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.”
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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.””

— David Deavel

Whittaker Chambers and Solzhenitsyn

In a probing new piece over at American Mind, our own Daniel J. Mahoney pays tribute to Whittaker Chambers on the 70th anniversary of the publication of his extraordinary memoir, Witness. Chambers, who “did not return from Hell with empty hands,” in André Malraux’s memorable formulation, shared with Solzhenitsyn a dim view of man’s ability to orient himself morally if “blind to the things of the spirit.”

“Solzhenitsyn never attacked reason—not for a moment—but rather criticized an “anthropocentric humanism” that mistook human beings for gods and denied God’s saving presence in the human world. Václav Havel made much of the same argument in his well-received essays and speeches from the 1970s through the 1990s. But in Chambers’ and Solzhenitsyn’s cases their moderate and humane messages, alert to the evil that lurks in men’s hearts and in ideologies that attack both God and man, were willfully and mendaciously confused by our cultural elites with moral fanaticism. That effort in elite circles to in essence silence or cancel both Chambers and Solzhenitsyn is worthy of much reflection. It reveals the woke spirit avant la lettre.”

— Daniel J. Mahoney