The impulses of antipathy have played an important role in the development of patriotism. When one becomes aware of the existence of other peoples unlike himself, the sense of difference which arises is liable to take on the character of a strong and active aversion to and depreciation of them. Nothing is more common than the feeling that one’s own people is a kind of chosen race, and that all other races are inferior. A speaker who had lived many years among the Navajo Indians once said that they regarded and called themselves “The People.” They were at the top of mankind; the Mexicans ranked next to them; the Americans came third and last. This was their arrangement of all the peoples that they knew. The same attitude appears in civilized man. He is characterized by self-satisfaction, and the peculiarities of others, even of dialect and pronunciation, are enough to call forth contempt and ridicule. It follows that strangers can easily be enemies. In Latin, the word hostis which at first meant simply stranger or foreigner came later to mean enemy. The words of Loisy are again appropriate: “In the lower stages of human evolution, a foreigner is not far from being an enemy, if he be not one actually. In the higher stages of our evolution, among people who think they are really civilized, he still seems in practice to be of another species, because he has a different mentality, and unusual ways. Each separate human group has thus a fashion of collective egoism, whence comes self-satisfaction, a pride which may possess dignity, which may be a power, but which also may become a source of blindness and wickedness.”[19] This antipathy to foreigners has been strong even when other forces appeared to be in the ascendancy. Such was the case, for instance, when religion seemed to have the center of the stage; nationalistic jealousy was a factor in the movements which centered about Wiclif, Huss, Luther, Henry VIII, and John Knox. These men could all count upon antipathy to foreigners. And the same antipathy shows itself today in the fact that the peoples of different nations not only hate the enemy, but also show a lack of solicitude about their allies. In the outcry for increased production in the spring of 1917, some individuals expressed themselves as being ready to plant for American consumption, but unwilling that any of the products should go to foreigners. And the “foreigners” that were in mind in some instances were the Canadians, our next-door neighbors. It may be added, however, that it does not seem as if there is in race hatred any insurmountable obstacles to overcoming it. Races which are thrown into contact become accustomed to one another, and are able to live in harmony.
The form assumed by the general impulse of aversion or antipathy may be either defensive or aggressive, and may tend toward either self-preservation or self-assertion. There are nations which of their own motion will not be warlike, but in which the warlike temper will flare up when they are once attacked. In such nations patriotism has been associated with the fight for freedom. Sometimes it seems as if the definition of the patriot was that he was one who defended his country’s liberty. This love of freedom is featured in American expressions of patriotism. A verse from “Hail, Columbia,” will serve as an example:
“Immortal patriots! rise once more:
Defend your rights, defend your shore:
Let no rude foe with impious hand
Let no rude foe with impious hand
Invade the shrine where sacred lies
Of toil and blood the well-earned prize.”
The call in this verse is that for defense.
There is an instinct that attends this impulse to self-preservation that strikes one forcibly as being prominent in the patriotism of the present time, and that is fear. It is an impulse that manifests itself when one’s existence or vital interests are threatened. The peoples of the world today are in an excitement of fear because each one of them believes that national existence and the personal values that depend upon it are endangered. There is a reason why it is easy for nations, while trusting in their own good intentions, to be suspicious of one another. When the individual looks at his own country, he is likely to see the common people who are all about him and are like himself. And, since he feels that his own purposes are good, he can easily credit good motives to his fellow-citizens. But when, on the other hand, he looks into another country, he is likely to see the governing class looming up, since that is the class that figures most prominently in the newspapers. And it is this class which is likely to be most aggressively nationalistic, and is, moreover, the object of very little understanding by the ordinary man. Hence, while he thinks that all the good people that he knows cannot comprise anything that is inhuman, he can believe that there may very well be foreign monsters. The result is fear, fear of other countries, a fear that breaks out into a panic when danger arises, and drives men to seek the safety of the fatherland. Now the present is a time of panic, and the impulse of fear has put its impress deep upon current patriotism.
But what is feared tends to become hated too, and so patriotism gets tinged with hate. Examples of it are at hand. This war has produced its “Hymn of Hate,” so labeled, and others not so labeled. Many of the Psalms are expressions of patriotic hate, and since the war began have been read as such. J. M. Robertson[20] contends that patriotism is nothing else but fear and hatred. To his mind patriotism is not love or affection at all, and the only apparent affection there may be, is that which is compelled by the necessity for common action against an enemy. Fear itself, Robertson points out, implies a hostile impulse; love and hate, cohesion and repulsion, are to him strictly correlative terms; there is no love which is not linked with hate. “It is not,” he says, “brotherhood, or sympathy, or goodwill that unites the general population in a flush of passion against another population: the ostensible brotherhood of the moment is merely a passing product of the union of egoisms.”[21]
It is certain that in great measure Robertson is right. But one may well doubt the truth of the assertion that it is necessary to hate in order to love. It is not necessary to hate one woman in order to love another, or to have an enemy in order to possess a friend. Neither does it seem essential in the nature of things to hate one country in order to be able to love another. Moreover, hatred is not unqualifiedly a term of opprobrium. How can one rightly care for anything without in some way resenting attacks upon it? There are such things as righteous wrath and righteous hatred if they be directed against what is evil.
These remarks upon fear and hatred throw further light upon some of the phenomena of patriotism already touched upon. One can better understand now the frantic excitement that often attends a national crisis; fear “more than ... any other instinct, tends to bring to an end at once all other mental activity, riveting the attention upon its object to the exclusion of all others.”[22] New light is thrown upon the solidarity the group shows. Under the stimulus of fear, the herd instinctively unites. Unity is the basis of morale. And the individual subordinates himself to the group; his normal intolerance of isolation is heightened in the presence of fear. And a corollary of all this is that the patriotism of fear is destructive of thought, but is prolific in unity of emotion and action.
Self-assertion is an attitude which under the conflict of interests with others may be induced. And in the external affairs of nations, it may be brought to triumph over the motive of security. The means by which this is done is through the argument that only by taking an aggressive part can one defend himself, the argument in other words, that the best defense is a good offense. The result is that the distinction between defensive and offensive warfare is liable to be obliterated, a fact which adds to the perplexities of the problem of war. “The feeling that war is always defensive wrecks the peace propaganda. The word defensive is capable of being stretched indefinitely. It is not confined necessarily to preventing an invasion. A people will feel that it is fighting a defensive war if it attacks a nation which may attack it in the future.... Or the people may feel that what it regards as its legitimate expansion is being thwarted.... So by imperceptible gradations every war can be justified, and, as a matter of fact, is justified as defensive.”[23] When once a war is started, a people will support it, even if it is aggressive, and if one couples with this the fact that when a nation arms in self-defense, it acquires the means of aggression, he can understand how easily a patriotism which supports only a policy of self-preservation can be brought to support a policy of self-assertion.
One way in which the will to self-assertion is likely to manifest itself is as an impulse to expansion. A stationary condition is not satisfactory to the group; it desires to reach out. This impulse shows itself in churches and orders of all kinds by the constant demand for new members. The group wants to see itself grow. But if nations grow, they are apt to think that they need more land. And when this occurs their patriotism will attach itself to the desire for expansion, and become imperialism. J. M. Robertson couples the words Patriotism and Empire in the title of a book, and in that book he says, “Patriotism conventionally defined as the love of country, ... turns out rather obviously to stand for love of more country.”[24] And where there is coupled with this the impulse of acquisition, it becomes plain why the economic rivalry of nations has been so important in bringing about the situation out of which war arises.