For King and Country?
Tags: Nationalism, Stoicism, Cosmopolitanism, Essays And Letters, Politics

It’s 1933, and the shadow of Hitler looms over inter-war Britain. At the time, Winston Churchill is struggling to rally a crippled nation to arms as its allies become compromised, and its rivals emboldened. Appeasement, Churchill thinks, is not an option– but he faces opposition from the most unlikely of sources. On February 9th, the Oxford Union, a student society from the university of the same name, passes a motion against national warfare. The motion “This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country” or as it came to be known, the Oxford Oath, became a sensation. Soon enough, colleges and universities across Britain and overseas, in the United States, began to take their own oaths. Its initial proponent, Kenelm Hubert Digby, was publicly humiliated and his fellow undergraduates shamed as well. Ironically, some like to point out, many of these young men would eventually enlist to fight against the Reich in the years to come.

I misunderstood the purpose of the Oxford oath at first. Its original intent was to transmit the anti-war and pacifist sentiments of what Telford Taylor, the chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, described as the “colorful reflection of the British temper between the two great wars. Exhausted and disgusted by the prolonged bloodbath in Flanders Fields.” I am neither anti-war nor a pacifist, and yet I found the oath to be attractive at first sight. It had the right amount of youthful zeal and intellectual pomp, and it impressed me a great deal that such a brief motion could capture with ease the ideas which I had prior been toying with for nearly half a year. In an essay titled “I owe nothing to my country”, I once wrote that virtue transcended language, nationality, and culture. I wrote emphatically, and with a tremendous air of self-righteousness, on how I hadn’t let my national identity impact my character. Rightly so, I was called on my bluff. It would have been naive, as it was pointed out to me, to say that I was somehow impervious to my heritage. I wrote a second essay, which was nothing but a glorified restating of my initial positions. And, though I didn’t write anything on it after, It had bothered me that I was never able to get closure on what I had then called “radical cosmopolitanism”.

I had gotten the idea of a radical cosmopolitanism from a lecture on Marcus Aurelius by professor Michael Sugrue. A fascinating and tragic character, Marcus Aurelius had been the last great emperor of the Roman empire, and the most influential figure of Stoicism– a school of philosophy which inherited much of the Hellenic tradition of ancient Greece. One of the main ideas behind Stoicism is that of the cosmopolitan individual. Where Socrates went when he said that the body is a sickness, the Stoics followed. The synthesis between Socratic and Platonic beatification of the immaterial and rational soul, and classical Roman values, results in a philosophy that venerates “virtue” above all, and bestows absolute agency on the individual. It’s an antiquated idea that relies on roman paganism and freedom of will to function, but it holds up decently to modern ethical standards, and easily lends itself for transformation towards a sort of neo-stoicism– to which I subscribe.

The great emancipation of Stoic cosmopolitanism is the severing of our actions from our time and space. A Stoic, said Dr. Sugrue, would be as happy being an emperor as they would be being a slave– neither position which would inform a Stoic about the nature of virtue. No country, social position, title, duty, gender, or ethnicity holds a monopoly on virtuous action– moderation, duty, kindness, equanimity. These are at the disposition of every human being, anywhere and at any moment– or so the Stoics say. Despite the scientific and metaphysical problems I have with Stoicism –to which I’m tempted to diverge– I am yet to part ways with its central idea that ethics is and ought to be external to our circumstances in life. This is not to say that moral action is not circumstantial, but it means that a cosmopolitan morality negates moral and cultural moral relativism by proposing the idea that morality can be rational and moral action can be agreed upon on rational grounds.

Whether the Stoics were right or not about human nature, the divorce of ethics and morality from tradition is supremely important for the modern individual. And, indeed, it is the individual who is the key figure of this conversation. Collective values, such as that of a nation, are perfectly fine as long as they are democratic and self-sufficient. They must be democratic, as they should be able to be changed– a constitution, for example, can be amended. And, they must be self-sufficient– independent from anything but the validity of their own moral and ethical claims.

But, what does this mean for national identity, patriotism, or nationalism? Well, if rationalism and morality ought to exist outside of culture and convention, it means that we are intellectually free from the awful restraints of our own circumstances. We needn’t read the same books that are read where we exist, or sing the same hymns. Our aesthetic interests can expand beyond the culture that surrounds us, and the bounds of our intellectual curiosity become endless. And yet, cosmopolitanism need not be a-politan. Cosmopolitanism doesn’t destroy localized culture or demands the impossible task that we become separate from it. Rather, it abolishes its sole proprietorship on our values and culture and consequentially forces us to ask ourselves what is it that we truly value, and how it is that we justify its worth. When we have done that, we might possibly end up separating ourselves from facets of our national or cultural identity and values, painful and ostracizing as it may be. However, if we do so, it will be from the comfortable position of rational inquiry and personal genuineness– which, in my experience, provide better and longer lasting peace of mind than any anthem ever has.

When I read about the Oxford pledge, I didn’t think about pacifism, but rather, about the precious idea that nothing holds authority over my moral landscape but my own convictions and beliefs. I wouldn’t fight for a king or country. I would fight because I’d believe, out of my own volition, that fighting was the right thing to do. And, if justice, reason, or virtue, by a cruel twist of fate, demand a struggle against my own, I only hope to have the strength to fight them too, and in sad and awful combat, prevail.