Category: general thoughts

“England is under threat of invasion, and though we be on the far side of the world, this ship is our home. This ship is England.”

Jack Aubrey – Master and Commander: Far Side of the World

Master and Commander is one of my favorite films, and probably among the most underrated movies of all time. It didn’t help that it was released the same year as Return of the King. While the third Lord of the Rings film deserves praise, I think Master and Commander was a superior piece of cinema.

The story of course concerns a British ship during the Napoleonic Wars pursuing a hostile French privateer off the coast of South America. They’re thousands of miles away from the homeland they’re trying to defend, but as Captain Aubrey points out, the nation is where the people are. On the ship, they remain true to their heritage and identity. They sing British songs, receive British navy traditional ration of grog (rum), hail British heroes like Admiral Nelson, perform British sailor rituals (May the Lord and saints preserve us!) and uphold British societal hierarchy among the crew so that a young one-armed boy of aristocratic background leads a group of older commoners into combat.

Because of that, their ship is England.

That line has stayed with me ever since I first heard it (regrettably, I waited years after its release before viewing it).

To me, the movie quote brought to mind the Robert Louis Stevenson poem Requiem:

This be the verse you ‘grave for me:

Here he lies where he long’d to be;

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

I thought of both when I recently burned this wood plaque for my home, as part of an ongoing effort to have my residence reflect my values as much as possible.

It is a personal slogan of mine regarding identity and the basis for community, society, and nation. The term “hearth and home” indicates their critical function to a person’s sense of home, but that refers more to the physical.

Ideas and values are what form larger relations, and they begin with what a person does.

When I completed the purchase of my first home last year in heart of the Cascade Mountains – hence the opening and closing line in my weekly podcast – one of the things that excited me the most about it was the opportunity to express my convictions and beliefs within my living quarters in a way that had not been possible in previous residences.

Prior, I had been living with the mindset of a refugee or transient. Rented bedrooms and studio apartments don’t leave much space to hang pictures and signs, and even then they are temporary spaces. You never quite know when you have to move and find another spot to place your head at night, so it hardly inspires much investment in this regard.

Now, my house is filled with paintings, pictures, posters, decorations, relics, historical artifacts, and other objects that celebrate what I believe. Even before a person steps foot inside my house, they’ll see the Whiskey Rebellion or the Pine Tree flag flying on my porch.

Peter Bailey in the Christmas classic It’s A Wonderful Life remarked that it’s deep in the race for a man to want his own home, and my personal experience has confirmed this.

Shortly after I purchased my house, I took my trip to the British Isles. One of the most cherished memories of mine was time spent at one Irish bed and breakfast chatting with an elderly Irish couple.

I was particularly affected by a comment the wife made to me after, having mentioned my Irish heritage, I discussed my new home purchase. She insisted that I hold on to at all cost, even if it meant I had to “live on tea and toast.”

As she explained, home ownership has significant meaning to anyone of Irish descent. British law for centuries forbade Irish Catholics (which more or less meant all ethnic Irish) from owning land their ancestors had tilled for generations. After repeated English invasions, they had been forced to rent it from foreign landlords. They had no control over how the land was managed.

Although not Catholic, I took the message to heart.

We live in an era of renewed emphasis on identity, but it is primarily confined to politics. Having done my fair share of investigation into the discussion, I’ve found much of the debate convoluted, inconsistent, and fraught with misplaced effort due to a cargo cult-like misunderstanding about how the world works.

We’ve seen this with Donald Trump’s presidential slogan “Make America Great Again.” What exactly defines “greatness”, a source of immense contention among his supporters and detractors, is somewhat of a moot point from my viewpoint (personally I find greatness far less desirable than freedom, but that is a separate topic).

Almost entirely absent from the discussion is the role the individual plays in celebrating and maintaining in their home whatever they want championed elsewhere. Identity politics is more or less the idea that what you are, is inextricably and exclusively tied to the political arena and whatever happens in that realm.

Needless to say, this is all well beyond your personal control and authority.

What concerns me is the idea that government can make a nation great – as we’ve seen with communism and other forms of totalitarianism, they can certainly destroy it.

But what makes a nation great is its people, and what composes the people are individuals.

A man who believes that his country should be “great” or celebrate certain values, customs, traditions, holidays, or peoples must not wait, expect, or demand they do it before he does it.

He must act on his own regardless of what others do, because all of that begins at the individual level. Every tradition originally started because somebody proposed it and then went through with it. I have several of my own that I intend to start.

Recently I had a great conversation on Dr. David Perrodin’s podcast about the role of rituals in modern society. One of mine I started years ago when I got back into hiking after a long hiatus following my Boy Scout days; it was around that time I also got a tobacco pipe and celebrated successful summits by smoking. It’s now an integral part of any successful hike I go on, when I also take the time to enjoy the beautiful view (weather permitting) and reflect on life.

It’s a personal thing for me, and something I intend to do for the rest of my life. But if enough people engaged in it as well, it would become a distinct part of a culture – though realistically the mountains might look like they had a wildfire every weekend and probably prompt “no smoking” ordinances by more “health-conscious” folk.

“Society” and “culture” are simply concepts that help us generalize the totality of many, many separate actions, much like a painting is the result of a thousand of brush strokes and a journey the culmination of thousands of steps.

With my personal example, if it happened it would be because everyone involved would choose to do it on their own. The cultural norm would originate organically from the bottom up, not imposed from the top down.

The passive mindset that has a man insisting someone else do something before he take action, or that they take action on his behalf, is fundamentally at odds with the idea of “every home a nation.”

It makes men willingly and voluntarily submit to the decrees or behavior of others, because they can’t adopt a mentality of independence. They substitute individual greatness by living vicariously through others.

Some may find my slogan to represent unhealthy hyper-individualism akin to the notion that “every man is an island” and, ironically, dependency on government rather than community to make it possible.

However, that’s only if you don’t want to acknowledge the outside world.

To me, it means that the home is where it all begins; it is the source.

If the people aren’t great, then neither will the nation.

Like a stream of water, if the source is polluted, it doesn’t matter what happens downstream. A pure source doesn’t ensure that the river’s end will produce clean water, but nothing else matters later if it is not clean at the very beginning.

It also means if the source remains good, people can always return to it. When other the traditional institutions fail to perpetuate and maintain the culture and customs of a people, people can always practice them in their homes. They do not need or require approval from others, and they should do so whether anyone else joins them.

In doing so, they keep their identity alive, without apology, without explanation, and without reliance on their government. They don’t need to announce in a press release, proclaim it on social media, or have it declared a national holiday by a government thousands of miles away.

It is in the act that men make an idea come to life.