Teddy Roosevelt, an extraordinary man and a somewhat ambiguous President --as pretty well all of them have been-- made a statement about being American. He condemned hyphenated Americans and said that without the common bonds of culture and citizenship, the country would become merely "a polyglot boarding-house."
A prophet in spite of himself.
"Multicultural" America: A polyglot boarding-house.
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1 comment:
The question is whether you can have a large country that spans hundreds of miles and at least a dozen major cultures. Rome, particularly the empire, proves that it's possible, but it would require a system of government and a will to rule and conquer that would probably be completely at odds with republicanism as we understand it today. And then there is always the vast margin for human error. So it can be done, but certainly not indefinitely.
I think our best bet would be if we created a syncretic pan-European culture that focused on "Western Civilization," understood as an amalgamation of many disparate groups that had contact with and influenced each other: the discipline of Rome, the culture and learning of the Greeks, the honor and valor of the Gauls and Germani, the ferocity of the Norse, the warrior-poet tendencies of the Celts… it sounds an awful lot like a culture that got thrown together after a civilizational collapse event by people who wanted- or needed- to cut down the inter-civilizational period down by about six or seven hundred years. It would be a very wary civilization surrounded by neighbors eying its territories; more than a little xenophobic and martial.
What are the odds that the West could become such a civilization in a couple hundred years?
-Sean
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