Teach Them Well.(Review)

Making Patriots, by Walter Berns (Chicago, 150 pp., $20)

America is built on a creed, a system of ideas that are universal. But patriotism-one of the most important factors in ensuring any country's continuing vigor-is a devotion not to abstract ideas but to a particular place. In his thought-provoking and obviously heartfelt new book, constitutional scholar Walter Berns of the American Enterprise Institute explores how we can foster the ancient value of patriotism in what remains even after 225 years a novus ordo seclorum, a new kind of country.

Berns begins by acknowledging that we Americans cannot be a new version of the ancient Spartans, who have come to symbolize the traditional understanding of patriotism. In Sparta, the good of the individual was identified with the good of the state: A man's gods are the city's gods, and he achieves his own glory by expanding the city's glory. Not coincidentally, Sparta was a militaristic society; the struggle for national glory was waged in the theater of international conflict.

The American Founding, with its dramatic assertion of the rights of the individual, put the world on notice that the new nation wanted no truck with this traditional concept. We were to be a mercantile republic, with each citizen worshipping his own gods and pursuing his own happiness-in the confidence that these individual pursuits would conduce, generally, to the happiness of the nation. Just how drastic a departure this would be from European precedent is clear from George Washington's historic words to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island:

It is now no more that tolerance is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

Berns quotes these words for two reasons. First, they demonstrate how ingrained in the American tradition is the concept of natural individual rights. Other countries had magnanimously declared that they would "tolerate" even those of their fellow citizens who were Lutherans, or Catholics, or Jews. There is no question of that kind of cultural arrogance in the United States: Here, one can be a Baptist, or a Catholic, or a Jew, or anything else one chooses, not on the sufferance of one's fellow citizens, but because one is a human being endowed by God with natural rights and freedoms deserving of all protection by a just society.

This idea is America's great legacy to the world. But Washington's statement is important for a second reason. In asking that all those who benefit from living in the enlightened republic "demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support," it raises the question of how that "effectual support"-a ...