A reader finds a contradiction in my entry on Sharansky

A reader thought he had caught me saying the opposite of what I intended to say. He wrote:

Sharansky writes, “What gave me the courage to do so was the inner freedom I had found in reconnecting myself to the history and heritage of my people.”

You wrote, “This shows that the belief in freedom, of which Sharansky himself is such an eloquent spokesman, is not enough. One must have a nation, a culture, a religion, a people.”

Sharansky was a citizen of the USSR. He decided that this identity was not his root self. He was a Jew before he was a Soviet.

If one were to use Sharansky’s same logic here in the US, then every Afro-American is essentially an African. Every American of German extraction is really German. Every American descended from French roots is really French.

Sharansky said that his Soviet citizenship was transcended by his Jewishness. By the same token, one’s American citizenship then is transcended by one’s racial or tribal roots—those that precede historically one’s contemporary identity.

If Sharansky asserts that his primal identity is Jewish (not Soviet), then Ronald Reagan’s primal identity was Irish (not American).

Using Sharansky’s logic to the nth degree, there is no true American identity.

And if we extend history backwards, Sharansky is not really a Jew. Abraham came from Mesopotamian tribes that preceded the Hebrews. However if Sharansky had hypothetically emigrated to the US, would his Jewishness still have taken precedence over his American identity?

My reply:

Your argument is clever but misses the point. You’re taking a secondary or accidental aspect of the argument and making it primary. The primary idea that I found suggested by Sharansky is not that he was a Soviet Jew who discovered his non-Soviet, ethnic, Jewish identity, and that I therefore am calling for Americans to discover their non-American, ethnic identities and opt out of America. No. The primary idea suggested by Sharansky is that the sense of a peoplehood was essential to give him a rootedness and connection with a larger concrete particularity to give him the strength and courage to stand up against the Soviet totalitarian regime. In the case of Polish patriots who resisted Communism, their ancient Polish and Catholic heritage gave them that strength.

The totalitarian Soviet system gave its citizens no historic, real identity, only a “universal,” ideological, Soviet identity. So any Soviet would be forced to find some other source of rootedness if he was to rediscover his humanity. Solzhenitsyn discovered it in Orthodox religion and the sense of a historic Russian culture.

In the case of America, there is a historic American culture and identity, which has been radically thinned out by modernity and liberalism and, as I said, by the ideology of universal freedom which tends to usurp the place of a national and traditionalist culture. I am calling for Americans to re-discover their historic identity as Americans. For many Americans, their religious and ethnic membership is also a part of what they are, but we’ve had that from the start, and, if the differences are not too great, as among Protestants, assimilated Catholics, and assimilated Jews, the sub-identities can work reasonably harmoniously within the common American identity.

However, if there are people in America whose main loyalties lie elsewhere and who are the analogues of Sharansky as you understand him, that is, if there are people who identify primarily with their African roots or their Jewish/Israeli roots or whatever, then, if they followed Sharansky’s example, they would relocate to Africa or Israel instead of imposing a multicultural/multinational regime on America. So that should be fine with us. I’ve always said that American Jews who regard Israel as their country should become Israelis. But, once again, the main point here is not about one’s ancestral ethnic identity transcending one’s national identity, but about the need for all men to have an identity, whether national, ethnic, or religious, rooted in something larger than themselves.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 18, 2004 12:40 AM | Send