Simone Weil on Nationalism and Rootedness

Simone Weil's The Need for Roots contains some complicated and occasionally contradictory thoughts on nationalism. (Like the similarly complicated thoughts on equality). Early in the book, in her section canvassing the fundamental "needs of the soul," she emphasizes the need for "honor" that goes beyond ordinary, interpersonal respect. The key feature of honor is that it ties people to great traditions of the past: "This need is fully satisfied where each of the social organisms to which a human being belongs allows him to share in a noble tradition enshrined in its past history and given public acknowledgment" (19).

We need to have heroes--socially recognized heroes--with whom we identify. She aptly notes the difficulty of this need when combined with the pressures of cultural assimilation and immigration:

Had France been conquered by the English in the fifteenth century, Joan of Arc would be well and truly forgotten, even to a greate xtent by us. We now talk about her to the Annamites and the Arabs; but they know very well that here in France we don't allow their heroes and saints to be talked about; therefore the state in which we keep them is an affront to their honour (20). 

The need for honor connects to the master topic of her book, the need for "rootedness." She defines rootedness as "participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future" (43).

One thinks here immediately of Burke's famous reworking of social contractarianism:

Society is indeed a contract.... but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. 

The "rootedness" our souls require entails a recognition of the connection between our lives and the treasures of the past and future. The rootlessness of the modern world is in large part a consequence of violent conquest and even more damning capitalist economic dislocation. On this latter point:

Money destroys man roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures. (44).

A friend of mine flagged this passage to me. He noted that this broad point--the complaint about a rising "cash nexus" society in which we only relate to one another via self-interested contract--is well known. What's striking about Weil's version is her focus on the mechanism. A rich, rooted social life is complicated, characterized by competing, overlapping sources and sorts of authority. It is much easier to wipe that all away and think only in terms of cash contract. Adam Smith might think something similar--this is why he is so keen on the aesthetic appeal of an orderly, simple system. I'm reminded too of Chesterton's definition of the madman: "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."

Weil's next section is about the rootlessness brought about by the modern economy. Much of her discussion is persuasive, broadly in the vein of a utopian socialist/distributist communitarian criticism of modern industrial capitalism.

My main interest here, however, is in Weil's section on the nation as a source of rootedness. She begins that discussion by noting that the State is effectively the only institution we have left that connects us to the past and future (99). Neither the family nor the village nor the professional guild can do that anymore.

This is where things get confusing. Weil is ferociously critical of the modern French state. Forged out of the brutal conquests of early modernity and the revolution of 1789, modern France's claim to unity comes out of a violent rejection of the past. Democratic popular sovereignty in modern times has become the essence of French patriotism. (The only alternative to that is a LARPy legitimism that ignores France's present and its future). Consequently, modern France is unlovable. The French "hunger for something to love which is made of flesh and blood" (114).

The political Right clings to nationalism, but has turned it into a kind of idolatry. Weil associates this idolatrous nationalism with the legacy of Rome: "The Romans really were an atheistic and idolatrous people; not idolatrous with regard to images made of stone or bronze, but idolatrous with regard to themselves. It is this idolatry of self which they have bequeathed to us in the form of patriotism" (140).

The political Left rejects nationalism and turns instead to a cosmopolitan justice. This too is a mistake. It entails an abandonment of the past, which is essential for rootedness: "Loss of the past, whether it be collectively or individually, is the supreme human tragedy, and we have thrown ours away just like a child picking off the petals of a rose" (119).

(As Weil wryly notes, it's not really possible to reject nationalism. The cosmopolitan left has really just turned the Soviet Union into the locus of its national pride).

So Weil wants us to reinvent patriotism. Unpatriotic citizens are contemptible and infantile. They are like children always making demands and always refusing to obey (154). A healthy patriotism cannot be held with unmixed pride, for that way leads to neo-Roman, pagan, fascism. Nor can patriotism just be dedication to a set of principles, for that is too bloodless to satisfy the need for rootedness.

Weil's solution for all this is a Christian patriotism (as opposed to the Roman patriotism):

One can either love France for the glory which would seem to ensure for her a prolonged existence in time and space; or else one can love her as something which, being earthly, can be destroyed, and is all the more precious on that account (170).

We cannot ignore past sins (as the neo-Romans do). Nor can we tell noble lies to deceive ourselves about what we have done. But dwelling on past crimes should not destroy our sense of patriotism. On the contrary, in a strange sense we must love our country all the more because of its faults. This is the key difference between the Roman patriotism of glory and the Christian patriotism of compassion:

Let no one imagine either that a love of this [compassionate] nature would run the risk of ignoring or rejecting what there is of pure and genuine grandeur in the past history of France, or in the country's present hopes and ideals. Quite the opposite. Compassion is all the more tender, all the more poignant, the more good one is able to discern in the being who forms the object of it, and predisposes one to discern the good. When a Christian represents to himself Christ on the Cross, his compassion is not diminished by the thought of the latter's perfection, nor the other way about. But, on the other hand, such a love can keep its eyes open on injustices, cruelties, mistakes, falsehoods, crimes and scandals contained in the country's past, its present and in its ambitions in general, quite openly and fearlessly, and without being thereby diminished; the love being only rendered thereby more painful. Where compassion is concerned, crime itself provides a reason, not for withdrawing oneself, but for approaching, not with the object of sharing the guilt, but the shame. Mankind's crimes don't diminish Christ's compassion. Thus compassion keeps both eyes open on both the good and the bad and finds in each sufficient reasons for loving. It is the only love on this earth which is true and righteous (171).

Importantly, this patriotism of compassion is more STABLE than the Roman patriotism of glory. For glory can only hold a people together in times of war and crisis. It collapses in times of peace as "people cannot feel themselves at home in a patriotism founded upon pride and pomp-and-glory" (174).

But the patriotism of compassion begins from the flaws and fragility of the state. Teaching people to love the state that way produces a more enduring patriotism:

if their country is presented to them as something beautiful and precious, but which is, in the first place, imperfect, and secondly, very frail and liable to suffer misfortune, and which it is necessary to cherish and preserve, they will rightly feel themselves to be more closely identified with it than will other classes of society (175).

This is how we must reimagine the sanctity of the state. The state is not an idol to be blindly obeyed. The state is sacred in a different sense, and sacred enough to command legitimately that we sometimes make the ultimate sacrifice (162). Another familial metaphor:

We must obey the State, however it happens to be, rather like loving children left by their parents, gone abroad, in the charge of some mediocre governess, but who obey her nevertheless out of love for their parents" (177).

(The difference here between the parents and the governess, tracks a difference Weil deploys throughout between the nation and the political state).

The state is not sacred as an idol--holy in itself. Rather, it is sacred as a "vital medium" (160), as serving a sacred purpose, as something through which holy and good things emerge (180).

This does not entail an absolute duty to obey the state. We have a duty to obey the mediocre governess, but not the abusive one. Weil is appropriately fuzzy on the boundaries of this duty:

It is certainly not an unlimited obligation, but its only valid limit is a revolt on the part of conscience. No criterion can be offered indicating exactly what this limit is; it is even impossible for each of us to prescribe one for himself once and for all: when you feel you can't obey any longer, you just have to disobey. But there is at least one necessary condition, although insufficient of itself, making it possible to disobey without being guilty of crime; this is to be urged forward by so imperious an obligation that one is constrained to scorn all risks of whatever kind. If one feels inclined to disobey, but one is dissuaded by the excessive danger involved, that is altogether unpardonable, whether it be because one contemplated an act of disobedience, or else because one failed to carry it out, as the case may be. Besides whenever one isn't strictly obliged to disobey, one is under the strict obligation to obey. A country cannot possess liberty unless it is recognized that disobedience towards the authorities, every time it doesn't proceed from an overriding sense of duty, is more dishonourable than theft. That means to say that public order ought to be regarded as more sacred than private property (177).

A stark choice, without much room for prudence. You are either under a strict duty to obey or a strict duty to disobey. Woe to him whose conscience demands disobedience, but whose fear keeps him in line.

Simone Weil on Equality

One of the fundamental human needs Simone Weil identifies in The Need for Roots is equality. As she puts it:

Equality is a vital need of the human soul. It consists in a recognition, at once public, general, effective and genuinely expressed in institutions and customs, that the same amount of respect and consideration is due to every human being because this respect is due to the human being as such and is not a matter of degree.

In other words--all human persons qua human persons deserve to be treated with respect, that respect is not contingent on social rank, and that respect must be manifested through public recognition. All seems straightforward enough.

Weil goes on to distinguish her understanding of equality from the leading liberal account: Equality of opportunity, or meritocracy. The problem with meritocracy is not that it is impossible to deliver as an ideal. The problem is the moral perversity of the ideal itself! A true meritocratic society would distribute social rewards as a function of moral desert or effort or talent. But this implies that those at the bottom deserve their social inferiority, or at the very least are social inferiors in virtue of their incompetence:

For a man who occupies an inferior position and suffers from it to know that his position is a result of his incapacity and that everybody is aware of the fact is not any consolation, but an additional motive of bitterness. 

Weil's basic critique of meritocracy is quite familiar. It was probably given its best statement in John Schaar's phenomenal critique of the equality of opportunity, and the theme is found in the Michael Young book that gave us the word. But the worry is much older than that! It runs through Augustinian critiques of moral desert. Consider this example from the neo-Augustinian Pierre Nicole, who notes that IF we justify social inequality on the basis of moral desert, we are going to produce immense social discontent:

If one became Great only by desert, the height of the great would be a continual noise in our ears, that they were prefer'd to the prejudice of others, whom we fancy more deserving than they ... But thus joyning Greatness with Birth, the pride of inferiours is allaid, and Greatness itself becomes a far less eye-sore. There is no shame to give place to another, when one may say, 'Tis his Birth I yield to. This reason convinces the mind without wounding it with spight or jealousie. ... Another advantage that accrues from this establishment is, That Princes may be had without pride, and Grandees found that are humble. For it gives no occasion of pride to continue in the rank where God's Providence has plac'd us, provided we use it to the ends he prescribes.

The second problem with equality of opportunity as an ideal is that it destroys social stability. The meritocratic utopia is a permanently churning society, with rich falling and poor rising constantly. What many liberals take as an ideal strikes Weil as a reductio: "that sort of equality, if allowed full play by itself, can make social life fluid to the point of decomposing it."

I think this egalitarian vision of a radically dynamic society--which struck Plato and perhaps Marx as the definition of democratic freedom--is distinctively American. Of particular importance is its insistence not simply on upward social mobility, but on the mathematically necessary downward mobility. (My old boss Richard Reeves' hobbyhorse).

Here's one example from Jacksonian America:

Money and property, we know, among us, are constantly changing hands. A man has only to work on, and wait patiently, and with industry and enterprise, he is sure to get both. The wheel of American fortune is perpetually and steadily turning, and those at bottom today, will be moving up tomorrow, and will ere long be at the top. The rich man of this year, may be poor the next, and the wealthy family of this generation, is likely to dissipate its fortune in the next. Scarcely ever does it remain in the same line to the third generation. ... All property, among us, tends to the hands of those who work and wait for it. They are as sure to get it, as the sun is to rise and set.

And another example:

A very important and striking feature in our political and social system, which indeed is the result of our institutions and laws, is, that there is no aristocracy amongst us--not even an aristocracy of wealth. An aristocracy cannot exist without peculiar and exclusive privileges and rights, recognized, sanctioned, and upheld by law. There cannot be, in this country, even a confederacy or combination among the rich men to acquire peculiar privileges. They have none to defend. ... They are not like the hereditary nobles of Europe, whose names are enrolled in a heraldic college, set apart from the rest of mankind, designated by titles, marked by badges of honor, bound together by intermarriages, by a commuity of interests and of feelings, a distinct order in the state; nothing of all this, and they are as mutable besides as the motes that float in the summer air. Death is every busily at work in dismembering all overgrown fortunes.

... If a line could be drawn between the two classes, at any given moment, and then five years pass away, I doubt whether the smaller portion could be recognized as the same. Hundreds on hundreds would be found to have changed places. And to speak of a clan of men thus constituted as an aristocracy, is as sound and sensible a philosophy as to point to the insects of summer as the emblems of eternity. 

There's a nice contrast between the American meritocratic faith and Nicole's argument for the superiority of hereditary aristocracy.

But anyway--Simone Weil rejects the ideal of equality of opportunity. She offers two positive suggestions for manifesting the genuine need for equal respect. The first is that punishments ought to be given out in proportion to rank:

an employer who is incapable or guilty of an offence against his workmen ought to be made to suffer far more, both in the spirit and in the flesh, than a workman who is incapable or guilty of an offense against his employer. ... the exercise of important public functions should carry with it serious personal risks.

This seems eminently sensible to me.

Weil's next suggestion is less plausible. She argues that much of the difficulty in inequality comes from inequalities of degree. If we can force ourselves to understand social differences not as ranked inequalities along some scale, but simply as fundamental differences, then perhaps we might be able to experience social differentiation without inequality. Separate but equal, in other words:

Equality is all the greater in proportion as human conditions are regarded as being, not more nor less than one another, but simply as other. Let us look on the professions of miner and minister simply as two different vocations, like those of poet and mathematician. And let the material hardships attaching to the miner's condition be counted in honour of those who undergo them. 

There is certainly something true here. Weil is right to insist that a modern capitalist economy in which money forms the only social bond makes it impossible to think in terms of differences of kind, but always in terms of differences in monetary rank. But her proposal strikes me as wildly psychologically naive. It will not do to tell ourselves that these differences just represent different social roles, but not ranks of inequality. I think that's clear with Weil's next example:

In wartime, if an army is filled with the right spirit, a soldier is proud and happy to be under fire instead of at headquarters; a general is proud and happy to think that the sucessful outcome of the battle depends on his forethought; and at the same time the soldier admires the general and the general the soldier. Such a balance constitutes an equality.

Yes, there might be some important way of LEGITIMIZING the obvious inequality between general and soldier. Perhaps a reciprocal appreciation of the distinctive role each plays might contribute to a fuller sense of the web of mutual dependence in which we find ourselves. Perhaps too that appreciation might render legitimate and even positively valuable the reality of social inequality. But it's too much to suggest that we have done away with inequality as such. The soldier is obviously inferior to the general.

Weil makes this same mistake in her brief discussion of the human soul's need for hierarchy. She says obedience and a "certain devotion towards superiors" are necessary. Weil loves obedience. Later in the book she claims that the soldier whose bravery comes from an internal constitution or the pursuit of glory "is very inferior in human quality to that of the soldier who obeys the orders of his superiors." Only direct revelation from God is more praiseworthy than following orders.

Yet she insists that this obedience is a devotion to the superior as a SYMBOL of the transcendent chain of being. I don't think the human mind is capable of such abstractions. We obey our superiors as HUMAN BEINGS, either in virtue of their office or their person (usually some combination of the two). With some philosophic distance we might recognize that the master I obey is not naturally superior to me, but that seems besides the point. Authority is not simply a symbolic nod to the structure of the universe, it is an ineradicable social reality.