Cicero on Duties to Parents and to the Fatherland (NATION 1)
Against Political Withdrawal
Most modern Westerners find nationalism offensive and patriotism embarrassing. With the occasional exception of a politician campaigning for votes, overt expressions of love for one’s country are confined to “red states” and rednecks. LGBT flags fly alongside American flags at U.S. embassies.
While the turn against nationalism intensified after the horrors of fascism in the mid-20th century, it originated within liberal political theory itself. Liberalism proclaims universal rights and breaks down distinctions between people and things. Liberals seek to found nationhood on abstract moral principles (“freedom!” “equality!”) rather than on a common culture, language, religion, etc. This leads to cosmopolitanism—the belief that people should be “world citizens” rather than citizens of specific nations—since there is no reason, in principle, why people from all over the world cannot adopt the same moral principles. Liberal internationalists have presumed for several generations that everyone wants liberal democracy along Western lines, a miscalculation that led President George Bush to fight two protracted wars in Muslim countries.
This belief in Western moral superiority coexists awkwardly with a commitment to “multiculturalism.” Liberals celebrate “diverse” cultures, seek to downplay American cultural distinctives, criticize “whiteness,” and project progressive Western values like tolerance or feminism onto other religions. But the great sin is to prefer one’s own culture to others (especially if it’s Western or doesn’t accept the right beliefs) and/or fight for it.
This post examines a classical philosophical argument on behalf of patriotism, public service, and the nation. In On the Republic, Marcus Tullius Cicero defends a commitment to the life of politics against those, like the Epicureans, who advocated a stress-free, apolitical life devoted to pursuing one’s own happiness.[1] He argues that each person has a duty to obey and help one's country that is on par with the duty to obey and help one's parents. Cicero’s analysis teaches us three important truths: (1) humans have unchosen duties; (2) one such duty is a duty to serve and honor one’s country; and (3) political statesmanship has a role to play in shaping people’s character.
Natural Duties of Gratitude
The surviving manuscripts of On the Republic are incomplete. The text begins in the middle of an introductory discussion about whether people ought to live a political life of public service or a private, comfortable life. A fragment of the text preserved in another author reads: “Thus, because the fatherland secures more benefits and is an older parent than he who begot [i.e. one’s father], surely a greater gratitude is owed to it than to a parent” (29). Cicero argues that we have natural duties to our country that are similar to our natural duties to our family.
Cicero makes little attempt to ground duties to parents because he assumes that people will recognize automatically that we have a duty to honor and care for our parents. But this idea is less accepted in our day, and so it helps to begin here. Natural duties towards parents is in fact central to ethical systems across the world. The fifth of the Ten Commandments states: “Honor you father and mother” (Exodus 20:12). The Confucian family system in East Asia rests upon “filial piety” towards elder family members. Similar notions were alive in the Greco-Roman world too.
The central point, on the classical view, is that duties to people can be based on proper gratitude for benefits we have received from them. We should respect and obey our parents because they have sacrificed so much to birth, feed, clothe, and teach us. Aristotle wrote: “The friendship of parents to children, and of men to gods, is a relation to them as to something good and superior; for they have conferred the greatest benefits, since they are the causes of their being and of their nourishment, and of their education from their birth.”[2] While gratitude is an understated virtue in our relaxed American society, some cultures have elaborate gift-giving rituals, where a gift imposes on the receiver a precise obligation to reciprocate. The duty to repay benefactors is deeply rooted in human nature and thus seems to be a part of natural law.
Gratitude-based duties, it is important to note, are not consensual. The obligation grabs us immediately upon receiving the benefit. This is why some people refuse a gift, because they don’t want to accept the obligation to reciprocate. They can’t be bothered. But we cannot choose or reject our parents or our nation. They shaped us, formed us, and made us who we are. If we had grown up anywhere else, we would be quite different. Thus, to the extent that there is anything good about us, we have no choice but to honor and obey those who made that possible. Even if we think our parents did a poor job raising us, it was still a massive investment of time and effort.
Duties to the Fatherland
For Cicero, a person’s duties to his country are analogous to his duties to his parents, because both have played a crucial role in rearing him. A citizen is protected from crime by the laws, is protected from invasion by the military, is protected (in many cases) from poverty by public assistance or by state enforcement of economic regulations, and—crucially—is educated by the rules and institutions the state provides for the people. A person’s father is only able to work for a living because the state maintains order, punishes theft and fraud, and pay for economic infrastructure like roads and bridges. The state preserves the family by licensing marriages and shielding the privacy of the family from outside intrusion. Therefore, Cicero concludes that the nation and its laws deserves our obedience, support, and sacrifice.
Later, Cicero remarks that nations bank on the grateful service of their citizens.
“Our fatherland has neither given us birth nor educated us according to law without expecting some nourishment, so to speak, from us. Nor has it supplied a safe refuge for our leisure and a tranquil place for quiet merely to serve our convenience, but to appropriate for itself, for its own advantage, the largest and greatest part of our minds, talents, and counsels, giving back only so much to us for our private use as is beyond its own requirements” (33).
If these expectations are cheated, the public authorities have no reason to invest in its citizens in the future. Society is a collectivity that can only survive if a concern for the common good animates its members. And the common good is mediated in large part through the state and, especially, the nation’s laws.
Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century AD, provides a complementary defense of duties to family and nation in his treatment of the Fifth Commandment (“Honor your father and mother”). For Thomas, we should love our neighbor, which really means everybody we encounter. There are two ways to love someone: avoiding doing evil to them, and doing good to them. It is possible, Thomas argues, to avoid doing evil to everyone, and so we have a universal duty to avoid harming all people. But we are not to do good to everyone. Thus, “we should love all, but we are not bound to do good to all. But among those to whom we are bound to do good are those in some way united to us.”[3] He numbers parents first among those to whom one is united, but we are also united to our political communities more than to foreign nations.
Thomas, moreover, expands the notion of “father” in such a way as to include the ruler as one’s “father.” He points out that people are called “father” not only when they physically cause someone to be born but also when they fulfill the role of a father: protection, nourishment, and education. Thus, the following people are called “fathers:” church leaders (1 Corinthians 4:15), benefactors, old men (Deuteronomy 32:7), and rulers and kings (2 Kings 5:13). The latter are called fathers “because their whole care is the good of their people.” “Now, all these fathers must be honored, because they all resemble to some degree our Father who is in heaven,” for instance by bringing us into existence and keeping us in existence. Thomas thus links our duties to our parents with our duties to our country.
It seems to follow from Cicero’s reasoning—although he doesn’t say so explicitly—that duties of gratitude are not unlimited. Both parents and countries can lose the respect and obedience of the people under their authority, if they fail in their duty to promote the well-being of their charges. This is especially true if the parents/rulers command their charges to do something that violates the moral law, which bounds all authority, but it can also apply to cases of “neglect” or gross negligence. We owe a certain amount of gratitude to our parents for bringing us into the world, but if they do not do more than that, they have abdicated their role as parent. (The same is true of Thomas’ argument, which goes even further in reducing the status of “father” to someone who performs a certain role.)
Moral Formation of the Citizens
One of the main benefits of a good upbringing is the inculcation of virtues like self-control, justice, wisdom, courage, and piety. You could also include the “social virtues” such as conversational skills and humor. Children need to be clothed and fed, but after that they have many needs related to higher human pursuits.
For Cicero, as for the classical tradition generally, the state plays a key role in inculcating virtue. Modern states don’t do a lot of moral formation (although the public schools have tried), so we’re used to viewing moral formation as a task primarily for parents, or perhaps a religious body. But, for Cicero, public “law” is a necessary component of forming the citizens’ characters. What “philosophers say” about virtue must be “accomplished and strengthened by those who have configured laws for cities.”
“When comes piety, or from whom comes religion? … Whence come justice, fidelity, fairness? When come a sense of shame, self-control, avoidance of disgrace, desire for praise and for honorableness? Whence comes courage in labors and dangers? Without doubt, from those men who gave form to those things by training and who strengthened some of them by customs and consecrated others by laws” (30-31).
Note that both “customs” and “laws” are shaped by the lawgivers.
The crucial role of the state and society in moral formation grounds the duty to obedience and honor described above. A good state doesn’t just protect us from enemies foreign and domestic; it gives us a sense of what is right and wrong and how to achieve the former while avoiding the latter. Even “religion,” for Cicero, comes to us from laws and customs. Unless we reject the morality of our upbringing, then, we owe a deep debt to the nation as well as our parents.
The Duty of Public Service
How should we discharge the duty to our homeland? Cicero argues that exemplary individuals ought to engage in public service through political and military leadership. He praises the heroes of Roman history who shunned leisure to perform incalculable benefits to their fellow citizens. He portrays political life as honorable and shirking it as disgraceful.
Cicero is countering the Epicureans, a sect of philosophers who advocated a private and quiet life of pleasure (including intellectual pursuits). The argument against serving one’s country, as Cicero describes it, holds that one is “tossed about in these waves and storms” rather than living in “tranquility and leisure” (30). Political life involves unpleasant “labors” and “dangers” (31).
In response, Cicero argues that humans possess an inborn attraction to the political life of honorable public service. (In retrospect, the desire for heroism seems to be distinctively masculine and to distinguish most men from most women.) There is, in the human heart, “such a necessity for virtue and such a love of defending the common safety” that great men will “overcome all allurements of pleasure and leisure” (30). Spurred by the “goads of nature itself,” humans are “very greatly drawn to increasing the resources of the human race” and are “eager to render human life safer and more prosperous by our judgments and labors” (31). “[C]ourageous men … see it as more wretched to be consumed by nature and old age than to be given an occasion to give back this life—which must be given back to nature anyway—in behalf of their fatherland above all else.” In short, Cicero considers people who devote their lives to private pleasure to be stunted and unnatural. (I wonder what he would say about Americans. The military currently faces a recruitment shortage despite America being at peace.)
Another argument against political service holds that the politician risks being spurned and rejected by his country. The opponents of the political life are “endowed with a rich vocabulary and eloquent when they collect the calamities of the most famous men and the injustices imposed on them by ungrateful fellow citizens” (32). Only “worthless men” who dominate republican politics, they say, often persuade the public to hate and punish the good politicians. Politics, on this argument, involves dealing with slimy people and false slanders, experiences which it would be ridiculous for virtuous and wise people to undergo.
Cicero responds by saying that politicians derive “honor” and “glory” from their contributions even when these are insufficiently appreciated by others (32-33). (Again, desiring recognition, especially public recognition, for competence and heroism is a characteristically male trait.) Even in the worst case, the most just “cause for entering public life” is the desire, on the part of good men, “not to obey wicked men and not to allow these men to tear the republic to pieces” (33). One’s country may need a strong leader in an emergency, and the only way to be ready for that emergency is to prepare, for years, to enter public service.
Ultimately, for Cicero, the political life of statesmen excels the philosopher’s life devoted to contemplation. Whereas philosophers are barely able to persuade “a few persons” to follow their prescriptions, statemen are able to compel “all persons” to practice virtue (31). Thus, for Cicero, the “greatest use” of virtue “is the governance of the city” (30. “There is nothing in which human virtue more nearly approaches the majesty of the gods than either founding new cities or preserving ones that are already founded” (34-35). Cicero himself proudly devoted his life to leading Rome as a Consul and Senator.
Conclusion
Cicero’s argument informs postliberal philosophy in several ways:
1. We have natural, unchosen moral obligations.
Liberalism is based on choice and autonomy. Thomas Hobbes, a proto-liberal thinker who was massively influential on the later development of liberalism, literally defined justice as fulfilling one’s contracts.[4] Liberals love “social contract theory” because they have a hard time imagining duties that people have not voluntarily taken on. From economics to sex to family life, “consent” is the watchword of liberal morality.
Cicero helps us realize how unnatural that impulse actually is. A healthy politics is possible only after we acknowledge the ties of family, friendship, and nation. This does not mean we abandon morality. But natural relationships channel our duty so as to provide for universal human needs, among them physical sustenance and moral formation. We should do evil to no one, but we should do good primarily to those closest to us and to whom we have natural ties. The importance of caring for one’s own has become even clearer as study after study finds that most social problems are caused by a faulty upbringing. The best things even a billionaire philanthropist will ever do, he will do for those closest to him.
2. One such unchosen moral obligation is to our country.
Liberalism is suspicious of deep attachment to particular objects, viewing them as prejudices or “narrow.” Especially on the Left, patriotism is downplayed. Borders are open. Multiculturalism is popular. Americans admire members of the military, but many don’t feel an obligation to serve personally. Liberal philosophers have had a particularly hard time justifying the draft.
This post situates Cicero in a long line of thinkers who emphasize natural ties to family and nation. It complements the work that “national conservatives” and “Christian nationalists” are doing to rehabilitate national distinctiveness and patriotism. In The Case for Christian Nationalism, for instance, Stephen Wolfe argues that an attachment towards “particular” and “nearby” things, such as one’s family, region, and homeland, is natural and good. The deep roots of this view have been obscured by the recent dominance of liberal cosmopolitanism. Postliberals need to find ways, like Cicero, to defend the nation.
And yet, for Christians, the political virtues inevitably will occupy a lower place than they did for the ancients. In The City of God, Augustine undertakes, among other things, to show how the “city of man” (i.e. political communities) is less worthy than the “city of God” (the true church). At one point, Augustine argues that the Romans had a faulty conception of virtue. Roman statesmen “seem[ed] to do some good,” but only “in order that they might be glorified by men.”[5] Even when “the Romans held their own private interests in low esteem for the sake of the common good, that is, for the commonwealth,” they did so in order to gain “honour and power and glory.”[6] It goes without saying that, for Augustine, the Romans did not practice true virtue, and that their reward pales in comparison to the reward of those who serve God.
Christians can debate how valuable the nation and its goods are, but I think it is undeniable that Christianity introduces an otherworldliness into politics that, to some extent, displaces patriotism. The church is an international body, and the God of Christianity is a universal God (unlike the Roman gods). A modern form of nationalism should be a genuine but tempered nationalism.
3. Conservatives ought to influence politics for the sake of moral formation.
Cicero’s argument that politics is essential to moral formation fits very well with the postliberal dogma that a “neutral” public square is impossible and undesirable. Humans are naturally shaped by the cultural environment, including both laws and social customs. Stephen Wolfe is right to argue that the “totality of national action” encompasses both “civil laws and social customs,” both of which should be oriented to the common good of the community and its members.[7]
However, just as Christian theology tends to devalue the political virtues, Christianity alters the way in which moral formation takes place. To the extent that virtue comes from nonlegal sources, Cicero’s argument for the centrality of political statesmanship weakens. Each generation should pay attention to what does in fact shape hearts and minds. Today it might be social media as much as the laws. In the Christian era, the church serves an important role in moral formation that partly (but not wholly) replaces the role of the state. This is especially true in a democracy, like ours, whose magistrates are elected by a corrupt populace. When it comes to moral living, one’s pastor might be more important than one’s representative.
Furthermore, if there is a higher “virtue” than public service, like salvation or godliness, then worldly politics should be subordinate to it. This is precisely what Thomas teaches in On Kingship:
“But because the man who lives according to virtue is also directed towards a further end, which … consists in the enjoyment of the Divine, the end of the whole community of mankind must therefore be the same as it is for one man. The final end of a multitude united in society, therefore, will not be to live according to virtue, but through virtuous living to attain to the enjoyment of the Divine.”[8]
Only the church, Aquinas argues, can help us to reach our heavenly good, and so the civil magistrate plays a subordinate role in relation to the church. This principle will cash out differently depending on the precise relationship between church and state in a particular time and place.
Nevertheless, Cicero points to a crucial and neglected aspect of politics that will always be true: the tendency of elites to influence laws and social customs in favor of a particular conception of virtue and of the good life. If conservatives or religious traditionalists retreat, we are ceding this important source of moral influence to the Left. That’s a bad idea, both for individuals and, eventually, for society as a whole. We have a duty not only to our children but to our fellow citizens. Some capable, intelligent conservative men now considering the ministry should consider going into politics instead. It is important to “give back” in the form of public service because politics matters—a lot.
[1] All references are to Cicero, On the Republic and On the Laws, ed. and trans. David Fott (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).
[2] Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Lesley Brown, trans. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 158 [book 8, chapter 12].
[3] Thomas Aquinas, On the Two Commandments of Charity and The Ten Commandment of the Law, St. Thomas Aquinas On The Two Commandments Of Charity And The Ten Commandments Of The Law : Thomas, Aquinas, Saint : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.
[4] Hobbes, The Leviathan, chap. 15.
[5] Augustine, The City of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 215 [book 5, chap. 15].
[6] Ibid.
[7] Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2020), 9-14.
[8] Thomas Aquinas, De regimine principum, in Political Writings, ed. and trans. R.W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 40-41.