Ship of Fools

"Tis in my memory lock'd, And you yourself shall keep the key of it." William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Dear brethren across the pond: Would a “fair trade” of Paradise Lost for Rice, suffice? The reason Americans have a stake in the preserving of cultural memory of Great Britain is because you have our spiritual DNA- once that memory is gone we are lost at sea and we sink together. Remember this:

If you downplay & dissolve the cultural inheritance of the people of a Country, the new people are not going to remind you or even care. Everything becomes banally universal like food and football—totally undistinguished.

What happened? An elite and unelected class have spent decades actively apologizing for it, while simultaneously importing millions of people who have no ancestral stake in that memory and, quite naturally, no incentive to revive it. Why would they?

When the native stories, heroes, literature, music, and historical pride are systematically white-washed in schools for inclusion, and Shakespeare treated as optional or problematic, there is the rub; the newcomers did not build Saint Paul’s cathedral, or fight at Agincourt or Waterloo, they didn’t write the King James Bible or the songs of Vaughan Williams. Their emotional connection is to their own histories, mosques, foods, flags and customs. These require no deep historical literacy, no shared sacrifices or fervent loyalty.

A nation as Renan says “is a soul, a spiritual principle…One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together. Like the individual, the nation is the outcome of a long past of efforts, sacrifices, and devotions”

What is to be done? It requires a conscious act of devotion by the people who are actually descended from those who created its culture and a willingness to say, without apology, that some things are worth preserving precisely because they are not universal.