Nature & Animals Quote by David Starr Jordan

Jordan’s line works because it flips two sacred words into interchangeable labels for the same animal reflex: barking. The image is deliberately undignified. Religion becomes a dog yapping at something vast, remote, and indifferent; patriotism becomes the same dog yapping at whoever wanders into view. In both cases, the point isn’t theology or civic duty so much as misdirected aggression dressed up as meaning.

The subtext is a jab at how communities sanctify impulse. Call it religion and the noise gains cosmic seriousness; call it patriotism and the noise becomes protective virtue. Jordan isn’t arguing that faith or love of country are inherently absurd. He’s targeting the mechanism by which institutions convert raw fear and tribal alarm into moral prestige. The dog doesn’t suddenly become wiser because we changed the noun. We do.

Context matters: Jordan was a prominent public intellectual in an era when nationalism was hardening into militarism and “patriotic” rhetoric routinely excused exclusion, censorship, and war. In that climate, his comparison isn’t just comedic; it’s diagnostic. It suggests that the loudest public pieties often function as permission slips for suspicion, a way to make hostility sound like principle.

The wit lands because the moon and the stranger are perfect opposites: one unreachable, one uncomfortably close. Yet the bark is identical. Jordan’s punchline forces a modern reader to ask an uncomfortable question: how much of what we honor as conviction is just a socially approved startle response, amplified into ideology?