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flanked-evergl 7 months ago

The best response I can give to you is quoting Chesterton's Heretics:

"Mr. Rudyard Kipling has asked in a celebrated epigram what they can know of England who know England only. It is a far deeper and sharper question to ask, “What can they know of England who know only the world?” for the world does not include England any more than it includes the Church. The moment we care for anything deeply, the world—that is, all the other miscellaneous interests—becomes our enemy. Christians showed it when they talked of keeping one’s self “unspotted from the world;” but lovers talk of it just as much when they talk of the “world well lost.” Astronomically speaking, I understand that England is situated on the world; similarly, I suppose that the Church was a part of the world, and even the lovers inhabitants of that orb. But they all felt a certain truth—the truth that the moment you love anything the world becomes your foe. Thus Mr. Kipling does certainly know the world; he is a man of the world, with all the narrowness that belongs to those imprisoned in that planet. He knows England as an intelligent English gentleman knows Venice. He has been to England a great many times; he has stopped there for long visits. But he does not belong to it, or to any place; and the proof of it is this, that he thinks of England as a place. The moment we are rooted in a place, the place vanishes. We live like a tree with the whole strength of the universe."

stvltvs 7 months ago | parent [-]

So cosmopolitanism is bad because you are somehow less strong because you're not rooted in your homeland? Why is this not just proto-fascism?

flanked-evergl 7 months ago | parent [-]

Cosmopolitanism is bad because you are rooted in nothing while thinking you are rooted in something that does not exist. Patriotism is not merely proto-fascism because it does not lead to fascism, and it has been a bullwark against it.

stvltvs 7 months ago | parent [-]

Simple patriotism isn't what I read Chesterton to be referring to here. Patriotism leaves space for cosmopolitanism, but this passage sounds an awful lot like the "blood and soil" of fascism. I don't know anything about the Chesterton, just going on what you've quoted which seems to say love England or leave it.