Practicing compassionate patriotism

In 1943, the French philosopher-mystic Simone Weil was working in London with the Free France resistance movement. Although she wanted to be on the front lines of the Second World War, she was assigned a desk job. Among other projects, she produced the manuscript we know as The Need for Roots, laying out a plan to rebuild a just France after the Nazis’ defeat.

I have been rereading this book not just as a scholar of Weil but as an American Christian living in Canada and “bent on fathoming what it means to love my country,” in the words of poet Adrienne Rich. Bewildered and grieved, I have been seeking wisdom in Weil’s honesty. Her country had capitulated to Hitler; the question of how she could love it was not hypothetical. Tracing how France arrived at its Nazi collaboration, Weil repeatedly criticizes Hitler’s concept of “greatness,” a thirst for imperial power she connects to political idolatry. France is guilty of embracing Hitler’s murderous passion for greatness, she writes, including in its own violent colonial project, and must reject this vision altogether to be a just society. Weil was also painfully aware that religions could participate in totalitarian power-mongering. Although she had experienced a series of mystical encounters with Christ, she argues passionately against Christian supremacy.

These insights feel uncannily prescient, yet perhaps the most compelling to me right now is Weil’s vision of how to love a country that has been hijacked by injustice. She writes, “the world needs a new patriotism. It is at this time, when patriotism is causing bloodshed, that this effort to invent a new form must be made.” Against Hitler’s obsession with greatness, Weil suggests a patriotism motivated by “compassion for one’s country.” By compassion, Weil means a love that is tempered by sorrow and critique. To be clear, she’s not calling for compassion for corrupt leaders or abstract ideas but rather for a populace, for a collective with a particular relationship to a land and to each other in the group project of good governance. “A patriotism inspired by compassion gives the poorest part of the population a privileged moral position,” she writes: it centers their flourishing rather than the comfort of the richest and most powerful.