Counterrevolutionary Meditations

It is a conversation I hear with increasing frequency, either as a participant or as someone who merely happens to overhear something as he proceeds about his ordinary business. Parents will be discussing their children, usually their young children, for this conversation seems to occur most frequently between parents of children under the age of six, parents acutely conscious of the reality that the developing minds of children are almost uniquely primed to acquire the skills with which they, the parents, are concerned. These parents are concerned that their children acquire, not mere proficiency, but fluency in a foreign language. Fluency, that is, in a foreign language, and not just any foreign language, for the simple joy of entering into the life-world of another people - for this is what language is: the world of a people made logos.

These parents, without exception - even Russian emigre parents who silently mourn their childrens’ incomprehension of, and disinterest in, their Russian heritage - fairly tremble that their children might attain to muturity bereft of a mastery of the Spanish language.

And so it was that last Sunday, after the Liturgy had concluded, and the children were racing about the hall while parents tried both to corral them and to enjoy a few refreshments, that I overheard friends of mine conversing on just this very matter. They nodded, of course, to the imperative of ensuring that their children acquired this knowledge, and ranged over the various means by which it might be imparted to their little dears. What was the proper proportion of reading, audio instruction, educational video, and grammatical instruction in this exigent undertaking? How much time each day? Each week? should be devoted to such study?

I overheard these questions, posed with an insistence and moment that confessed openly a certain state of mind somewhat short of desperation, yet not at all stranger to it. Inwardly, though, rather than an impulse to offer an opinion, I felt a sense of release, of unburdening, for knowing that, having heard similar conversations played out countless times, I could utter nothing that would be received with gratitude, I simply thanked God that my two-year-old son was exceedingly rambunctious and had to be pursued lest all of the refreshments end up on the floor. The reason I could offer nothing that would be received positively by these earnest parents was that the passage of time had transmuted the furtively-expressed subtext of such conversations into text, or perhaps marginalia interwoven with the whole of the text, such that text and commentary had become one. And in that subtext-made-text could be glimpsed the means by which a culture, a people, a nation - for this is another way of saying, a distinct people - having grown old and feeble, perhaps a little senescent, the light behind the eyes having dimmed slightly but perceptibly and unmistakably, passes from this mortal coil.

That subtext-become-text suffuses these conversations as the atmosphere of a place permeates everything located in, or even merely passing through, that place. It has its own substantiality, rooted as it is in the most prosaic of interests. These parents desire that their children will master Spanish not because it is a fine thing to be fluent in languages (were it so, the language in question would not always be Spanish), nor because they are all enchanted by Spanish culture, as though this were a matter of reading Cervantes or Unamuno in the original. They simply wish for their children to acquire fluency in that tongue so that they may be able to make their way in the world that is aborning; they want their children to possess one of the critical tools of success in that world, and fear lest the want of the same should find those children excluded from many of the opportunities by which worldly success is reckoned. They desire, that is, what most parents desire for their children, and that is certainly not an ignoble desire. But neither is it altogether blameless, a matter without consequence for any save those children whose parents are so intent upon having them master Spanish. For there is a difference between the meaning of these desires, which is largely exhausted by the discrete objects of the parents, and the significance of the acts to which they lead, collectively, which, is, in a few words: acquiescence, relinquishment, dissolution, disinheritance.

This is, quite simply, not the manner in which the confident bearers of a culture and heritage comport themselves in the face of an unasked, unsought demographic transformation. Those who possess the confidence of their culture, and exercise that confidence through its institutions, inclusive of their government, do not acculturate themselves to newcomers; rather, they insist, and even command, that the newcomers should adapt themselves to the ways of the natives. They would not conceive of themselves as ciphers for the culture and folkways and language(s) of whatever polyglot mass of people happened to be resident within their borders, but would understand, not at the level of thought, of doctrine or creeds, but existentially, as a mode of being, that their way of life was something positive, not an emptiness or lack waiting to be filled: a substantial reality that could not absorb just anything without becoming something else altogether. And yet.

And yet this is not the dominant posture of Americans, at least not so far as I can determine. Those who have considered the matter at all have apparently made their separate, individual peaces with the future - which, as Daniel Larison has been reminding his readers, authorizes every sort of humbug - and, with gazes fixed firmly upon the prize, have sought merely to position themselves and their children to profit from the general dissolution. Millions of individual decisions, taken for the benefit of their subjects, have as their ineluctable outcome not the benefit of the whole nation, but a sort of capitulation, the self-alienation of the nation from itself. The unseen hand does not coordinate the selfish actions of the many to create an ordered whole, but slowly sweeps a nation into the dustbin.

It may - nay, it will - be objected that in making these remarks I erect an interpretive framework on a partial foundation, that of Americans striving to learn Spanish, ignoring the efforts of native Spanish-speakers now living among us to learn English. The analogy, however, is misleading, even invalid; it assumes a symmetry in the absence of the only fact which renders the contours of the situation visible and distinct: the existence of the American nation, a reality greater than the sum of the individuals who comprise it. It is this reality, and this reality only, that enables the understanding that while it is utterly natural and necessary for foreigners to learn our language, it is unnatural for us to adapt to theirs, in our own country, and that to do so is to lose our country at some tangible level. It will also be objected that my judgments are severe and lacking in charity, or some such thing - that my remarks stand as a condemnation of people who are only striving to make their ways, and the ways of their children, in the world they have been given. To this I can only answer that I am not a nominalist. The subjective intent behind these actions may be any number of things, but the fact that someone may assert them does not alter the reality that the objective significance of these acts is to jettison a cultural and historical identity in the name of imagined prosperity. To lose sight of the broader cultural and political context within which these decisions are taken, perceiving only the individual decisions themselves, is to refuse historical understanding, as if to say that in late antiquity Roman culture and political institutions did not disappear or collapse in the West, only that millions of individual decisions regarding customs, law, language, governance, and so on, were made, and that, mysteriously and ineffably, something new appeared. Those millions of decisions, made by individuals in diverse circumstance, and under a variety of pressures and influences, just were that disappearance itself. And so also is it with us. That something new, whether something defined or a Mexifornian state of becoming, just is the dissolution of the American identity that was; that new something is not the condition of the possibility of the dissolution of an existing identity, but is that dissolution itself.

Finally, it will be objected that I here conflate the people of the nation, who must make do with circumstances as they can, circumstances beyond their power to influence, and those in positions of power and authority who have either connived at this usurpation or bowed to unalterable fate, the “economic laws” that decree the necessity of what is now transpiring. Of course, in the latter case, the salient fact is the vast income differential between America and, primarily, Mexico, in which case one would be reduced to arguing, in effect, that necessity decrees the averaging of the incomes of Americans and Mexicans, since it is the pursuit of higher incomes that brings the latter to America. This is a determinism, even fatalism, so gross as to beggar the imagination. One almost wishes that it would be stated more forthrightly to the American people. In the former case, one would be on to something, but this would not alter in the slightest measure the fact that ordinary people are acquiescing in the world ordained for them, nor that this world abolishes their old identity.

In the end, the future overheard in conversations too numerous to count is nothing more, nothing less, than the culmination of the present, the present in which newcomers, legal or not, are not assimilating to our culture, but we to theirs. This is how a nation dies in the private advantages of its individual members.