Alasdair MacIntyre wrote that to be asked to die for the modern state is like being asked to die for the telephone company. Is this claim true?
AT&T did not organize and successfully execute the storming of the beaches at Normandy. Verizon did not abolish slavery by a civil war. The founders of T-Mobile did not organize a government based on the claim that all are “created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
In his 2021 fall conference lecture, “What We Owe to the Dead, Alas!” MacIntyre said that “extraordinary gratitude” was in order for those who had “willingly and courageously given their lives so that the victory over atrocity and injustice could be achieved” in the Second World War. I could not agree more. They did not die for phone service. They suffered death to defeat extraordinary evils that only other nation states, banding together as allies, could defeat.
To reduce our nation to a bureaucratic service provider does not do justice to the history, culture, and creed of our nation. It is a blindness to what is beautiful about our nation and a failure of gratitude for what we now enjoy.
In a nation, the focal meaning of the community of friendship is greatly extended, “Like gold to airy thinness beat,” to use the words of John Donne. But for Aristotle and Aquinas, the community of friendship extends in a certain sense to all human beings. If an extended sense of community can reach everyone in the human family, it can also reach everyone in our nation with whom we share particular histories, activities, and cultures. If we can be called to love the planet and act for its good, we can surely also love our country enough to do what we can to shape its future.
For Aquinas, this friendly love is ordered: “In matters pertaining to nature we should love our kindred most, in matters concerning relations between citizens, we should prefer our fellow-citizens, and on the battlefield our fellow-soldiers.” The call to love all human beings is particularized by opportunities to serve those to whom we have particular ties, especially ties generated by gratitude and by those that we have the power to help.
To reduce our nation to a bureaucratic service provider does not do justice to the history, culture, and creed of our nation.
As Edward Feser points out, people have a special love for their own families which does not require them to hate or harm other families. Feser writes, “In the same way, people naturally and rightly have a special love for their own country, but this need not and should not lead them to despise and want to lord it over other countries.”
This proper love of country is the virtue of patriotism. It avoids the extreme of an ultranationalism that idolizes a nation. The virtue of patriotism also avoids the opposite extreme of antinationalism that demonizes a nation.
Some people mistake their country for the kingdom of God. Other people are blind to the benefits we have been given by our homeland. Many of us, I fear, are like the son blind to paternal gifts as recounted in Robert Hayden’s poem, “Those Winter Sundays.”
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
A withdrawal from politics, including national politics, is failure to be grateful for those goods that our nation has provided for us. Indeed, if we care about local politics, as MacIntyre urges us to do, at least in the United States, we should also give due care to national politics. Given the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, federal legislation can preempt state and local regulations. So anyone who cares about the local, as MacIntyre does, has reason to care about the national.
Some of us may be called to make large differences for the well-being of our country by running for office or serving in public life. Yet properly qualified, I agree with MacIntyre’s claim that “those who make the conquest of state power their aim are always in the end conquered by it.” The necessary qualification is that those who make the conquest of state power their ultimate aim are always in the end conquered by it. To make an idol of anything is, in the end, self-defeating. One can make an idol of any created good, including family life, local politics, a religious community, labor unions, co-ops, schools, or credit unions.
All of us are called to love, and the concrete ways we are to love is shaped by our personal vocations and the virtue of practical wisdom. But failure to love one’s country and take action to aid one’s nation is ingratitude and a lack of ordered love.