Patriotism and Universal Benevolence: Are They Consistent?

• A christian is of no country, he is a citizen of the world; and his neighbours and countrymen are the inhabitants of the remotest regions, whenever their distresses demand his friendly assistance: Christianity commands us to love all mankind, Patriotism to oppress all other countries to advance the imaginary prosperity of our own: Christianity enjoins us to imitate the universal benevolence of our Creator, who pours forth his blessings on every nation on earth; Patriotism to copy the mean partiality of an English parish officer, who thinks injustice and cruelty meritorious, whenever they promote the interests of his own inconsiderable village.

This claim elicited many responses in Britain in the final decades of the eighteenth century. The matter was taken up in debate clubs, and it provoked the publication of some significant pamphlets and philosophical works. Sampling the responses illuminates an important perspective on the consistency of patriotism with the ethical ideal of moral equality.

Two responses to Jenyns came from students of the great Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson. Both emphasized epistemic reasons supporting the virtues of patriotism. Drawing on Hutcheson’s insights on the providential design of the moral sentiments, Archibald Maclaine, a minister of the Church of Scotland in The Hague, advanced the prime importance of caring for our particular social attachments in light of our contextual knowledge. We are best equipped to care for our families, our friends, our communities, and our countries because we have unique insights into their character. A particular focus on the good of our familiars need not, however, be inconsistent with a commitment in principle to the good of strangers. Maclaine believed that God, in his providence, has arranged a potential for mutually beneficial human relationships at all levels of social interaction, including at the level of the nation.

This last proposition is broadly attested to by social science, at least according to the insights of another student of Hutcheson, Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations Smith deployed the tools of political economy to demonstrate the mutual entailment of the good of our country with the prosperity of our international neighbors and the good of humankind more broadly. In the 1790 edition of his work The Theory of Moral Sentiments, (TMS) Smith brought insights from his political economy to bear explicitly on the issue of patriotism, tapping into the discourse sparked by Jenyns fourteen years earlier. Smith rearticulated arguments from Hutcheson and Maclaine about the virtues of particularity given our epistemic limitations, and he complemented those arguments with comments on the mutually beneficial nature of international trade.

Maclaine and Smith understood that many proposals framed as serving the common good of the nation do no such thing. Many ostensibly patriotic proposals are at best misguided and at worst screens for the advancement of factional interest. This fact does not, however, detract from the virtue of true patriotism. It just shows that not all that self-advertises as patriotism is properly patriotic.

Patriotic Sentiments

In his book Patriotism, Morality, and Peace, Stephen Nathanson distinguished four central aspects of patriotic sentiments: “(1) special affection for one’s own country; (2) a sense of personal identification with the country; (3) special concern for the well-being of the country; (4) willingness to sacrifice to promote the country’s good” (pp. 34-35). Such sentiments are natural and widespread in the modern world. Some believe they morally require correction.

For Jenyns, our tendency to prioritize the interests of our country ought to give way to a cosmopolitan ethic, which he framed as consistent with the Christian imperative to universal benevolence. We should view ourselves as citizens of a common city of humankind. We should no more prefer the welfare of our own local neighborhood to the welfare of the city of humanity than a man should prefer the good of his hand to the good of his whole person. Thus, the sin of patriotism ultimately reduces to the sin of pride: to prioritize one’s own country is predicated on the mistaken belief that we are in fact of greater moral significance than our neighbors.

One prominent counterpoint to the arguments of Jenyns in contemporary philosophy can be found in the writings of Roger Scruton. Scruton saw the duties of patriotism flowing from our unchosen moral obligations to the nation, which is to be distinguished from the state. The nation is the outer bound of the community that has shaped and nurtured us into the people we have become. There are of course idealized and fictitious visions of the nation that are recruited for ideological purposes; but that doesn’t detract from the reality and formative significance of the national community. Loyalty is due to the nation by virtue of the rootedness of self-understanding in the realities of place. Moreover, without patriotic affection for pre-political social community that constitutes the nation, Scruton argues, our political associations will not sufficiently cohere. They will fail to provide us with law, order, and the protection of individual freedom.

The responses to Jenyns’ argument against patriotism in the eighteenth century pursued a different but not entirely inconsistent line of argument. Most respondents to Jenyns mainly affirmed the Christian duty to “universal benevolence,” that is, the duty to organize our affairs in a way that actively contributes to the good of humankind at large. But they emphasized the consistency of serving universal benevolence with a devotion to family, community, and country, in keeping with longstanding Christian teachings on particularity.

An early expression of those teachings in Christianity can be found in Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana, where he argued that we are to focus special attention on our social connections, notwithstanding the general Christian imperative to love all men equally: “Further, all men are to be loved equally.  But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.” We have limited attention and resources, and we cannot actively serve the good of everyone. To discriminate, then, Augustine argues that we are to choose those with whom we have some personal connection. Our familiars are not morally superior to strangers. But in the sea of humanity, they are our focal points: “since you cannot consult for the good of (all people), you must take the matter as decided for you by a sort of lot, according as each man happens for the time being to be more closely connected with you.”

The point about our special obligations to our familiars featured in the early eighteenth century in debates about the compatibility of self-love and neighbor-love. The philosophical terms of that debate were then in turn mapped onto the later intellectual debates about patriotism debates sparked by Jenyns.

A prominent figure in the early debates on self-love was Francis Hutcheson. In his 1725 Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Hutcheson emphasized the providential orientation of our sentiments towards the good of our familiars, beginning with our own person. Augmenting a point along the lines of Augustine’s teachings on particularity, Hutcheson focused on our epistemic limits. We can admire the wisdom of God in the orientation of our affections towards our familiar connections because we have so little understanding—and therefore power—to enhance the lives of those at great social distance. The whole of humankind lies far beyond our comprehension and power. We are most empowered to serve the good of our own person, hence the virtuousness of proper self-love; beyond ourselves, we are equipped with the contextual knowledge to effectively serve our families, communities, and, at the outer bound of familiarity and effectiveness, our country.

A student of Hutcheson, Archibald Maclaine, drew from Hutcheson’s analysis to respond to Jenyns in 1777. He charged Jenyns with promoting a “fanatical quietism” by equating the love of country with “pride, revenge, and savage feroscity.” The fact that many acts flying under the head of patriotism are covers for nationalistic domination and the subjugation of others does not detract from the virtue of a true patriotism: “we should not imagine that there is no genuine coin, because we meet with a multitude of counterfeits.” True patriotism is warranted for Maclaine because it orients our focus towards the largest social group that we might hope to positively impact. Patriotism, like friendship, for Maclaine is to be understood as a particular expression of the general duty to universal benevolence, a species within the higher genus of love:

• Universal benevolence is a generous sentiment, a noble affection; but its real exertion is beyond the reach of humanity, and it can only become active and useful by its application to particular objects. A man would certainly make a ridiculous figure, who, under the pretext of being obliged by christianity to exercise only universal benevolence, should neglect his country, and those smaller societies, to which alone the useful effects of his zeal can extend.

Framing the Christian ethic of moral equality and neighborly love as in conflict with obligations to our local attachments is, for Maclaine, a grave moral error. The duty to love our neighbors finds expression not in abstract planning or high-level political schemes, in the first instance, but in the active care for those within our spheres of influence and attention, of which the country is the focal endpoint.

Similar points came forward in Adam Smith’s final edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1790. In a chapter called “Of Universal Benevolence,” which was new to the final edition of the work, Smith affirmed the ethical ideal of universal benevolence. Like Maclaine, however, he argued that an abstract focus on universal benevolence could distract from our concrete duties, through which the good of our neighbors are in fact served. “To man is allotted a much humbler department” than the care of the universe: “the care of his happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country.” Rearticulating the insight of Hutcheson, he points to the wisdom manifest in our natural orientation:

• That wisdom which contrived the system of human affections, as well as that of every other part of nature, seems to have judged that the interest of the great society of mankind would best be promoted by directing the principal attention of each individual to that particular portion of it, which was most within the sphere of both his abilities and understanding.

Smith added the claim in his discussion that we do not—and should not—simply love our countries out of consequentialist considerations. We should love our country “for its own sake, and independently of such considerations”; in a similar fashion, we should love our families for their own sake, independently of the considerations of the widespread social usefulness that comes from the attachment of each to his or her family. But we can, nonetheless, appreciate the benefits of virtuous familial love, friendship, and patriotism to humanity at large.

Patriotism as Virtue

Justifying patriotism on epistemic grounds along the lines just sketched doesn’t answer a fundamental question: is the good of our country actually consistent with the good of our neighbors? Do we live in a world in which the gain of one nation comes at the loss of another? Answering the question requires insights from economics.

In 1781, a cleric named John Prince delivered an address before the English Antigallican Society called “True Christian Patriotism.” In the address he articulated a moderated version of patriotism, in response to Jenyns. Patriotism is virtuous not in the form it was practiced by the pagans: the “passion for national glory… incited the ancient Romans to trample upon the natural rights of mankind, in order to aggrandize themselves.” But patriotism is virtuous and consistent with Christianity so long as the good of one’s country is pursued by “fair, just, and reasonable means.” His address essentially concluded with an admission, however, that pursuing the good of one’s nation by fair, just and reasonable means will often run against the material interests of other nations:

• You (society members) have devoted yourselves to your country, which includes in it your brethren and companions, and every other beloved relation: to defend and maintain your religion against the wiles and attacks of Popery: You have engaged yourselves to encourage the honest industry of your own countrymen, and to prefer their manufactures and workmanship, in spite of the tyranny of fashion, to Gallic fopperies: You have not enriched foreigners, and starved your own country’s artificers: You have served your country in a way that must render your patriotism and loyalty unsuspected.

To be patriotic means to care for the good of one’s nation. To care for the good of one’s nation means to care for the wealth of the nation. For Prince, the wealth of the nation is furthered by the privileging of domestic industry, which harms one’s neighbors, but through a complex of policy measures, not through open warfare.

Smith had taken such arguments to task in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations. In that work, essentially, he argued that the jealousy of trade—”the malignant jealousy and envy” (WN, 228) with which we view the success of our neighbors—is fundamentally unpatriotic because it is predicated on the backwards notion that the material success of our neighbors means our own poverty. It also can be seen as unpatriotic in a more classical sense: the jealousy of trade, such as Prince expressed in his sermon, is typically a product of special interests. Policies stemming from that jealousy privilege the interests of certain market incumbents over the good of the nation as a whole. Smith’s contemporary Josiah Tucker, whose books Smith owned in his personal library, had made a similar point earlier, arguing that “the Interest of the Trader, and the Interest of the Kingdom, are two very distinct Things.” The “able Statesman, and judicious Patriot” will distinguish between the two and promote the good of the country through the arts of peace and commerce.

In 1790, in the context of his discussion of patriotism, Smith alluded to his analysis in The Wealth of Nations and pointed to the relevance of economic analysis in appreciating what patriotism ought to look like in practice. We have limited power outside our spheres of familiarity, but the study of political economy illuminates the large extent to which the pursuit of the good of our country entails the good of our international neighbors, at least in times of peace. Patriotism doesn’t require us to levy protective tariffs on goods and services, to or subsidize failing domestic industries. The commercial success of our allied neighbors ought to be seen as a boon—something the patriot, a person by definition interested in furthering and even sacrificing for the national interest—ought to generally promote, through efforts at commercial liberalization. As he put the point in TMS,

• France and England may each of them have some reason to dread the increase of the naval and military power of the other; but for either of them to envy the internal happiness and prosperity of the other, the cultivation of its lands, the advancement of its manufactures, the increase of its commerce, the security and number of its ports and harbours, its proficiency in all the liberal arts and sciences, is surely beneath the dignity of two such great nations. These are real improvements of the world we live in. Mankind are benefited, human nature is ennobled by them. In such improvements each nation ought, not only to endeavour itself to excel, but from the love of mankind, to promote, instead of obstructing the excellence of its neighbours. These are all proper objects of national emulation, not of national prejudice or envy. (TMS, 229)

One way to conceive of patriotism as a matter of proper focus: in a world of billions, we owe allegiance and attention to the good of the place in which we reside, partly because we have such little knowledge, and therefore ability to make a positive difference, beyond our national borders. This doesn’t sufficiently capture the psychology of patriotism, and there are other aspects of patriotism not here considered, chiefly the notion of sacrifice, which situates the good of the nation above the good of the individual. But when coupled with insights from economics, as advanced by Smith, the point about proper focus illuminates the consistency of the love of one’s country with the good of other nations. There are, of course, instances of conflict over borders or certain natural resources in which the good of different national political forces are at odds. But such conflicts don’t reduce the potentiality of a mutually beneficial cooperation of the nations. Smith in particular worked to illustrate that potential. As Jeremy Bentham wrote in 1843, the work of Adam Smith was “a treatise upon universal benevolence” in which “the nations are associates and not rivals in the grand social enterprise.”

Footnotes

(1) Soame Jenyns, A View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion, Hard Press, 2018.

(2) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith. Cannan edition online at Econlib.

(3) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, by Adam Smith. Online at Econlib.

(4) Stephen Nathanson, Patriotism, Morality, and Peace. Rowman & Littlefield, 1993.

(5) De Doctrina Christiana, by St. Augustine. Available in translation online at On Christian Doctrine (Book II). NewAdvent.org.

(6) An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1726, 2004), by Francis Hutcheson. Online Library of Liberty.

(7) Archibald Maclaine, A series of letters addressed to Soame Jenyns, Esq. on occation of his view of the internal evidence of Christianity by Archibald Maclaine. HardPress, 2018.

(8) John Prince, True Christian Patriotism. A Sermon Preached Before the Several Associations of the Laudable Order Antigallicans. Gale ECCO, Print Editions. 2018.