Myth and Memory in the American Identity

http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.2461/pub_detail.asp ^ | Oct 2005 | Wilfred M. McClay

[mal]

I’m delighted to be here today, at the kind invitation of my friend Matt Spalding, and to have the honor of taking part in this very distinguished series of lectures on the sources of American national identity, and about how we might go about renewing or restoring them. It’s a subject of the first importance, and I’m glad that Heritage is devoting attention to it. Man does not live by tax cuts and fiscal discipline alone -- although a little more of each would be perfectly fine with me. Still, it is impossible to rally a nation to fight for its soul if it no longer knows what that soul is. As before in our history, our current challenges have forced us to think more deeply and clearly about such things -- about who and what we are. And it is not entirely a bad thing that we find ourselves at this juncture. Periods of decline and crisis are inevitable even in the healthiest society, precisely because what is good in the past can never be passed along mechanically and effortlessly from one generation to the next. Each generation has to rediscover those things for itself, and relive the truth of Goethe’s dictum: "What you have as heritage, take now as task, for only in that way can you make it your own." This is a more majestic and momentous thing than is covered by the word "reappropriation." And it is not at all the same thing as saying that each generation gets to invent its own Constitution and its own history. In fact, it is the exact opposite. But more about that later….

[Restorer]

Arnold Toynbee, a great historian of the last century whom no one except Samuel Huntington bothers to read anymore, was right in seeing the dynamic of challenge-and-response as the chief source of a civilization’s greatness.

Not entirely true. I've read him myself. Some amazing insights, but tries to fit history into the straitjacket of his pre-ordained rise and fall of civilizations. Doesn't always fit very well.