The Virtue of Independence Day

Granted that the writing of the American Declaration of Independence, the voting for colonial independence, the adopting of the Declaration, and its signing were spread out over time; nevertheless, as of the official date of July 4, 2019 it will have been twelve score and three years since the birth of the U.S.A.  According to the Declaration, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of a people’s unalienable rights, then it is the right of that people to alter or abolish that government, i.e., to practice national self-determination. 

      By August 14, 1941 the interests of the United States and the United Kingdom had converged to the point that an Atlantic Charter could be declared, in which Roosevelt and Churchill stipulated that their policies were to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” (national self-determination).  After World War II, however, there was an increasing emphasis on international institutions such as the United Nations and the European Union.  Thus, the resurgent nationalism expressed by the British electorate in the Brexit vote of June 23, 2016, as well as by the American electorate in the Presidential vote of November 8, 2016, represented a break with post WW II internationalism and a return to the aspirations of the Atlantic Charter.

      Finding this change in the public acceptance of internationalism to be highly significant, Yoram Hazony wrote the excellent book The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) to proclaim the value of free national states.  Such independent nations stand in stark opposition to what Hazony calls the “liberal empire,” administered by the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States; and widely accepted as the best type of political state.  In contrast, however, Hazony supports free national states by distinguishing nationalism from the national socialism that led to the Holocaust; disputing the charge that nationalism creates more hate than does imperialism; focusing on liberal empire’s problematic promotion of peace and prosperity based on a sacrifice of collective self-determination; and pointing out that a national state encourages loyalties to natural or adopted family, tribe, nation, tradition, religion, and language. 

      Hazony finds that, just after the Reformation, there were two principles in European politics: First, a government had to be strong enough to defend itself from external threats, to adjudicate disputes among its citizens, to police itself, and officially to recognize one God.  Second, nations that were strong in the foregoing sense had the right of self-determination of their national and church governments.  (The reviewer notes parenthetically that these principles rendered it self-evident at that time that any newly discovered lands and peoples that did not have strong government in this sense were ipso facto ripe for colonial take-over.)  It would have been incomprehensible in that era to suggest that all nations could, would, or should become one. 

      Subsequently, John Locke offered his social contract theory of politics: There is only one underlying political principle, and it is individual freedom and consent to obligations.  Other, Burkean, loyalties to family, tribe, nation, tradition, religion, and language are extraneous and are to be jettisoned; and even the existence of national borders is said to be an unjustifiable artifact of primitive politics.  Hazony traces this stream of thought from Rousseau through Kant, Rand, and Rawls.  

      Here, the reviewer registers a minor disagreement with Hazony: It is true that Kant did sometimes write in favor of the idea of a cosmopolitan, utopian empire or, alternately, a world republic.  However, he also recognized the existence and strength of what he viewed as a “national identity politics” that would prevent the attainment of any of his ideal polities.  For that reason he insisted that a league of nations should be formed as a federation of free states.  (See the May 1, 2019 blog posting in this series.)  Thus, Kant did allow for national borders but could not foresee the future futility of such leagues.

      Hazony’s overall thesis remains unaffected: Today, the ongoing liberal reconstruction of Western politics unrealistically neglects Burkean loyalties and is a form of imperialism in the proud tradition of the Pharaohs, Babylonian kings, Roman emperors, Papal statesmen, Marxists, and any others who are “quick to express disgust, contempt, and anger when their vision of peace and prosperity meets with opposition” from the ostensible beneficiaries.  Moreover, any resistance to liberal doctrine is today “afflicted by public shaming campaigns and heresy hunts,” which are unwittingly modeled on medieval infallibility, inquisition, and index; and which are turning the Western democracies into one very large university campus.  For example, liberal imperialists view the consolidation of the European Union as the only political opinion that may be upheld by decent people in the face of opposition from Brexiteers.

      There never has been a Hobbesian or Lockean state of nature in which individuals were only loyal to themselves; instead, Hazony writes, there have been anarchical states of nature characterized by the lack of permanent, centralized governments.  Centralized governments come into being either as free states, in which individuals’ Burkean loyalties are transferred to the state, as when the loyalty to a father is transferred to the fatherland; or as despotic states, established by conquest.

      Hazony lists five virtues of the national state in his Chapter XIV.  First, the desire for collective freedom shifts from family units to the national state itself.  This shift strikes the reviewer as the attitude, “Why should individuals’ petty preferences interfere with the flourishing of the state?”  Comparing domestic slumber to martial vigor and national honor, Shakespeare has King Henry V say before the Battle of Agincourt that “Gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.” 

      The second virtue of the national state is a disinclination of contented national states to acquire empires.  Third, the freedom of the national state allows individuals to focus on material prosperity and cultural inheritance.  Fourth, nationalism is based on an empirical standpoint, a moderate skepticism regarding human reason, and a plurality of political paths.  Fifth, the national state offers the best environment for free institutions that evolve over long periods of time by trial and error and that support individual liberties. 

      Hazony proposes that the best political order is one of independent national states.  Yet although such independence is an evident good that should be established wherever feasible, political independence is not a right, because there are too many potential independent states and too few physical resources and moral rationales.  Even if India had a right of self-determination to assert against the British Empire in 1947, it does not follow that the speakers of each of India’s 1700 distinct languages should be awarded their own national states today.  Even if the thirteen British colonies in North America had a right of self-determination to assert against the British Empire in 1776, it does not follow that the Confederate states had a moral rationale for succession in 1861.   

      Beyond the attractive virtues of independent national states and the moral rationale for independence set forth in the Declaration’s listing of the “repeated injuries and usurpations” by the British king, the reviewer notes that the decisive factor in the American Revolutionary War may well have been the “geographical virtue” of a great physical separation between North America and the British Isles.  On July 4, 2019 it is time to celebrate not only the virtue of nationalism but also the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean and the slowness of sailing ships nearly a quarter millennium ago!

Identity Politics Torpedoes Yamamoto

In a First Things article of January 2019, Yoram Hazony has again written on the topic of contemporary Western liberalism and whether the nations under its auspices are thriving or deteriorating.  Hazony sides with those analysts seeing primarily deterioration.  Beyond his cited evidence, one notes that the hypothesis of disintegrating nation-states finds support in the existence of an opioid epidemic, homelessness, and declining longevity in the U.S.; in the existence of the originally rural “yellow vest” protests against higher, allegedly pro-environmental fuel taxes in France; and in the Brexit resistance to a loss of British national sovereignty to Brussels.  (As of January 2019, Brexit seems doomed to failure in its execution, but the resistance is genuine.)

Hazony sides with those analysts seeing primarily deterioration.  Beyond his cited evidence, one notes that the hypothesis of disintegrating nation-states finds support in the existence of an opioid epidemic, homelessness, and declining longevity in the U.S.; in the existence of the originally rural “yellow vest” protests against higher, allegedly pro-environmental fuel taxes in France; and in the Brexit resistance to a loss of British national sovereignty to Brussels.  (As of January 2019, Brexit seems doomed to failure in its execution, but the resistance is genuine.)

What type of government presides over this deterioration?  Humpty Dumpty held that words meant whatever he chose; and, after hearing his interlocutor, Alice, doubt that words could have such an arbitrarily large elasticity, maintained that the only question in the usage of words is “Who is to be master?”  In the case of contemporary Western politics, given the allotment of one adjective and one noun to characterize government, which terminology generates the greatest rhetorical advantage - - “liberal republicanism,” liberal democracy,” “conservative republicanism,” “conservative democracy,” “compassionate capitalism,” “progressive socialism,” or something else?  Hazony finds that the terminology of  “republican government” predominated through the 1960’s (Benjamin Franklin thought, after all, that the Constitutional Convention had approved a Republic), whereas “democratic government” has predominated since the 1960’s (“one man, one vote” seems like political nirvana).

Hazony contrasts the American and British ideas of liberal democracy (in the style of the Enlightenment) and conservative democracy (in the style of Edmund Burke and others).  Enlightenment liberalism is a type of rationalism based on the sufficiency of reason, the existence of perfectly free and equal individuals, and political obligation by individual choice alone.  In contrast, conservative democracy is based on individual freedom, limited executive power in the government, and tradition in the form of historical experience, nationalism, and religion.  One observes that both conservative democracy and liberal democracy emphasize the high status of “free individuals”; but that the idea of freedom varies radically between liberalism (featuring pure reason as the basis for each individual freely to choose his own group for the purpose of identity politics) and conservatism (featuring tradition and history as the basis for each individual freely to recognize his own group for the purpose of national politics).

Jason Willick has examined an example of identity politics in a Wall Street Journal article of 12/29/18.  Identity politics as a type of trench warfare is today embittering Silicon Valley: Fred Yamamoto was born in Palo Alto, California in 1918; was interned after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941; enlisted nevertheless in the U.S. Army in 1943; was killed in battle in France in 1944; and was chosen to provide a name for a Palo Alto middle school in 2018 on the centenary of his birth.  Regrettably for Fred’s memory, however, there was another individual, Isoroku Yamamoto, who both shared a last name with Fred and was the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack.  (Fred was not related to Isoroku except in the theoretical sense that all human individuals have descended from a common ancestor.)  Moreover, Isoroku’s homeland invaded Manchuria in 1937 and perpetrated many atrocities in East Asia, starting when Fred was 19 years old and thousands of miles removed.  Today, pro-Fred and anti-Fred identity politics have enraged the Palo Alto community and left the school board back-pedaling, looking for an alternative school name.  “The objection to the Yamamoto name seems sadly characteristic of America’s balkanized culture.  Complaints of insensitivity and trauma have become distinctive marks of American-ness … [but] Fred Yamamoto’s name lives on as an aspiration to something greater.”  One surmises that a traditional nationalist would say that Fred’s life continues to be an inspiration for an American culture, now sadly interned.

The Reputation of Nations

Although nationalism is often defined as a political, social, and economic system dedicated to promoting the interests of a particular people in a definite territory, this definition fails to specify which people and to demarcate which territory.  Which comes first, political theorists seeking to convince the population of some geographic area to subscribe to the theorists’ system and to develop common interests, thereby becoming a nation; or does a certain population, possessed of a well defined culture, recruit a political theorist to draft documents announcing the existence of a nation?  Historically, both routes to nationhood have been observed: Defeated empires may be divided into nations by arbitrarily inventing borders in the hope that the included populations will find commonalities.  (One thinks of the partitioning of some of the Middle Eastern territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire.)  Alternately, rebelling colonies, identifying with a common culture, may declare their independence.  (One thinks of the American Declaration of Independence.)

      According to the doctrine of nationalism, once a nation exists, its leaders aim at gaining and maintaining sovereignty over a homeland, holding it as axiomatic that an ascendant nation should both govern itself and exert hegemony over any other territories that might fall under an implicit or explicit imperial purview.  Nationalism also promotes developing and maintaining a national identity based on factors such as culture, language, religion, politics, and, where applicable, a common ancestry.  In a book to be published before this blog post appears, Yoram Hazony has catalogued some of the successes and failures of nations.

      Some have criticized the very idea of empires and nations: In the nineteenth century, the English historian and Latinist, Sir John Robert Seeley, wrote of the British Empire, "we seem, as it were, to have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind."  In the twentieth century, George Orwell thought that nationalism supports political extremism in favor of a limited societal group.  Others have thought that competing nation states lead not to a quasi-equilibrium drifting towards social progress, but to a vicious circle of violence based on the fact that national borders do not typically coincide with national cultural identities.  For example, in the twenty-first century the Myanmar government has perceived the Rohingya people as a foreign body threatening the Myanmar nation.  In addition, nationalism has been seen as a driving force for the Trump and Brexit phenomena, as well as for the resistance of Southern and Eastern Europe to the immigration policies of the European Union.

      Although some critics see nationalism as a dangerous trend, the historical successes of nationalism should be noted as well.  Western traditions of limited government and individual liberty were nurtured by the national cohesion existing within each of the nations of England, Scotland, and the Netherlands.  The original American colonies inherited a common language, a legal tradition, and a limited range of religious practices.  The eclipse of these common factors in contemporary American society (e.g., McGuffey’s Readers haven’t been prominent for quite some time) can be seen as a source of the increasingly bitter contention in American politics.

      Thus, we see that there is a necessary trade-off in political theory: Inordinate favoring of a limited societal group is bad, but some favoring of one’s own way of life is required for the national cohesion that has historically preceded eras of limited government and individual liberty.

Of Emmaus and Enlightenment

     Writing in separate Wall Street Journal articles during the past month, George Weigel and Yoram Hazony discussed the roads through Emmaus (4/1/18) and through the Enlightenment (4/8/18), respectively.  The initiation of a gradual legalizing of Christian belief and practice from the time of Constantine I to Theodosius I (300’s A.D.) is typically attributed to Constantine’s perception of a divine mandate for, or at least of an administrative convenience accruing to, such legalization.  On this account, this legalization began shortly after Constantine’s victory over his western competitor at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge on October 28, 312 A.D.  Weigel finds that the revolutionary effect of Jesus of Nazareth on his disciples on the road to Emmaus and elsewhere nearly three centuries earlier had galvanized the first Christians to become “a dominant force” within the Roman Empire.

     In contrast, defining the time, place, and content of Enlightenment thought may be more contentious.  The first roots of the Enlightenment seem to extend to the early modern period of Western philosophy, when Descartes (1596 – 1650) issued his clarion call for systematic doubt before accepting absolutely certain, true beliefs into a foundation for knowledge in all areas of inquiry.  Locke (1632 – 1704) reduced the foundational requirements from certainty to probability in empirical areas of inquiry.  Synthesizing both rational and empirical outlooks, Kant (1724 – 1804) famously became a transcendental idealist in order to remain an empirical realist.  We assume here that the full flowering of the Enlightenment occurred from 1715 (death of the French “Sun King”) to 1789 (start of the French Revolution).  

     The supposedly irrefutable, cutting-edge arguments promulgated by the French Enlightenment philosophes included statements to the effect that “man is a machine” (Julien de La Mettrie) and that “the brain secretes thought like the liver secretes bile” (Pierre Cabanis).  Following up on a remark by the philosophical historian Frederick Copleston, one observes that Cabanis must have found a truly remarkable bile-analog if it could serve as a “litmus test” for truth!  Hazony finds that contemporary advocates of the Enlightenment oversell the benefits of unfettered reason (because beneficial trends in science, medicine, and politics had already started before the Enlightenment) and underestimate the contributions of tradition, religion, and national identity (because any arrangements that could have prevented the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the Russian Revolution would have been highly desirable).  How could things have gone so wrong?

     Regarding politics, in 1784 Kant authored the highly regarded essay, Was ist Aufklärung? (What is Enlightenment?), in which Kant self-servingly praised Frederick the Great (1712 - 1786): It turns out that true Enlightenment freedom pertains to the public speech that Frederick granted to academics such as Kant, even while all others might appropriately be required to espouse the party line of the institutions employing them. 

     Regarding religion, in 1793 Kant wrote the book, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloβen Vernunft (Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone), in which he predicted that that the Enlightenment would lead people to cast aside dogma, authority, and tradition in favor of the rational principles that he believed formed the basis of all religions.  According to Kant, for example, it is not ritual or doctrinal profession that makes one pleasing to God, but rather having a rigorously disinterested moral attitude.  Such an approach to religion, however, entails a comprehensive demythologization in which Jesus’ presence on the road to Emmaus is symbolic at best, and the “dominant force” seen by Weigel is nowhere to be found.  Although Kant sees that historical faith has served as a vehicle for spreading elements of the rational faith, he seems to have hoped for a time when mankind can finally dispense with such vehicles.

     Ultimately, Kant never managed to cancel at least one contradiction in his thought: Frederick, Kant had enthused in 1784, was the only ruler “who is himself enlightened … [and] who likewise has at hand a well-disciplined and numerous army to guarantee public security.”  So far from boldly discarding all authority, Kant relied on princely heroes who would encourage Kantian academic debate, establish increasingly liberal parliaments and state churches, and enforce obedience to the state - - all by virtue of their princely authority.  But if authority is allowed to temporal sovereigns in the 1784 analysis, why should it be denied to historical religions in the 1793 book?  As Hazony concludes, “national and religious institutions may not fit with the Enlightenment, but they may have important things to teach us nevertheless.”