XIII.
"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.