In Search of Ordinary Patriotism

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May 16

We are winding toward a season in America in which our thoughts about our country must come to bear upon our decisions, and we must, whatever our convictions about modern democracy, consider how we should best use our constitutional rights. And yet, as we approach the upcoming election season, it seems that many conservatives are uncertain about what it is that we are conserving – about what vision of our country we are seeking to uphold and protect.

Meanwhile, we – even we who call ourselves conservative and Christian – grow detached from our locales, our immediate “country.” We do not know the history of our places nor the neighbors who share our places. We no longer assume that our children will return to their places to uplift them, but rather that they will depart to “make something” of themselves. Our spirit of placelessness prevents us from true presence in our places, and placelessness thus fuels further ambiguity, particularly about what it is that we are conserving. Perhaps we seek to conserve “family values” or the “American Way” – but, abstracted from physical places and literal families and communities, these ideas are empty of significance.

The British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton wrote at length regarding conservatism and place. Scruton’s writing about place often involves the term oikophobia – that is, a hatred or distrust of home. Oikophobia has to do not only with hatred towards one’s place but towards all that the oikos, the household, entails.

In Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet, Scruton defined oikophobia as an

educated derision that has been directed towards historical loyalties by our intellectual elites, who have tended to dismiss all the ordinary forms of patriotism and local attachment as forms of racism, imperialism or xenophobia of which it accuses the world. I do not mean fear of home, however, but the repudiation of home—the turning away from the claims and attachments that identify an inherited first-person plural.

Local attachment is of little merit in our day, especially among my generation. When I graduated high school, my friends and I all brimmed with eagerness to leave our hometown – permanently – and explore the locales of our choice colleges. When I graduated college, many of my peers brimmed with that same vagrant enthusiasm as they set their sights towards jobs in nearby cities. Nowadays, when I share my husband's and my desire to return to our hometown and start a family there, I am routinely met with surprise.

If we are to believe Scruton, however, this desire to return to origins is not radical but merely a part of our historical loyalties and an outflow of patriotism. Our oikophobic culture, however, not only disdains these loyalties but also conflates “all the ordinary forms of patriotism,” as Scruton writes, with racism and xenophobia, as well as nationalism or – that most ambiguous of terms – “Christian nationalism.”

But “Christian nationalism” is often a misnomer. In A Political Philosophy, Scruton sketched a contrast between nationalism and national loyalty: while nationalism is “belligerent” and bent on war, national loyalty “involves a love of home and a preparedness to defend it.” Elsewhere Scruton termed national loyalty the “low-key patriotism of custom and place.”

While examples of twisted patriotism or actual nationalism are readily available in the history of the twentieth century, we lack, at large, manifold current examples of a pure, simple, ordinary patriotism of custom and place. Scruton, indeed, is one example of the home-loving spirit of ordinary patriotism, as his writings on his own nation and his care for his home, “Scrutopia,” reveal. In America, Wendell Berry and the localist and agrarian movements which he has inspired likewise exemplify the ordinary patriotism Scruton commends.

Wendell Berry himself demonstrates a patriotism of custom and place: after living the life of an academic for several years, Berry returned to his native land of Henry County, Kentucky, and bought a farm which he has tended ever since. From his love of his home springs Berry’s literary work as a novelist, essayist, and poet.

But Berry’s stories, together with his life, give further examples of the beauties and difficult duties of ordinary patriotism. One such example may be found in Berry’s short story “Fidelity,” which chronicles the death of Burley Coulter, a central figure in the fictional “Port William” (a town mirroring Berry’s own experience in Kentucky). In “Fidelity,” Burley’s family and friends take Burley to the hospital out of fear and rescue him from the hospital out of love. The story follows Burley’s son, Danny Branch, as he retrieves the dying Burley from the abandonment that is “the best of modern medical care” and restores him to his place, burying him in the land he loves. Only with the help of family and friends in Port William can Burley be saved from the abstract, metallic world of modern medicine and from Kyle Bode, an investigating officer typical of modern bureaucracy.

Faithfulness represents one of the story’s prominent themes, as its title makes evident. Burley’s people are a faithful people, and they are faithful to his memory and to one another in the midst of Danny’s daring rescue. They are faithful to their way of life – a way of life not easily trod upon by figures such as Kyle Bode. “They practiced an old-fashioned independence, an old-fashioned generosity, and an old-fashioned fidelity to their word and their friends,” Berry writes in another story about Port William, and these words apply to the characters of “Fidelity,” as well.

Out of old-fashioned fidelity flows ordinary patriotism. In one telling scene of “Fidelity,” Kyle Bode tries to tug information from a lawyer who is a friend of Burley, and he responds by insisting that patriotism prevents him from answering. To Kyle Bode’s confusion, the lawyer, Henry Catlett, continues to maintain his patriotism: “I mean patriotism – love for your country and your neighbors. There’s a difference, Mr. Bode, between the government and the country.”

There is a difference between the distant processes of our federal government and the life of the “country” – the locales in which we reside. Henry and his fellows act out of a love for their country and neighbors, and, in the end, it is this love that allows them to honor and serve their friend Burley.

Though rhetoric about patriotism is abundant in our culture, the active patriotism of “old-fashioned fidelity” is rare and seemingly unreachable. But love, which breeds fidelity, grows from knowledge. We can begin to be patriots in a true sense by knowing our places.

Certainly, many of our modern places render local attachment worthless and instead enshrine our culture’s regnant attitude of oikophobia. This has been my own experience in my temporary home in a city on the East Coast: traffic and trash pile upon the streets of my city; apartments pile atop each other; restaurants and storefronts and corner stores file one after another. It is easy to lose oneself in the vastness and mess of the place, and in so doing, to also lose one’s sense of the place itself. Though I’ve been here half a year, I still don’t have much of a sense of the city at large beyond my immediate neighborhood.

But perhaps to have a sense of the neighborhood is a good start toward the kind of patriotism that Berry’s characters embody. In an essay that revitalizes the term “provincial,” J.C. Scharl encourages us moderns to love our provinces in their particularity and distinctiveness. Though I am not sure that I yet love my current home, I love the brownstones around my block, the diner at the intersection, and the park down the street, together with its lake and winding trails. Even though my hometown commands greater love than my current city, this, for now, is my “native land,” so to speak. While I am here, I will strive to be a “patriot” even here. This is my current province, and I ought to welcome and love its distinctiveness.

In “A Defense of Patriotism,” G.K. Chesterton recognizes the good that such love can bring, overthrowing nationalism for national loyalty and rhetorical patriotism for active love:

What we really need for the frustration and overthrow of a deaf and raucous Jingoism is a renascence of the love of the native land. When that comes, all shrill cries will cease suddenly. For the first of all the marks of love is seriousness: love will not accept sham bulletins or the empty victory of words. It will always esteem the most candid counsellor the best. Love is drawn to truth by the unerring magnetism of agony; it gives no pleasure to the lover to see ten doctors dancing with vociferous optimism round a death-bed.

In St. Paul’s words, love rejoices with the truth. May our patriotism of love likewise rejoice in what is true, good, and beautiful.

Discussion Questions:

Why do people, especially young people, feel pressure to abandon their homes? What causes the rupture between one generation and the next?
Can one love the whole without loving all, or at least most, of the parts?
Why is it that opinion polls indicate that Americans, especially young people such as the author, are becoming less patriotic?