Individual Attitudes and National Attitudes
I think Proust has a good point in Times Rediscovered about starting from individual attitudes to understand national attitudes. It is the opposite approach of that in Plato’s Republic, of looking at the nation to understand the individual, but both approaches have their place. As always, it is a matter of starting with what is easier.
…the immense human entity called France, of which even from a purely material point of view one can only feel the tremendous beauty …if one perceives the cohesion of millions of individuals who, like cellules of various forms fill it like so many little interior polygons up to the extreme limit of its perimeter, and if one saw it on the same scale as infusoria or cellules see a human body, that is to say, as big as Mont Blanc, was facing a tremendous collective battle with that other immense conglomerate of individuals which is Germany.
…in the same way as there are bodies of animals, human bodies, that is to say, assemblages of cellules, which, in relation to one of them alone, are as great as a mountain, so there exist enormous organised groupings of individuals which we call nations; their life only repeats and amplifies the life of the composing cellules and he who is not capable of understanding the mystery, the reactions and the laws of those cellules, will only utter empty words when he talks about struggles between nations.