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.
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