Can the nation state make us better?

No, said John Locke (d. 1704). The state was brought into existence merely to protect private property.

Yes, said Edmund Burke (d. 1797). The same God “who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue, willed also the necessary means of its perfection. – He willed therefore the state.”

Locke’s idea sounds too reductive; Burke’s, too grandiose. Both should be treated with caution: in Burke’s time, and certainly in Locke’s, the state was a different entity from what it is now.

At the heart of Locke’s minimalism was his belief in a clear line of demarcation between the realms of state and church. His views on the state were empiricist: he saw it as a social contractual arrangement devoid of any sacral significance. All in all, one can see a direct line of descent from Locke to the French and American Enlightenment and, closer to our own time, liberalism.

Burke’s idea, though more attractive, has seeds of theocracy within it. After all, “perfecting human nature” is the institutional domain of the church, not of the state.

If, as Burke suggested, the state has the same purpose, then it is either redundant or else can act only as an adjunct to the church. Rather than merely keeping an eye on the state’s behaviour and judging it on the basis of Christian tenets, the church would then in effect have to run it.

That’s neither its natural function nor even its doctrine: salvation is individual, not collective. It’s as individuals, not as citizens, that people will be saved.

To what extent the state can be seen as God’s tool of perfecting human nature is thus open to debate. It’s safer to assume that it’s not the state’s function to create paradise on earth. Its purpose is only to prevent hell on earth.

And it’s in this function that the modern nation state has been found wanting. One wonders if Burke still would have persisted in his belief that any state was divinely ordained had he come back in the twentieth century and seen Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany in action.

What he did see in his lifetime, the French Revolution, horrified and disgusted him – even before its worst excesses were perpetrated (Burke’s Reflections came out in 1789). That event adumbrated modernity in any number of ways.

Perhaps the most pernicious one was marginalising the church, while attaching an absolute, if strictly secular, value to the nation state. That created the concept of nationalism, which is entirely an Enlightenment construct.

Pre-Enlightenment patriotism was so far removed from nationalism as to be almost its opposite. Patriotism was strictly local and cultural. People loved their own neck of the woods inhabited by those who looked, sounded and prayed the same way they did. They also loved their natural habitat and tended to prefer it to any other.

That was reflected in their political arrangements. Localism trumped centralism, and people pledged fealty to the local squire they knew, not loyalty to the semi-mythical figures in the capital.

The sacralised nation state, that retarded child of the Enlightenment, assumed unprecedented power by subsuming localism into centralism. People’s loyalties were yanked out of their local area and forcibly transferred to the capital, the home of the governing bureaucracy that was far from the local area geographically and even farther conceptually.

People were now encouraged, nay mandated, to think and feel on a large scale. Their love of their neighbours and landscapes got to be treated as merely a quaint subset of their real identity as members of a nation.

A nation’s nature is unifying and centralising, which too is reflected in its indigenous political arrangement. The omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God was by a series of incremental steps gradually replaced with the omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent state – the condensed personification of the nation.

As such, the nation state assumed – or rather subsumed – some of the cultural aspects of localism. But they remain subservient to the overarching political ideology, a term I never use in a positive sense.

The nature of a national political ideology may occasionally sound benign: liberty, democracy, that sort of thing. But even with the best possible intentions, the potential for perversion is both vast and almost guaranteed to be realised.

Any ideology is an intellectual construct, a product of human thought. And that substance tends to be rather fickle and changeable. Think of the universal constants of cosmic life: had they differed from what they are by a minuscule fraction of one percent, life on earth would be impossible.

In theory, it’s possible to come up with a universal ideal of a nation. In practice, however, deviations from the ideal are bound to appear and multiply. The grander the concept – and any national idea is grand by definition – the greater its potential for abuse.

The milk of political and cultural localism was spilled long ago, and it’s no use crying over it. But that cold-blooded statement of fact doesn’t preclude a healthy dose of pessimism about the sacralisation of the nation and nation state.

That’s partly why I regard nationalism (as distinct from patriotism) and conservatism as mutually exclusive – and National Conservatism as an oxymoron.

Hence, like the columnist Stephen Glover, I treated the conference organised earlier this week by an American movement called National Conservatism with suspicion. Unlike Mr Glover, I didn’t attend it. Thus I can have no grounds for disputing his findings that the conference put forth nothing but sound conservative ideas, of the kind Rishi Sunak should listen to, but won’t.

However, he dismisses the ‘National’ part of the movement as merely synonymous with patriotism and antithetical to liberal globalism: “For Hazony [NatCon founder], tradition is paramount. It flourishes in the nation state, sustained by national customs, laws and institutions. Family is the bedrock of society, and religion a valuable influence.”

I vote with both hands for the last sentence. Family is indeed the bedrock of society, and one could say that religion is the bedrock of family. But I emphatically disagree that this tradition “flourishes in the nation state”.

I’m closer to the idea that the congenitally atheistic post-Enlightenment nation state wages systematic war on family as the embodiment and conduit of tradition. No doubt the NatCons will agree with this observation, but they clearly regard it as an aberration, and thus would reject the adverb ‘congenitally’.

That’s where we go our separate ways. The very essence of the Enlightenment – and of all its offshoots, including the nation state, socialism, nationalism, globalism – is the repudiation of tradition. The nation state has squeezed its bulk into the space vacated by the church, and demands the same adulation and loyalty.

But it’s not entitled to them. The paternalistic nation state, even in its benign, Western variants, fosters the wrong parts of human nature by tossing all its traits and aspirations into a giant cauldron and claiming that the resulting uniform stew will be good for you. And, once the meal has been cooked, everyone is forced to subsist on it, even if it produces a gagging effect.

I’m sure all the speakers at the NatCon Conference were as sound as Mr Glover describes them. But – solely from the way he describes them – I’m not sure they’ve considered the relationship between conservatism and the nation state at sufficient depth.

If they had, they would have called their movement something else.