece, Albania and Turkey were less than democratic Utopias; it is difficult to imagine the Sublime Porte as having set a stage for peaceful democracy in the region, and neither was China’s Imperial Empire, the Nationalist Leadership and organized crime in Shanghai supporters of traditional civil rights based democracy. Nationalism was not the essential agent for military and political conflict in the 20th century; instead it was as Ortega y Gasset wrote ‘The Revolt of the Masses’ prevalently against imperial rule, and of rule by aristocracy.

World War Two was the last battle of the Second World War. Hitler was a new proxy for the defeated aristocrats of Germany that had to give up power to the Weimar Republic. Germany narrowly avoided becoming socialist at the close of the First World War and the military leadership appointed Hitler to infiltrate and lead the way through the German National Socialist Worker’s Party to a new synthetic state corporatism in which aristocrats with capital might unify with the Nazi authority thus protecting their assets against the Bolsheviks in Russia and Germany. Because Henry Ford, Prescott Bush and others took that as better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick for trade, Germany advanced under Hitler to the inexorable drive to dominate Europe.

Of course there is more to it than that. Yet the contest between imperialism in various forms and democracy with strong individual rights based in a real nation is fundamental in western civilization. Nationalism does not require aggression at all-it requires good ecological economic leadership, full employment, justice, security from illegal entry and mutually beneficial trade relationships. The United States can be a strong, independent nation and have a sustainable, self-reliant economy and ecology or it can become part of some global imperialism in which elections nationally are basically sham votes for items from a one party ruling class.

The last point I wanted to mention was Mr. Lukac’s statement that it isn’t idealism and realism that are antithetical, but idealism and materialism that are. That is quite a useful point to make.

Realism has a couple of meanings philosophically speaking (or more) as does idealism. Today we might be more accustomed to talking about realism vs. nominalism than idealism. I believe that Prof. Lukac’s meanings are of that of history and common sense, although he does mention Hegel, German idealism and determinism.

Realism has historically been a descendent of Plato’s realm of forms. Philosophically realism was a belief in the reality of perfect archetypes in a transcending realm of which all things in this world are replicas albeit imperfect forms.

Common sense is the other meaning of realism we may consider now. Realism in politics is the pragmatic, the functional and the actual-the way things are. Realism tends to thus be associated with materialism and it is simple to clarify matters and pose materialism as the fundamental antithesis to idealism.

There is a funny thing about idealism that makes its meaning somewhat equivalent to the amount and quality of ideas that one has. It is easy to ossify idealism and say that it is Hegel’s world spirit evolving to actualize itself. We can even throw Darwin’s evolution theory along with Telhard Desjardin’s noosphere into such an evolution of idealism comprehensive of materialism, quarks, space-time and all-potential universes. That is, one may place that sort of idealist paradigm within the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus’ criterion of the non-static manifestation of temporality through various emanations from The One and transcend or bridge the gap between idealism and realism, so it is useful to allow realism and materialism to be equivalents and substitute the one for the other in our linguistic thesis vs. anti-thesis comparison.

Idealism has another meaning besides that of Hegel that I ought to mention. Bishop Berkeley developed a philosophy of idealism-or pure idealism that let the world of perceptions be a phenomenon of mind acceptable in a sense to Jean Paul Sartre’s approach to rationalism named existentialism. Basically Berkeley let the world of experience have no foundation objectively that could be greater than any world that could be created directly for our minds to experience.

If the world and Universe could be a kind of Matrix or virtual reality-an idea for Berkeley, Lukacs wrote that Hitler had the other sort of Hegelian idealism in mind. If one remembers reading Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Mind’ one recalls that G.W.F. Hegel believed the German state was the highest form that the world spirit had yet evolved mankind to. Thus Hitler might have had a similar historical misunderstanding and belief in determinism equal to that of Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin. I was unaware of that, and am a little skeptical that Hitler had much depth in reading philosophy. It is more credible to believe he had read Nietzsche.

At any rate, Mr. Lukac’s interesting point does stimulate one to consider a little how materialism might be the antithesis of idealism. I suppose I must upgrade a little the meaning of idealism and also that of materialism.

Idealism will mean that thought and design in a world-a kind of anthropic idealism, leads one’s way. Materialism shall mean that matter prevails over thought, and irrationalism is acceptable as it conforms to given material mass, energy and space-time.

With that clarification it is easy to see that idealism and materialism are antithetical. Because the only realms where anyone much cares about such a contest are philosophy and the philosophy of economics we must consider the salient point in the business environment in the ecosystem today; does capitalism work best to manage the world’s environment with faith in Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’?

We might wonder if blind faith in material irrational evolution of parallel environmental reconstruction that may encapsulate the prevailing Wall Street approach to the world ecosphere that regards the ecosphere as n externality is opposed to an idealism that takes responsibility for human interaction within the world ecosphere. I believe the answer is yes.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand was a mechanism for economic determinism. It meant no more than let free enterprisers run their affairs without royalty (or large corporations) oppressing us. It was not in anthropomorphic sink for all social responsibility regarding the environment.

In building designs people think before building if they can. Usually the results turn out better than letting the blind forces of nature evolve an office tower. Materialism must be helped along by idealism if it is to work-yet the ideal world; a world of pure mind in which human beings construct any reality they like is equally absurd. Real limits exist in any era to what human beings may do to change the environment and world or even universe. Politically the challenge is to understand those limits and make of them not points of crisis and conflict, chaos and catastrophe but opportunities for progress, construction of new worlds, restoration of healthy ecosystems, sustainable habitations for all life forms.

God got all of that better of course. The Universe is a kind of tree of life sprung from a mustard seed of infinitesimally small size (or perhaps it is that small anyway comparatively). I appreciated the concept of materialism being the antithesis that Mr. Lukacs raised in his book about Hitler versus Churchill. Materialism without thought and vice versa tends to be incomplete, ineffective political philosophies.