Heritage Lost IV

Nothing I have written so far should be seen as an evaluation of the comparative worth of any particular culture. Or a denigration of any. I merely say that we Americans are a product of a particular culture and, in order to understand who we are, it is vital that we know and understand that culture. Otherwise we risk becoming confused and ineffective.
The culture we are a product of is that of 2,000 years of British/Anglo Saxon (English) history. Our democracy, our habits of governance, the words we speak, the common illusions we make all rise out of an English/American past.
This is true whether we are white, black or yellow, European, Asiatic or African. We all come here—some to escape hanging, some from debtors’ prison, others to flee religious or political persecution, still others chained to the hold of a slave ship, yet others to avoid starvation. Almost none of us came by choice.
Millions of us share tales of misery and privation leaving our homes, of relatives that died on Atlantic voyages, of nativist persecution as we came ashore. We all faced harsh prejudice—because of an Irish brogue, a dark skin, a Catholic or Jewish faith.
Somehow we stopped being Zulu, Irish, Dutch, Polish, Chinese, Bantu, Jewish, Italian, Japanese, French, Finnish, Korean, or English—and became Americans. I am a student of names—but it is more and more common to meet an American who hasn’t the faintest notion where his ancestors came from or what his name might mean.
THAT is why this country works. Benjamin Franklin expressed concern about the nation holding together as more and more non-English folk crowded ashore even in his day. Not to worry; they BECAME English /Americans. They adopted enough of the culture of the founding fathers to rub the rough and potentially violent edges off their diversity.
Whether the person sitting next to you had a Polish grandfather or had an ancestor on the Mayflower, the language he speaks is as much a product of Shakespeare and the King James Bible as that of any Londoner or Yorkshireman.
He believes in—and more importantly UNDERSTANDS—how this thing called democracy works. He has, without knowing it, absorbed a thousand years of English experimentation and experience (some of it quite bloody) in our unique form of self-government. It is HIS culture.
He is no longer European, African or Asian—he is this unique thing called “American” that began with the Virginia House of Burgesses and the Mayflower Compact. A past that builds upon Milton, the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, the English Civil War, the rise of Parliament to a co-equal position with that of the king, the defense of democracy on battlefields in Europe and America (at Bunker Hill and Saratoga, both sides were fighting to defend democracy as they saw it), and throws in Kit Marlowe, Dunne, Swift, Addison, Edmund Burke, Hobbes, John Locke and Walpole—this is now HIS past. It forms him as much as it does any WASP.
No. He should not forget or be ignorant of the heritage he came from, be it Dutch, Chinese or West African. But, above all, he should know and understand his AMERICAN heritage. I will go so far as to say that he is not fully an American who does not know its past and its tradition.
For one thing, Democracy is actually a delicate flower. It only seems to grow well in certain soils—it doesn’t even do that well in many parts of Europe. To keep it, we must understand how it grows and what it needs to nourish it. Other cultures will not, cannot do this.
A common language binds a nation together like no other glue can. Diversity in language can be as dangerous as a load of nitro-glycerin. I can think of few things in history that have torn a nation apart faster. The Cold War, for instance, grew out of a two thousand year old split between the Latin speaking half of the Roman Empire and the Greek speaking half. The two halves spent most of those millennia at war or in a state of near war.
Study other cultures, well and good. Necessary, even. But jolly well learn your own first. It’s not necessarily better than any other—but it is most necessary to know it. That’s what we’re drifting away from in our schools today.