NOT BY BLOOD:

The Love of Country

So first, and most simply, Burke is very concerned with the love of country--we might say with nationalism as a kind of patriotism, which he takes to be essential to a healthy political life. He thinks this sentiment runs very deep in most people. As he put it at the Warren Hastings trial in 1794: "Next to the love of parents for their children, the strongest instinct both natural and moral that exists in man is the love of his country." This is real love, a passion more than a reflection, and it's connected to the fact of having grown up amid the sights and sounds and smells of the place. "The native soil has a sweetness in it beyond a harmony of verse," Burke says.

This kind of patriotism is very visceral. It literally is about soil sometimes. Though not about blood. Burke thinks there is a metaphorical connection between blood ties and national ties, but only as a metaphor. Key to the strength of British national feeling, he writes in 1790, is that "we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections."

But notice the distinction: The image of a relation in blood, not the reality of a relation in blood. The image, and with it a crucial part of the love of country, is achieved by treating our country as an extension of our family, and by seeing it as a source of what we have in common with those with whom we have the most in common. It's precisely a way of extending our sense of who we are as a people beyond blood ties.

This deep love of country has great political significance in Burke's view. It is crucial to what holds a people together, and to why people respect the law, and the authority of their government. When the French tried to tear up the sources of this national sentiment and replace them with abstractions about the rights of man, as Burke puts it, they left the law with no support except the power of the state.

That ended any prospect for a free society in France. Love of country is therefore absolutely necessary for the freedom of a free society.

And yet, the key to this love of our country is not just that the country is ours. "To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely," Burke famously wrote in the Reflections on the Revolution in France. And what makes it lovely is what he called its "distinct system of manners"--that is its ways and habits, its most cherished commitments. Or we might say its national character.

National Character

This is the second of Burke's ideas about nationalism that might help us think more clearly: that there is such a thing as a national character, and that it is somehow at the heart of the life of the nation.

That character is a product of common experience, formed over history, and holding us together in time. It is the sum of the things we do and believe, and something like the nation's personality. A society's political life is an expression of its national character, and can only really function as long as it is somehow aligned with that character.

This character of the British people constantly arises in Burke's approach to the French Revolution, for instance. The British will not ultimately be tempted by the example of France, he writes, because "Thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century."

National character is particularly important to how Burke thinks about political revolutions and transformations--and not only in France. It's how he understands the events of the Glorious Revolution, and how he thinks about the Polish uprising against the Russians and about indigenous uprisings in India. These revolts, all of which Burke defends, arose in defense of the character of each of those nations.

And this is crucial to his thinking about America, too. Burke comes to believe that the Americans should be allowed their independence because he thinks the British have tried to govern them in a way that ignores and insults their national character. As he put it to parliament, "In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole."

A failure to govern a people in accordance with its national character is not only imprudent but also a kind of injustice. This is key to what he saw happening in France. He suggests that the French Revolution was not a popular uprising in defense of the national character but a kind of elite coup against it. It was an effort to extinguish the nation through a politics of abstraction imposed on the people by a small minority of radicals.

"These pretended citizens," Burke says of the revolutionaries, treat France like a conquered country, not like their own country. They "condemn a subdued people, and insult their feelings," he says, and "destroy all vestiges of the ancient country, in religion, in polity, in laws, and in manners."

Notice that these invaders who would destroy all vestiges of the national character are French, not foreigners. Burke several times over his decades of political writing suggests that the character of a nation needs to be defended by the people not just from foreign conquest but from domestic corruption or decadence.

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