Loving Our Own
What is the place of love in politics? Given humanity’s long history of wars, revolutions, and civil strife, the place of love seems very small indeed. But if politics is filled with battles between “us” and “them,” then at least there is some room for love among “us.” I call this “loving our own.” Love of our own is the basis of nationalism, populism, and white identity politics.
Modern Political Thought
Modern political philosophy is cosmopolitan, materialist, and elitist due to its understanding of human nature. Modern political philosophy seeks a stable foundation for political order in something that all human beings share: desire. We all desire life and the material necessities of life, including the security of our lives and property. Reason is understood as a tool for satisfying our desires through the mastery of nature. This includes science, technology, industry, and networks of communication and distribution.
Modern political thought is cosmopolitan, because if politics is founded on something shared by all human beings, why shouldn’t there be a single global political order? Moreover, modern science, technology, industry, and channels of communication and distribution encompass the whole globe. Why shouldn’t politics be forced to catch up?
Modern political thought is materialistic, because it bases politics on the satisfaction of material needs and understands reason merely as a tool for satisfying them.
Modern political thought is elitist because it is technocratic. As material needs multiply, the skills necessary to provide for them become increasingly specialized. Thus modern societies inevitably take on a paradoxical cast: a strong verbal commitment to equality and democracy accompanied by the rule of elites whose entitlement to power, namely “expertise,” pointedly delegitimizes making them accountable to non-experts.
If the right political order is founded in human nature—which is common to all mankind—then the right political order should be the same for all mankind. There should be one government: either a single global state or, barring that, many states with essentially the same form of government.
From this viewpoint, although differences between political systems can be explained by historical contingencies, such differences cannot be justified. They are seen as nothing but relics of the past, when people were ignorant of the rest of the planet and incapable of global travel and communication.
But if different political systems are not anchored in anything permanent, then they didn’t need to exist at all. Thus they need not continue to exist. Thus we can look forward to a world in which they are abolished and replaced by a universal and homogeneous technocracy serving basic human needs.
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The modernist project has an ambiguous attitude toward diversity. On the one hand, the foundation of modern cosmopolitanism is not diversity but unity: the fact that all human beings have the same basic material needs. Unity is strength. On the other hand, as the modernist project unfolds, it will embrace the whole world, diversity and all.
As modernity embraces more peoples, it makes sense to cheer on the increase of diversity as a concrete sign of its success. It also makes sense to puff up the joys of diversity to forestall, diminish, or at least cover up inevitable xenophobic grumbling and tensions.
Ultimately, though, the modernist project must regard the diversity of races and cultures in the same way as it regards the diversity of political systems: as a problem to be solved, not a boon to be celebrated.
Moreover, it is a problem to be solved in the same way: global diversity is historically contingent. Even biological diversity is historically contingent if one is a Darwinist. None of it had to happen, thus none of it has to continue either. Thus modernists can look forward to the day when human biological and cultural diversity simply melt away in the warm bath of global consumerism.
The Identitarian Alternative
Modern political thought follows logically from its understanding of human nature, but it leaves out something very important.
To appreciate this, we need to look at premodern thought, specifically Plato’s Republic. In the Republic, Plato works out parallels between the individual human soul and political regimes. For the moderns, the human soul has two parts: desire and reason. Desire is in control, and reason is merely a tool for satisfying desire through science, technology, industry, etc.
But for Plato, the human soul is more complex. It has a third part, which he calls thumos. Thumos is often translated as “spiritedness,” meaning a passionate attachment to particular things associated with oneself: one’s self-image, one’s family, one’s friends, one’s language, one’s culture, one’s homeland, etc. In short, thumos is love of one’s own.
Thumos is not, however, an attachment to one’s own life. We have a desire for self-preservation, but thumotic attachments often overrule this desire, for instance when we risk our lives over matters of honor or principle. Love of life is not consistent with sacrificing one’s life, but love of one’s own is.
For Plato and Aristotle, thumos is the foundation of politics, but they understand politics as inherently plural, meaning that there are many different polities, not one universal state. Politics is a matter of “us and them.” What distinguished us from them is that we share things—a common lineage, language, culture, history, etc.—that they do not.
The existence of different peoples is simply a matter of fact. It did not have to be. It does not have to continue. But it probably will continue, because people are bound to their groups by love of their own, which disposes them to resist any attempt to assimilate or destroy them.
Thumos, therefore, is a foundation for all forms of identity politics. It is the foundation of preferring one’s ingroup to other groups. It is the foundation of ethnocentrism, i.e., putting one’s ethnos at the center of life.
The preeminent form of identity politics is the nation-state. When a particular people gains political control over a territory, dedicating the state and the territory to their common good, we have a nation-state.
The territory controlled by a nation-state and dedicated to the common good of its people is its homeland. A homeland is defined by its purpose. To serve this purpose, it does not need to be the place where a people originated. Indeed, since human beings do not spring out of the earth, it makes no sense to say that people are “indigenous,” which literally means “sprung from within” a given territory, or “autochthonous,” which means sprung “from the earth itself.”[1]
The Biology of Loving One’s Own
Loving one’s own has been observed by modern biologists as well as classical political philosophers. For example, J. Philippe Rushton was an evolutionary psychologist who created Genetic Similarity Theory and, on this basis, argued that ethnonationalism is the best form of government.[2] Political scientist Frank Salter defends similar arguments.[3]
According to Rushton, harmonious relationships between individuals—including feelings of solidarity and a willingness to engage in altruism—are strongly correlated with genetic similarity: the more genetically similar people are, the more harmonious their relationships. This can be verified simply by spending some time with identical twins, who think and act astonishingly alike—even when raised in very different environments—because they are genetically identical.[4]
Conversely, the more genetically different people are, the greater the disharmony between them, as we can observe in the relations of different races sharing the same culture, physical environment, and political system. If it is natural to like genetically similar people, it is equally natural to dislike people who are genetically different. The flip side of loving one’s own is often called “xenophobia,” meaning a fear of strangers. Thus in the political realm, diversity is not a source of strength; unity is.
But why would sharing genes increase the harmony between individuals? Aren’t genes notoriously “selfish”?[5] Our genes are “selfish” in the sense that they drive us to perpetuate them, even after our deaths, in other bodies. The primary way they do this is biological reproduction, but biological reproduction works best by making us unselfish, meaning willing to care for, take risks for, even sacrifice our lives for our children. Thus selfish genes program individuals to be altruistic to others who bear the same genes.
But our genes are not just carried by our biological offspring. Thus, if we have a genetic propensity to care for our genes in other bodies, that means we will care even for strangers who are genetically similar to us. The greater the similarity, the greater the care. Thus we would predict that the most genetically homogeneous societies will be the most harmonious. Harmony, moreover, expresses itself as cooperation and altruism, which promote overall social well-being. And it turns out that two of the most genetically homogeneous societies in the world—Denmark and Iceland—routinely top the rankings for indicators of national well-being.[6]
Genetic Similarity Theory perfectly explains one of the oddest features of thumos, namely the possibility of conflict between love of our own and the desire for self-preservation.
Can There Be Cosmopolitan “Love of One’s Own”?
Basing politics on desire leads to cosmopolitanism, because we all have pretty much the same desires. Basing politics on reason also tends to be cosmopolitan, because reason focuses on universals, not particulars.
But basing politics on thumos is inherently particularizing: “one’s own” is inevitably different from “someone else’s own.” This is true of individuals and of groups. Groups are real, and we belong to them just as much as they belong to us. We are not simply isolated individuals.
Cosmopolitans hope that nationalism will wither away over time because they believe that it is a historical accident, not an expression of human nature. But thumos is as much a part of human nature as reason and desire, thus identity politics and nationalism will exist as long as mankind does.
But can’t love of one’s own lead to cosmopolitanism? Can the whole world be “one’s own”?[7] We all agree that love is precious, but precious things are rare like diamonds, not common like sand. If love is scarce, the more people we love, the less love each receives. It’s a zero-sum game. Thus ideas like “love of mankind” are problematic. The broader the circle of our affection, the thinner it becomes, to the point that professions of love of mankind seem scarcely more than rhetorical gestures. They are expressions of aspirations, not actual feelings, and love is first and foremost a feeling.
But let’s just grant that one can come to regard “all mankind” as one’s own. Surely, though, one does not start there. One can only arrive at such expansive sentiments from more restricted ones. Furthermore, one inevitably builds relationships with people who are like oneself—genetically and culturally—before building relationships with people who are different, and “all mankind” contains all diversity.
So what happens when there are inevitable conflicts between the people you are closest to and those further away, the people most like you and those most different? Most people will remain loyal to those they are most attached to, which means that cosmopolitan sentiments will never be strong enough to establish a universal political order unless all diversity is obliterated.
Since one’s original family, tribal, and national ties are so strong, any cosmopolitan order will also be rife with suspicion that it is not governed for the common good of all mankind but rather for the particular group interests of those who wield power. In short, cosmopolitanism will always tend toward forms of imperialism: not global self-government, but rather the government of subject peoples by an imperial master people.
One can build very large empires through despotic means. But such empires will always be susceptible to breaking up along ethnic lines. The largest feasible non-despotic political order is a nation-state, where a nation is understood as a people unified by common blood as well as a common culture and history.
The Diversity Question
Identitarians may not celebrate diversity as much as cosmopolitans do, but identitarianism is more consistent with the long-term preservation of diversity, whereas cosmopolitanism tends ultimately toward homogenization.
First and foremost, identitarians wish to hold on to their collective identities. They love who they are and wish to remain so. As long as different peoples love themselves, their differences will persist, even if they don’t particularly love one another.
Cosmopolitans, by contrast, have no real love of diversity, because they view cultural differences as less important than common desires, and they see diversity as an impediment to building a universal homogeneous state.
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Identitarians and cosmopolitans have the same problem with diversity: different peoples in the same political system are bound to clash. Identitarians, however, wish to avoid such clashes by reducing diversity or avoiding it altogether, whereas cosmopolitans are committed to having more and more distinct peoples under the same state. Therefore, in the short run, they are committed to increasing conflict, although in the long run, they are committed to reducing conflict by eliminating diversity.
Populism & Identity Politics
Populism and identity politics are frequently connected. What explains this?
There are two basic forms of populism: Left and Right. The populism of the Left is a form of modern materialism, seeking the more equal distribution of goods. The populism of the Right is a form of identity politics. My focus here is the populism of the Right.
The purpose of identity politics is to promote the common good of a distinct group, i.e., to preserve and perfect it. The common good is the moral core of the idea of popular sovereignty, which can be expressed as “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Government of the people is simply a fact: people are governed, for good or ill.
What makes government good? This is a moral question. Good regimes govern for the people, i.e., for the common good.
How does one govern for the people? This is a technical question. Fortunately, there are many forms of government that serve the common good. In his Politics, Aristotle argued that governments by one man, a few men, and many men can all pursue the common good. But the most reliable way to secure the common good is probably a mixed regime, with elements of one-man, elite, and popular rule.
Government “of the people, by the people” means self-government. One cannot have universal participation in politics, because some people are simply not capable of self-government, for instance children, the senile, the insane, etc. Thus self-government means the greatest possible participation in government, but there is an important caveat: participation must be consistent with the aim of good government. Thus those who would lower the quality of political decision-making cannot participate in politics.
Populists speak of the people in two senses: (1) the people as a whole, as opposed to other peoples, and (2) the people as the majority, as opposed to the ruling elites. Populists do not object to elites as such. Indeed, they are willing to be governed by populist leaders or parties. Instead, populists object to elites that rule in their own interests (individual or class), or foreign interests, at the expense of the common good. The goal of populist politics is to install new elites that serve the common good.
Because populism is a form of identity politics, populists also demand that their rulers be culturally and organically one with the rest of the people, not foreigners. How can you expect your leaders to put your nation first if they don’t even belong to it?
Populism vs. Technocracy
For populists, leaders must first and foremost be accountable to the people. Thus the main qualifications for being part of the ruling elite are sharing a common identity and bonds of mutual affection, as well as good character. Educational credentials and technocratic expertise are nice. But good leaders can just hire such people.
For political materialists, leaders must first and foremost be competent technocrats to administer the machinery of production and distribution. Thus credentials and expertise come before questions of identity or character. Group identities fundamentally don’t matter if you are concerned only with material considerations. Character doesn’t matter, because both good and bad people can be correct, skillful, and materially productive. Accountability doesn’t matter, because experts shouldn’t have to answer to the ignorant. The people just need to shut up and enjoy the bounty delivered by the system.
A related concept is “meritocracy.” Globalists often argue for open borders because merit should be the only thing that matters. Merit, of course, can never be a reason for mass migration, because most people are average or below average. Beyond that, immigration is not necessary to access the skills of the most talented. We can always employ them in their homelands.
But the idea of meritocracy is most absurd in the realm of politics. If we really want to be ruled by the “best,” then why not choose one’s leaders from the entire planet? Why not have Chinese technocrats running every country on earth? If that doesn’t sound like a recipe for good government, then maybe there’s more to good government than technical expertise.
Populism & Democracy
Populism’s critics often claim it is a threat to “democracy.” That depends on what you mean by democracy. If you believe that democracy is “rule by the people,” then populism is democratic because it makes the common good the criterion of justice and seeks to empower as many people as possible to participate in politics.
But critics of populism are usually defenders of “liberal” democracy, which is characterized by elected representatives and minority rights. In practice, elected representatives are easily bought by the rich and thus tend to govern in their factional interests. This is oligarchy, not democracy. In practice, minority rights mean minority veto power over policies that pursue the common good.
Thus liberal democracy really means minority rule: rule by minorities and coalitions of minorities, and also rule by the rich, who impose their political preferences (open borders, free trade, loose morals) and luxury belief systems (global warming, Leftist identity politics, the fetishization of exotic foreigners) on the majority, at the expense of the majority. Populism really is a threat to this sort of democracy, and rightly so.
Identitarian populism and liberal democracy are fundamentally incompatible because they have different purposes. Liberal democracy is a form of modern desire-driven political materialism. Its primary purpose is material comfort, to be secured through science, technology, industry, trade, etc., all of which are globalizing. Right-wing populism is a form of thumos-based identity politics. Its purpose is to promote the flourishing of a particular group under a particular state within the borders of a particular homeland.
Global & Particular Values
Global institutions both arise from and reinforce distinctly global values.
Science and technology are global institutions. They spring from scientific objectivity, which involves disenchanting the world (setting aside religion, myth and poetry) so that we can dominate it. Objectivity also involves setting aside naïve, common-sense, first-person ways of looking at the world, as well as the “prejudices” of one’s particular society. All of these are seen as impediments to knowing and dominating objective reality. Science and technology are cosmopolitan, because objectivity means uprooting oneself from one’s particular historical polis and instead becoming a citizen of the natural world, the cosmos.
Industry and trade are global institutions as well. They arise from and promote a specific set of values: freedom of choice, the pursuit of material comfort and security, hard work, competitiveness, efficiency, rewarding people for merit, and getting more stuff for less money. Industry and trade are cosmopolitan too, because the pursuit of a good price abstracts away from nationality. Thus it is natural for economic men to undermine the ethnic integrity of their own homelands, by buying cheap foreign goods (thus shipping jobs overseas) or opening the borders to migrants who will work for less.
Nationalists and populists recognize the value of science, technology, industry, and trade. They recognize that people have private lives and private interests. They value individual liberty and freedom of choice. They appreciate and reward merit. They even value getting a good price. They understand, however, that if these are one’s only values, or one’s highest values, they will lead inexorably to a homogeneous global society where their identity, sovereignty, and self-government are destroyed.
But nationalists and populists have other values: identity, sovereignty, self-government, and the common good of their own distinct peoples. They also understand that these values can conflict with cosmopolitan values. When cosmopolitan values conflict with identitarian values, identitarian values must come first. Thus nationalists and populists are willing to intervene in private economic activity, even if it results in higher prices for consumers.
If you think of yourself simply as a seeker of truth or good prices, you are a citizen of the world. Nationalists and populists, however, want you to also think of yourself first and foremost as citizens of your own homelands. Science, technology, industry, trade, and personal liberty are all fine things, but they must exist within the borders of nation-states, which will ensure that they serve rather than dissolve the people and their homeland.
The Great Choice
In Wagner’s Ring, Alberich the Nibelung steals the Rhine gold and uses it as a tool to pursue world power. The Rhine gold, particularly the magic ring fashioned from it, can be seen as a symbol of modern science, technology, industry, and the world-spanning ambitions they unleash. But Alberich can steal the gold and forge the ring only by renouncing love.
What kind of love? Not self-love, for Alberich is motivated by wounded vanity throughout. One might think it is sexual love, because Alberich was teased by the Rhine Maidens before stealing the gold. But he only felt lust for them, and lust remained after renouncing love.
What Alberich truly foreswears is love of his own, for once the gold is in his hands, he enslaves his own people—even his own brother—to make them tools of his quest for world power. He even sires a son, Hagen, as a tool of his ambition.
Wotan faced a similar choice: love of his own or power over others. He refused to take the ring, because it was cursed. But long before, he had already chosen to pursue world domination, and along the way, he trades the people he loves for power: his sister-in-law, Freia, whom he sells to the giants to build Valhalla, his son Siegmund whom he sired as a tool of his ambition, his daughter Brünnhilde whom he also sired as a tool for pursuing power, etc. Because Wotan made the same choice as Alberich, Wagner calls him “Light Alberich” as opposed to “Dark Alberich.” As a god, Wotan may be more presentable than a dwarf, but his treason is the same.
The great choice is love or gold, i.e., loyalty to our own or the pursuit of boundless wealth and power.
Every attempt to secure global power requires the betrayal of one’s own people, usually by those who feel little love of their own. Every empire is founded by leaders who are willing to send their own kin to die to seize other people’s lands. Enormous fortunes can be amassed by selling out one’s own countrymen to the global economy: cutting costs and raising profits by shipping factories overseas and opening one’s borders to cheap migrant labor. But don’t be too smug about this, because you too make the same choice every day when you buy cheap foreign goods. This treason is so woven into our economic lives that it is nearly impossible to survive without it.
Simply Because It Is Mine
G.K. Chesterton once accused Rudyard Kipling of being a cosmopolitan for loving England because she was strong. But strength is an abstract quality that can be found in other countries too. So Kipling didn’t love England, he loved strength. For Chesterton, however, true patriotism is the love of a concrete homeland simply because it is one’s own.
The same is true of races. Studies of racial differences are useful for explaining why some groups are overrepresented in colleges and others are overrepresented in prisons. They are useful for explaining why multiracial societies are filled with conflicts. They are even useful for explaining why some groups hate other groups.
But it is a perversion of the heart to love one’s own race because it outdoes other groups in abstract traits like intelligence. Should members of less-gifted races hate themselves? Again, we love our own people not because they are the best by some abstract measure, but simply because they are our own.
Cosmopolitanism enthralls us partly because it seems required by reason itself. Must we not justify ourselves to the whole world in terms the whole world can accept? But it is futile to offer cosmopolitan arguments for identitarian conclusions.
The spell of cosmopolitanism is broken, and identity politics awakes, when you realize that you don’t have to give abstract reasons for concrete attachments. And neither does anybody else. It is enough to say, “I love my homeland simply because it is mine.”
Notes
[1] Greg Johnson, “The Autochthony Argument,” Confessions of a Reluctant Hater, second edition (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2016).
[2] J. P. Rushton, “Ethnic Nationalism, Evolutionary Psychology, and Genetic Similarity Theory,” Nations and Nationalism 11 (2005): 489–507.
[3] Frank Salter, On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, & Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2006).
[4] For an excellent popular overview of studies of identical twins, see Nancy Segal, Born Together―Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
[5] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
[6] Marie Helweg-Larsen, “Why Denmark Is the Happiest Country,” Live Science, March 30, 2018.
[7] Greg Johnson, “What’s Wrong with Cosmopolitanism?,” In Defense of Prejudice (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2016).