“In seven years you could hold cinders in your hand for what America was worth”
“We love Whitman for his optimism but it was Melville who was the truer man because he saw the malice”
But then, was it optimism on Whitman’s part or was he sending up a desperate prayer?
Where in any case is this redemptive historical narrative you wistfully allude to? Maybe we should summon Massasoit and as him what he thinks
7
This paper's right wing columnists should try to control their philosophical musings. Misty "intellectual" essays fail to mask their savage assumptions.
Since 1981 their enabling pontifications have helped bring us to the brink. Too many have been harmed for no reason.
Their shame has no limits.
23
The most important thing you will pass on to your children, for good or ill, is the quality of your presence (or absence.) You can pretty much forget the rest.
13
My goodness Mr. Douthat, your sense of ennui is almost palpable. You have thought your self into quite a pickle when it really is quite simple.
Give your children a sense of the real history of the world, not a fantastic version. Teach your children your best version of a creation myth. If you, in your experience have come to believe in a particular creation of the human species, that belief is worthy of passing on to your children. Then pass on your sense of morality and ethics. Everything else can be stories of lore and of family and friends. If those stories have lessons in them, then all the better.
To the degree there is a commonality of your beliefs and myths with others, then you are part of a culture, and your children will either identify with that culture or they will reject it, depending on how convincing or convicted you are.
But acceptance or rejection will depend on the veracity of your beliefs and methods of teaching.
I think you will find your way through the questions, if you seek honestly and rigorously for the truth.
11
Bing second generation American born Irish (and Welsh) I never got the whole obsession with Ireland and Irishness my parents, and cousins had. Never felt Irish, and don't know what it means to be Irish. I'm American...born in NYC, raised in the boroughs and then mostly Long Island.
I'm that...I'm not that all the way over there. (he points someplace vaguely east)
All the music, (I do like some of it) and dancing at the family gatherings were always odd to me. However, the forced dancing helped me later when High School dances were torture for my male friends, while I was all in...and so were the girls! Still works.
But I also saw the dark side of that Irishness. The racism. The sexism. The violence. The wanton drunkenness. The way the often corrupt American-Irish politicians used it to get votes and money. How the men contributed to the terrorist attacks back in the "old country" when the hats were passed, to support the IRA.
Shameful. How much of that money could have been better spent on their own families.
I don't know what being Irish is. I don't feel like I'm lacking in anything important by that unknowing. Nothing is lost, there is no empty space.
I'm not even sure what I know what it feels like to be "American." I don't see us as a People, a race, but rather a diverse population living under a set of ideas, striving to reach ideals. Anyone is welcome to help.
25
It was reassuring to find such a generous and inventive interpretation of the late Eric Hobsbawm's notion of invented traditions, since it has been so widely used, as he doubtless intended, to call into question the authenticity and value of almost any and every tradition one might care to name. An unrepentant Stalinist of a gratingly mandarin type, Hobsbawm lacked any idea of the importance of cultural continuities, or rites and rituals, which he sneered at in a typically snooty and superior academic Marxist manner. He would have had no time for the richness and complexity of Mr Douthat's picture of how we acquire social identities.
3
Ross,
You even get to botch a non-politcal essay!!
"...going from a Protestant religious consensus to a “Judeo-Christian” one, from an Anglo-Saxon settler nation to a 20th-century melting pot."
You seem to be implying that our country is no longer based on Protestantism? Have you heard about the power structure of the "Gospel of Wealth" Evangelical Protestants who constantly pontificate from the Halls of Congress and Fox News?
If Protestantism is so on the wane, what's with the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC that seems to be held every quarter???
"But I’m not sure what that means, exactly, if I’m raising them Catholic in an increasingly post-Protestant...America"
Over 50% of the American public consider themselves Protestant, with another 17% having been brought up Protestant, having the core philosophy, but no longer the ritual.
I'm a cradle Roman Catholic and have been called non-Christian by Protestants, and that my leader is the anti-Christ by similar sectarians. That seems as if there is still a strong residue of America and Protestant is one in the same for a good percentage of my fellow citizens.
12
“...[it] feels almost like a judgment on our inability to figure out, in common, what it is that we should wish to have passed down.”
Indeed the question, what should we pass down, creates the very American dilemma that Mr. Douthat’ generation of coservatives mourn. In the traditional past, the white hyphenated Ango-American majority, despite all the contrary evidence , created the American mythical tradition that America was in its essence a white, Protestant, nation of Anglo-European immigrants defined by rugged self-sufficient individualists.
Yet the Pennsylvania Dutch in the 18th century, the Scandinavians,Irish, Italians, Portugese, Greeks, and Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews in the 19th century brought their own history, cultures,traditions and myths with them.
Our modern dilemma arises when we confuse American civic national identity with a mythic American identity based on singular race,ethnicity, religion, homogeneous culture, and a reverence for a mythic past selectively fabricated by the original Anglo-west European ethnic majority.
Now we have become a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural People with no singular ethnic-historical tradition. In desperation the “old order” seeks to conserve their mythic past where America claimed to be a nation of homogeneous people based on blood, soil, and common history. That fantasy was false at the creation and is dangerous today.
7
The problem with tradition is thinking that the “thing” itself is what we long for rather than what the thing “represents.”
I think of coal miners in WV today who say it is a tradition that their families have been in the coal business for four generations. And so they look to Conservatives to keep the industry going at all cost. But in fact the “tradition” was started by an ancestor who actually broke with the traditions of his ancestors and struck out to America to take a risk and make a better life. That is a tradition - being a risk taker - that is much more worthy of maintaining. And when you strip out the thing from what it truly represents you see that the single mom with two kids from Guatemala risking everything for a better life in America has much in common with that coal miner’s great grandparents.
26
Ross, mother of four adult children, here, I wrote to tell you that your children will make up their own minds on what to believe; and they won’t necessarily take up what you have taught them. We raised our four, in Catholic schools (like my husband and I were schooled), a Catholic home in which grace was always said, Lent was observed, as was Advent. And all the High Holy days. We taught them about the value of social justice, and we taught them to love and respect everyone.
Our children all graduated from college and are professionals, all have left the Catholic Church. Why? Hypocrisy. We left also, after a lifetime steeped in our Catholic traditions and church. We could no longer stand nor live with the knowledge of centuries of abuse by the clergy and the hypocrisy of the hierarchy!
So Ross, the BEST tradition to offer your children is LOVE. They will always value the love given to them...all the rest of the stuff is fluff!
Love your children...it’s all they need!
19
Thoughts:
" going from a Protestant religious consensus to a “Judeo-Christian” one, from an Anglo-Saxon settler nation to a 20th-century melting pot."
As there is no Christianity in Judaism and precious little Judaism in Christianity (See variousletters of Paul...), there is no "Judeo-Christian" tradition.
America has always been an idea, not a tradition. Some ideas conflicted with others and others still do. See the 21st Century continuation of the American idea.
As the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem, taught us:
"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." KJV
‘“Tradition” - one of those words conservative people use as a shortcut to thinking.’
- Warren Ellis
40
The Irish saved western civilization twice...so far.
In the Fifth Century Irish monks copied and preserved the western canon from the barbarians who occupied Europe for one thousand years.
In 1962 an Irish-American president defied the WASP ruling order and refused to invade Cuba. We now know that Cuban and Russian troops, had they faced invasion, would have defended themselves with tactical nuclear weapons, and World War III would have been the result.
As an Irish wit once remarked, God invented whiskey to keep the Irish from running the world.
9
Irish is what white Americans claim to be when they can't claim to be Italian or Jewish.
An exaggeration surely, but it was something that occurred to me listening to my friends and acquaintances in the 1980s when, in the cultural aftermath of the "Roots" phenomenon, white Americans felt left out and started to wear their putative ethnicities on their sleeves. For Jewish Americans it was simple, for they had indeed a genuine tradition, rich in diversity, in revisions, reinventions and reenacted fundamentalisms. For the rest of white America, Italians held the trump card, for they had an authentic cuisine. They learned to cook grandma's recipes, as "foodies," with more trendy, expensive ingredients.
As for the catchall "Irish," not so much. You might stomach the food, but you couldn't serve it to your friends. Beyond that, it's just hard to construct a tradition by applying a heavy sentimental veneer to memories of drunken belligerence, patriarchy and pederasty. Which is perhaps why Scottish started displacing Irish at some point as the universal white American ethnic can-opener, without solving the problem. At least fewer people have any sense of what Scottish means, aside, that is, from a sentimental fondness for drunken belligerence, patriarchy and pederasty in a "Gaelic" font.
The lurking cultural problem is that white American claims to various reinvented white ethnicities remain, at Root, about race: a reactive mixture of envy and resentment toward Black America.
6
My favorite story of Irish history is the rarely told story. The church wanted members to limit their drinking and made them swear off.
Then came the ether bars where they drank ether that provided a immediate intoxication for 20 minutes and awful smelling gas.
The members professed sobriety from alcohol as did the Church.
It was a stinky disaster that ended shortly thereafter.
1
“Tradition, to me, is a poison. And when you start to destroy it, those with that poison in their veins react with hostility. They think their culture has given them something, and are blind to what it has taken away.”
- T.J. Kirk
34
As the offspring of two Irish immigrants, I am surprised that Mr. Douthat identifies the Irish heritage as bring one of conservatism. (Many of the soldiers in the Easter Rising were members of the Irish Citizens Army, working class Socialists organized by James Connolly, the great Socialist leader, who was subsequently brutally executed by the British imperial State.) Growing up in the era of Robert Kennedy and Daniel Berrigan, we were taught without having to be told that the the Irish were always the underdogs, crushed beneath John Bull's British boot. Their catchphrase was always, "Up the Rebels!" In this country, Irish workers organized many labor unions. The films of John Ford and the plays of Eugene O'Neill, great American artists who were proud of being Irish, are full of sympathy for the downtrodden . . . If Mr. Douthat wants to get his Irish up, he should subject himself to the recently Tony awarded play, The Ferryman, which is nothing more or less than a Celtic Minstrel Show, a bigoted, nasty assemblage of every crude and ugly stereotype ever used against lower class Micks, hailed as a masterpiece by all the London and New York critics. Wisely no Dublin production is planned.
15
Tradition: the history of ignorance and error. Pass it on - or pass it over?
3
"in Irish historical narrative," I meant to say. Sorry for the typo.
As your children come of age you can teach them of American traditions by reading these books to them:
The Long Death: The Last Days of the Plains Indians. Ralph Andrist
Beloved. Toni Morrison
The Round House. Louise Erdrich
The Hate U Give. Angie Thomas
Mean Spirit. Linda Hogan
Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Ibram X Kendi
Stony the Road. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
“Teach Your Children Well......”
4
Douthat is struggling with what is the true White Man's burden - how to reconcile a history and present of white supremacy that enables its progeny to contribute to its ultimate demise.
4
“...I have young children, and I want to give them a story of America that coheres as an inheritance...
Don’t bother trying...
They’re not going to listen to anything you say, while they watch everything that you – and the rest of us – do...
Gaelic will die – because it’s tedious...
Brogue-tinged English will endure – because it’s charming...
And because it encourages succinctness and metaphor...
PS
One thing you might pass on to them...
Hard borders – anywhere, but especially within nations – are a loser...
If they then ask, what keeps them all going – just answer:
“Tradition”
6
I like this column. Unlike the plethora of articles by cultural critics one reads on line that claim to know everything about what everyone else should believe and do, Mr. Douthat here has genuine questions about how to balance tradition and change, how to be honest about our past and ancestors and yet continue to value what is valuable in our heritage - whatever, in this diverse nation, that heritage may be. And how to balance our own conclusions with those arrived at by others whose life experiences are different.
As another piece of writing on this same subject, I recommend Leviticus 19:34. "But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt."
8
My Da grew up speaking Irish and English on a 20-acre wheat farm in a hamlet outside Ballygar, County Galway, Ireland.
He was the youngest of four. The oldest son inherited the farm. My aunt had a breakdown in nursing school, and following a lobotomy in a Church hospital, she spent 60 years in a Church nursing home. My father and my other uncle both received their education for free from the Church.
And so Father Matt (my dad) and Father Hugh landed in Los Angeles in 1957 as diocesan priests. In about 1963, my dad became a member of the NAACP. The bishop, not liking this, transferred my dad to Watts from the San Fernando Valley. My dad was in Watts during the riots, and then he became a missionary in Peru and Bolivia.
My dad came back to the states after a few years, obtained an MSW on the Church's dime, and then promptly left the priesthood to marry my mom.
Having seen the racism, misogyny, and child abuse rampant in the Church for 20 years, my dad spent the rest of his life working in social services with poor parents, disabled children, and men with HIV/AIDS. Neither my sister or I were sent to Catholic schools, and we chose our own faith from about age 10. He always voted for Democrats until he died in 1996.
My dad did a better job than Douhat has done at identifying the best parts of the Catholic tradition. And if my dad weren't born a white guy, the Church would have never given him the chance to do so. At least he figured that much out.
17
Sadly, I think that the Irish tradition is a tradition of tragedy, perhaps nowhere better exemplified than in the mournful ballad, "The Rising of the Moon". A tradition of courage and patriotism and fealty, forever bursting forth, and forever being crushed by the forces of technology and modernity. If you want to stretch the point, you could draw parallels with the "Lost Cause" of the American South, wherein the agrarian Irish gentry (e.g., the O'Hara's of Tara) are decimated by the British-modelled industrial North, yet vow to "Rise Again".
1
Countries like Ireland and Japan and China and France are very old and relatively homogeneous, at least until recently. As a result, they were able to develop a cultural tradition that everyone could buy into (unless you are Tibetan or Uighur in China, but I digress). The United States is not very old, and except for the period between 1920 and 1964, accepted many immigrants from many different cultures. As a result, we never developed that one single, deeply rooted, cultural tradition. There were attempts over the years, which is why we all learned about Pilgrims and cowboys and Laura & Mary in school, but it wasn't really an organic tradition that bubbled up from below. It was something to be taught to us in school. The real cultural traditions in this country are too diverse to become a single tradition. I think it is a wasted effort to look for a single American cultural identity. Embrace the diversity! That is our heritage.
10
"...I want them to see their country’s sins clearly — as the left often sees more clearly than the right..."I'm old but if I were young agin I'd have to think twice about having children. The main reason being the "sin" of what humans have been guilty of concerning th environment. I would for bring ing children into the environmental disaster that awaits us. We have had a "tradition" [capitalism] of putting growth and wealth ahead of sustainability and this trdliton is so ingrained in our culture that I fear it's going to be impossible to change in any meaningful way. I'm not so worried about passing on my Americanism or Italian heritage as I am about passing on a culture that cares about the survival of our species and the others with whom we share the planet. Im' not optimistic.
6
Who We Are: a tumultuous people, Ross. We are not static. We continually combine with new citizens and recombine with existing ones in new ways. This inevitably creates friction. Occasionally there are periods in which it appears the friction might catch fire. This is such a period now. But in a country with a tumultuous people all of this passes to the next phase, soon to be followed by yet another. Teach your children this.
1
I think perspective comes w/ the revisiting the story of the prodigal son.
That is a story where a benevolent parent allows his son to exercise the free will he gave him & that free will takes him far away but then eventually brings him back, to the benevolent parent who spent each day watching the distance looking out for his child’s return. In essence that story tells our (individual but collective) biography from the father’s (or God’s) perspective.
The journey we are on might not be “correct” and it might not be wise, but if it is imbued with the motive to find truth, about so many things, including life & ourselves, then it is ok, and in the end maybe even virtuous. Any quest done for decent or maybe even less than decent reasons can lead to virtue even if we end up back in the same place.
America’s past is a combination of vice and virtue, but if we constantly update our journey with a desire for wonder, truth, freedom as we know it at the time, we will eventually end up in better place.
Ireland is in a better place today than it was 100 years ago and a hundred years before that.
Meanwhile, Catholicism’s transgressions are great and heavy. If it seeks truth & virtue it can end up in a better place than it is now. Unfortunately much of many of Catholicism’s core simply wants the church to act as it always has, as an authority, and just ignore the transgressions. In the future, if not the past, authority comes from virtue & truth and not the reverse. Deal w/ that.
5
Thanks for this recommendation. May I in turn recommend the work of the Oxford historian Roy Foster, who has been addressing the issues you raise for quite some time. In particular, Foster explores the presence, if not the prevalence, of what he calls "therapeutic forgetting" is Irish historical narratives. With respect to critiques of sentimental nationalism, those can be found as early as the 1940s and 1950s in Sean O'Faolain's journal The Bell, where O'Faolain subjects Eamon de Valera's narrow-gauge, pastoral version of Irish nationalism to withering critiques. These examples from Ireland's creation not only of a tradition but also of a national identity might be instructive to those seeking to forge their counterparts from the materials of American history. Good luck in finding the right balance of memory and forgetting in rearing your children.
2
Perhaps as parents the focus should be on American art in regards to an inheritance to uphold for our children. Put religion aside for a moment, but still uphold your moral values, and, for your children, lift up American music, food, dance, literature, architecture, sculpture, paintings, film, sports, fashion, and on and on and on. And in the same breathe as one lifts up American art, a parent also points to its unique roots outside America, all other cultures of the world, that were -- and still are -- the foundation for American art. What an awesome inheritance to pass on to your children.
3
I see the dilemma Mr. Douthat is going through. Tradition of the nation , religion or family is what makes for continuity of a group of people, a large clan in essence. We choose some of our traditions and reject some, so it is malleable. I left my country 45 years ago and was never raised in the traditions of my country. The emphasis was on learning English, science and arts leaving me with only traditions of my adopted country US. Then again these traditions have been changing, I am changing and the zeitgeist has changed dramatically. My wife is catholic light and I have become an atheist from an agnostic. We have 6 children and we decided to create our own traditions. Instead of the fictional holidays of Christmas, Hanukkah and Easter I recommend to my family that mine and my wife’s birthdays be celebrated as our holidays since we have done more-to them than any God. If I have been religious my life would be less complicated. As rational and logical immigrant I have to create my own traditions .
Vik Jayanty
5
Dear Mr. Douthat:
As a practicing Christian who is also pretty far left, I am immensely encouraged to see you thinking about faith, tradition, and politics.
I want to point out that the Left HAS traditions of both belief and practice, and often tries to live by them.
The climate movement looks back to environmentalism and the conservation movement before that.
Black struggles see themselves in Black Power (Islam), civil rights (some-faith-based: the SCLC and King, both mainstream and Dissenting Protestantism) and abolitionism (Quakers and other Dissenting churches).
I could go on: the Left generally has found itself in traditions like the anti-war movement (some faith-based: the Berrigans and Dorothy Day; all kinds of Protestantism and Judaism); the labor movement; Populism; even to what was then (18th Century) called "the [quite riotous] people out of doors" (in both here and Britain, noting religious revivals in both places).
Carnival (once and perhaps even still part of the Lenten season in places) in Europe goes back at least a millenium, and is very much alive and well in the political Street over there.
On the other side look at the traditions that support climate denialism (Creationism), and the alt-right (the Klan and nativism - anti-Catholic rioting, for that matter).
My comment has been pretty academic, but the point is essential. You're right to be thinking about religious traditions and politics, and wrong to be facile about it.
7
Don't raise your children to be clones of you and your political philosophy, or subservient to your religious philosophy. Teach your children to think and make these choices for themselves when they have enough knowledge and experience.
And don't just teach the American history of the pioneers and plantation owners. For your children to fully understand American history they have to know what was done to the people who already inhabited the continent before the Protestants arrived. Your children need to know what was done to the people who were brought here from Africa against their will.
This is not a "progressive tendency" to remember the past to hold it in contempt, Ross. It an attempt to teach an accurate history, even if uncomfortable for certain groups having certain mindsets, so there is a chance it might not be repeated.
13
My Irish ancestors came to this country and left the Irish music and Irish flag behind in Ireland and never spoke the Gaelic language here or in Ireland. They became very Americanized and loved America. They felt so blessed to have been able to come for a better life and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Of course, they worked hard and did not take anything for granted.
I am an American of Irish heritage. But I think of myself as American first and having Irish blood.
7
Much to ponder. Some of the tradition-building seems more an exercise in identity politics. On a personal level I have watched my partner's youngest brother, now a grandfather, inexorably become a caricature of hard-right Westerm Pa redneck culture. Over the decades he became more ossified turning from an intellectually curious young blue collar guy to a walking/talking Fox News stereotype.
Related, I think, is my visceral distaste for two of music's most popular genres. Country and Rap. Both seen forever navel gazing and singing about their respective genres or narrowly drawn stereotypes about country or rap life. Way to cheaply meta for me. (I know there are exceptions, so no umbrage please.) Both genres have become pat, easy signifiers.
My guess is that genuine tradition is so strong, so deeply felt that it is almost unrecognizable to its members. It's like the air one breathes and a comfortable and automatic as a favorite T-shirt.
Those in Charlottesville chanting their bile are not traditionalists but self appointed shock troops using the nostalgia of a tradition and cultural resentment as reactionary accelerants.
Perhaps the fellow Douthat cites will find tradition, but it seems to me if you have to work at it that hard, it will forever be out of grasp, or like c Ch'ville, its a suspect project.
7
@LMT Well observed. A genuine ethnic tradition is not something for which one shops, browses Internet, consults Wikipedia, shells out for DNA tests, or uses as a conversation ice-breaker.
6
On reinventing our traditions and forging an American identity: I don't see a problem. We have a rich and fascinating American story. We have not and are not losing anything. We are just becoming more inclusive and telling the stories of all the people who have been part of our history and who are part of our country. Consider what now congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said at one of her campaign rallies:
"I'm a third generation Bronxite.
I'm a Latina, I'm a Boricua,
I'm a descendant of Taino Indians.
I am a descendant of African slaves.
I am proud to be an American!"
Raise your children to understand the rich American culture they inherit and to appreciate all the people in it. And to understand that America is dynamic and made great by the wonderful hard working people who have come here and continue to come here with many backgrounds, religions, and yes even no religion. You can choose to raise them with Catholic traditions but to not put that in the context of everything out there would seem a poor preparation for American life.
15
The two deepest thinkers on tradition were T.S. Eliot and Max Weber. Another important thinker was Edward Shils. The greatest essay on the topic is Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent. Read and re-read it.
3
My wife, who is not Jewish and is an atheist, used to insist we get out the Menorah every year and light candles so that our children could identify with my tradition even though I don't recall ever doing Hannukak myself, and regard the whole Yahweh myth as a curse. Perhaps she was motivated by the complete obliteration of her tradition perpetrated by her German Danish immigrant forbears. Suffice it to say after 3 years she gave up as she caught us all betting on which candle would go out last. Under pressure of educational multiculturalism the dreidel persisted for a few more years.
How does the invention of tradition that never really happened help with the advancement of humanity? Can one build honesty on a foundation of myths and lies?
6
Maintenant tradition is a tradition.
4
Ross Douthat, you cannot raise your children with the certainty that your hopes and dreams will be actualized in their lives. It doesn't work that way any more than a fantasy of a perfect Gaelic national past can without the reality of the Magdalene laundries. The America story was never (read that NEVER) homogenous.
15
Good lord. Take your kids to Ireland and show them the west. Take them to Yeats’s tower. Take them to Ballyvaghan and show them the burren and feed them the great fish stew at Monk’s pub. And while doing it, just be quiet.
19
Look, you want to give your kids an idea of what America is? Show them Meredith Wilson's The Music Man. White picket fences, red, white and blue bunting, and a town recoiling from some strange new thing. That's the America we're being sold today.
"Think, men, think!"
5
as far as tradition goes, like everyting else there s good and bad in the past. I'm sorry we are losing newspapers, the popular culture in music (think big bands, Gershwin, Porter...) and painting seems eroded now, the super-rich that once built libraries, created national parks and founded universities now seem to have turned their backs on Americans, but: I wouldn't want to go back to the days where blacks were excluded or worse, women were denied opportunity, Jews faced quotas, pollution was unregulated, religion imposed blue laws, bans on alcohol and forced prayers on all...
So we have to pick and choose what traditions to honor
6
Keep it n mind that if you raise them as conservative, you are infusing them with fear...fear of change, fear of exploration, fear of other, fear of innovation. I am not sure you would want this for your kids?
Also, the falling birth rate seems to be a rational choice.
8
Problem with our history its so full of lies. First all men created equal as the founders approved slavery and did not allow women to vote. Then the revolution created by American smugglers of tea versus British Tea company. Boston tea party a bunch of hired thugs, Then our "war" with Cuba, and Mexico, then our destruction of the native Americans, then our Jim Crow south and the list goes on. Facts versus mythical stories told to our children and then they find out the truth. We have no traditions to be proud of, we make them up. "fake History".
4
Interesting column. Re: The next to last paragraph. I don't see a dilemma or a paradox here. Jefferson was a "pantheist" and his vision for democracy was both well conceived and potent enough to survive even his own contemporary prejudices (with a few tweaks along the way) Otherwise, I see a future where most of us will have mocha skin and speak Spanish--and I have no absolutely no problem with that.
5
The issue of a shared experience that provides national cohesion is an urgent one that needs to be addressed in an America that is coming apart at the seams.
Where Douthat falls short is in having the imagination to escape the gravity of “traditional traditions” like ethnicity, religion and patriotism. As a conservative he is emotionally wedded to them, and he suggests that we settle for “white lies” when we invent tradition, rather than the patent lies Hobsbawm accuses us of. But in 2019 we need to think bigger and more practical.
In the past religion and patriotism have served as a collective glue, but their emotional power no longer works for everyone - only within certain tribes. Patriotism doesn’t work for those who are racially alienated or cut off from sharing in America’s wealth, from the Dream.
There is only one glue that will cement the shared experience Douthat desires: reduce economic inequality. The accumulation of wealth in hands of just a few fractures society. We live in an “extractive” political environment in which a few people are able to structure economic institutions to exploit and extract resources from the rest of us
So, we need to look beyond just the traditions of ethnicity, religion and patriotism and provide a practical glue for our society. Decent jobs, healthcare and education will provide a concrete shared experience beyond contrived religious and patriotic myths
Our choice: the mythical primacy of the individual, or collective success.
6
A healthy nationalism DOES link "the living, the unborn, and the dead". Even more so, so does an unhealthy nationalism. Nazism, Mussolini's fascism, and the Ku Klux Klan are all stronger at this than the Irish example or the American one (although this aspect of these evils is often omitted in popular accounts).
I am bigger on heritage than most Americans. I discuss with my grandchildren their ancestors, sometimes saying "This is part of our heritage". However, you should choose good heritage and reject explicitly the bad. Where there are bad parts - and the aspects of Irish and American heritage this article touches on include some very bad ones - reject them. Do teach them to your children and grandchildren, but when they are older, and as evil that must not be romanticized.
6
Too bad that nostalgia is never the same as reality.
2
Wonderful column honoring your Mom.
1
This is akin to how language changes over time in its country of origin, but remains what it was at the time of emigration in the country of arrival. The Irish are in some ways appalled at what many Irish-Americans
have made of "Irishness".....not to mention the green beer. Life changes; tradition is fluid. Our children will create their own contexts whether you like it or not.
4
Tradition means white power.
Tradition means male power.
Tradition means church power.
Tradition means subservience.
Tradition means subservient women.
I don't think you are speaking of the long tradition fighting all this.
9
Tradition, a humanized history, is always a rethinking of the past.
1
A very thoughtful piece, one to read and consider, perhaps without reflexively asserting one's own "woke"-ness.
1
Traditions are not a monolithic and static social concepts - it is a living, changing and evolving social forces that created this glorious human civilization over the last 5000 years. The idea that traditions can be grouped as “good” or “bad” is the theory of post modernism communist thoughts which is founded on quick sand. The Indian Upanishads classified the continuous flow of tradition by defining the debt of new generation on three classes - “Paternalistic”, “scholastic “ and “spiritual”. Every generation has to reinterpreted the ideas of the family in new reality of the current generation not discard the old, reinterpreted the scholarly works of the previous generations in the new foundation of knowledge and finally reinterpretation of the catholicity of the divine existence on new experiences of human society. It is a seamless continuum that drives the human to higher and higher stages of human consciousness - the story of human evolution. At human level, physical evolution is not the important guiding force of survival, the traditions are the major driving force of survival - a qualitative change, not a quantitative change. Today, we almost reached the peak of the survival capacity and now working on the other aspects of the consciousness like happiness, humanism, love, empathy. We must discard the post-modernism destructive idea of throwing out the traditions of the society- we forcefully embrace traditions and take it to new heights.
2
Sort of like the old saw, those who win the war determine the storyline? And a dubious consideration, harping on fatherhood, on Mother’s Day???
Having some Irish blood in me as I do, the elements of rural and Catholic Ireland grab at me on many different occasions, sometimes reflected even in the current politics of the USA, a refusal to consider the diversity of the world in which we live and an attempt to make the world the Irish one as it was 100 years ago. Futile indeed, and foolish, and an insult to those different!
3
We in the US have an incredibly rich heritage and creative people are constantly rediscovering and reassembling our past and our shared activities. There is a huge middle ground between "The founders were demigods and everything the US did was great" and "Dead racist white men left us only a legacy of injustice." Jump into that middle ground, and don't be afraid to pick your favorites. Don't worry so much about whether this great messy experiment called the US is in decline or in trouble. Pass on what you love about it, that's all you have control over and all you can really do in the end.
137
@Cal Prof love your comment. I am always struck by people who say America is great but fail to articulate anything meaningful about what makes it great. "Freedom" is the one refrain that people can't really expand on but I find it the most resonant; no, its not the bill of rights or some enshrined liberty we have and other countries don't. Its true freedom. Freedom to be weird, not to be afraid either materially or spiritually. Even our politics I find somewhat benign. Americans are the most relaxed people I have encountered and I find that the truest manifestation of our freedom.
4
When I go to my immigrant relatives from various countries I see 3 outfits and 5 recipes. When I go to America, I see ALL. E Pluribus Unum. It is a grand thing. Don't tear it up.
5
Ross, the age of the buggy whip is dead, as is the age of the 8 track and floppy disc. Change is not evil. Every bit of knowledge that the human race builds us toward a better place. Hammurabi's Code brought the rule of law into being, but it is not a modern outline for justice. The teachings of Jesus, Mohammad, Confucius and the Buddha have much in common to teach good and inclusion, but none will be universally accepted as the end all of truth-nor should they be.
Of course, every bit of knowledge can be perverted by people with evil intent. But the evil is in the human, not the knowledge.
I am sorry you are uncomfortable in the modern world and cannot see the progress, remember the good of the past and provide the evil a decent (and honest) burial.
7
Yesterday is the past, tomorrow is the future, today is the present and that is a gift.
From the bulletin board in a cancer clinic
2
Using Mr. Douthat's argument, shouldn't we be celebrating the glorious heritage of the Southern Confederacy?
We, as a people, have done some very good things and some very bad things and a good measure of well intentioned dumb things.
If you are secure in the good parts of your culture you can acknowledge the the bad and try to correct it.
3
The problem is the rapid pace of technological change and corporate willingness to destroy Nature, cultures, traditions, memories, society, fairness, social cohesion in the name of profit.
For millennia, the adults & the elders showed and taught the children how to live in the world. Now the world changes so rapidly that there is no stability. In the 100 years between 1900 and 2000, the world changed radically: the development of aviation, the industrialization of agriculture, electronic everything, the takeover by computers & digital technology. The techno world changes so rapidly that the children and adults live in different worlds, different realities. Instead of adults teaching children, now the children are the first to adopt and be comfortable with new technologies, and now the children have to show the adults how to use the latest toys and gadgets. Any adult who does not subscribe to the newest glitzy thing is considered a boring dinosaur with nothing to pass on.
The young have been inundated by porn, social media and a debauched culture with no adults to show them the way or to set standards. So now the young think twerking, garish tattoos, metal studs pierced through holds in the flesh and unmelodic noise are the height of culture. Because adults have abdicated their responsbiility to provide the important things: clean air, clean water, sustainable culture, a planet safe from the ravages of global warming, peace, a future, the young are stuck in anomie.
2
"Or if I want them [my children] to see their country’s sins clearly..."
Why is this a question?
It seems hypocritical coming from a Christian who believes human sin is inevitable, from a Catholic who believes confessing one's sins is a sacrement, and from a self-described rational, moral, ethical person who would want to atone for our collective sins and perhaps forestall their re-occurence.
3
What exactly is the tradition Mr. Douthat looking to pass down to his children? Would that be the one about the rape, pillage, theft, and genocide of the native population by our early settlers founders? Would it be the one about slavery, indenturetude, bigoty, and the worlds greatest hypocrisy enshrined by our founders? Or perhaps it is the more modern traditions of continuing segregation, inequality, ignorance, hate, exploitation, injustice, corruption, religiosity, deceitfulness, narcissism, and global environmental destruction that he prefers.
Personally, I think we would be far better off forgetting trying to pass down these past and present traditions and start working on some new traditions based on truth, decency, equality, justice, kindness, respect for each other, and respect for the world we depend upon for our existence.
3
"Here the business of getting a living … is enormously easier than it is in any other Christian land—so easy, in fact, that an educated and forehanded man who fails at it must actually make deliberate efforts to that end. Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy. And here, more than anywhere else I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows."
--- H.L Mencken, writing in 1922 on why he stays in America.
3
@A. Stanton Did Mencken ever go to South America, I wonder? Or Palermo? USA really isn't that unusual in morals and ignorance, alas. And, so immigrant friends tell me, it IS an easier place to do business than their home countries.
M's curses are funny, but I am tired of this kind of tirade against the US.
@Liz
I don't know about Palermo, but Mencken was well traveled, including Europe, parts of Latin America and the Holy Land. Leaving aside for a moment some of his laugh-producing exaggerations, I think he hits the nail-on-the-head here.
4
The American story is unique and rich. This was a country of immigrants, truly a "melting pot", all these individuals felt driven from their homes for many similar reasons, survival. They all left their homes because they could not survive, earn of living and raise a family. Not any different then the immigrants from today all seeking the same thing. Numerous governments failed to protect their citizens and there were mass migrations, sometimes governments themselves ousted those "unsavory" individuals.
My Father too was a migrant, from Galicia in Poland. He arrived at 15 with his father, no further schooling for him. He needed to find a job to work and send for his Mother and the rest of his family. They were truly good and wonderful people my father's family. My Mother, loved my "greenhorn" Father and so did her family. I was extremely lucky to be born into so much love.
This America of dream is being trampled beneath the feet of the Republican Party in general and trump specifically, our hater and chief. He is stoking the fires a fear and nationalism. This nation appears to be burning and will be torn asunder. It is unknown if we can stop this assault before America is ashes.
7
The "crackups of the 1960s"? You mean the movements that brought us civil rights and ended the Vietnam War? Interesting description.
13
"Of course we Americans have reinvented our traditions repeatedly over the years — going from a Protestant religious consensus...."
Right there is a Founding Fraud. I think it is safe to say the leading Founding Parents were pretty much Enlightenment agnostics, with just perfunctory knee-bends to the Almighty.
B.
6
Reinvention, yes...dishonesty, no.
We can't help seeing history from our current point of view as we frame our own stories. What becomes dangerous is when we deny the (sometimes) ugly truths about our histories.
I don't say America is not exceptional, but I am accused of being a hater or an apologist when I insist we acknowledge ALL of our history which includes some very ugly things like taking native American children from their families and sending them to "boarding schools" to erase their culture which may be our original sin followed by slavery. America, warts and all.
Now we see the Chinese repeating ethnic cleansing against Tibetan culture with the muslim Uighurs.
Makes you think before telling other countries how to live.
3
There is no "Irish blood", Ross. This formulation has a dismal history that should be obvious to you. Don't use it. I am the descendants on one side (Dad's) solely Irish, and on the other (Mom's) solely Anglo-Saxon, no "intermingling" of "blood" on either side. But there is no pure descent in either line: Vikings, Normans, Spanish invaders; Scots Celts, French invaders, Saxons, on and on. "Blood" has been used throughout history to justify crimes, cruelties, and pointless arrogance. Don't use it.
3
Ever searching in the past for a solid tradition that we Americans can agree on and build on, Ross Douthat presents the choice here as a binary one: we invent our traditions as a way to subvert them, “debunking, skeptical, emphasizing the artificiality of all traditions,” or as a way to celebrate and keep alive an ahistorical Irishness that is oh so attractive to Americans in the her and now. This is a false choice that implies that the past must be one way or the other: Ireland is either the mystical old sod or, as Joyce put it, “the old sow that eats her farrow.”
Our conjured pasts are always invented, whether we inherited them or not. The pick-and-choose approach to retaining or gaining a tradition is never an attempt to face the actual past. I am sure that Mr. Dougherty’s invention and continuation did not partake of the shameful, fatal history of Irelands’ treatment of pregnant, unmarried girls in the last century, nor did it reach back to the distant Gaelic mists for the epic poems of Ossian, thought to be the Irish Homer until it was discovered that he and his poems was the complete invention of the Scotsman James MacPherson. Irish mud is no clearer than American mud, however green it might appear this spring to Mr. Douthat.
this is as good an article as any to see the poverty of white racism. Reinvention of history to make it right for you is the topic. But Ross has to go to Ireland to find a story. Yet right here in America blacks have remade themselves and the country by reinvention, from objects of history to makers of history. That is the most noble and spellbinding magic the world has ever seen
(ok, maybe just as noble and spellbinding as other world transformations). But Ross is blind to it; standing by Niagra falls, but missing its grandeur and its roar. or to put it in biblical terms, as Jesus said: it is harder for a rich man to go to heaven, than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.
3
Ross, you concern about finding the right traditions to teach to your children, while benign in itself, has something in common with the xenophobia sweeping our country right now. You and the anti-immigrants want to control the future. You want to be sure that you pass down traditions that your children keep in the so that in the future they believe as you do. The anti-immigrant crowd wants to make sure that the country that exists after their death will be like the country of their childhood memories. Both desires are foolish.
Teach your children to think, to care about other people and to enjoy life. Let them know how much you love them. That's really the best thing that any father can do.
5
Excellent --- wonderful stuff, Mr Douthat.
2
Many good insights but one important - sometimes very damnable - point should be added.
We have a little joke that goes "... like the Cubans in Miami....". Those who fled the Castro revolution (sometimes for their good reasons and sometimes to escape some justified revenge) and even their progeny (like Sen. Rubio) are living in a time warp, as in the opinion piece.
Not just the Cubans of course, there are analogous groups such as diaspora Zionist Jews and others who are fighting the wars of a previous generation on behalf of the people who were living in that previous generation.
B.
2
Imagine spending your most formative early childhood years in an American town with no racial diversity, no obvious ethnic diversity and without any grandparents present to talk about traditions. Any visual references to architectural tradition were absent because the town was built from scratch out in the middle of the desert. Everybody was from somewhere else. None of the kids knew what kind of jobs their dads had because they all worked at "the plant" 20 miles away and never talked about it. I was one of those kids and my take on traditions is: who needs them? I celebrate the fact that the U.S. was the first nation created by people to serve people, rather than forcing them serve some timeless state and its divinely-mandated ruler.
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@Charles Packer
I am constantly made aware of how many seemingly educated, literate and intelligent people have so little knowledge of history. It has been an absolutely brutal week for Canadians who love America.Westphalia is more than a region in Germany.
12
My parents were Jewish and I was raised with traditions connected to religious holidays. The one that has remained strongest is Passover because for me the tradition signifies change, liberation, gathering with loved ones, and drinking wine. My parents did not try bind me to any myths of America, Israel, or the European countries of their parents. Instead, they emphasized justice and an awareness of people who had less than us, even though we did not have a lot. Traditions survive when they reflect values that have meaning for us. Scapegoating the 1960's is merely away a way to avoid recognizing how our values have changed since the 1980's when greed became good.
126
We recently have both a more demanding and more naïve view of the role of history in our lives. We insist that history tell unvarnished truth, and when it doesn't, there is a call that it has been sanitized. History in reality has audiences and a variety of intentions. One if its functions, not at all to preclude other functions, is to teach and pass on what is admirable and virtuous. We should want a record of what succeeds and the character we hope to possess in an imperfect world. But it also needs to be the lighthouse that warns us of the rocks. These narratives do not have to be side by side. The audience needs to know what it is reading for and the lessons to take away. Our current discourse demands that we weaponize our past, rather than benefit from it. We shouldn't question what to pass on, we should question if we know how to do it anymore.
36
We can still acknowledge our full history, with the good and the bad, as something separate from tradition. "Tradition" is what we choose to uphold and celebrate from that history. If we want to embody the better qualities of our ancestors, or anyone's ancestors, that takes work and sacrifice. We don't have to emulate their flaws and failures.
Sometimes that means consciously setting aside things from our traditions as handed down to us, things that we now believe to be wrong or morally repugnant. So if my ancestors were slave owners, I can acknowledge that without celebrating it.
There's also a distinction between personal or family tradition, and the traditions of the multiple larger communities of which we are all a part – neighborhood, city, state, national, global. Or voluntary communities that we choose to be a part of, in the case of things like religious affiliation or even professional associations.
1
"Like Dougherty I have young children, and I want to give them a story of America that coheres as an inheritance. But I’m not sure what that means, exactly, if I’m raising them Catholic in an increasingly post-Protestant or even pantheist America."
"Pantheist"? I see religion still pretty alive and well here, even though attendance at Catholic Mass is off due to the clerical sex abuse scandals.
Thanks for mentioning Dougherty's book, which I definitely wish to read--to compare his concept of tradition to what my own dad left me.
That said, I don't envy your task of imparting tradition to your children. In fact, I don't envy your task of simply raising children in today's America.
For me, this is the darkest era I've ever lived through, way worse than the "crack-ups" of the 60s, as you call them. How can you impart both religious and patriotic traditions in the time of Trump, where even fireworks are going to be subverted to presidential ego according to a Post article I read yesterday? When polarization and the dreams of our founders are so divergent across political classes?
181
@ChristineMcM
I wake up with a dark political foreboding every day. It's not healthy, but refuses to leave. I am exhausted being led by hate, stupidity and cowardice. I am actually surprised that the Chinese and Russians have not taken full advantage of our weakened political state sooner. The more our adversaries watch this President steal billions from the Pentagon, for his wall, with full support from the Republican Party, the more confidence they have in pouncing soon. This preoccupied President and his incompetent crew, have their eyes off of enormously powerful threats. Our days are numbered, and there will no United States to save us.
15
@ChristineMcM well said. Repubs and their leader 45 seem to have most darkened the skies of America in my long life. I see my mother and relatives watch a steay drumbeat of fox/briebart/sinclair fear and hatred that can only bring our society harm. Can't wait for a better reset of our society. Human kindness not painful hatred.
18
If I were reinventing American traditions I would start with the universal commitments the Constitution, the Declaration Of Independence and all of their successor documents have made to a state that (1) honored human rights, (2) recognized the freedom of worship and the separation of church and state, (3) called on citizens to form an “ever more perfect Union,” (4) set up and maintained one of the world’s oldest and longest lived democracies, (5) welcomed immigrants first from England, then all of Europe, then everywhere in the world, (6) celebrated individual creativity and initiative, (7) promoted education and science and made them available to all of its people, (8) defended democracies and the rule of law among all its international allies, (9) created beautiful national parks and protected its air and water, (10) began facing up to its most terrible mistakes (I.e. slavery, colonial expansion) , and continues even today to be open to social and cultural change. It sounds abstract, but that is only because we still need to create or celebrate in more tangible ways these impressive cultural traditions that have been an inspiration around the world.
129
@Christopher Davidson You have succinctly summarized the true American narrative, which relies much more on a set of common ideals and values rather than a reverence for a fictitious moment in cultural history, like the 1950's. Our values will remain intact as long as we see them as universal values that creatively channel the ambitions and self-improvement motivation of ourselves and of the countless numbers of people who will eventually come here to become Americans.
11
There are two kinds of ''traditions'' :
1. The benign kind whereas certain acts that have been done for generations give a kind of fluidity to the past, while anchoring some sort of identity within the people that keep them up
2. The other not so benign ones that are deep rooted out of fear, religion or animosity. They are kept up usually by state sanction or by enormous peer pressure. These ones usually conflict on a whole host of levels - in particular against freedoms or human rights
We all know which ones fall into either category, and you might be surprised as to which ones you might partake in that are not so benign, but you have been doing them for so long, you cannot see past them.
I wander around this earth firmly set in me ''Irishness'', but I don't adhere to any religion (actually am against all of them), stand up for human rights (in particular women's and their sole dominion over their own bodies) and don't ever drink green ale of any sort.
The tradition I have with me own family is that any one of them can be whatever they wish to be and I will love them regardless.
Tis' grand.
225
@FunkyIrishman
Very sentimental, my friend.
What I have seen in my own family, particularly among first generation immigrants, is a fierce determination to hold onto something from the country of origin. Language, food and holidays have been particularity important. And often set the scene for conflicts with the younger generation. My own (now late) father, who came to the states from Egypt, struggled mightily with his own children. We were steeped in American culture, and every assumption he had about life was shaped in a different time and place. I know that he, and the others, did not mean this as a rejection of their adopted land, or of us, but it is hard to relinquish the values with which one was raised. It’s the eternal struggle, everywhere, of families.
Kudos to you for the unconditional love and support shown to your kids. May they do you proud.
32
@FunkyIrishman well said, as usual you save me the trouble of writing myself.
14
@Stephen
Sure, make me do all the work ! Thank you, but I am sure you have a lot to say as well, and also have the gift (or the curse) of the gab. I just happen to make type out of thoughts and they magically appear.
Carry on me friend.
16
To me, the reference to the "melting pot" of America is the most pertinent. I raised my daughters as Christian, teaching them the childhood stories about the Good Samaritan, etc. (the main lesson being to love thy neighbor as thyself). Now, one is married to a Hindu from India and the other to a Jewish man from New York. My stepson married a girl who was born in Korea. They all love celebrating Christmas together at at our house (for them it is not really a religious thing - it is exchanging gifts and enjoying each other's company). We are developing a family tradition which is rich because of our diversity, which is built on love and acceptance. To me, it is the embodiment of "Love thy neighbor" from my religious background and also "All men (and women) are created equal," from the American tradition.
101
@Carolyn
"But some are more equal than others.
George Orwell
6
I would urge Ross Douthat or anyone else in the survival of the Irish language to look up the youtube channel for TG Lurgan, a musical project of Coláiste Lurgan, an independent summer school based in Connemara.
TG Lurgan releases music video covers of the latest pop songs with new lyrics in the Irish language. It is heartwarming to see so many young Irish teens singing in their native language and having so much fun. The music videos they produce are beautiful and joyous.
I think the Irish language is at its most vibrant in the last 80 years because of the efforts of TG Lurgan and others to re-energize it for the youngest generation and make it relevant again.
2
We are all a modern version of our collective past. Is that so hard to understand?
2
Although I’m a liberal I do read RD’s columns regularly and usually learn from them. He’s clearly obsessed with Catholicism and religion’s role and worries that society is shunning faith. It’s the other way around. While society has evolved, Catholicism (and other religions) require that followers suspend belief in science, paternalism, gender equality, and other things we all know to be outdated.
Work to bring religion into harmony with modernity and you will be even more proud of you faith.
7
I find this a wise and appealing column. Respect for personal heritage and traditions is "a common task, at which our society is failing." One sees it alive in families, and in local cultures. There are signs of health in the broad appeal of Ancestry.com, and in some of the inquiries into DNA profiles. Consider the vitality of local historical museums, efforts to revive and elaborate upon craft and artisanal practices, and farmers' markets. I am happy to see Ross granting that many progressive or left-leaning people are more interested in the reinvention of traditions than those who call themselves conservatives.
1
I believe that what we have in common as a society is, in equal parts, what we chose to remember, our interpretation of those memories, and what we ignore. Ironically, the things we ignore are like cultural dark matter and dark energy. We now speculate that only 5% of the physical universe is visible to us. 95% of the universe, is completely invisible to us. The earth, air, sky, water, and all plant and animal species were merely an unexamined given for most of human history. We now see all these elements in a completely different way. These new ways of seeing are creating a whole news set of important memories that we will hand down to our children and grandchildren.
2
My DNA is overwhelmingly Irish. But when I visited Ireland decades ago, I didn’t find the romanticized version Irish-Americans describe (soft green landscape filled with whimsical, lyrical and witty poets with the gift of gab). Instead I found it to be cold, gray and dismal. The people were “witty” but also sardonic, bitter and constantly swearing. And many of them frequented the pubs - a lot. After three weeks, I came away thanking the heavenly stars that my ancestors left so that I was able to come into being in the sunny, Southwestern parts of the United States. My culture here is a combination of Mexican/Anglo/Native American traditions set amongst sunshine and dramatic landscapes. It’s not perfect and the influx of newcomers from all over North America creates constant change, challenges and ongoing modernization. But I’ll take this hot mess any day over any faux traditional nostalgia that Ross Douthat appears to yearn for.
12
@Annabelle Ireland has never been Ryan's Daughter or The Quiet Man and I'm sorry that you were ever led to believe that it was. That's Hollywood's version, not the Irish's.
Re: the greyness, how exactly do you think the Irish land got so green? Rain. I find it unfortunate that you didn't know Ireland was a rainy place before you got on the plane. It's what makes the grass so green and ultimately the lambs so fat. In this age of Climate Change, in my opinion, Ireland does seem better suited for the survival of the species than the sunny (arid and drought and wildfire-prone) American Southwest.
And you might want to go again. Ireland has progressed in the last few decades. It's no longer under the heel of the Roman Catholic Church. Ireland was the first nation to hold a popular vote and approve marriage equality for gay people. Their president is a gay man, of half Indian descent. A high percentage of the population is young and forward thinking.
You might give Ireland another chance, or not.
6
I come from a mixed background. We have mixed traditions. My father was Irish and my mother was Jewish. We drank a lot, but we got it wholesale.
18
I admire Douthat's thoughts on how best to raise his young children, especially in the face of the unraveling of the American traditions passed along as stories and national celebrations.
He writes "Or if I want them to see their country’s sins clearly — as the left often sees more clearly than the right — without falling prey to the progressive tendency to remember the past only in order to hold it in contempt."
Our national story, our traditions, began with a simple, or simply contradictory grand statement that "All men are created equal." Any history acknowledges the statement as being at odds with the lives of the men who penned our Constitution, wealthy landed white men, some slave owners.
So, a generous reading tells us the statement was aspirational and that as a nation we were born to protect our God-given rights and move forward to build a "more perfect union."
That more perfect union to progressives includes basic rights including the right to healthy lives, a clean environment, and equal educational and economic opportunity. These are natural understandings of the traditions our founders pointed out to us and benchmarks of a truly, growing more perfect union.
Today these traditions are under attack by one political party and viewed as simply too dangerous to fight for by the other. An yes, we have a tradition of two political parties dominating our politics, a tradition the founding fathers (not moms) warned us to forgo.
1
How about we value sharing the truth? People and institutions evolve and change hopefully for the 'good'. Looking into the past of old tradition and practice can be seen in new light and not reinvented but acknowledged for what it was truly.
Our failing as a society is growing due to a complete disregard for what is true. Why do we argue about facts? It is when facts 'get in the way' of our desires we then throw them away because they do not serve.
It is not hard to figure out that we should respect all human beings equally. But that is not what was passed down by some. That fact was ignored and continues to be inconvenient.
6
Mr. Douthat appears to lament the failure to give our children a cultural inheritance but from the adults, young adults, millenials, gen zs I talk to they feel like they are inheriting a salvage yard. The baby boomers (of which I am a member) is leaving the younger generations with crippling national debt, crippling student debt and crippling climate death. I wouldn't have kids either if I were 30. The promise of America was killed by people 40 and older. We need to turn the country over to the younger generations and support everything they ask for: complete gun control, elimination of a carbon-based economy, universal health care, free college. It's their inheritance; we ought to let them shape it.
14
I've read the book and I think Douthat's take on it is accurate. And I find his ruminations on what is said in the book and on his own activities and concerns fresh and engaging. Thank you, Ross.
5
Not buying it. I understand, and to a very limited extent sympathize with the desire to reconnect with a mystical past, but it tends to be rather selective, and is often tinged with the needs of the moment. I wonder if the attempt to reconnect with the Irish past includes the ancient tradition of the Magdalene laundries, along with the leprechauns. My own ancestors came from Poland and Bielorussia. They saw no need to sing Central European folk songs, or hold sentimental Pograms.
5
This is not so hard. President Obama has it right. We are a nation of people constantly striving to be better; to make the union more perfect and leave up to the words of the Declaration: We Hold These Truths to Be Self Evident that All People Are Created Equal. My family was there when this words were written. They came later; some from Ireland. But our history; my family’s history, is Ireland or any of those other places; it’s here America; not even the place but the idea.
9
Finally, Douthat asks some important questions without taking condescending potshots at the Left!
Let me offer some answers:
"I’m not sure what that means if I’m raising them Catholic in an increasingly post-Protestant or even pantheist America."
- It means that you raise them with an awareness and respect that your religion isn't "better" than others.
"Or if I want them to honor old ancestors whose commitments our culture now repudiates."
- Acknowledging our ancestor's historical sins doesn't mean repudiating them as people in toto. We understand their commitments in historical context, and learn how to preserve the good and winnow out the bad.
"Or if I want them to be conservative, in some sense, without being trapped by nostalgia or tempted by the darker side of nationalism."
- We Liberals ask the same questions. It's not an either/or question; there are many ways to find a satisfying and respectful middle ground (if one is willing to let go of absolutist dogma).
"Or if I want them to see their country’s sins clearly (as the left often sees more clearly than the right) without falling prey to the progressive tendency to remember the past only in order to hold it in contempt."
- You're correct in the first half, but wrong about the second. We Liberals don't look at the past only "to hold in contempt." Rather, we look at it to understand our old mistakes, and understand how we got to our current dynamics of dysfunction, in order to create a better and more just future.
14
Declining birth rate is a problem in many developed economies. It was never a problem for the United States because of our history of accepting immigrants. That was before an anti-immigrant authoritarian became president.
16
Our drop in birthrate, which Mr. Douhat calls a collapse, isn't any
kind of judgement on us or a sign that "our society is failing." These are Anti-faith conclusions: they evince a distrust, if not a
paranoia, of change. Such conclusions here have transparently
political and religious motives, dressed up as eminent logic.
12
What I find baffling is all those stories about people who were adopted as children by people of a very different culture and tradition from the birth parents, who instead of identifying with the culture and tradition they were raised in, feel the urgent need to research and get in touch with their birth parents and learn about that culture, as if genetics were all-powerful in determining identity after all, despite our society's belief that nurture is stronger than nature...
Or those who find out they have other siblings they never knew about until they are adults, who nevertheless want to get together and accept those new siblings in their family - again, finding out about a genetic connection instantly creates a family one.
Or those intent on digging up or passing down genealogical information about their great-grandparents.
My parents had nothing much to say about their ancestors, so I don't know much about them beyond the names and occupations of my grandfathers. I discovered I have thousands of "relatives" in North America, but I don't know any of them, so to me they aren't relatives in any meaningful sense of the term.
To me, a family is the people one grew up with, or grew up hearing about. It is about common memories and traditions, a common environment, not the happenstance of genetics.
Why is genetics suddenly so crucial to people's personal identities, precisely at a time when our society has rejected it as a basis for tribalism and nationalism?
9
@AG
I think you have pretty much everything precisely backwards. Maybe many in our culture may believe nurture is stronger than nature, but the facts don't indicate that.
"Why is genetics suddenly so crucial to people's personal identities, precisely at a time when our society has rejected it as a basis for tribalism and nationalism?"
First, it is not sudden; people have always wanted to know of their past, but now we have technology and better science which allows us to learn more.
Secondly, there is no reason whatsoever that one can't be deeply interested in their origins while also strongly rejecting tribalism.
The notion that who we are is primarily the result of our environment is misguided, as anyone familiar with separated-twin stories can see.
6
The Irish are wonderful story tellers and I know from experience. They love to speak of the past and do it so well. My father lost his Irish-born mother at an early age and yet he remembered her fondly up until his death. I loved to hear the tales of his upbringing and felt I was right there in the room. I was lucky to know my mother's Irish parents who were just wonderful and kind. I was not so lucky to know my father's parents but I am sure they were wonderful too.
I think all families pass on to their children traditions of their past. It is so important to keep some of the old such as for some of us is religion and combine them with the modern. Life is forever changing and we have to keep up. The past is what often makes us who we are today.
The greatest gift my ancestors have given me is my Catholic faith. As a person gets older they need a sense of purpose in their lives. My faith gives me the peace and joy that is missing in today's modern world. All the riches will not bring you peace of mind. For me, only my religion does.
8
I understand Ross' unease at current rootless "cosmopolitanism", if only because it's hard to understand the present, and work for the future, if one doesn't account for the past.
Still, he strikes me as much more of a "somewhere", and the trends of interconnected globalism are pushing more and more towards being "anywheres".
And that may not be such a bad thing, despite the disquiet it causes among those who are afraid they are losing something, some connection to a local tradition and history; they may not yet recognize they would also be gaining something--the shared fellowship of all humanity.
We may have had more of a sense of this in the 60's and 70's, when those photographs from the Apollo space missions showed one planet, no boundaries, with one ecosphere, indivisible.
And given the challenge of climate change and the population migration it has already produced and will only exacerbate, this mindset that we are all human, all worthy of the rights of being human, might go some ways towards damping down some of the conflict over dwindling resources (we might well work towards better ways to share them, or even increase them, if we developed the mindset they all are deserving of some).
We can assume many titles, many identities, but none are more humble, and at the same time none are more exalted, than human.
6
There is very little tradition, Ross.....it's all about the moment brought to us by the instant media that has overwhelmed our lives. We aren't listening to stories anymore. We are texting our messages to those who are texting theirs.
There's little to hand down in a world of thumbs. I wonder how long it will be until our ears become extinct.
8
"Some of the creative reinvention involved in answering these questions is every father’s task".
So in your learned opinion, Mr. Douthat, teaching children to see their country's sins clearly, should not be a mother's task as well, the one that usually spends more time with them than daddy-dearest?
As a naturalized citizen and native of Germany, I taught both my double citizenship children the crimes of the past of both European countries and the ones of the US.
I find it very frightening though that the crimes against truth, science and logic, including caring for the least among us, now repeats itself again in my adopted country, curtesy of the man sitting in the Oval Office right now and his sycophants in the administration and Congress.
47
Americans have at least two comparisons with Ireland upon which to draw: we share with the Irish a beautiful country and second, we are strife torn and in both cases, we have no idea where to turn. If we did, we would be improving our lot.
A father's greatest task is to teach patience and caring for our fellow humans. Sadly, such policies are being trampled into to the ground at a terrible cost to all.
7
Here's an American tradition for you (from Harvard historian of religions Eugene Taylor)
Several decades prior to the American Revolution, the first spiritual 'awakening' occurred. Rather than being purely "fundamentalist," it had at least a hint of a Wordsworthian "motion and spirit.... that rolls through all things."
Another series of spiritual awakenings took place from the early to late 19th century, inspired in no small part due to the upsurge in interest among German and American philosophers in the Indian yogic and spiritual tradition, culminating in Emerson's transcendentalism and James' radical empiricism.
Seemingly submerged by the materialist and technocratic mindset of the first half of the 20th century, a renewed awakening occurred in the 1960s. Douthat's view of this as a crisis tags him as one of the many who subsequently attempted to drag us back to that technocratic/corporatist mindset.
It is evident, as we see Trump and all who foolishly cling to him slowly descending into utter disintegration, that the fight against the future is failing.
The story that began with the first spiritual awakening, flourished with transcendentalism and radical empiricism, is slowly reaching its climax. As it becomes utterly unavoidable that the only hope for civilization is what the Buddha referred to as "a radical turning about in the deepest seat of consciousness," the dreams of Emerson, and James will reach their fruition.
www.remember-to-breathe.org
5
@don salmon
(last paragraph, slightly edited)
The story that began with the first spiritual awakening, and flourished with transcendentalism and radical empiricism, is slowly reaching its climax. As the realization becomes utterly unavoidable that the only hope for civilization is what the Buddha referred to as "a radical turning about in the deepest seat of consciousness," the dreams of Emerson, and James will reach their fruition.
1
@don salmon
A "small" clarification for the Gemlis and Socrates who may stop by with their ill-informed attacks on spirituality, as if every spiritually-oriented philosopher throughout the history of civilization, East and West, had a childish notion of a bearded deity recklessly indulging sadomasochistic impulses.
Pediatric psychiatrist Dan Siegel has an exercise so simple it has transformed the lives of children as young as five (in poor neighborhoods in NYC and Oakland as much as middle class and wealthy areas). He has taught his "wheel of awareness" exercise to over 30,000 people, and thousands of children around the world are learning it in their schools as well.
He makes an extremely simple distinction. If our experience is like a wheel, consider everything we're aware OF to be on the rim of the wheel, and awareness itself in the center, the "hub" of the wheel.
Sometimes children are given the image of a "still, quiet place" at the center. Some like to think of the flotsam and jetsum of the crazy voices in our heads as the stuff on the surface of the ocean, and still, quiet awareness as the peaceful depths.
Whatever image appeals to you, recognition of that fundamental awareness is at the heart not only of James' and Emerson's philosophies, but of all contemplative practice the world over.
And thousands of children as young as five are learning this in school.
Do you want to solve climate change, war, Trump, etc?
5
I would not worry about our "collapsing birthrate". The population of the U.S. was not quite 300 million in May of 2006. Now it is around 329 million. That's a 10% increase in just 13 years. We will cross the 400 million mark around mid-century.
The world is making plenty of babies too. The world's population is well north of 7 billion and will exceed 9 billion by mid-century. Human demographics is a large part of why an immense species extinction spasm is now underway.
These frightening statistics are fitting in at least this way: America was substantially populated by persons and their babies coming from elsewhere. That is OUR tradition.
However they get here, these souls would be well advised to learn and understand our history and traditions, both good and bad. There are plenty on both sides of the ledger.
In a recent lefty public radio program (WNYC's "On The Media") I was reminded of the wholesale relocation of native Americans from their ancestral lands (what of THEIR traditions?), and learned how our southern border was carefully drawn to maximize the land area taken from Mexico while minimizing the number of brown people that came with that land.
But we can also celebrate our great founding national documents birthed in The Enlightenment and secured through bloodshed. What a remarkable tradition THAT represents.
We have more than enough persons to learn and inherit our traditions. Our problem is we're poor learners. Making our own babies won't fix that.
22
I was born and raised in Scotland by a Scottish father and German mother. I am married to a Greek and we have had two children born and raised in this country. My daughter now lives in London. We have Burns suppers, Greek Orthodox Easters, Christmas Eve German style and celebrate the 4th of July. This is fun, but the important thing has been to teach our children to treat everyone with respect, regardless of where they come from. I want my children to know about their heritage but not to assume their ancestors were anything but ordinary flawed human beings doing the best they could in the circumstances in which they found themselves. As for our "collapsing birthrate", I would suggest that has more to do with practical issues such as wage stagnation, the cost of childcare, healthcare and higher education than any dilemma about traditions.
71
As I age, I find my Catholicism more comforting and inspirational. Despair over the "state of the world" is contrived in my mind. Life has always been a struggle punctuated by joy. Angst over the "state of the world" is a modern day luxury, and one taught, in my mind, by anxious parents trying to do right by the planet but unaware (as always) of what they are sowing in the following generations.
My point is that Catholicism and faith is a worthy tradition. It will be there as comfort in times of need. Don't abandon it for modern day "traditions", which are transitory.
8
AACNY,
This is a lovely post and I could not agree more with you. Thank you for this.
2
I don't know why Mr. Douthat talks about "the crackups of the 1960s". The sixties were a decade not of crackups, but of integrations: With the civil rights movement African Americans began being welcomed into the American society as a whole. With "woman's lib" the same started for women. With AIM the same started for Native Americans. Kennedy's election marked a big step for the integration of Catholics into mainstream America. The protests over the Vietnam War marked a big step for the integration of sanity into American policy.
72
@Dan Styer
The Vietnam call up of 500,000 men to serve a war no one really understood demonstrated the incredibly unfairness of our laws. Men could be drafted at 18 or 19 and be dead long before they had the right to vote at 21. It was the 26th amendment which gave 18 year olds the right to vote which was the greatest accomplishment, in my opinion, of the 60s.
10
Religion and nationalism have been responsible for too much destruction over the last four millennium. Isn’t it time to move beyond these artificial distinctions, recognize our allegiance to humanity, and discover a future common to us all? It will be the task of a few generations to let some of the traditions go and and construct a new society where culture and prosperity are embraced as inclusive to all.
22
Our collapsing birth, indeed, the world's collapsing birth rate has nothing to do with traditions not being handed down.
My family came to this country in the late 1600s and farmed the land until the late 1950s. Families and farm families, especially, were filled with children, or as my grandparents would half joking call children, workers and insurance polices. For most of the preindustrial agrarian period children were absolutely necessary for farming couples to survive. Children were economic assets, not liabilities. Without children and lots of them, farming couples were very vulnerable as premature death, incapacity and early old age/death were the reality. It is hard to imagine that just a little over 100 years ago people needed children in order to survive.
My ancestors did not have children to pass down traditions or indoctrinate the next generation in religion or politics of some kind or the other. They did it to create a household/farm labor force.
I do not get the sense that you, Ross, have any understanding that throughout human history up until about the last 100 years, having working children in the family was absolutely critical for the family to survive. You seem to think that small families, or worse, not having children today are some sort of political statement or human failing. Children have gone from once a huge asset to a huge liability in household economic terms.
63
@Sparky
Well said Sparky. Did not realize that.
3
Ross, if I could offer some parenting advice---let your children find their own way---not your way, but their way. My wife and I found that all efforts to push our children into what we perceived as preferred activities or beliefs backfired. I am not suggesting that as a parent you do not present options--but the more the better. And, what you will see as they get older, are bents or proclivities that, even if you personally find little value in, get 100% behind that bent (assuming it is not harmful/dangerous).
15
What will become of tradition in the human future and similar concepts and processes such as culture creation and history?
First it will become evident that humans prior to advanced systems of technology and communication did not have the means to really create tradition, culture, form history itself not to mention with any competence, because it's only with capacity to record, to transmit, to imprint in collective memory virtually everything that happens that we have an adequate field by which we can select elements for tradition, for culture, to pack into and makeup the history of a people and the human race as a whole.
In fact we live now in a devastatingly revolutionary time for concepts such as tradition, culture, history. We have the means now to chart, record, remember every person's life and any number of natural events in exquisite detail, yet the powers that be get to decide in preemptive form, without any real criterion and justification as to worth, who and what gets to be remembered and who and what gets simply deleted, condemned to the waste basket of what's not worthy of remembrance in human and natural (surrounding environment) history.
Just listen to discussions today from all power quarters of society about what should and should not exist on the internet. It's an argument about fame, about worth, who gets to be remembered and the millions who in their lifetimes are condemned to the waste basket, to not be part of future tradition, culture, history.
1
Ross, you conclude your essay with the lines "collapsing birthrate, our increasing failure to even have children to inherit, feels almost like a judgment on our inability to figure out, in common, what it is that we should wish to have passed down."
I have four children, two married, one in a long-term committed relationship. Those three have with their partners chosen to not have children. Things might change;they might not. All three give the same reasons - the state of the world and the state of the country.
What is it that we should wish to have passed down? What do we want them to inherit? A livable planet, a healthcare system for all our citizens, a fair and human immigration system for our brother and sisters, an educational system that affords equal access, a secure old age. My sons and their partners might not procreate a next generation, but I can say that that is the world they work to pass down, if not to children of their own, to the children of others.
The issues of who "we" are as a people, what shall be "our" national narrative, and what constitutes "our" tradition are important and you have often raised the issue in interesting ways. It might be time for all of us to explore what those terms mean.
12
“Or if I want them to honor old ancestors whose commitments our culture now repudiates. Or if I want them to be conservative, in some sense, without being trapped by nostalgia or tempted by the darker side of nationalism. Or if I want them to see their country’s sins clearly — as the left often sees more clearly than the right — without falling prey to the progressive tendency to remember the past only in order to hold it in contempt.”
What you really seem unable or at least afraid to do is teach your chidren that things are not black and white. My parents raised me with a strong set of values, a respect for tradition, an appreciation for my ancestors and a love for my country while talking openly and honestly about the mistakes and problems that were part of those things also. They taught me that almost no one or thing is all good or all bad and that you should work to find the good before rejecting the whole and then figure out if or how the bad could be made better or how to make up for the harm it has caused and that doing so is not at the same time a rejection of the good. They also taught me that everyone doesn’t have to be like me and while their may be a natural desire for others to conform to your way of doing things one needs to really explore whether they are in any way preventing you from doing what you need or want or you just feel threatened by the idea of them.
6
Very thought provoking, the essence of a good op-Ed piece.
7
Our tradition is not having a tradition. By being Americans, at some level we give that up, "that" being the blood bond of European nationalism, itself something of a 19th century fiction. That has both positive and negative consequences, but we might as well get used to it. We can have warm feelings about the various national traditions from which we come, but at some level we have determined that they are not our destiny. So get over it.
5
People whose nationhood is threatened by external forces such as Ireland by the English and Poland by many nations cling to any shred of something that identifies them as Irish or Polish and in roses cases it was the Catholic church.
One sees the same thing when non Protestant immigrants were immersed in the stew that is America and their religion helped to identify them. It was not unusual when I grew up in the midwest to see towns that had an Irish catholic church and a few blocks away a German catholic church.
And as they assimilate they become more American as the generations go on and less in need of a faith to give them identity.
Douthat can 'raise' his children any way he chooses but if his children are raised properly they will be independent and not cling to all of their parents's beliefs but will forge their own identities.
13
Mr. Douthat is making a point that I think is being missed in many of the comments.
Every child deserves to know and feel his birthright- his national, religious, ancestral identity.
To deny a child knowledge and stories based on his identity is to deprive him of necessary equipment for entering adulthood.
The American story, for example, is rich and inherently good, despite some blips along the way. Every child deserves and requires the identity imbued by these stories, for example.
13
@prevention says that Douthat's point is "Every child deserves to know and feel his birthright- his national, religious, ancestral identity."
First of all, if that were Douthat's point, then he should have said it himself.
But prevention's idea of "birthright" is limited and stilted. Every child should know his/her birthright not only as a, for example, Irish, but as a human, benefiting from the Arabic invention of our number system, and as a living thing, benefiting from plants and insects and fungi and microbes.
Every child should know his/her birthright not only in his/her parent's religion, but in all religions. That way if and when a child selects a religion, or selects no religion at all, the child will know why s/he is making that selection. The same applies to other social systems: languages, customs, family and housing arrangements.
Every child should know his/her ancestral identity but not only for the past five or six generations. S/he should look to the trilobites and see ancestors, s/he should look to the fish and see siblings. S/he should see all humans as closely related.
"To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold - brothers who know now they are truly brothers." -- Archibald MacLeish
3
What a scary thought. Leave your children alone. The concept of ‘Identity’ comes inevitably to fruition on an official card, or a yellow star patch.
As an example of an identity bestowed upon children, perhaps take a (long)look at the cul-de-sac of culture in the drum-banging protestant orange-order in the north of Ireland.
2
This essay resonates with me and many of the posts reflect what's concerning to we "traditionalists". Too many people seem to revel in looking for all the warts in our country -- they would do well to travel more broadly to other countries so that they could put our issues in perspective. People take their freedom for granted in this country. A good life is not just about "material things".
For example, I realize slavery was a terrible thing, but how many countries have fought a major, brutal war to end it?
For example, how many countries have successfully absorbed high levels of immigration? We need to have confidence in our culture and principles in order to continue to do it well.
I would suggest individual freedom, equal treatment under the law, self- governance and respect for a higher spiritual authority as some of our basic principles.
16
@JEH Well, all those concepts originated in Europe. Without the Enlightenment, no one of them would exist.
Don't pat our communal backs too hard: most if not all other countries were able to end slavery WITHOUT fighting a major war.
1
The handing down of beliefs, customs, practices and personal history from generation to generation, what we call traditions, has always been selective even to the extent to when it is transmitted to its heirs. For instance, children are not told of the evil their forebearers may have done. That is, if ever, saved for much later in life.
A lot of what is entailed in maturing is coming to terms with the selectivity of what was related earlier in life. This used to be a gradual process punctuated by moments of disturbing realization that we had been misled but that is changing rapidly. Wikipedia and the internet as a whole has allowed all of us to see and read of what the reality of those traditions were.
Carefully constructed traditions often collapse in the face of easily discovered history today. As they say, "the truth will set you free", which doesn't mean that it will make you necessarily happy or comfortable in your "exceptionalism".
7
Traditions, including that most stubbornly unyielding one (religion) have not stood up well to modernity. At least since the reformation (which, Taliban-like, tried to enforce adherence to its own vision of former, largely abandoned traditions) each generation has found itself redefining the world in light of science's advancing illumination.
And the process is accelerating: Our understanding of America and its traditions has changed not just over our lifetimes, but in just the last half dozen years, and continues to change at a disorienting pace.
In the future there won't be any traditions, except in the Islamic world, where for some reason the young continue to believe everything the old men tell them.
7
Today, on this mother's day. I want to remember and honor the lives of my grandmothers, and my mother, and their suffering in their efforts to bring and raise children into the world.
Elinor Vaughn, the maiden name my paternal grandmother was born in Wales, in the mid 1800s. Her husband, my grandfather, Llewellyn Llewellyn, Jr., was was a coal miner of Welsh descent.
Elinor had eight pregnancies from which five children survived to adulthood. She lost three babies. She died in 1919 in the great flu epidemic.
Nellie Dyes, the maiden name of my maternal grandmother, My grandfather, John William Patterson, was a poor Indiana dirt farmer who suffered from intestinal bleeding while holding a plough in the ground pulled by a horse.
Nellie had four surviving children from seven pregnancies. She too lost three babies. She died in 1911, leaving my mother, at age 16, to be left to the care of kind half -aunts. Of my three maternal uncles, two were jailed for theft and one was committed to an insane asylum after an attempt to kill my grandfather.
My mother, God bless her, turned for comfort to religion. She was devout and turned the sadness and suffering of her family into a kind and gentle soul.
On marrying my father Bessie became Betty Llewellyn.
After my father's death, when I was just twelve years old, she, a widow, loved and supported me through an extensive education.
God bless you all, the suffering mothers I memorialize today.
31
What’s been interesting to me is that we define ourselves by where we come from first and where we are second. Even those born on American soil, with families here for generations, are Irish American, African American, Italian American and not the other way around. Whereas, if you’re born in Ireland you’re just Irish.
Because most Americans consider themselves to be effectively still immigrants, I think there is a sense of longing for the tribes they’ve left. For descendants of Europeans, the stories from just a few generations back, the Irish, Scotch-Irish, German, Italian, etc, provide a grounding, a sense of belonging.
And maybe that’s part of the tension of being an American, at least a European American, which is all Ross and I know. In some deep, genetic spot we still feel uprooted. Regardless of why our ancestors came to America, we haven’t been here long enough to completely belong. This can manifest itself in powerful ways across the political spectrum, from a hatred of immigrants to a strong focus on the many injustices humans in American have perpetrated against other humans.
Further back our ancestors come up from Africa to Europe and Asia (consider the poor Neanderthal), took those lands and called them home. It’s been something like 10-15 generations since the first Europeans landed on this continent. But it still hasn’t been long enough to call it home.
9
It seems to me that you're conflating the notion of national tradition with that of national sin Ross. America, like Ireland, like every country, or for that matter every person that's ever lived is highly imperfect and has more than its share of moral defects or sins. The history of America's and American's mistreatment of Blacks and native Americans in particular is almost unrelievedly appalling. But America most certainly has traditions that far transcend the political programs of Conservatives or Progressives. The values and policies of both Conservatives and Progressives are shaped by those traditions far more than either "side" would probably like to think. Our tradition's core, rooted in Revolutionary War era history, embodied in our Constitution, is the understanding that governance in America is self-governance by majority rule. If 50.1% of an American town votes for building a new school, then it is and should be built. Every Americans is not only of equal dignity and worth, to be given equal treatment under the law, but somewhat uniquely has fully equal political rights. The American tradition values fairness, decency, hard work and initiative above strict adherence to abstract rules and yet Americans strongly believe in voluntary adherence to the lw and rules (compare driving in the US to almost any other country). The American tradition is of irreplaceable value especially in divided times like these. We do have much in common.
4
@KenC This description of the American tradition hits it right on the nose: fairness decency hard work and initiative described the American character.
our American religion has been the golden rule.
Sometime in the last 50 or 60 years greed, self interest and fear of the “other “ found a way to dominate our psyche I blame the Chicago school Of economics for creating a top down attitude that profits dominate all other considerations but I’m sure other influences contributed as well.
But as Ken says there certainly has been an American tradition just as there was an Irish tradition before it
2
Mr. Douthat starts off by contrasting two readings of the phrase "the invention of tradition": the skeptical and the renewal.
In fact these two readings do not contrast. Both elements of "the invention of tradition" are essential, and they are essential to each other.
The only way to make tradition relevant and believable and lively -- in short, the only way to renew tradition -- is by being skeptical. If we still thought that Washington chopped down a cherry tree or that Columbus proved the world was round, then tradition would be a hollow rite with no meaning and no interest.
The only reason anyone makes the effort to be skeptical of tradition is because they are interested in it -- they find it lively and "a necessary way to bridge to gulf of years."
Skepticism is essential to renewal, and vice versa, in scholarship, in writing, and in tradition.
4
"Or if I want them to see their country’s sins clearly — as the left often sees more clearly than the right — without falling prey to the progressive tendency to remember the past only in order to hold it in contempt."
Or maybe trying not to be so devoted as you often are to creating the sins of the present that your children hopefully one will hold in contempt.
5
@Robert Roth
That’s not very friendly is it? In fact it’s particularly biting and mean-spirited. I’ve read Ross and others in the Times and though I rarely agree totally with them, I take them as writing authentically and with good intent. Ross’ voice is especially important in the Times given it’s overwhelming liberal tilt. It’s good to hear it all and in that way we are all better off.
11
Charles,
If Ross was a friend, a neighbor or co-worker I might agree with you. But he is a very public figure. If for example Roe v. Wade is overturned it will be in no small measure because of people like Ross continually and compulsively working towards that happening. Things that he writes can have profound social consequences. And its not just you and me having angry differences in a discussion. Though that also could be important. But still it is different. I have no problems with the Times publishing Ross. Or other conservative writers. Though I don't think the tilt is quite as liberal as you think. Bret Stephens once complained that he didn't like it when people said he was an affirmative action hire because the Times wanted more conservatives on the editorial page. At the time what passed for liberal were mostly center left writers. But since then more left liberal maybe even radical writers have been added. So the range in fact now is wider which like you I am grateful for.
3
@Charles Gonzalez
Conservatives invented and own "not friendly", from Mitch McConnell and Joe Wilson on up to Trump and his cabinet of selfish autocrats. Ross has cheerled the entire time. His voice in the Times is antiquated and irrational; always has been. When "intellectual conservatives" acknowledge the failure of their chosen policies and denounce their benighted leaders they can be dealt with in friendship. Until that time, it is war.
3
Tradition “lives” as it engages with the present realities and thrives when it informs the present with wisdom and insight into the perennial challenges we face as humans. It thrives when celebrated in ritual, song, and feasting. Tradition withers when it is frozen in rigid rules and bleak nostalgia and becomes the haven for fearful certainty and those who would wall off the present reality of life together. The withering of the moral fabric in the age of Trump testifies to the withering of tradition in 21st century America.
3
My father attended Jesuit institutions early in the 20th century because his father knew focusing on Judaism and Jewish traditions would not serve him well in the Europe where they lived.
My bilingualism informs me that in English and French Histoire has two very different meanings even as English's word history is only about three hundred years old and French histoire conveys a traditional and far more universal understanding.
History as we understand it is facts about what happened in the past. It is the lies and propaganda handed down by the few who could read and write to form and animate society. Histoire is stories past down from generation whose metaphors and parables as in the bible convey the wisdom and truths throughout the ages.
Canadian historian and philosopher John Ralston Saul in his book The Comeback conveys why our Aboriginal communities are again assuming an important role in our Canadian society. Our Supreme Court has confirmed that not only are oral traditions with their stories,songs legends and prejudices valid history they are as often as not more truthful than the words written on paper to exalt the powerful and diminish the mob.
There is a reason the returning prodigal son is cherished more than the one committed to tradition.
History misinforms us of a famine in Ireland which never was there were no potatoes, the troubles reveal the truth about a genocide starting with Cromwell and culminating in a culling and a forced or "permitted" starvation.
6
As a legitimate heir to known (20th century) and unknown Irish emigrants (early 19th c famine), I can tell you that they rejected violence above all things. As recently as yesterday an Irish-American friend and I were worrying over the potential violence Brexit might fuel. Avoid, at all costs, any so-called "tradition" based on resentment and enemies.
1
Tradition is a useful ambiguity. It is the stories of our parents and grandparents, carefully edited, to inform us that we have a worthy lineage. It is the story of our nation, carefully edited, to inform us of our glorious history and bright future. It is the collection of stories that comfort us when we ruthlessly edit the history of our lives for our children and grandchildren.
7
One of the ideas behibnd free public education is that all American children should have essentially the same cultural and social lesson plan. A parochial education skews the narrative.
By the time a kid gets to high school, a foundation should have been laid for understanding civics. Without it, it's hard to become a solid citizen.
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@Daniel F. Solomon Agreed, and even harder now that kids aren't being taught to read and write Cursive style. This bothers me hugely - the thought that the present generation and all future ones will not be able to even read what their grandparents might have written. It frightens me, actually, to think how much tradition and TRUTH will be lost, as this educational practice continues.
6
We’d all be better off focusing on the lives we live and people we love today, than the mythical stories and traditions of the alleged places of our ancestors. Many of the passed down past is little more than folklore, often without any evidence, designed to make us feel connected to some earlier time, place and people.
A woman I know often talks about her Norwegian heritage and has visited Norway a couple of times. When asked, she refused to take one of those DNA tests. Her husband, a good friend, told me confidentially that she has heard of people who think they know their ancestry and then find out through these tests they have been wrong their whole lives. She likes being Norwegian. She is and will always be so. So she’s not taking any tests.
She is also a great person—intelligent, religious, kind and caring, a great friend and a fantastic mom and wife. Whether she is Norwegian or not, her Norwegian ancestors would have been glad to have her in their tribe.
11
@Jack Sonville I suspect what you are so rightly appreciating is an inherited (or invented for that matter) culture or cultural connection. A fun and wonderful thing. DNA has nothing, or only a little, to do with it. Skoal!
1
We live in a dark age, there's a deep melancholy right now because most of us are shocked and dismayed by all things Trump. What we must realize is that the dark night ends when the light returns and it will. Already persons who will take us to the 2030's are here and beginning to act. Our cultural heritage will be reconfigured but not defeated. What we must realize is that the founding fathers understood that diversity and creativity must come from many different kinds of people. The nationalism we see today is a backlash to the genuine success of multiculturalism and fear of liberal democracy. In a few years the next generation will sort things out. In Ireland after decades of poverty and desperation now is a time of setting things right and celebration of what matters. That will happen in America soon enough.
7
I think we need a national day of regret. We need to regret the destruction of the Native Americans, and we need to regret slavery. We need to document and preserve the stories of the original people and those brought here in chains. There might need to be a new holiday, a new picture on some currency, a national landmark with these names and stories for people to visit and study for their own family histories. It can be a day of great gratitude too. For resilience. We are a young country and our story is just beginning. We slaughtered our Druid equivalents, and we continue to debase the children of slaves. Maybe, in post-Donald, we can come clean and start a new tradition for our grandchildren. The tradition of honoring one's past, regretting one's mistakes, and moving forward in accord with a love and not hate.
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@Jodi Harrington
Douthat mentioned "falling prey to the progressive tendency to remember the past only in order to hold it in contempt." This tendency helped elect Trump.
11
@Tucson Geologist
Too bad Douthat failed to mention the conservative tradition of ignoring the past to profit from the future. Conservative "principals" currently being ignored include separation of powers, deficits are bad, tariffs hurt the economy, and personal integrity in the White House is all-important. Apparently those principals only are in force when Democrats are in charge. Ross finds it oh so easy to find the flaws in what he supposes to be liberal thinking while ignoring, papering over, or praising the gaping flaws in their own supposed reasoning. This what-aboutism is a staple of so many conservative commentators - Stephens here does it constantly.
26
It sure did!
We don’t instill traditions and culture by selecting them from a checklist and then pushing them down on our children. Culture is lived, tradition passed down in story and ritual, stained glass windows, holiday meals, and habits of the heart.
I revere the Declaration of Independence and The Sermon on the Mount. The latter is at the core of my moral being and assures that the norms and values I pass down are drawn from wells of human magnanimity. The former reminds me to respect and defend my brothers’ and sisters’ right to find and live by their own moral compass. Thereby each generation improves upon the past while retaining accumulated wisdom and beauty.
This to me is our American culture, these its traditions.
20
This is just a lovely piece, Ross. Imagining what an American tradition would be, imagining what we would have to be as a nation to be able to have or invest an American tradition, at a time when two seemingly different stories are hammering themselves out, strikes me a good exercise. For all of us.
5
We brought our kids up in 3 countries (US, France, Italy), I am American and my wife British with Irish heritage. We talked about the histories and politics of all these countries, but had absolutely no interest in indulging mythic fantasies, which Douthat seems to think we should.
Take Ireland: my wife was always surprised at how Americans of Irish descent romanticized the past. She grew up in England and regularly visited relatives in Ireland, many of whom were isolated farmers. What she saw was poverty, a parochial outlook, and boredom. The narrow, rigid Catholicism forever alienated her from all religion. Of course, she loves her cousins - she has at least 40 that she knows - and sees them regularly.
We felt no need to instill some more illusory, positive image in our children of any nation. They will find their own identities as multi-lingual cosmopolitans. Indeed, living outside of the US for so long and seeing how our politics have evolved, I have no desire to see my kids to idolize America or hold it out as some ideal and pride. I'd rather they see the warts and failures and assess its accomplishments for themselves.
12
I’m not sure that Ross’s struggles to create traditions that combine the past and his own beliefs are all that different from the struggles of Michael Brendan Dougherty and believers in Irish cultural rebirth and those rejecting that culture like James Joyce. There aren’t many slavish devotees to the past, refusing to bend the past to help it fit in with their present. We all select parts of the past and reinvent a new whole.
The problem for Ross, I think, is that the present keeps changing, and new generations keep wanting to graft new things onto the past; those generations are re-inventing to fit their own current needs. Apparently, “cosmopolitanism” for him slays a past filled with nationalism in favor of a present focused on a variety of traditions and values, leaving us with supposedly incoherent cultural cues lacking any connection to a common past. But America was never as unified and uniform as Ross thinks.
Unfortunately, Ross again mistakenly blames cultural change and confusion for an apparent decay of families and family values, oh and political divisions. He really needs to read up on the real culprits like regional economic stagnation, income inequality and unaffordable higher education. If your only tool is a hammer, however...
Chris Buczinsky's post here with this bit "We can have many narratives connected by overlapping similarities instead of one common plot line" really nails it.
14
Unbelievable that Douhat feels that creative traditionalism is out-of-reach for Americans! Our society is freer than ever to question authority and tradition without fear of retribution. And our children are more discriminating than ever when evaluating the morality of actions, especially of their parents generation. (He will soon find out)
America was built on IDEALS of freedom and equality so imperfectly implemented by all the rich white men in power at the time. Similarly, the Catholic Church may have some good TEACHINGS about loving your neighbor, but they have definitely been overshadowed by the horrifying and abusive actions of powerful white men.
The answer is to judge any existing or proposed tradition through a lens of modern inclusiveness and positivity.
America's ideals, and Christianity teachings, are powerful because in reality they are universal values. Take these values and teachings, and apply them to everyone, not just the patriarchy.
Then American tradition and action will continue to inspire and lead the world.
3
You do not have to re-invent, Mr. Douthat.
Start with learning your family history and learning it within the framework of the history and society in which these events unfolded.
Read your colleague Roger Cohen's biography of his mother, The Girl from Human Street. He also wrote about it in his columns.
My wife, who is a prominent historian of modern Jewish history, has written, inter alia, (academic) biographies (in an academic press) of her grandmother, father and my mother, placing them all in Jewish and world society of the time. She is completing now a work on her mother.
For her (and I admit that this was done from the perch of tenure and highest academic rank) it was a true lesson in multi-faceted "tradition" as it was for me when she wrote the biography of my mother. It was only really then that i learned about my family on all sides and how they lived and functioned in their worlds.
To choose, Mr. Douthat, one first has to learn.
5
@Joshua Schwartz Actually, invention is nescessary. It is always about selecting (what is relevant to the story), knowning ( always partial and biased) , and creating a story of the past. Any form of meaning attached to these stories is related to the inventing person and their present situations. Any relevant information is only relevant in in the person's own understanding. Ultimatly, a narrative is often stripped out of contradicting elements, uncertainty and complexity.
In the end, tradition is rather a choice of the present, searching meaning in the past to imagine the futur and make sense of the present. Calling back to a simpler past is often a way to criticize the chaos of the present, calling back to retrograde past serves as a way to call for opptimism in the futur. Invoking past families to create coherence, linkage and a sense of continuity. Its creates and attached deeper symbols for sharing and entrenching one own narrative.
If invention is used instead , it is that tradition (in a broad) is moslty an act of the present, of interpretating, connecting and assessing certain elements of the past, rather than a direct gateway to the past itself (as a teacher and a puppil). In a stricter sense, traditions are simple actions that are framed with legitimacy of the past. But whether or not they are directly related in the act itself is often a more complex questions often answered by the negative.
1
@Pierre My wife and I are both historians. The point was not "invention" but "re-invention". Obviously in trying to learn about one's roots ones tries to "discover". Invent is from the latin root inventio-invenire > discovery- to discover.
Mr. Douthat talks about "creative reinvention". I counsel first discovering the facts (= invention).
2
Children need to be taught some sort of identity upon which to base their perspective. The vast majority will reject it during adolescence and then re-embrace it to some extent when defining themselves in adulthood.
Modern morality seems to discourage the teaching of any childhood identity, even a gender identity. However, all humans embrace an identity which is delivered to them during childhood - very, very few start from scratch.
So, if not from the family philosophies, or their daily education, where do young people obtain their foundations? TV sitcoms, soaps, advertising, and talk radio.
4
Mr Douthat is looking at this thing all wrong. Searching for a one essential national narrative we all have in common is futile and completely unnecessary. We can have many narratives connected by overlapping similarities instead of one common plot line. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great modern German philosopher, called this alternative form of unity a “family resemblance.”
This concept of our unity has the virtue of being truer to our multicultural past and present, more realistic in the demands it makes on our fellow Americans who think differently than we do, more tolerant of alternative and competing narratives. Such an understanding of how we are united respects differences while nevertheless finding, in a dispersed unity, what makes us a national family.
Put simply: we don’t need to share a common narrative. Our multiple and competing narratives bear a family resemblance, and that’s what we call “being an American.”
32
Increasing depression, loneliness, isolation and suicide among our youth says your wrong.
1
Being against Catholicism is a part of our conservative tradition. And being suspicious of a secular society and its values (and even of democracy) is part of a conservative Catholic tradition.
Being against racial equality and race mixing is also part of our conservative tradition. In fact, our conservative tradition does not favor the enlightenment and the secular society it gave rise to, and the abstract ideal of equality we are now trying to exemplify. This country in its founding was not conservative, and conservatives can be at home here only by ignoring what we were founded to exemplify.
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@sdavidc9
Actually this country was founded mostly by people who wanted to make as much money and pay as little tax as possible.
3
I grew up in an Irish American family in Chicago, having a feisty Irish grandmother who came over on the boat, by herself, from Cork in 1909 at the age of 15. What I learned from her is that she left Ireland to make a better life, and forget the past, not that it was all bad. She used the bad memories to encourage her to do better, and used the good memories encourage all of us to be the best that we could be. Most all immigrants bring a little of the old country with them, but came here to build new lives and new traditions, with new friends and new communities. I've found over the years that a lot of what I thought was Irish tradition was really built for me by a feisty little red headed grandma, who just wanted the best for all of us.
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Hi. Perhaps just a bit more is due to Ireland. The ability to defy ,to stand alone if one knows one is right and to take the consequences is somehow very Irish. I’d recommend the documentary “Keepers of the Flame” about the Irish Civil war in the 1920s. The people looked and sounded like the adults of my Brooklyn NYC youth. The cast of the heads, the sometimes foolish defiance, the misplaced trust
When I first visited Ireland in the seventies, it was like visiting a neighboring parish in Brooklyn that I had somehow overlooked.
4
Yes, Anne, "[t]he ability to defy, to stand alone if one knows one is right and to take the consequences" -- just like that guy facing down the tank in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, right?! I never knew there were so many Irish in Beijing. Now that's a far-flung, trans-oceanic tradition, for sure!
4
Douthat’s desire for “creative traditionalism” and the renewal of a long ago Irish cultural identity is akin to Trump’s nativist and white nationalist vision for America. I’d rather have many voices and people who don’t all look or think the same—-also known as multiculturalism—-to give to future generations...
12
"Near Tradition" is itself a tradition among Irish and Scottish distant connections. But there is something to work with. The Irish legacy of music, writing, and agriculture including sport horse breeding, are undeniable, and are still strong in Ireland outside the Euro urban centers.
3
We ought to be celebrating our collapsing birth rate. If only we could make that little ray of daylight aspirational for the rest of the world, all of it, including the poorest.
Our best, most intelligent hope for a tradition for our children and their children is to get the rest of the planet on the same page with some serious remedies for the ecological catastrophes that await the next two or three or four generations hence. Pretending it won't happen is as useful as praying. God to planet earth: you wrecked it; you either fix it or forfeit your future.
57
Wow ! what a piece of journalism. Congratulations for putting this, these doubts, questions, and contemplation into a very important thought process that most parents are not preparing for.
I am Jewish of Holocaust survivors. I was born in Canada with daughter settled in NYT. It was important for me to spend many years in Poland along with my children to know our roots first hand besides time in Israel.....then many and continuing years of discussion. One needs ones roots and first hand experiencing is vital. Life is more than the years that we live.....
8
"late cosmopolitanism" (as apparently modern, pluralistic and tolerant liberalism that embraces the concept of a global society) rejects the politics of nationalism and imagined blood-lines because it leads directly to Victor Orban and Donald Trump.
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@sd I see where you're coming from. The millennial generation may end up embracing globalism or it might take longer. Or nativism might drag us into a dystopian future that looks like the thirties and forties but this time with nukes.
Problem is, a lot of folks are not ready for full-on globalism. They recoil from it. It will take time.
A properly formed traditionalism that rejects nativism but doesn't go all in on globalism may be the bridge that's needed.
Almost all progress causes some losses. That's one of my bedrock philosophical beliefs. We need to progress because the alternative is hideous. Denouncing any regrets about what gets lost is not helpful at all.
I believe Mr. Douthat is sincere.
4
My mother’s family has a long tradition of genealogy, so much so that maintaining the family’s history is woven into who we are. Photos, letters, journals, newspaper articles, wedding and birth announcements, stories, any and all mementos, passed down from one generation to the next.
I will admit to some ambivalence here. It is a bit difficult for me to identify with people whose lives and beliefs were so different from mine, whether or not we share a gene pool. I was never, among others, God-fearing. But I still understand that, like me, they did the best they could in their respective societies. And I deeply appreciate that their collective efforts over the ages made my life today possible. Ultimately, we all owe that gratitude to our ancestors, however disconnected we find ourselves from them.
Happy Mother’s Day, everyone.
13
Mr. Douthat should stop worrying about how to steer his progeny's world view. Playing at being a parent, he should opt for simplicity, generosity, honesty, straightforwardness, openness, and a non-authoritarian stance regarding all those close and those far from the family. Then he should hope for the best. Soon enough his children will not be his children, but their own persons.
78
We humans have passed on the legacy of family and tribe for thousands of years. We aren’t equipped to reinvent ourselves.
All we have now our cell phones, apps and social networks that isolate us, depress us and destroy our capacity of intimacy.
6
@Garry If we can't reinvent ourselves we will perish. We haven't had nukes for thousands of years. Nor have we had the capability to irrevocably change the climate of the entire planet in radical ways.
I, for one, don't let my cell phone or Facebook isolate or depress or ruin intimacy. Why do you think that is inevitable?
I'll bet some folks complained that writing and reading was destroying society. Now it took a very long time for reading to expand outside a tiny elite but it did happen, certainly by the 5th century BC in parts of Greece (not saying it hadn't happened elsewhere sooner, just going with what I know).
That did lead to the rise of Sophistry and various social ills. It also gave us the philosophy of Plato and the science of Aristotle.
Progress always comes with a price tag. Sometimes the price is very high indeed for certain groups. Genocide.
I don't think we have a choice but to continue to progress. We now know enough to alleviate the worst effects. Whether we will or not is a very open question.
3
@Jack Toner Good points, but -- on the subject of Plato and Aristotle -- you might want to read Karl Popper's book "The Open Society and Its Enemies". Popper, who was Austrian, and of Jewish background, wrote the book in Christchurch, New Zealand, in the early 1940s, after he had fled Vienna and moved to New Zealand shortly before Austria fell to the Nazis. Popper wanted to trace the historical and intellectual roots of European authoritarianism, fascism, and racism, and he traced them back to Plato and Aristotle. Popper believed they were geniuses, but he makes an excellent case that they were also reactionary classists and racists who laid the groundwork for many future authoritarian ills in Western thought. (Racists, interestingly, in that Plato and Aristotle were admirers of the Egyptians and probably also the Ethiopians, but thought that the Northern Europeans were barbarians, fit only for slavery. In future millennia, Popper argues, the Northern Europeans would take Plato and Aristotle's racist hierarchies and just switch around which racial groups were on the top and which were on the bottom.)
1
Well, Mr. Douthat is certainly upholding the traditions of the Land of Over-Simplification and False Dichotomies. There is no reason why one cannot love the US and still see its past and present with clear eyes about strengths and weaknesses; and to do so without fretting about conservative or liberal labels. One of the problems with Americans who accept the invented traditions of the "Old Country" (Ireland, Italy, Nigeria, Mexico,China...you name it) is that many do not know the real history of either the US or the place the alleged ancestors came from.
37
@arp I think you're putting words in his mouth. He's not telling us to forget about slavery or the destruction of the aboriginal societies.
He's saying that most people need some sort of tradition to provide some roots. And he's acknowledging that traditions are to some degree made up. He even cites a Marxist historian!
Try to read with a more open mind and heart.
Perhaps you don't need the kind of traditions that Mr. Douthat is talking about. I tend to feel that way my own self but then I wonder: am I fooling myself? Do I have "traditions" that I think are reality?
For sure most Americans don't know much about history. Don't see that changing.
7
Personally, I’m not that concerned with how future Americans view their history. I’m much more concerned that humanity itself is on the brink of a global catastrophe, one that will be caused by American ignorance, antipathy and malevolent disregard of scientific fact.
150
I'm concerned that we only care about heritage as a weapon. Moral clarity about the past is easy. Whether we want to condemn the foundational evils of America, or whitewash (no pun) them as mistakes overcome, when we simplify the past the goal seems to be to simplify the present.
Recognizing how easily barbarism & cruelty & stupidity became institutionalized in the past should be a warning to examine ourselves and what society expects of us. There's nothing inconsistent about acknowledging that our ancestors were capable of generosity & strength as well as violence & greed. So are we. I have no doubt that the future, if there is one, will condemn us for many evils. What is our slavery, our unforgivable sin? Climate change? The conversion of culture into a market for data? The proliferation of destructive weapons? We should honor our ancestors by making good on their mistakes & their suffering. We should learn from them, about ourselves. Maybe I'm idealistic, but I think that's what both the perpetrators & the victims of the past's evils would hope of us.
16
Excellent column. Like so many things happening around us, the idea of America is changing.
I am an immigrant from the Balkans in 1954, living all my life in Manhattan.
Whenever I despair about America, I take a drive coast to coast. From sea to shining sea, and find it is still is the America I love. Old Age spots and all.
26
Douthat's reference to 'crack up of the sixties' is itself an exercise in in 'creative traditionalism' in which the long overdue counter narrative challenging the inherited historical status quo. daring to reconfigure the American story, is debunked as corrosive ingratitude for blessing bestowed. Every nation and indeed every generation to some degree creates the history it needs in an ever evolving critique and self-examination as voices rise to dispute often invented 'coherent national narratives' demanded by cultural conformists clinging desperately to 'lineage and loyalties' which serves their indentities and values. America has never experienced a 'consensus,' religious or otherwise, except in the comfortable, smug inventiveness of of conservative nostalgists determined to weather the strum and drang of collapsing certainties that never were, a past that never existed...except for the one they imagined. True historical memory is the uncompromising examination of all those disparate elements of our individual and collective stories defying convenient or necessarily satisfying narratives. Living with complexity and contradiction and still finding common cause is the challenge.
2