The Life of Reason by George Santayana (best black authors txt) 📖
- Author: George Santayana
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To define one's country is not so simple a matter as it may seem. The habitat of a man's youth, to which actual associations may bind him, is hardly his country until he has conceived the political and historical forces that include that habitat in their sphere of influence and have determined its familiar institutions. Such forces are numerous and their spheres include one another like concentric rings. France, for instance, is an uncommonly distinct and self-conscious nation, with a long historic identity and a compact territory. Yet what is the France a Frenchman is to think of and love? Paris itself has various quarters and moral climates, one of which may well be loved while another is detested. The provinces have customs, temperaments, political ideals, and even languages of their own. Is Alsace-Lorraine beyond the pale of French patriotism? And if not, why utterly exclude French-speaking Switzerland, the Channel Islands, Belgium, or Quebec? Or is a Frenchman rather to love the colonies by way of compensation? Is an Algerian Moor or a native of Tonquin his true fellow-citizen? Is Tahiti a part of his "country"? The truth is, if we look at the heart of the matter, a Protestant born in Paris is less a Frenchman than is a Catholic born in Geneva.
If we pass from geography to institutions the same vagueness exists. France to one man represents the Revolution, to another the Empire, to a third the Church, and the vestiges of the ancien régime. Furthermore, how far into the past is patriotism to look? Is Charlemagne one of the glories of French history? Is it Julius Cæsar or Vicingetorix that is to warm the patriotic heart? Want of reflection and a blind subservience to the colours of the map has led some historians to call Roman victories defeats suffered by their country, even when that country is essentially so Roman, for instance, as Spain. With as good reason might a Sicilian or a Florentine chafe under the Latin conquest, or an American blush at the invasion of his country by the Pilgrim Fathers. Indeed, even geographically, the limits and the very heart of a man's country are often ambiguous. Was Alexander's country Macedon or Greece? Was General Lee's the United States or Virginia? The ancients defined their country from within outward; its heart was the city and its limits those of that city's dominion or affinities. Moderns generally define their country rather stupidly by its administrative frontiers; and yet an Austrian would have some difficulty in applying even this conventional criterion.
The object of patriotism is in truth something ideal, a moral entity definable only by the ties which a man's imagination and reason can at any moment recognise. If he has insight and depth of feeling he will perceive that what deserves his loyalty is the entire civilisation to which he owes his spiritual life and into which that life will presently flow back, with whatever new elements he may have added. Patriotism accordingly has two aspects: it is partly sentiment by which it looks back upon the sources of culture, and partly policy, or allegiance to those ideals which, being suggested by what has already been attained, animate the better organs of society and demand further embodiment. To love one's country, unless that love is quite blind and lazy, must involve a distinction between the country's actual condition and its inherent ideal; and this distinction in turn involves a demand for changes and for effort. Party allegiance is a true form of patriotism. For a party, at least in its intent, is an association of persons advocating the same policy. Every thoughtful man must advocate some policy, and unless he has the misfortune to stand quite alone in his conception of public welfare he will seek to carry out that policy by the aid of such other persons as advocate it also.
The springs of culture, which retrospective patriotism regards, go back in the last instance to cosmic forces. The necessity that marshals the stars makes possible the world men live in, and is the first general and law-giver to every nation. The earth's geography, its inexorable climates with their flora and fauna, make a play-ground for the human will which should be well surveyed by any statesman who wishes to judge and act, not fantastically, but with reference to the real situation. Geography is a most enlightening science. In describing the habitat of man it largely explains his history. Animal battles give the right and only key to human conflicts, for the superadded rational element in man is not partisan, but on the contrary insinuates into his economy the novel principle of justice and peace. As this leaven, however, can mingle only with elements predisposed to receive it, the basis of reason itself, in so far as it attains expression, must be sought in the natural world. The fortunes of the human family among the animals thus come to concern reason and to be the background of progress.
Within humanity the next sphere of interest for a patriot is the race from which he is descended, with its traditional languages and religions. Blood is the ground of character and intelligence. The fruits of civilisation may, indeed, be transmitted from one race to another and consequently a certain artificial homogeneity may be secured amongst different nations; yet unless continual intermarriage takes place each race will soon recast and vitiate the common inheritance. The fall of the Roman Empire offered such a spectacle, when various types of barbarism, with a more or less classic veneer, re-established themselves everywhere. Perhaps modern cosmopolitanism, if not maintained by commerce or by permanent conquest, may break apart in the same way and yield to local civilisations no less diverse than Christendom and Islam.
Community of race is a far deeper bond than community of language, education, or government. Where one political system dominates various races it forces their common culture to be external merely. This is perhaps the secret of that strange recrudescence of national feeling, apart often from political divisions, which has closely followed the French Revolution and the industrial era. The more two different peoples grow alike in externals the more conscious and jealous they become of diversity in their souls; and where individuals are too insignificant to preserve any personality or distinction of their own, they flock together into little intentional societies and factious groups, in the hope of giving their imagination, in its extremity, some little food and comfort. Private nationalities and private religions are luxuries at such a time in considerable demand. The future may possibly see in the Occident that divorce between administrative and ideal groups which is familiar in the Orient; so that under no matter what government and with utter cosmopolitanism in industry and science, each race may guard its own poetry, religion, and manners. Such traditions, however, would always be survivals or revivals rather than genuine expressions of life, because mind must either represent nature and the conditions of action or else be content to persist precariously and without a function, like a sort of ghost.
Some races are obviously superior to others. A more thorough adjustment to the conditions of existence has given their spirit victory, scope, and a relative stability. It is therefore of the greatest importance not to obscure this superiority by intermarriage with inferior stock, and thus nullify the progress made by a painful evolution and a prolonged sifting of souls. Reason protests as much as instinct against any fusion, for instance, of white and black peoples. Mixture is in itself no evil if the two nations, being approximately equal, but having complementary gifts, can modify them without ultimate loss, and possibly to advantage. Indeed the so-called pure races, since their purity has gone with isolation and inexperience, have borne comparatively little spiritual fruit. Large contact and concentrated living bring out native genius, but mixture with an inferior stock can only tend to obliterate it. The Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, the English were never so great as when they confronted other nations, reacting against them and at the same time, perhaps, adopting their culture; but this greatness fails inwardly whenever contact leads to amalgamation.
There is something unmistakably illiberal, almost superstitious, in standing on race for its own sake, as if origins and not results were of moral value. It matters nothing what blood a man has, if he has the right spirit; and if there is some ground for identifying the two (since monkeys, however educated, are monkeys still) it is only when blood means character and capacity, and is tested by them, that it becomes important. Nor is it unjust to level the individual, in his political and moral status, with the race to which he belongs, if this race holds an approved position. Individual gifts and good intentions have little efficacy in the body politic if they neither express a great tradition nor can avail to found one; and this tradition, as religion shows, will falsify individual insights so soon as they are launched into the public medium. The common soul will destroy a noble genius in absorbing it, and therefore, to maintain progress, a general genius has to be invoked; and a general genius means an exceptional and distinct race.
Environment, education, fashion, may be all powerful while they last and may make it seem a prejudice to insist on race, turning its assumed efficacy into a sheer dogma, with fanatical impulses behind it; yet in practice the question will soon recur: What shall sustain that omnipotent fashion, education, or environment? Nothing is more treacherous than tradition, when insight and force are lacking to keep it warm. Under Roman dominion, the inhabitants of Sparta still submitted to the laws of Lycurgus and their life continued to be a sort of ritualistic shadow of the past. Those enfranchised helots thought they were maintaining a heroic state when, in fact, they were only turning its forms into a retrospective religion. The old race was practically extinct; ephors, gymnasia, and common meals could do nothing to revive it. The ways of the Roman world—a kindred promiscuous population—prevailed over that local ritual and rendered it perfunctory, because there were no longer any living souls to understand that a man might place his happiness in his country's life and care nothing for Oriental luxury or Oriental superstition, things coming to flatter his personal lusts and make him useless and unhappy.
Institutions without men are as futile as men without institutions. Before race can be a rational object for patriotism there must exist a traditional genius, handed down by inheritance or else by adoption, when the persons adopted can really appreciate the mysteries they are initiated into. Blood could be disregarded, if only the political ideal remained constant and progress was sustained, the laws being modified only to preserve their spirit. A state lives in any case by exchanging persons, and all spiritual life is maintained by exchanging expressions. Life is a circulation; it can digest whatever materials will assume a form already determined ideally and enable that form to come forth more clearly and be determined in
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