Our time is extraordinary. We are living in a time of upheaval, compared to which even the Reformation was only a small ripple. The view of the world and man that has dominated and shaped Europe since antiquity is dying. We are presumably at the end of an era that began about two and a half millennia ago. The strange thing is that hardly anyone is aware of how extraordinary that makes our time. And when this is pointed out to them, most just shrug their shoulders.
The European Tradition
The view of the world and man I am referring to is sometimes summed up in the formula “Athens and Jerusalem.” “Athens” stands for Greek literature, especially Greek philosophy, more specifically Plato and Aristotle, who far surpass all other Greek philosophers. “Jerusalem” stands for the biblical tradition, which focuses on the words, works, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas are the most important Christian authors—the Plato and Aristotle of Christianity, as it were.
And what about Rome, the third pillar of the European tradition? In terms of direct influence on European culture, the Romans surpassed even the Greeks, at least until the early 19th century. But with the partial exception of legal thought, the Roman mind and Roman literature were highly dependent upon the Greeks. The influence of Rome on the European Tradition is to a large extent a mediating—and attenuated—transmission of the Greek spirit.
Athens and Jerusalem are not separate entities. The later books of the Old Testament, and especially the Apocrypha, clearly show the influence of Greek ideas, as does the New Testament. The church fathers and the scholastics are even more Hellenized. Augustine was a Platonist to the end, Thomas Aquinas a Platonic Aristotelian.
The 16th and 17th centuries were the time when the European Tradition stood at its peak. Christianity and Antiquity—or rather, a Christianity shaped by Antiquity—was everywhere the frame of reference, moulding the European spirit almost completely. Among the leading authors at that time were St. Francis de Sales, Jacob Boehme, St. Robert Bellarmine, Francisco Suárez, Cornelius Jansen, Blaise Pascal, John Milton, Jeremy Taylor, John Bunyan, Ralph Cudworth, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, and St. Alfonsus Liguori. I mention these names only to show how foreign that time has become to most of us.
Revolution and counter-revolution
The reason for this alienation is the historical attack on the European tradition. Its beginning lies precisely in that period, in the 17th century. It is known as the Enlightenment, a name the attackers gave themselves to justify themselves and to cast their opponents in a bad light. In their mind, it was they who brought light to centuries of darkness. The most important names are René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes. The latter is the greatest, the Plato of Modernity. Descartes and Hobbes paved the way for all the later thinkers of the Enlightenment. In fact, these only repeated and elaborated what is essentially already to be found in these two.
In the 17th century, the Enlightenment was little more than a counterpoint to tradition, but in the 18th century its following grew rapidly, thanks mainly to the popularising writings of Locke, Voltaire, the authors of the Encyclopédie, and many others. Their work culminated towards the end of the 18th century in the French and American Revolutions, which were largely based on the new ideas of the Enlightenment.
However, the European Tradition was very much alive, so that the new ideas met with considerable resistance. From the beginning, the French Revolution was rejected and opposed by a large part of both the European ruling class and the population. This led in 1815 to the so-called “Restoration,” the attempt to return to the status quo ante. This attempt was doomed to failure, however, because even though the Revolution had ended, the revolutionary ideas had not disappeared. A part of the population was and remained partisans of these new ideas. The rest of the 19th century and much of the 20th century were largely a struggle throughout Europe between the new ideas of the Enlightenment and the European Tradition, between ‘revolution’ and ‘counter-revolution.’
The turmoil that the French Revolution triggered in Europe, however, also gave rise to Romanticism, a view of man and the world that turned not only against the Enlightenment but also against the European Tradition. In the period from 1815 until well into the 20th century, therefore, not two but three views of man and the world struggled for supremacy.
It was a struggle in which the European Tradition slowly but surely lost more and more ground. In the sixties of the 20th century—of which the year 1968 has become symbolic—the final offensive of Enlightenment and Romanticism began. Antiquity and Christianity, Athens and Jerusalem, for centuries the European frame of reference, received the coup de grace in these years. The following half century—our own time—is marked by the definitive elimination of the spirit, the values, the understanding of man and the world of the European Tradition. These are now being radically and comprehensively replaced by a new morality and new laws, which are a product the Enlightenment’s and Romanticism’s new understanding of man and the world.
The water we swim in
If you think about it, it is actually an unimaginable process: In our time, an epoch of about 2,500 years seems to be coming to an end. We are the first to live in a completely new era that no longer wants anything to do with the thinking of the ancestors, but is based entirely on a new spirit and new values. Spirit and values, moreover, that are largely the opposite of the spirit and values that have determined human existence in Europe—and not only there—for centuries and millennia.
The crucial question is: Is this new epoch an advance over the old or does it mean a decline? For most people, the answer to this question is clear: the new is better than the old. Where we are is better than where we came from. In the past, everything was worse. People were poor and died young. The common people were oppressed by the nobility or the clergy or, in another variant, by the capitalists, women by men, children by adults, the individual by the community, and all by the white man. The world was marked by prejudice, ignorance, and superstition. From all this and more, the new era has freed us. Long live the modern world!
Nowadays, with a few exceptions, we are completely modern. The vast majority of Europeans no longer have any idea what Antiquity and Christianity stand for, let alone feel that they are in any way relevant. Many people are no longer even aware that Antiquity and Christianity were for many centuries the measure of things. That the dominant views of man and the world now stem from the Enlightenment and from Romanticism is something only a few are aware of, because they have become so axiomatic. Like water for the younger fish in David Foster Wallace’s joke: two young fish are swimming in the water and meet an older fish who greets them with the words, “Good morning, boys. How’s the water today?” One of the young fish looks at the other and says, “What on earth is water?” Enlightenment and Romanticism have become the taken-for-granted water of the large majority, just as Christianity and Antiquity used to be.
The two modern worldviews are fundamentally related. Both are based on the principles of freedom and equality, and yet they contradict each other because they interpret these principles in completely different ways. Political and social as well as academic debate largely takes place within the boundaries of these two worldviews, with the contemporary ‘Right’ often relying on arguments stemming from the Enlightenment, while the ‘Left’ likes to resort to those with a Romantic background. But there is also a variant of Romantic thought that is generally regarded as ‘right-wing,’ namely nationalism. More on that later.
Conservatism
And conservatism? There is an endless debate around the question of what conservatism actually is. In part this is owing to ‘conservative’ being used as a self-description by people who think completely differently. There are even those who think that conservatism is a synonym for Romantic nationalism. In my opinion, it would be best to describe as conservative that worldview which defends the great European Tradition against Enlightenment and Romanticism. Conservatism in this sense arose in the revolutionary period towards the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. It emerged from the conviction that Enlightenment and Romanticism offer ideologically distorted images of reality. It considers their spread a tragedy because the putting into practice of these ideas seriously threatens human well-being and felicity in both personal and public life.
Essence, not history
These are weighty accusations, and those who make them must present evidence. I will attempt to do this below by means of an analytical sketch of the essence of both the Enlightenment and the Romantic philosophies, including their problematic features. I will then turn to the question of nationalism and its relationship to conservatism.
What is the essence of Enlightenment thinking and of Romanticism? Is it the greatest common denominator of all the opinions uttered by partisans of the two parties? Certainly not. A statistical average is something quite different from the essence of a thing. The essence of Enlightenment thinking and of Romanticism lie in the ideas they stand for, thought through to their logical conclusion. Many Enlightenment thinkers were and are not willing or able to consistently think their ideas through to the end. They are split and shimmer between Enlightenment and Tradition, Enlightenment and Romanticism, or between all three. The same is true for many Romantics.
So, this is not an historical analysis, but an analysis of essence. I am not interested, here, in the Enlightenment and Romanticism as historical episodes or movements. Nor am I interested in what this or that Enlightenment thinker or Romantic wrote and how that differs from what others might have written. Rather, I am interested in what in essence underlies their respective ways of thinking. If one peels this out, it immediately becomes clear that Enlightenment and Romanticism are not merely great historical movements, but they also remain our contemporary ways of thinking par excellence. They even ground the ruling ideologies of our time. This is so, even though they are up to three hundred years in the making, having emerged between the 17th and 19th centuries.
The Enlightenment
First, a sketch of the Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant is often regarded as its greatest representative. In reality, though, he is one of its earliest critics. The ideas of Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Claude-Adrien Helvétius, and Paul Henri Thiry d’Holbach: these constitute the Enlightenment. All authors whom Kant disapprovingly called representatives of the “doctrine of happiness” (Glückseligkeitslehre). This doctrine of happiness was and is the mainstream of Enlightenment thinking.
Admittedly, one cannot help but also appreciate the Enlightenment, especially for its concern for the common man. Freedom, in the age-old sense of not being a slave, and equality, in the sense of being equal before the law, are noble ideals. This also applies to the ideal of a society in which all live in a certain prosperity and the eternal plague of poverty is overcome. The Enlightenment also understood the role that technology, based on the modern natural sciences, and the market, based on free exchange, play in bringing all this about. Only on this basis, is a material bien-être for all possible. These are not trifles.
But, having set natural science and free markets on their course, the Enlightenment swiftly degenerated into crass hedonism. The initially modest belief in the possibility of achieving a general level of comfort soon gave rise to the idea of basically unlimited technical and material progress. Its aim became to make it possible to satisfy ever more desires, whatever they might be. From then on, this ever-higher hope was to be equivalent to happiness and the meaning of life.
Since then, everything began to revolve around consumption. In order to consume, we have to work (at least, perhaps, until the invention of the technology that makes work superfluous). Money, once earned, is to be spent on our hearts’ desires. Seen in this light, man is first and foremost a producer and a consumer in an increasingly technology-suffused marketplace. Production and consumption under the conditions of competition and technological progress are the poles around which life revolves. Everything is meant to be seen in their terms, including education, politics, and the state. The goal of education is the acquisition of the competences necessary for the role of producer in the market. The goal of the state is the legal ordering of production and consumption in the market, while continuously stimulating technological progress and economic growth.
Note that according to this ideology there is no place for outmoded realities such as communities or borders. The natural work of the market and of technological innovation only work when unhindered by ‘artificial’ boundaries. Enlightened people are therefore individualists and globalists. Social problems, even if caused by the global market and technology, can and will be solved by the same global market and technology—meaning by the price mechanism on the one hand and by technological progress stimulated by the market on the other.
What are the consequences of Enlightenment thinking? If life is about satisfying as many desires as possible, then it ends up leading to a world completely dominated by the desires of the great mass of humanity: a world of amusement parks, shopping malls and outlets, ubiquitous motorways and car parks, playgrounds, wellness centres, hypermarkets, porn hubs and online shopping, prefabricated houses and housing estates, a universal tourism industry and a plethora of sweets, alcohol, fatty foods, drugs and screens, screens, and more screens. Because, for the vast majority of humanity, the meaning of life is to do what you feel like doing. And what you feel like doing is eating, drinking, shopping, having sex, and entertaining yourself. ‘Having a good time,’ as the case might be. This is a world in which all human relations become liquid and volatile. Stable families and communities are a thing of the past. The individual and his fleeting desires is the only thing that counts. That is where the originally noble idea of the emancipation of the common man has brought us.
Romanticism
And Romanticism? It is essentially a criticism of the Enlightenment project, a counter-Enlightenment, a second, alternative design of Modernity. From the Romantic point of view, the Enlightenment alienated the world from its natural state. Romanticism is essentially a call to leave this alienated, enlightened world behind and return to nature, to a natural life, to authenticity, to Eigentlichkeit: true being. It saw the Enlightenment as a kind of fall from grace, which made man a slave in a new sense has disfigured the world and made it ugly, uninhabitable by the sincere souls or natural man. Hence, ‘Back to nature!’
The world, our natural environment, is much more than the raw material for the satisfaction of our desires, says the Romantic. Besides, life is about something quite different than the satisfaction of desires. Enlightenment thinking, if followed to its conclusion, will take mankind down a ruinous path, and it might even destroy the world. Putting desires on the throne leads to the exploitation of the weak both here and elsewhere, for instance, by paying below subsistence wages; to the unscrupulous and profit-driven mistreatment of animals in the meat industry; to the equally unscrupulous poisoning of consumers with sweet, fatty and unhealthy foods; to the establishing of a medical-pharmaceutical complex that has an interest in maintaining and, if possible, increasing the number of sick people. The increasingly sophisticated information technology used by profit-oriented producers is causing the privacy and human dignity of the individual to go up in smoke. The ever growing production and consumption cycle threatens to ruin the climate, threaten plant and animal species, etc.
The Enlightenment view of man as essentially a producer and a consumer is seen by the Romantics as philistine. From its very beginning, Romanticism has argued that life is about something quite different than the satisfaction of desires. Life is not about making and spending money, it is not about wealth and entertainment. Life is about authenticity, about Eigentlichkeit. That means ‘being who you are’ as an individual and letting other people and the world be as they are. Not to want to change, renew, and improve everything, as progressive, ‘enlightened’ people want to, and actually making things worse or destroying much of the greatest value. Not to pass oneself by in the name of purchasing power and prosperity, but to be oneself and to actualize oneself, even if this means that one’s purchasing power is much lower than it could otherwise be. And in the same vein, not to see nature as raw material for possible production, but as something that has value in itself and must be left alone to be and to actualize itself. Not to see man as the ruler of the world, who arranges the world in the way that is most useful to him and serves his desires the most, but as a guest who respects the natural environment in its Eigentlichkeit. Not motorways, but country lanes. Not industrially baked bread, but artisan spelt bread. Not continuous economic growth, but a sustainable, stationary economy. Not an amusement park, but ‘the path inwards.’ And so on.
How is all this to be achieved? Ultimately through a ‘change of consciousness.’ Man must become aware of his alienation from the nature around him and from his own nature and radically change his life and his society. The most important instrument for this is the state. Its task is to tame or to ban the market and the purportedly wicked instances of technological innovation nationally, internationally, and supranationally. This would be achieved not only through legislation but also by education, to raise the ‘consciousness’ of the citizens in order to bring about a better society.
This sounds like the opposite of the Enlightenment mission. But note that the Romantic mission is ultimately just as individualist and globalist as the Enlightenment message, although it is based on quite different arguments and leads to a different kind of individualism and globalism. The market and technology do not stop at the border. Thus, the politics needed to tame them cannot stop there either. Exploitation and oppression are global phenomena, as are the pollution of nature, climate destruction, and mass tourism. That is why a global policy is needed. Moreover, authenticity and Eigentlichkeit are also truly universalist ideals. Everyone and everything in the world must be able to actualize itself, to be and remain itself. This implies a global missionary task for the Romantic politician: the self-same ‘change of consciousness’ is needed everywhere in the world. Again, individualism and globalism go hand in hand here, but both signifying something completely different than in the Enlightenment view.
Radical individualism
What to make of all this? It is impossible to reject Romanticism completely. It is a necessary correction of Enlightenment optimism regarding the market and technology. Only those who are completely blind can still ignore Romanticism’s criticisms today and cling unthinkingly to the idea that the market and technology offer solutions to all problems. But what about the Romantic alternative to the Enlightenment? What about its ideal of authenticity, of Eigentlichkeit? Of ‘back to nature’? This ideal is at least as problematic as the ideals of the Enlightenment.
I don’t mean a healthy diet and lifestyle. These are of course highly recommended. These are often described as ‘natural,’ although they are only very partially so. Even the most strictly organic ‘natural yoghurt’ is not very natural. Nature is useless and even dangerous to humans unless cultivated by human hands and ingenuity. What is also unproblematic is more green spaces and parkland, more fresh air, a somewhat simpler and healthier lifestyle and an equally healthier diet. All of this is highly recommended.
However, one cannot go much further. Even if, at the bottom line, life would be better without cars and computers, you can hardly ban them and hunt everyone back to the countryside, à la Pol Pot, to once again become a self-sufficient farmer. Thanks to the market and technology, the world’s population now comprises eight billion people. A real return to nature would mean a quick death for most of them. It goes without saying that the explosive growth of the world’s population cannot continue in this way. But a ‘return to nature’ is not the solution to a potential overcrowding of the earth.
The problematic nature of Romantic thinking becomes even more apparent when we consider its view of man and his purpose in life. For the Enlightenment, man is a homo economicus, driven by his desires—his will to consume—and is unchangeable in this. Romanticism recognises that man is indeed often a slave to his desires, but it believes that man does not have to be that way and should not be. Life, Romanticism holds, is about getting to know oneself and becoming that true self, ‘actualizing’ oneself. Only those who are truly themselves are free. The highest commandment for every human being is, in other words, to be authenticitic. Nothing is more necessary than (to be able) to be oneself. Anyone can sense how influential this ideal is in Europe today. Almost every child grows up thinking that his real, deep self is the most precious thing he has. It is the God inside that needs to be cared for most of all. (The present (trans)gender craze is rooted in these ideas.)
These ideas constitute the most radical, uncompromising individualism of all time. This individualism does not say, like the individualism of the Enlightenment, that each person should choose as much as possible for himself, but that each person should choose only what suits his self. That is, it must be said, outrageous. It leads to a hopeless search for an intangible being: one’s unique, true, deepest self. It leads to endless navel-gazing, incessant inner doubt, indecision, and paralysis. The focus on one’s own authentic self also means that to the age-old conviction that everyone must learn how life should be lived from others, and particularly from elders, becomes inconceivable. Imitation, after all, is incompatible with authenticity. The result: boundless experimentation, many unnecessary mistakes, and, ultimately, failed lives.
Above all, however, the ideal of authenticity leads to limitless egoism. When the highest commandment is to be oneself, adaptation to and being considerate of others are out of the question. Hence the much-invoked: ‘Everyone should accept me as I am!’ and ‘I must above all remain true to myself!’—both serving primarily to justify unsocial and egoistic decisions. The ego is made the final authority; it is made God.
Here our brief description of the two reigning views of man and the world—Enlightenment and Romanticism—must end. The current public, political, and academic debate in Europe—and the rest of the West—today takes place almost exclusively within this intellectual framework. Together they constitute the so-called mainstream.
Nationalism
As a conservative, one stands in the middle of all this, looks and listens with amazement at all the res novae and asks oneself how the world could have slid in such a way, and how it was possible for man to have strayed so far from the path of the tradition. The way forward is the way back, we conservatives know that. But is it possible to go back, to somehow save and revive the great European Tradition? Or is there no hope?
For about twenty years now, we have observed the rise of views and parties that are called ‘national’ or ‘nationalist.’ The mainstream is increasingly criticised in the name of the people, the nation, and borders. The mainstream’s reaction has thus far been a profound horror. In its discourse, the only relevant variables are the individual and the universal (the global), the ego and the globe as a whole—and the EU is a prelude to the latter. That is the discourse with which the mainstream is familiar and which it sees as true, rational, decent, and right.
However, more and more people are now coming forward to appeal to an intermediate category—the people or the nation—to demand that political sovereignty remains at the national level, and that in politics one’s own people should come first. This does not fit at all with the prevailing thinking, and in many people evokes associations with the aggressively expansive nationalism of the first half of the 20th century.
Such associations, of course, are absurd. The current form of nationalism is neither aggressive nor expansive, but defensive. Moreover, for the earlier form of nationalism, the race to which one belonged was decisive; for today’s nationalism, it is culture: language, values, morals, and customs. These are essential intellectual differences that must be taken into consideration.
The question is: is this nationalism a hopeful sign for conservatives? Are national or nationalist views and parties akin to conservatism? Do they also want a return to the European tradition? Or are they rather a variation of modern thought, and as such just as opposed to the tradition as the main currents of Enlightenment and Romanticism? I would say: the picture is mixed. Today’s nationalism is partly of a Romantic nature, partly also of traditional provenance.
Romantic nationalism
Let us begin with nationalism of the Romantic kind. This nationalism, like the mainstream, individualistic variety of Romanticism, takes the idea of authenticity as its starting point. Only here this idea is not applied to the individual human being but to the people, to the nation. Rousseau, the father of Romanticism, speaks of a moi commun, a common, great self. The nation is seen as a great ‘I’ of which the individual is only a part. The great ‘I’ is important. The small ‘I’ matters only insofar as it is of use to the great. The highest value is the Eigentlichkeit of the great I. It is to be preserved in its purity. It must be defended and, if necessary, reconquered. Just as mainstream, individualistic Romanticism is an idolatry, an idolatry of the little ‘I,’ so Romantic nationalism is an idolatry of the great ‘I’: the people, the nation.
This can be seen in three phenomena in particular. Firstly, the language, which takes on religious features: expressions, rituals, and attitudes traditionally reserved for God or the church are here applied to the nation. Think of qualifications like ‘holy,’ as in ‘holy Germany’; or the quasi-religious reverence for everything that represents the nation, from the flag and the national anthem to the leader and the state. It is no accident that Eric Voegelin and others have called this type of nationalism a substitute religion.
The second characteristic of this idolatry is the exclusivity of its focus on the nation. One hears little or nothing about the importance and value of other communities. This applies both to communities smaller than the nation or the nation-state (family and relatives, villages, neighbourhoods, civil and political associations, and so on), and to the community that encompasses all European countries, indeed all of humanity. For Romantic nationalism, the nation is the unum necessarium: the only thing necessary.
Thirdly and lastly, Romantic nationalism, just like mainstream individualistic Romanticism for that matter, is linked to a pervasive moral relativism. What is good for one’s specific nation is good, what is bad for it is bad. There is no lex naturalis that is eternal and valid for all man and all people, no moral commandments that transcend the salvation of one’s nation.
This Romantic type of nationalism is in clear tension with the European tradition. If we define conservatism as the defender of this tradition—as I think we should—then Romantic nationalism is also in tension with conservatism. Insofar as such Romantic ideas play a role in today’s national or nationalist parties, I do not think we can see these parties as a hopeful sign.
Communitarianism
But nationalism is not necessarily Romantic nationalism. And today’s nationalism is, in my opinion, for the most part not Romantic, but founded in traditional insights.
Today’s nationalism is based on a concept that has traditionally underpinned every analysis of politics and society, but which has almost completely disappeared from contemporary consciousness: the concept of community. For the modern individualists and globalists, this concept means little or nothing. If it evokes any associations, they are mainly those of suppressed authenticity (Romanticism) or of restrictions on competition (Enlightenment).
As we said earlier, for modern people from Left to Right, society consists only of the market and the state. The Right wants to leave most things to the market, the Left thinks the state must regulate most things through the state. That there is also a third entity, the community, is hardly noticed anymore, or, when it is, it is seen as something unpleasant.
In fact, society has always been first and foremost a community, or a community of communities. Community is man’s natural habitat. The market and the state emerged as auxiliary systems in the service of the communities. Gradually, however, and at an accelerating pace after the Second World War, the market and the state have taken the place of the community, thereby largely dissolving it. In Europe and the rest of the West it now exists only in rudimentarily form, for example in villages where the population is still rooted and knows each other well. The cities and urbanised areas are almost exclusively inhabited by individualised people, whose lives are largely organised by the market and the state. They are not part of any substantial communities. Even families, the most original and biologically rooted of all communities, are weaker than ever and have lost much of their original cohesion.
Geborgenheit
Is the disappearance of community problematic? To answer that question, we need to understand what the difference between community, market, and state is. Analytically, the difference is clear. In a community, the values that (should) prevail in the family, in kinship, and in friendship apply gratuitous mutual help and support of one member for another, with brotherly and maternal love as the exemplar par excellence. In the market, self-interest and money prevail; in the state, rules apply that are imposed from a position of power and enforced under the threat of violence. In everyday reality, of course, there are all kinds of intermediate forms, but the differences are also clearly recognisable there.
Both the market and the state are indispensable in every developed society, but that does not mean that they are the alpha and omega of society. Man is a social being, who can only be comfortable in Geborgenheit: he needs to be sheltered from the storm. A closely related notion is that of ‘belonging’ as opposed to being a stranger or alien.
This is something little reflected upon by modern man. It does not fit into his world view, which centres on the market and the state. But Geborgenheit, a sense of belonging, cannot be provided by the state and the market. Yet it is something that every man, even modern man, deeply longs for. The German word “Heimat” has exactly this connotation, the shelteredness, resulting from belonging to a community. “Heimat” is related to “Heim,” meaning “home.” All notions that are central to today’s nationalist discourse have sprung up from the feeling, that more and more people share, of losing one’s ‘home.’ The nationalist is homesick for the Geborgenheit¸ the sense of belonging that his community once gave him.
All communities that exist, whether big or small, are based on and provide a sense of belonging. This feeling can only exist if the members of a community share things that create an emotional bond: whether the bonds blood, of a faith, a language, or virtues and customs, values and traditions. Only this causes people to judge: ‘We belong together!’ Only this leads to feelings of comradeship, mutual loyalty, and commitment to help and support. Such feelings are hence of eminent importance in a human life. Those who have to do without them have only the cool, business-like market mechanism and the equally cool and business-like state to fall back on. “Woe to him who has no home!” Nietzsche writes somewhere. He is right.
This longing for Geborgenheit is certainly not an inappropriate feeling. The desire for shelteredness in the community, for a home, the need to belong, is deeply human, and it reflects an important truth: the good life outside a community is virtually impossible for human beings.
Kinds of communities
The most important communities in human life are family, relatives, and friends. Thus, they are what people ultimately fall back on when in need. Those who have no family, relatives, or friends inevitably have an insecure foundation to build their lives on. In the end, they are often all alone.
In addition to family and friends, there are also other communities that give the individual Geborgenheit. First and foremost, the traditional village and neighbourhood. But also traditional church communities and other traditional associations. I mean associations whose memberships are stable and whose members know each other and their families long and well.
Since the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the national community, overarching all others, has loomed over all these communities. It establishes the unity of the people and the fatherland, in which the members of the people are no longer separate individuals or communities but, in a sense, all become part of the same family, who owe each other gratuitous help and support because they belong together and are part of the same tribe.
Inclusivity
Life without community is not worth living. But every community is exclusive, i.e., not ‘inclusive.’ A community is unthinkable without the dichotomy of inside and outside, ‘us’ and ‘them.’ For Romantic individualists, this is the reason to be against communities, forgetting that the market and the state also exclude in their own way: namely, those who cannot pay the price, and those who do not conform to the rules.
Exclusion is necessarily part of human existence and cannot be abolished. ‘Inclusivity’ is a utopian concept that in practice only destroys communities without lifting exclusion. Families are communities too. In fact, they are the most important communities. And they—necessarily—exclude like no other community. Is that a reason to ban them under the banner of ‘inclusivity’?
Another side of every community is the restriction of market efficiency, the curbing of competition. This is the reason for Enlightenment devotees to be against communities. If the community impedes competition to such an extent that utter poverty is the result, there is much to be said for the Enlightenment critique. But as long as this is not the case, it should be kept in mind that the Geborgenheit of the community is a much greater good than the extra purchasing power that one gains if one exchanges the community for more market.
Subsidiarity
To sum up: a good society is a community of communities, not of atomized individuals. This includes the community of the nation. The mainstream lacks all understanding of this basic fact. It thinks the market and the state are the only possible social institutions. This is a fundamental error, bringing about political, social and psychological disruption and chaos. It is to the great credit of today’s nationalists that they have brought the concept of community back into the public, political, and academic discourse.
But does that mean that nationalists and conservatives are natural allies? It depends. Let us ask ourselves what exact notion of the nation and nationalism follows from the traditional concept of community, as set out above.
Firstly, as we have already noted, the most important communities are the everyday communities: family, village community, church, etc. Then come the broader ones like the region and the province. Then the nation. Then the continent from which one comes. Finally, there is the community of all people.
The more encompassing a community is, the less its existential significance. What does this mean for nationalism? That it must know its place. It is better to be part of a nation than of a continental or global empire. But on the other hand, family, village, church, club, and so on are much more important in daily life. The nation, the people, is existentially only a thin community. The nation can never replace a concrete and stable social fabric that exists at lower levels. A world in which only atomised individuals exist below the level of the nation is a nightmare in the making. A nationalism that neglects or even destroys the social fabric in the name of the nation is just as undesirable as imperial, continentalist, or globalist ideologies.
The nation must therefore never become the most important thing, let alone the only thing. The principle must be community—both as small as possible and as large as necessary. The tradition speaks of decentralisation or ‘subsidiarity.’ We begin with the smallest circle, which is the basis. The larger ones only take over where the smaller ones fail. Vibrant small communities are what a good society first and foremost consists of.
Personal care requires small units: small schools, small classes, small shops, small hospitals, etc. In big units people unavoidably become nothing but numbers. Real citizenship can really only exist in small units like city states, small towns, and villages. Everywhere else, people are primarily subjects, no matter what the political rhetoric.
If we use size as a yardstick to judge nationalism, the conclusion can only be that a national state is preferable in scale to an empire. But nation states are generally too big themselves to provide a substantial sense of community. The focus should therefore not be exclusively on the nation state, but above all on the preservation and restoration of smaller units.
Secondly, nationalism tends to lose sight not only of the weight of the smaller communities, but also of the larger ones. I am referring in particular to the European community. And I hasten to say immediately that I am not talking here about the European Union (EU) and the “community of values” it represents. These are the values of the Enlightenment and (individualistic) Romanticism. I am, instead, talking about the Europe that shares a centuries-old heritage of Antiquity and Christianity, the Europe of the great European Tradition.
Incidentally, this was also the Europe of the three Catholics Robert Schumann, Alcide de Gasperi, and Konrad Adenauer, the founding fathers of the European Community. Their Europe was certainly not the “community of values” that today’s EU advocates think Europe is. For these founding fathers, the European Community stood for a return to the great European tradition, which united all European nations and nationalities across the board, regardless of their religious and cultural differences. That was shortly after the Second World War. The idea was: the war was only possible because we neglected this great tradition too much and ran too much after nationalism. Which, it seems to me, is true and important to recognize. It would therefore suit today’s nationalist parties to not only think of their own nation, but to strive for an alternative Europe, a confederation of European nations, united by the common spirit of the great European tradition.
Whether that will happen is, of course, questionable. But if it doesn’t, only two alternatives remain. Either we will be ruled by a distant Brussels bureaucracy, which will impose the enlightened and individualist-Romantic perspective everywhere, with the whip of the market and the whip of—European wide—central regulation. Or the thirty or so sovereign states will do exactly the same themselves: namely, imposing the Enlightenment and individualist-Romantic perspective everywhere, with the whip of the market and the whip of (national) central regulation. Neither is an attractive prospect.
The house of being
Finally, two more remarks about a nationalism that help to put it in its right place. Firstly, what distinguishes a nation above all is a common language. That is what conveys a sense of ‘we’ more than anything else. Those who speak the language flawlessly belong to us. All others are foreigners. Consequently, the boundaries of language and nation tend to coincide. For the advocates of a European empire, multilingualism in Europe is thus a problem. They must have a preference for monolingualism. Europe will only become one when all Europeans speak the same language—just as the Americans do.
But monolingualism also has disadvantages, very big disadvantages, in fact. Because a language is much more than a means of communication between people. It is a way of being in the world. It is the home of the mind. A statement cannot simply be transposed into another language. Every language has its own peculiarity that is lost in translation. Different languages also mean different ways of seeing the world, of being in the world. They all reveal the mystery of reality in a different way. So, it is important that each people should continue to speak its own language.
This insight carries great weight and is a powerful argument for preserving nations. At the same time, it also shows the limits and dangers inherent in nationalism. For those who speak only their own language, those who are monolingual, are mentally trapped, even if they are not aware of it. Learning other languages is an enormous enrichment and deepening of the mind. Varying slightly on Goethe’s words, one could say: “He who does not speak a foreign language does not know his own soul.” After all, all knowledge is comparative knowledge. Self-knowledge begins with seeing oneself through the eyes of others. This is only possible if one speaks the language of the other. Nationalism can easily lead to speaking only one’s own language and losing sight of everything else. And this applies to every monolingualism, also to a Europe-wide one.
The telos of man
Lastly, there is something else that weighs most heavily in a correct assessment of nationalism. When, after death, standing before God’s throne, a man does not save himself by saying that he was a good German or Dutchman or Frenchman. God is not interested in that at all. He only asks one thing: ‘Were you a good person?’ The only thing that matters in the end is striving to be a good person. And with that ultimate telos of man, we have, of course, left the nation and nationalism—but also inter- and supranationalism—far behind.
