NATIONALISM HAS ALWAYS BEEN CONSERVATISM'S ENEMY:

All modern European history began, Babbitt declared, with the French Revolution. Though it had proclaimed a sort of radical internationalism, it had devolved very quickly into a brutal and violent nationalism, with "Viva la nation!" becoming its unholy war cry.

Infected by the ideologies and "isms" first propounded by the French, modern Europe had, too, devolved into particular chaoses of national units. "Europe is to-day less cosmopolitan in any genuine sense of the word than it was at almost any period in the Middle Ages. Moreover, the type of internationalism that has broken down so disastrously, as well as the type of nationalism that has overthrown it, are both of comparatively recent origin. 'The sentiment of nationalities,' says Renan, 'is not a hundred years old.' And, he adds that this sentiment was created in the world by the French Revolution," Babbitt explained. The so-called brotherhood of the Jacobins, Babbitt reminded his readers, was not so much one of universal love, but rather an alliances of "Cains, men whose hands were stained with blood and who looked on one another with incurable distrust." The French, Babbitt continued, moved from universalism to particularism to "bestiality."

How did all this infect Europe? Mostly, the great humanist claimed, because of the rise of a romantic and mushy humanitarianism, one that desired the individual to throw off the so-called shackles of tradition, custom, mores, and norms, to revolt against the fathers and mothers and against all that one inherited. By doing so, the humanitarians had desired the liberation of the "beautiful souls" but, in reality unleashed a form of Promethean individualism. "Not having to reform himself, the beautiful soul can devote himself entirely to reforming society; and this he hopes to do, according as his temper is rationalistic or emotional, either by improving its machinery or by diffusing the spirit of brotherhood." Both utilitarianism and sentimentalism become his tools.

In general, such universalism was flabby in its understanding of the world. With it, "men are not governed by cool reflection as to what pays, but buy their passions and imagination [a word Babbitt held in the highest regard, except when employed poorly]; and the appeal that the emotional pacifist can make to their passions and imagination in the name fo humanity at large, turns out to be pale and unsubstantial compared with the appeal of nationality." Internationalism, thus, would rather inevitably become nationalism.

Critically, Babbitt feared, one could readily (perhaps inevitably) transfer the idea of the beautiful soul from the individual to the nation. "Now, nothing is easier than to transfer this conception of free expansion, without the need of either inner or outer check, from the temperament of the individual to the national temperament."  Though the French may have begun all this with their failed revolution, it was the Germans, Babbitt believed, who adopted the idea--through their mythic Teutonic insanities--and placed it upon the German character. It was, he believed, one of the most "monstrous flatteries" in modern history, and it infected everything the Germans did and believed.

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