PATRIOTISM NOT TO BE DESPISED

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 281, 22 August 1940, Page 8

PATRIOTISM NOT TO BE DESPISED

Deep-Rooted Sentiment Of

Highest Value

ADDRESS BY SIR THOMAS

HUNTER

“I will give you a password for the times—‘Our country, still our country, to be cherished in all our hearts, to be defended by all our hands.'” said Sir Thomas Hunter, principal of Victoria University College, addressing the ’Wellington branch of the Royal Society of St. George last night on the subject of patriotism. He said that many modern people despised patriotism, but to him it seemed a sentiment of highest value.

Many people, he said, believed that internationalism could not exist together with patriotism, and accordingly despised and condemned it. But it seemed to him that internationalism that was . not the fruit of genuine patriotism was less likely to succeed. What had happened since 1918 should be a warning to British people when principles of internationalism were being considered. Patriotism had many different meanings to different persons. There was a great variety of opinion about it even among British people. It was a sentiment deeply rooted in human nature, based on the feeling of the nomad for his clan, and of the pr anitive agriculturist for the land—ties of blood and soil.

Patriotism as we knew it today was of comparatively recent growth. . This accounted for the diversity of opinion. It was staggering to find some people extolling it as the highest virtue, others looking on it as something rather vicious. The only explanation was that the people concerned were not speaking of the same thing. He wished to throw light on what that difference was.

Modern psychology taught that man shared with the animals the primitive emotions of anger, love and fear. In man, however, the tremendous development of the organs of reason modified and directed the primitive passions, and developed the complex higher emotions to which psychologists gave the name of sentiments. When the control of these higher sentiments was withdrawn it resulted in blasts of those primitive emotions man shared with the animals.

Emotions were temporary phases of life; anger and fear rose, culminated, and waned again, but sentiments were permanent. Patriotism was such a sentiment. It was based on emotional ideals built around country and kin, blood and soil, the traditions, achievements, and symbols of one’s country. Within its structure there was a tremendous range of varying degrees and types of sentiment.

Thus aggression, power, dominion, and bullying resulted when patriotic fervour was freed of the higher control, and there took place a recrudescence of the brute in mankind. In that form Nazis and Fascists were making patriotism abhorrent, yet he maintained that jingoism and selfish diplomacy, and bad faith, were not features of tine patriotism.

True patriotism was a balanced sentiment, more positive than negative, manifesting itself in service to one’s country rather than in sneering and jeering at an enemy. It stimulated the best impulses in man, instead of opening the floodgates of misery, cruelty and oppression, and to him it seemed a sentiment of the highest value.