Oh Americans, if only you could borrow this word from the
French for a while. It would solve so many of your problems.
Are you offended by the Ten Commandments on government
property? Do you have trouble with "In God we trust" on our coins?
Think of it not as Christianity forced on non-believers, people free not to believe, but as an honoring
of our heritage. And if you don't want to use our word "heritage," if
you think that's going to suggest too much that's white, or European, or male,
use the French word. "Oh, we're just doing that because it's part of the
'patrimoine.'"
Use the word the French use for "heritage" and
then look at how much they cram into it. They're the least-believing, most
non-churchgoing people in the world and how do they behave toward their
churches? With the greatest reverence. They pour more money into their
preservation than we spend on Interstate bridges. "Bien sur, c'est le
patrimoine."
I'm reminded of what our young guide said as she excused
taking us to view Lenin's living quarters, preserved in Pskov: "It's our
history, part of us." Christianity and the English character formed by
Christianity are not just part of us, they are the center of us. Without those
Protestant constituencies who in the seventeenth century elected the squires
who showed us what made parliaments work we'd have never made it in the
eighteenth century. And I'm not referring to the production of a constitution. I'm
referring to the character that makes a constitution work. I'm referring to
what the African statesman saw lacking in his own country when he asked the New
York Times writer (memory tells me it was Jeffrey Goldberg) "Why do you
obey judges' rulings?"
A constitution, laws, rules, contracts, all can be done in
by people who don't work within them in good faith, people who use them for
their own purposes. In the end democracy, as we've learned in its fall in so
many countries with constitutions, depends on a certain character. And
character is developed over time, in a tradition. Ours is indicated on our
coins and in our choice of holidays.
The trick of course these days is to honor our coin-holiday
tradition without offending Americans bringing the benefits of other, more
recent traditions. Or, I should
say, part of the trick. The other
part is to keep the vocabulary of offense ("marginalization,"
"prejudice," "centrism") under control. We best do that, I
think, by keeping our eyes on history. History shows us that the Christian
Protestant English tradition is accurately called "central" and that
other traditions, if you have to say it, are accurately called
"marginal." If we speak otherwise we go out of control,
linguistically, and — I was about to say "endanger democracy," but I
see that's only a remote possibility. So let me just say we make ourselves
vulnerable to language satirists like George Orwell. We're doing the equivalent
of a Stalinist re-write.
You say
ReplyDelete`History shows us that the Christian Protestant English tradition is accurately called "central" and that other traditions, if you have to say it, are accurately called "marginal."'
And elsewhere you refer to ` more recent' traditions. In both cases, to what are you referring?
I am referring particularly to the mainly Puritan representatives who in the Long Parliament successfully opposed the absolutist Stuarts and governed England for a while (though not well) and to the Parliamentarians who through compromise and negotiation muddled England bloodlessly through the rest of the century (the Glorious Revolution) while the rest of Europe, after its great religious wars, was falling into democratic chaos or back into absolutism. I am referring generally to the broader English tradition of law-respecting negotiation and compromise where I give a lot of credit to Elizabeth I and to the Anglican Church (the Via Media). Both Puritans and Anglicans were Protestant, trusting in the individual judgment (as, to read Holy Scripture translated into the vernacular, to Catholics a crime), and, hell, everybody in the seventeenth century was Christian. My view is essentially the Whig view of history, expressed for today's undergraduates in Palmer and Colton, The Making of the Modern World. I could be more specific if I had it here.
ReplyDeleteIn "more recent traditions" I am referring to such traditions as the African and Hispanic, whose benefits to our nation came later than the one in which our democracy was formed.
Good. Gotta be careful there, you wouldn't want anyone to read your post and think you mean, say, Judaism and Islam. The French, despite all the good things you mention, have rather failed to incorporate both groups, especially the second, into the national dialog and are paying the price for it. A secular country, it turns out, that sees the headscarf as a threat to secularism (at least that's the ostensible rationale) rather than an expression of personal liberty. Let's just say considerably fewer taxpayer euros are spent on mosques (and probably synagogues) than churches.
ReplyDeleteWith Judaism I'd have to be more careful than I am able to be since so it is so entangled with the Christian tradition. With Islam I think it's obvious that's its influence has been marginal. As for the French I'm not saying general good things about them, I'm saying that one their words, as they use it, would be useful to us.
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