How to Raise an (Optimistic) American
"When the well's dry, we know the worth of water."
[This is the first of an 8-part series. We’ll be posting one new update a week in December and throughout the next year.]
There’s an old saying that you can’t see the picture when you’re inside the frame. A similar metaphor is that fish don’t know they’re in water, or don’t appreciate water, until they’ve left the fishbowl. This applies to human animals existing in their cultural element as well as to the aquatic kind swimming in theirs.
This is part of the reason why immigrants to the United States are often so quick to take advantage of American opportunities: they perceive them readily, having personally, and sometimes painfully, experienced their antithesis. Cultural distinctions are plainly visible to them.
Native-born American schoolchildren don’t have this natural advantage. They swim daily in the abundant American culture, enjoying its many advantages and taking them largely for granted without readily perceiving what it would be like to live in their absence, and without the historical context to anticipate how fragile they may prove to be. As Ben Franklin quipped, “When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water.”
It’s also human nature to find fault readily with whatever lies close at hand, while imagining that the proverbial grass is greener elsewhere. As Mark Twain famously opined: familiarity breeds contempt. It doesn’t help that, for at least a decade now (and I’m being restrained in this estimation) most American schoolchildren have been fed a steady diet of disproportionately discouraging American cultural criticism in schools without appropriate balance or full contextualization. Hence, most young people are fully primed to quickly point out societal imperfections, but if you ask them to extol the virtues of the American Way of Life, or even to define its distinctness, they will likely struggle, or present a distorted caricature. It’s time to correct this imbalance.
It's easy to find fault and to criticize but often harder to appreciate what is right in front of us. And yet why do so many people risk their lives trying to get to America – and risk their lives to escape other countries? It’s a question worth exploring.
Regardless of the level of ambient awareness, it would be foolhardy indeed to poison the water we all swim in, because obviously it is what sustains and upholds us. And we certainly don’t want to drain the cultural tank without a clear understanding of what would rush in to replace it. The task, then, in fostering recognition and, hopefully, even appreciation, is to make the invisible, visible, and to draw attention to the elements that define us and that undergird the operation of our societal structures.
Interestingly, this task is becoming easier as those actively promoting replacement alternative ways of life (such as Socialism or Marxism) ironically are providing us with the tools for better understanding our own culture by throwing it into stark relief, and they are giving us a firsthand appreciation for how we are to be treated in a world operating according to different base presumptions.
Most people who have run up against proponents of what I’ll call replacement ideologies have not liked their encounter with it, and if the medium is the message—and the way people treat you is representative of the philosophies they espouse—then there is a great deal to be gleaned and extrapolated from these personal encounters.
For example: Do you like being told your opinion doesn’t matter; being shouted at rather than reasoned with; being called names or threatened for expressing your thoughts; being ostracized rather than allowed to peacefully coexist with a different set of opinions? No? Me neither. These tactics rankle most Americans, who intuitively sense that something—even if you can’t quite put your finger on it—is “off,” that something is “different,” and we feel somewhat violated. What is off?
America’s Eight Foundations
There are certain elements to our culture that cannot be divorced from our founding documents—which themselves are rooted in Judeo-Christian traditions, and associated Enlightenment thought—or from the systems by which citizens must abide and by which our economy operates, and these include:
Our political system – Constitutional republic with transparent elections, confidential voting, majority rule and consent of the governed.
Our economic system – free markets, voluntary exchange, and competition (capitalism) backed up with protection of private (individual) property rights.
Our culture – Enlightenment individualism, built on the foundation of Judeo-Christian values.
Our legal system – Individual justice with presumption of innocence, due process and rules of evidence, built on the English legal tradition.
Our method of advancement – Protestant work ethic and meritocracy.
Our method of communicating and figuring things out – Free speech (open voluntary exchange of thoughts in the free marketplace of ideas), no compelled speech or censorship, logical reason.
Our mode of interacting with one another –Equality, live and let live, agreeing to disagree, free to disagree (right to petition, peaceably assemble).
Our outlook on life – Self-reliance, American spirit, progress, optimism, American Dream, pursuit of happiness (freedom, liberty), resistance to authoritarianism (defiance), assertion of rights (it’s a free country!).
If you’re shocked or surprised by any of the items on this list, well, you may have gaps or distortions in your education. Do we always live up to the highest embodiment of them in practice? No, not always. (Neither, it must be pointed out, do other competing systems of government live up to the utopian visions they promote, which is a great understatement of their shortcomings when put into practice.) But this qualification does not discount them as worthy ideals to strive for, even when we fall short.
It is essential that these systems and values be deliberately and explicitly taught in our schools, to prepare successful future citizens capable of self-government. We cannot mandate belief in them, since that would be un-American, but schools must at minimum foster understanding of them. If your child’s school isn’t teaching these foundational concepts, then it’s going to fall on you, the parents (in which case, you’re going to be asking yourself why you’re paying the school to do a job they’re not doing).
Here’s help.
1. Our Political System
We live in a democratic, constitutional republic. Sure, Churchill called democracy the worst form of government except for all the others. Though it’s open to critique, our children should explore its relative advantages fairly and objectively compare it to competing systems. Our system is of the people, by the people, for the people, rooted in our Congregationalist, bottom-up past. Our leaders are to be elected through transparent elections with confidential voting and consent of the governed, meaning that bad leaders can be petitioned, held accountable, and recalled.
You cannot properly understand our political system and our founding documents without understanding the Enlightenment philosophy behind them, which means some familiarity with classical literature and people like John Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Kant, and so on. Furthermore, our bottom-up governing system derives from our origins in denominational Congregationalism, requiring understanding of church governing traditions. In other words, students need to read the writers, thinkers, and institutions who/which influenced the founders in order to properly understand the theory behind this system of government. Those who do will have an operating advantage over those who do not.
Having experienced tyranny under monarchy prior to our founding, Americans jealously guard their freedom and their right to engage in free and open elections of their leaders.
Sayings: Of the People, By the People, For the People, One man, one vote, E Pluribus Unum, In God We Trust.
Foundational Reading: Mayflower Compact, Selections from Cato’s Letters, Federalist and Anti-Federalist Letters. Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights, The Constitution of Liberty, Washington’s Farewell Address. Magna Carta (1215), The Articles of Confederation (1777), The Treaty of Paris (1783), The Constitution of the United States (1787), Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms.
Films: A More Perfect Union
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[This is the first of an 8-part series. We’ll be posting one new update a week in December and throughout the next year.]