What creates national identity

In his book, The 50 Percent American: Immigration and National Identity in an Age of Terror, Stanley Renshon says that mere belief in universal ideas about freedom and democracy, the Creed, as Samuel Huntington puts it, is not enough to create and maintain an American national identity. What is needed is a felt appreciation of America, emotional underpinnings that attach us to the country. I agree with Renshon completely. In fact, this was a central theme of my 1990 booklet, The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism. Here’s an excerpt.

Cultural Reductionism

As suggested earlier, pro-immigration liberals and conservatives deal with the looming threat to cultural assimilation by imagining that it doesn’t exist. America, they believe, has an infinite capacity for the assimilation of diverse peoples. This astounding conceit can be made credible only at a great cost—by flattening our idea of American society to the most superficial image of consumerism and pop culture. American culture is thus made equally accessible to all—and equally meaningless. “The process of assimilation is inexorable,” writes Time. “As these students become Americanized, they want to eat hot dogs and hamburgers and pizza…. They want designer jeans and bicycles and calculators and digital watches.” By reducing American culture to the idea of its material accoutrements, Time makes the acquisition of that culture seem as quick and easy as an over-the-counter purchase. Similarly, Wall Street conservatives and free market economists reduce America’s essence to the pursuit of maximum activity in the global marketplace. From this point of view it makes no difference whether a person can participate in the culture of this country or even if he speaks English; holding a job and paying taxes become the sole criterion of being a good and useful citizen. The strictures of contemporary debate force even cultural conservatives into the materialist fallacy; official-English proponents, for example, tend to base their plea for the defense of our common language solely on utilitarian grounds, rather than on the ground of the survival of a distinctive American civilization. What these various reductionisms have in common is that they disregard the intangible and affective dimensions of human society. Participation in commerce or science only requires the appropriate human activity and talents, which are, modern thought tells us, equal among all the races of the earth. But participation in a particular culture or way of life requires a degree of identification with that culture, the potential or desire for which is manifestly not equal among all men and nations. “It is the easiest thing in the world,” wrote Arnold Toynbee in a slightly different context, “for commerce to export a new Western technique. It is infinitely harder for a Western poet or saint to kindle in a non-Western soul the spiritual flame that is alight in his own.” If America is to survive its present decline, it needs to rediscover, and learn to articulate, this spiritual flame of which Toynbee speaks. The answers to our current problems lie within the still-living but neglected roots of our own civilization—not in giving up that civilization for the sake of some utopian global order.

This brings us to yet another kind of reductionism we ought to beware of: the tendency to dilute our idea of America into a mere abstraction of freedom and human rights. Yes, America stands for, and is based on, certain universal political principles; but we must insist that America also happens to be a country. Surely the Founding Fathers saw no contradiction between being devoted as philosophers to universal principles of republicanism and the rights of man, and as patriots to a particular nation, a particular people. To ignore our national individuality—in an effort to make America seem instantly accessible to every person and culture on the planet—is to turn the country into the blank slate of which we spoke earlier, on which the social engineers and all the migrating masses of the world can write whatever they please. In other words, America needs to revive the original name and meaning of the Statue of Liberty (now quite forgotten): “Liberty Enlightening the World”—a shining example for other nations to achieve in their own lands and in their own ways what we have achieved here, not a simply a mindless invitation for the whole world to move here.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 24, 2006 05:38 PM | Send