Simone Weil and nationalism (2)

Weil's condemnation of conventional patriotism

Weil points out that patriotism or nationalism, for all its importance in human affairs, has been written about very little (at least in French). Conventional wisdom (see e.g. Reck-Malleczewen) has it that patriotism only appeared with the French Revolution, but patriotic feeling was often very intense in the Middle Ages; patriotism is a modern development only in the sense that in the Middle Ages the object of patriotism was not the nation-state exclusively, but could shift between one's village, town, province or "nation" (France), Christendom or mankind. The French Revolution cemented a purely national patriotism both by abolishing local and Papal rivals to national authority and, Weil says, by transforming monarchical absolutism, which over the centuries had produced a great deal of suppressed anti-patriotic feeling among the French, into republican rule. "Those who had been French by force, became so by free consent." (Those inhabitants of the Vendée not slaughtered by the Revolutionary armies would probably have had a thing or two to say about that.)

The (more or less) free consent of the governed does not, however, guarantee the benign character of the modern kind of patriotism. Such patriotism is directed towards the State, despite the cold, unlovable character of that State, because the State tends to kill off every rival object of political affection. This lack of attractive alternatives exposes all of us to "moral torment". In destroying rival institutions, the State also "eats away the moral substance of a country. The German state is strong because it is new." (Rauschning would agree with this, at least in the German context.) The worship of an all-powerful centralized State is nothing more than "loveless idolatry".

Weil would go further than this. Not only is French- or German-style State-worship idolotrous; so is the love of one's country, one's people, if it is turned into an absolute good. Weil believes that Judaism, with its idea of the "chosen nation", is guilty of this form of idolatry. (Indeed, she speaks as though tribalism did not exist before the Jews came along. A similar criticism might presumably also be aimed at the English or Americans, who traditionally did not regard the State as all-important, yet similarly regarded themselves as exceptional nations. Clearly, however, it is difficult to tell in such cases where proper self-regard ends and idolatry begins. It is reasonable to argue that the Jews, the English, the Americans and various other nations besides have all had unique, important contributions to make to the world.)

Further, a people or any other collectivity for Weil has no real existence, or at any rate none comparable to that of the human individual. She claims that Plato "found the right expression when he compared the collectivity to an animal." Patriotic love for one's collectivity, for its own sake, is therefore as debased as adoration of an animal. A rather vicious animal, in fact: "The superior prestige of the nation is bound up with the exaltation of war. It furnishes no motives for action in peacetime except in a regime which constitutes a permanent preparation for war".

Patriotism also entails idolatry of the (collective) self, a practice cultivated by the ancient Romans, Weil's other bête noire. This is pride, and so the worst of all sins in Christian terms. "In the soul of a Christian, the presence of the pagan virtue of patriotism acts as dissolvent." The French pro-Catholic Right of the 1930s, for example, was corrupted by the view that patriotism trumped morality. There ought to be no pride in empire—or at any rate not in the French empire, since empire-building is not part of France's national vocation (which incidentally is "thinking on behalf of the world", Weil believes).

Weil sees no essential difference between the conventional patriotism of her own day, as seen for example in France, and the Nazi type of nationalism. Both are based on the worship of national military power. She emphasizes this basic point by going as far as to claim to admire Hitler for having the courage of his convictions, in contrast to the more inhibited citizens of liberal countries, who do not go beyond "a base submission of the mind" before the idol of national military greatness. "Once one recognizes something as being a good, one should want to seize it. Not to want to do so is cowardly." (This was a fairly dramatic way of putting things considering that Weil was at the time employed by the Free French government.) Hitler was the natural product of a society whose popular writers held up as role models such figures as the Roman dictator Sulla.