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C.S. Lewis on Patriotism

Posted Tuesday, July 04, 2006 by Brian Beers

On Independence Day, Lewis’s thoughts on the love of country is a breath of fresh air. In these days of strident discourse on America’s role in the world we need a right understanding of our love for our country. We cannot throw out patriotism as some would do. Neither can we equate love for our nation with love for justice. The rest of this post is an excerpt from The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis.

Patriotism has, then, many faces. Those who would reject it entirely do not seem to have considered what will certainly step—has already begin to step—into its place. For a long time yet, or perhaps forever, nations will live in danger. Rulers must somehow nerve their subjects to defend them or at least prepare for their defence.

Where the sentiment of patriotism has been destroyed this can be done only by presenting every international conflict in a purely ethical light. If people will spend neither sweat nor blood for “their country” they must be made to feel that they are spending them for justice or civilization, or humanity. This is a step down, not up. Patriotic sentiment did not of course need to disregard ethics. Good men needed to be convinced that their county’s cause was just; but it was still their country’s cause, not the cause of justice as such. The difference seems to me important. I may without self-righteousness or hypocrisy think it just to defend my house by force against a burglar; but if I start pretending that I blacked his eye purely on moral grounds—wholly indifferent to the fact that the house in question was mine—I become insufferable. The pretence that when England’s is just we are on England’s side—as some neutral Don Quixote might be—for that reason alone, is equally spurious. And nonsense draws evil after it. If our country’s cause is the cause of God, wars be wars of annihilation. A false transcendence is given to things which are very much of this world.

The glory of the old sentiment was that while it could steel men to the utmost endeavour, it still knew itself to be a sentiment. Wars could be heroic without pretending to be Holy Wars. The hero’s death was not confused with the martyr’s. And (delightfully) the same sentiment which could be so serious in a rear-guard action could also take itself as lightly as all happy loves often do. It could laugh at itself. Our older patriotic songs cannot be sung without a twinkle in the eye; later ones sound more like hymns. Give me “The British Grenadiers” (with a tow-row-row-row) any day rather than “Land of Hope and Glory”

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