Unexpectedly, Chesterton on Patriotism from 2021 is one of my all-time top performing posts due to a slow but steady drip of Google Search hits.

In 1908, G.K. Chesterton published the following line in Orthodoxy,

This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well.

By 1908, Chesterton had likely been exposed to Victorian early anthropological thinkers like Tylor and Frazer. Maybe I shouldn’t be impressed that he’d get it right, but I don’t think of Chesterton as having access to the best and latest evidence for how human civilization evolved.

I was browsing the book Sapiens (2011) this week and came across:

In the conventional picture, pioneers first built a village, and when it prospered, they set up a temple in the middle. But Göbekli Tepe suggests that the temple may have been built first, and that a village later grew up around it. (pg 102)

Today’s post is dedicated to congratulating Chesterton on making a conjecture that turns out to line up with the best we now know and archeological evidence that was only discovered in 1995.

Chesterton wrote,

The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico; to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles… If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence.

Also this month I witnessed Americans celebrating the 4^th of July. People here love this country “because it is theirs.”

I’ve heard a lot of panicking in the past 10 years about the fate of the nation, and I think we should always be in a partial state of paranoia. But, if love of country is needed in the recipe, we’ve still got it. (you might need an Instagram account to view Mark Zuckerberg Zuck wakeboarding in a bald eagle suit)