Chesterton Defends Patriotism Against the Cosmopolitans
I write this on July 4, 2022 in these United States of America. For those of you with even a scintilla of knowledge of American history, you will know that the Fourth of July is Independence Day, where we Americans commemorate the ratification of the Declaration of Independence (from Great Britain) in 1776. As such, one can imagine that this is a day of celebration and deep love for our country and people.
Of course, being 2022 in the year of our Lord, there are loud displays of discontent and hatred for our country. One could understand such hatred towards a particular country from a foreigner, but ours has the strange phenomenon of seemingly having her loudest haters living within her own borders. These types spew the typical complaints: the flaws in our country's past, the hardships that people face today, etc. It is as strange and improper a thing as a man who, on the anniversary of his wedding with his wife, chooses not to commemorate and celebrate the occasion with his bride, but to spend the day listing out her flaws and imperfections.
There is another threat, however, and it is one that I have written about before. That is of course, the globalist—or cosmopolitan—threat. The notion that any sense of love for one's own particular nation is hatred for all others. To quote G. K. Chesterton, "They directly impugn the idea of patriotism as interfering with the larger sentiment of the love of humanity. To them the particular is always the enemy of the general. To them every nation is the rival of mankind."
And since I see I have already introduced him, I would like to share an excerpt from G. K. Chesterton, who so eloquently and beautifully defends patriotism against the cosmopolitans. This brief excerpt is from the opening section of his 1904 essay, "The Patriotic Idea," and I highly recommend reading the whole of said opening, which I shall link here.
Now enough from me.
The Patriotic Idea
G. K. Chesterton
[The cosmopolitans] directly impugn the idea of patriotism as interfering with the larger sentiment of the love of humanity. To them the particular is always the enemy of the general. To them every nation is the rival of mankind...
If you ask them whether they love humanity, they will say, doubtless sincerely, that they do. But if you ask them, touching any of the classes that go to make up humanity, you will find that they hate them all. They hate kings, they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they hate sailors. They distrust men of science, they denounce the middle classes, they despair of working men, but they adore humanity. Only they always speak of humanity as if it were a curious foreign nation. They are dividing themselves more and more from men to exalt the strange race of mankind. They are ceasing to be human in the effort to be humane...
The truth is, of course, that real universality is to be reached rather by convincing ourselves that we are in the best possible relation with our immediate surroundings... The fundamental spiritual advantage of patriotism and such sentiments is this: that by means of it all things are loved adequately, because all things are loved individually. Cosmopolitanism gives us one country, and it is good; nationalism gives us a hundred countries, and every one of them is the best. Cosmopolitanism offers a positive, patriotism a chorus of superlatives. Patriotism begins the praise of the world at the nearest thing, instead of beginning it at the most distant, and thus it insures what is, perhaps, the most essential of all earthly considerations, that nothing upon earth shall go without its due appreciation. Wherever there is a strangely-shaped mountain upon some lonely island, wherever there is a nameless kind of fruit growing in some obscure forest, patriotism insures that this shall not go into darkness without being remembered in a song.