CHAPTER VI[ToC]
THE TEACHING OF PATRIOTISM (continued)
Patriotism we thought to be, in the third place, devotion to the group. Here the problem of the teaching of patriotism becomes specifically a question of social education. The question arises as to precisely what the objects of the devotion we call loyalty to the group are, and what factors in group-consciousness need most to be emphasized or educated as patriotism. Is it race or manners or the pure fact of propinquity or herd contact or all together that are the objects of social desire and the feeling of solidarity?
Race has been emphasized as the prime interest in group loyalty, but there seems to be doubt about this. At least there are difficulties in isolating anything we can call love of race. We can never separate race from propinquity, for example, or from mores, or from the bonds due to common possession of causes. Race loyalty appears to be a primitive feeling. When races were pure, groups small and possession common, all the elements of loyalty to group were present at once and coextensive. As civilization progressed the bond of pure race lessened. All races have now become mixed, we are told, and kinship in a group has ceased to be a fact. Nicolai maintains that race patriotism has grown out of family instinct, as something quite separate from herd instinct, but it seems likely that common interests, organization under necessity, or the social attraction resulting from any common cause must have been stronger than any consciousness of kinship, or any herd instinct as such—which may indeed not have existed at all.
It is this more conscious bond of function and propinquity at least that must be taken into account in the education of patriotism—certainly American patriotism. We in America can hardly emphasize race patriotism, without producing internal disruption. It is common function that is the distinguishing mark of the individuals of a group, rather than common origin. Common function, especially subsumption under one ordered government, particularly if the purpose be that of securing common protection, can plainly overcome all loyalty to race. Common religion antagonizes race consciousness, and we see therefore within nations races splitting up along lines of religious difference. We see within races also greater antagonism and greater lack of common interest between classes than between the same classes as found in different races. Aristocrats everywhere, for example, appear to have greater mutual sympathy and sense of nearness than do the upper and lower classes of the same race.
One of our own urgent educational problems is that of overcoming race differences and of utilizing racial bonds for practical ends. We try to put loyalty to group first, and we assume that race patriotism can be supreme only among those who have no country worth being loyal to. Loyalty to race, however, has a pedagogical use. We see it being employed to extend social feeling beyond the point to which propinquity and common cause can carry it. It was used, we know, in the propaganda and educational campaign by which German statesmen and historians hoped to develop a wider German consciousness. The racial object in this case is apparently purely fictitious. We see the same concept being used now to create or expand social feeling throughout the Anglo-Saxon race. What we mean mainly by Anglo-Saxon race is really English speaking peoples, having common or similar mores and ideals. It is, of course, by emphasizing and participating in common functions that loyalty either to an Anglo-Saxon union or to the total group in our own nation will be developed. Our own type of patriotism, in which there can be little or no racial loyalty as such, must be built upon more ideal and abstract conceptions than that of race. It is loyalty to group having a common idea, we say, which must be the basis of American group loyalty. This we must regard as higher than any race patriotism. All nations are now, as Boutroux remarks, to a greater or less extent psychological races. The factors that have produced them are the factors that have caused men to become functioning units.
This gives us a clew at least to a practical principle for the education of social loyalty. We must secure participation on the part of the individual in every function that belongs to each group to which the individual himself is attached. Thus all degrees and kinds of loyalty may be made to exist in the same mind without conflict or confusion, precisely because the loyalty desired is loyalty to people as groups or organizations having causes, not to collections of individuals as such.