Flying the Flag for G.K. Chesterton

Flags are funny things. During WWI when my granddad served in the British Army, the Tommies used old Union Jacks to clean their rifles. Can you imagine a US serviceman doing the same with the Stars & Stripes? Of course, the Tommies had sworn allegiance to the King. The Doughboys had pledged allegiance to the Flag.

From The European Conservative

By Steven Tucker

Chesterton knew that allegiance to the flag comes after the allegiance which already exists for hearth and home.

This year sees the 150th anniversary of the birth of G.K. Chesterton, the great English essayist and Catholic convert whose wisdom still echoes loud down the ages. Or does it? Chesterton is out of favour in some circles. A man who is a century and a half old could obviously never have anything worthwhile to teach us superior, progressive moderns, could he? I think he could.

The trouble is, he wrote literally thousands of essays, so which precise subject of his now allegedly outmoded wisdom should we select to focus upon to remember here? There are just so many to choose from. As a great flyer of the flag for GKC (as his dwindling number of remaining fans these days often call him), I decided it may be best to alight upon just that very topic: flags.

In late March, a controversy arose when U.S. sportswear giant Nike released their new kit for the England football team. This kit, instead of featuring the national crest of the St George’s Cross in its usual colours of red and white, displayed a more generic emblem recoloured in shades which looked like certain obscure variants of the gay and transgender flags—the new, liberal-globalist insignia intended someday soon to supersede all time-honoured banners of national pride in the name of replacement utopian internationalist solidarity.

National flags are falling rapidly out of fashion right across the Western world these days; rather than saluting them, increasing numbers of disaffected, leftism-brainwashed citizens are now inclined to burn such supposedly ‘racist’ and ‘imperialistic’ banners instead. Universalist, transnational flags of utopian globalist organisations like the UN and EU are much more in vogue. The nation state itself—which the flag represents—is increasingly deemed an outmoded phenomenon, every bit as ancient and irrelevant as the Treaty of Westphalia, which gave birth to the formal concept of just such a vile and racist legal entity in the first place.

GKC would strongly have disagreed.

Keep the Red Flag Flying Here

It is a good job that citizens in currently besieged nations like Ukraine still respect their own national flags rather more than many young Brits do the Union Jack or young Americans do Old Glory. In his essay “The Philosophy of Islands,” Chesterton writes that, “Man has always had the instinct that to isolate a thing was to identify it. The flag only becomes a flag when it is unique; the nation only becomes a nation when it is surrounded.” Could such harmless-seeming silken items sometimes be of genuine military utility, therefore, just like bombs and machine-guns? As a basic motivational tool, maybe so.

In Chesterton’s 1904 novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, the forcibly deposed President del Fuego lives in exile in London following the military defeat of his beloved homeland of Nicaragua. That defeat has come at the hands of a transnationalist power-bloc that successfully sought to absorb Nicaragua’s borders and people into its own by force of arms, much as Russia is trying to do to Ukraine today. Yet, this defeat proves to be physical only; on other, less material planes, the battle still continues.

“Nicaragua is not dead,” del Fuego argues, “Nicaragua is an idea.” If so, it is an idea summarised and symbolised most inspiringly and succinctly in its old national flag, with its bright hues of red and yellow. Deliberately stabbing his own hand with a penknife, del Fuego combines his blood with a rag of yellow torn from a nearby advertisement for mustard and pins it to his clothing in imitation of his sacred national banner. The globalist-minded, anti-patriotic London civil servants, before whom he performs this act of self-mutilation, think him mad—but this is not so.

President del Fuego proudly asks his unimaginative, grey-minded English acquaintances, “Can you not understand the ancient sanctity of colours?” Evidently, they cannot. “The Church has her symbolic colours,” del Fuego continues, and so does the nation state. Wherever El Presidente sees red and yellow in combination—not simply on an actual Nicaraguan flag, but even on such seemingly unrelated items as a blood-stained mustard advertisement—he sees the beloved land of his birth:

Wherever there is a field of marigolds and the red cloak of an old woman, there is Nicaragua. Wherever there is a field of poppies and a yellow patch of sand, there is Nicaragua. Wherever there is a lemon and a red sunset, there is my country. Whenever I see a red pillar-box and a yellow sunset, there my heart beats. Blood and a splash of mustard can be my heraldry. If there be yellow mud and red mud in the same ditch, it is better to me than white stars.

Is President del Fuego being naïve and romantic here, or rational and wise? To Chesterton, there was little difference between the two states of mind: to have the willpower and wisdom to defend one’s own country from external attack, one must first possess the naïveté and romanticism to actually love it.

Flags of Convenience

It may seem absurd for a man to boast that he is willing to die for the sake of a flag, but anybody drawing that conclusion has been foolish enough to mistake a flag for simply being a flag. If a man dies for a woman, does anyone really think he’s doing it just for a pair of breasts?

In his essay “The Flag of the World,” Chesterton shows how loyalty to a local flag like Nicaragua’s is not as silly as a typically priggish anti-patriotic globalist might claim, because such a sentiment is not truly loyalty to a flag as such, but rather loyalty to something much earlier and more fundamental. The flag simply acts as a convenient post-facto capsule symbol for all this:

A man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. He has fought for the flag, and often won heroic victories for the flag [in his prior life and mind’s eye] long before he has ever enlisted. To put shortly what seems the essential matter, he has a loyalty long before he has any admiration.

If a patriotic local community seeks to festoon its streets with national flags, then this would not necessarily be a manifestation of hyper-jingoism akin to the streets of 1930s Munich being swathed in swastikas, despite what some sceptical anti-Americans might claim on Flag Day, or what some self-hating Englishmen might jeer upon St George’s Day.

Banners of Christ

The ultimate basis for the love of one’s flag, Chesterton writes, is Christianity—the greatest truth of all in Chestertonian eyes, but the greatest heresy of all in the eyes of today’s governing class. In his essay “The Paradoxes of Christianity,” Chesterton observes that many critics deride Christianity for its apparent internal contradictions, some of which relate directly to the field of human warfare and flags.

For example, Christian teaching appears to hold mutually incompatible enthusiasm for both “submission and slaughter”—the New Testament tells us to turn the other cheek, the Old Testament to take an eye for an eye. Chesterton’s solution to this conundrum, as was his instinct regarding paradox in general, was to embrace it. Christianity was well able to contradict itself because—unlike other putatively catholic (i.e., universal) creeds like communism or liberalism—it was content to contradict itself. Like Walt Whitman, it was large; it contained multitudes.

As Chesterton admits: “It is true that the Church told some men to fight and others not to fight; and it is true that those who fought were like thunderbolts and those who did not fight were like statues. All this simply means that the Church preferred to use its Supermen and to use its Tolstoyans.”

If it were an oppressively universalist empire, like that of today’s progressive globalist ideologues, the Church would have settled upon one of the two competing poles and attempted to either make all its Supermen into Tolstoyans, or all its Tolstoyans into Supermen. Chesterton argues that true, non-oppressive universalism, like that of the Catholic Church, accepts the natural fact of human difference. It does not attempt to erase it wholesale under the fake rubric of compulsory ‘diversity’ like today’s EU or UN might seek to do. As Chesterton observes, “Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the Church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved.”

One clear symbol of this state of natural (not artificial, as under false flags like those of the UN) unity in multiplicity—analogous, for Chesterton, to that of the Holy Trinity—is the multi-coloured national flag, in particular the English flag of St George: the famous red cross upon a four-quartered white background (Nike take note!). Chesterton shows how Christianity has managed to unite the innate contradictions of human nature—its bellicosity and its pacifism, for instance, the lion and the lamb—beneath the single banner, by virtue of embracing such innate contradictions “side by side like two strong colours, red and white, like the red and white upon the shield of St George. It has always had a healthy hatred of pink … Christianity sought in most of these cases to keep two colours co-existent but pure.”

“It is the instinct of Christianity,” Chesterton writes in his essay “The Romance of Orthodoxy,” “to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces … No other philosophy [he is thinking particularly here of Buddhism] makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into separate souls.” Within Christian tradition, Chesterton says, the great Whole of God deliberately splits itself down into smaller individual fragments, in terms of the personal human souls which live separately from (yet still somewhat united with, on an underlying level) their parent God within individual human bodies. This allows them freedom of action, choice, and individual personality, as individual human beings.

The parallel with separate individual nation states existing independently from one another, beneath the one single shared umbrella shield of Christendom, is obvious: as geopolitical microcosm reflects theological macrocosm in this way, it is a sign that the independence of the individual nation state apart and aside from a universalist empire enjoys a natural, God-given spiritual basis, not just a common-sense practical and political one.

The internationalist utopians of today inaccurately see government as a branch of science, and so view their contemporary transnational institutions as being inherently more rational and logical ways of organising the affairs of men than ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘outmoded’ concepts like sovereign nation states have been. Mystics like Chesterton, however, are far more realistic in realising that men are not inherently rational, ordered, or uniform in nature at all, and that Panglossian hopes of universal government extending too far beyond the natural limits of the nation state are nothing but pure delusions—and dangerous ones at that.

Double Standards

Multiplicity in unity—what the Russian Orthodox Church terms sobornost—is for Chesterton the true secret of Christianity’s historic success. In “The Paradoxes of Christianity,” he had this to say upon the matter:

This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery of the new balance … Christianity was like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescences exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years. In a Gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were all necessary. Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support; every buttress was a flying buttress. So in Christendom apparent accidents balanced … If any one wants a modern proof of all this, let him consider the curious fact that, under Christianity, Europe (while remaining a unity) has broken up into individual nations. Patriotism is a perfect example of this deliberate balancing of one emphasis against another emphasis. The instinct of the Pagan empire would have said, ‘You shall all be Roman citizens, and grow alike; let the German grow less slow and reverent; the Frenchmen less experimental and swift.’ But the instinct of Christian Europe says, ‘Let the German remain slow and reverent, that the Frenchman may the more safely be swift and experimental. We will make an equipoise out of these excesses. The absurdity called Germany shall correct the insanity called France.’

Without the essential underpinning of this innate sense of unity in variety, it may be that both cathedral and Christendom alike would ultimately collapse. We can see this happening to our own societies today. That entity we used to call ‘the West’ may once have enjoyed a healthy underlying sense of Chestertonian sobornost to it, but not now that the utopian globalists are in charge of our fates. Witness the contemporary subsuming of the absurdity called Germany and the insanity called France alike into the enforced, homogenising embrace of that even greater lunacy called the European Union.

Would anyone really ever feel motivated to fight for the hyper-generic flag of the EU? I doubt it. This is not simply because the EU is an extraordinarily recent historical creation, but more fundamentally because it is a wholly artificial one, rather than an organic growth like most of its constituent member-states once were. Flags are powerful things, as Chesterton so accurately observed but only if they actually stand for something meaningful in the first place. Over-deracinated, over-universalised flags of Utopia are just worthless flags of No-Place—the white flags of an enforced post-human surrender to the forces of civilizational entropy.