I first wrote about America being an ideology in 1991, and since then I’ve particularly noticed when someone with a good mind has a different idea about it. It gives me a chance to do more reasoning and, over time, I have become even more convinced that America is a body of ideas. Here is an excerpt from a column by Samuel Francis that I disagree with, and my reasons below.
Francis wrote in the Conservative Chronicle, November 22, 1995:
The superstition that “America is an idea,” now proudly burbled from the lip of every politician and pundit, undermines the real truth about America, that the nation emerged out of a distinctive historical experience and cannot be understood apart from its history. . . . . [ill-educated people] may someday occasionally wonder why all those monuments and buildings are allowed to clutter up the streets; they may reflect on why so many things around them are so incomprehensible, and someday they may even discover that those who taught them and those who paid for their teaching have cheated them out of their heritage and the nation that grew out of it.
Based on what I have already written, it should be clear that:
I agree that America cannot be understood apart from its history. I believe that America has invested a great deal of meaning within its history. I agree that ill-educated people, by not knowing the extraordinary story of the history of America, have been cheated out of their heritage.
I agree that throughout America, there are monuments and buildings that carry with them some of the great treasure of humankind. This treasure can only be accessed through education, through people caring enough to visit and cherish this treasure and through the strength of the love that one should have for freedom and opportunity.
I do not agree with the conception that “America is an idea” is a superstition. On the contrary, America works to eliminate superstition by dealing with human beings and life as they really are. America only works when clear-headed thinking is practiced by people who care enough to learn and then practice the arts and sciences of reality.
I do not agree that the conception that “America is an idea” undermines the real truth about America. America is a State of Mind, a Way of Life, an Ideal, an Ideology embodied by a real country with a history that fills the ideology with details as well as with ideas to fight against. I believe that the real truth about America is bigger than the United States ever could be.
I ask you to consider the possibility that a America’s layer of values, artifacts, techniques, and goals may be especially susceptible to destructive influences. The strength of a culture does not and cannot maintain itself. As Robert Nisbet wrote, in The Idea of Progress, (page 324):
A respect for the past, nowhere more dedicated than in the United States, continued into the twentieth century. There were the innumerable festivals, holidays, and rituals, the purpose of which was a fusing of a people into a community, and this through a kind of telescoping of past and present. There could not have been many homes in which elements of the past—political, military, and religious, preponderantly—were not frequently, even constantly, brought to the attention of the young. How else to make children love country, race, or nationality, and religion except through the incessant recreation of the past and its great events, heroes, leaders, and prophets?
How else? But somewhere in the twentieth century the Leftist collectivists took control of our educational facilities and started removing whole blocks of truth from the history they taught. No longer would we pass on to our children and the world the details of the particular Western Intellectual Heritage that led to the ideas upon which America was created. It is the destructive lies that Anti-Americans tell, and the way that they omit vital information about America and its history from our schools and universities, that causes the true problem, that separates the heritage of America from those who are ill-educated.
The history of who and what we are, and where we came from must be told, and it must be told truthfully. At this moment, throughout the world, most of what we would consider valued history is being omitted from curricula due to the efforts of Leftists and Islamofascists. One of my favorite writers, Mark Steyn, writes, in “Reality is Up For Grabs”, that:
I find myself mulling over the future of the past. By which I mean that the latter depends very much on the former. For example, much as it may astonish younger readers, there are millions of people who grew up all over the world in schools that taught them that the Britannic inheritance was on the whole a good thing as opposed to the root cause of all the world's woes. [ . . . ] In Canada and around the western world, we have discarded large chunks of our past. The question is: what else can be junked? Over in London the other day, there was an interesting story in The Mail On Sunday, which began as follows: "Schools are dropping controversial subjects from history lessons--such as the Holocaust and the Crusades--because teachers do not want to cause offence, [. . .] What other bits of reality will be chipped away from the curriculum in the years ahead? And will what's left be enough to glue a nation together? After all, if you can't agree on the past, you're unlikely to agree on the future. A few months ago, I met the splendid prime minister of Australia, John Howard, on the day of a new education initiative to get the country's history taught (as he put it) as an "heroic national narrative." It's a marvelous phrase, but in Britain and much of Europe the classroom can no longer agree on who are the heroes and who are the villains.
Now, all of this may still seem too esoteric, too far removed from the day-to-day life we all of us lead. I would like to advance the possibility that this fight for America and the attendant fight for the truth about the past is actually the most important aspect of our lives right now. Everything we do, everything we want for ourselves and for our children, for the children of the world, every right we cherish, is only ours because of the efforts—not the wishes, the efforts—of those in our past who cared enough to fight for America, for the Constitution, for capitalism, for the values of the Western Intellectual Heritage that Americans cherish.
This Ideological World War is not removed from us at all—it envelops us, for good or evil.
Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson's Website, The Virtuous Republic, DeMediacratic Nation, Big Dog's Weblog, Adam's Blog, Maggie's Notebook, Right Truth, Webloggin, Leaning Straight Up, The Amboy Times, Conservative Cat, Pursuing Holiness, Rightlinx, third world county, Allie Is Wired, The World According to Carl, Pirate's Cove, Blue Star Chronicles, Planck's Constant, The Pink Flamingo, Right Voices, Gone Hollywood, OTB Sports, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Leave a comment