Thinking About Love of Country
/David Deavel, editor of Solzhenitsyn and American Culture, has a thoughtful reflection here on the nature of real patriotism. (The piece first appeared in print in February 2022, but is now available online.)
“As Solzhenitsyn observed, dismissals of patriotism can be purely class-based. But sometimes, as in Schmemann’s case, they are motivated by the fear that passionate love of a nation will inevitably lead to putting love of country over moral principles. Solzhenitsyn’s patriotism has nothing to do with this attitude, often called “jingoism” but which he calls “almost. . .a cousin of ‘fascism.’” He defined “patriotism” as “an integral and persistent feeling of love for one’s homeland, with a willingness to make sacrifices for her to share her troubles, but not to serve her unquestioningly, not to support her unjust claims, rather to frankly assess her faults, her transgressions, and to repent for these.”
Loving a country involves sharing in its shame, in some sense in its guilt (Swiss scholar Georges Nivat rightly called Solzhenitsyn’s an “anguished love of country”), and acting to help one’s own nation repent from its collective wickedness. It does not mean, as Solzhenitsyn said, that we ought “to scrape all the guilt from mother earth and load it onto ourselves.” As Daniel J. Mahoney put it, Solzhenitsyn “insisted that contrition should not be confused with masochistic self-hatred.””