Rabindranath Tagore's essay on the cult of the nation
The Cult of the Nation
is the professionalism of the people. This cult is becoming their greatest
danger, because it is bringing them enormous success, making them impatient of
the claims of higher ideals. The greater the amount of success, the stronger
are the conflicts of interest and jealousy and hatred which are aroused in
men’s minds, thereby making it more and more necessary for other peoples, who
are still living, to stiffen into nations.
With the growth of nationalism, man
has become the greatest menace to man. Therefore the continual presence of
panic goads that very nationalism into ever-increasing menace.
I do not put my faith in any new institution, but in the individuals all over the world who think clearly, feel nobly, and act rightly, thus becoming the channels of moral truth.
Rabindranath Tagore's four-part essay on Nationalism (1917)
Crowd psychology is
a blind force. Like steam and other
physical forces, it can be utilised for creating a tremendous amount of power.
And therefore rulers of men, who, out of greed and fear, are bent upon turning
their peoples into machines of power, try to train this crowd psychology for their
special purposes. They hold it to be their duty to foster in the popular mind
universal panic, unreasoning pride in their own race, and hatred of others.
Newspapers,
school-books, and even religious services are made use of for this object; and
those who have the courage to express their disapprobation of this blind and
impious cult are either punished in the law-courts, or are socially ostracised.
The individual thinks, even when he feels; but the same individual, when he
feels with the crowd, does not reason at all. His moral sense becomes blurred.
This suppression of higher humanity in crowd minds is productive of enormous
strength. For the crowd mind is essentially primitive; its forces are
elemental. Therefore the Nation is forever watching to take advantage of this
enormous power of darkness.
The people’s instinct
of self-preservation has been made dominant at particular times of crisis.
Then, for the time being, the consciousness of its solidarity becomes
aggressively wide-awake. But in the Nation this hyper-consciousness is kept
alive for all time by artificial means. A man has to act the part of a
policeman when he finds his house invaded by burglars. But if that remains his
normal condition, then his consciousness of his household becomes acute and
over-wrought, making him fly at every stranger passing near his house.
This intensity of
self-consciousness is nothing of which a man should feel proud; certainly it is
not healthful. In like manner, incessant self-consciousness in a nation is
highly injurious for the people. It serves its immediate purpose, but at the
cost of the eternal in man.
When a whole body
of men train themselves for a particular narrow purpose, it becomes a common
interest with them to keep up that purpose and preach absolute loyalty to it. Nationalism is the
training of a whole people for a narrow ideal; and when it gets hold of their
minds it is sure to lead them to moral degeneracy and intellectual blindness.
We cannot but hold firm the faith that this Age of Nationalism, of gigantic
vanity and selfishness, is only a passing phase in civilization, and those who
are making permanent arrangements for accommodating this temporary mood of
history will be unable to fit themselves for the coming age, when the true
spirit of freedom will have sway.
With the unchecked
growth of Nationalism the moral foundation of man’s civilisation is
unconsciously undergoing a change. The ideal of the social man is
unselfishness, but the ideal of the Nation, like that of the professional man,
is selfishness. This is why selfishness in the individual is condemned, while
in the nation it is extolled, which leads to hopeless moral blindness,
confusing the religion of the people with the religion of the nation.
Therefore, to take an
example, we find men more and more convinced of the superior claims of
Christianity, merely because Christian nations are in possession of the greater
part of the world. It is like supporting a robber’s religion by quoting the
amount of his stolen property. Nations celebrate their successful massacre of
men in their churches. They forget that Thugs also ascribed their success in
manslaughter to the favour of their goddess.
But in the case of the
latter their goddess frankly represented the principle of destruction. It was
the criminal tribe’s own murderous instinct deified – the instinct, not of one
individual, but of the whole community, and therefore held sacred. In the same
manner, in modern churches, selfishness, hatred and vanity in their collective
aspect of national instincts do not scruple to share the homage paid to god.
Of course, pursuit of
self-interest need not be wholly selfish; it can even be in harmony with the
interest of all. Therefore, ideally speaking, the nationalism, which stands for
the expression of the collective self-interest of a people, need not be ashamed
of itself if it maintains its true limitations. But what we see in practice is,
that every nation which has prospered has done so through its career of
aggressive selfishness either in commercial adventures or in foreign
possessions, or in both. And this material prosperity not only feeds
continually the selfish instincts of the people, but impresses men’s minds with
the lesson that, for a nation, selfishness is a necessity and therefore a
virtue. It is the emphasis laid in Europe upon the idea of the Nation’s
constant increase of power, which is becoming the greatest danger to man, both
in its direct activity and its power of infection.
We must admit that
evils there are in human nature, in spite of our faith in moral laws and our
training in self-control. But they carry on
their foreheads their own brand of infamy, their very success adding to their
monstrosity. All through man’s history there will be some who suffer, and
others who cause suffering. The conquest of evil will never be a fully
accomplished fact, but a continuous process like the process of burning in a
flame.
In former ages, when
some particular people became turbulent and tried to rob others of their human
rights, they sometimes achieved success and sometimes failed. And it amounted
to nothing more than that. But when this idea of the Nation, which has met with
universal acceptance in the present day, tries to pass off the cult of
collective selfishness as a moral duty, simply because that selfishness is
gigantic in stature, it not only commits depredation, but attacks the very
vitals of humanity.
It unconsciously
generates in people’s minds an attitude of defiance against moral law. For men
are taught by repeated devices the lesson that the Nation is greater than the
people, while yet it scatters to the winds the moral law that the people have
held sacred.
It has been said that
a disease becomes most acutely critical when the brain is affected. For it is
the brain that is constantly directing the siege against all disease forces.
The spirit of national selfishness is that brain disease of a people which
shows itself in red eyes and clenched fists, in violence of talk and movements,
all the while shattering its natural restorative powers. But the power of
self-sacrifice, together with the moral faculty of sympathy and co-operation,
is the guiding spirit of social vitality. Its function is to maintain a
beneficent relation of harmony with its surroundings. But when it begins to
ignore the moral law which is universal and uses it only within the bounds of
its own narrow sphere, then its strength becomes like the strength of madness
which ends in self-destruction.
What is worse, this
aberration of a people, decked with the showy title of “patriotism”, proudly
walks abroad, passing itself off as a highly moral influence. Thus it has
spread its inflammatory contagion all over the world, proclaiming its fever
flush to be the best sign of health. It is causing in the hearts of peoples,
naturally inoffensive, a feeling of envy at not having their temperature as
high as that of their delirious neighbours and not being able to cause as much
mischief, but merely having to suffer from it.
I have often been
asked by my Western friends how to cope with this evil, which has attained such
sinister strength and vast dimensions. In fact, I have often
been blamed for merely giving warning, and offering no alternative. When we
suffer as a result of a particular system, we believe that some other system
would bring us better luck. We are apt to forget that all systems produce evil
sooner or later, when the psychology which is at the root of them is wrong. The
system which is national to-day may assume the shape of the international
tomorrow; but so long as men have not forsaken their idolatry of primitive
instincts and collective passions, the new system will only become a new
instrument of suffering. And because we are trained to confound efficient
system with moral goodness itself, every ruined system makes us more and more
distrustful of moral law.
Therefore I do not put
my faith in any new institution, but in the individuals all over the world who
think clearly, feel nobly, and act rightly, thus becoming the channels of moral
truth. Our moral ideals do not work with chisels and hammers. Like trees, they
spread their roots in the soil and their branches in the sky, without
consulting any architect for their plans.
Excerpted with permission from “The
Nation” by Rabindranath Tagore,Patriots, Poets and
Prisoners: Selections from Ramananda Chatterjee’s The Modern Review 1907-1947,
edited by Anikendra Sen, Devangshu Dutta and Nilanjana Roy, introduced by
Ramachandra Guha, HarperCollins India.
See also
Rabindranath Tagore's four-part essay on Nationalism (1917)
