Songs Sung to Us in Childhood

It’s amazing how so many times the things we think we know about ourselves are things we were told as children. They can be completely wrong, yet they will play in our minds like Windows Platform in the background while we write our life in Microsoft Word. The platform is pervasive. Even though we may think we’ve outgrown it, it lurks there as a silent censor. We unconsciously measure things against it, particularly if the things we learn contradict things that flatter us. Finding a discrepancy from the familiar songs of childhood is a time when we may start to doubt ourselves or even, among the people who don’t like change, entrench our opinions in defiance of the evidence. It’s never an easy time.

There’s a lot of this silent censorship going around these days. For example, there are many in this country who don’t like the change that’s happening to America’s place in the world. They are angry because America is no longer accepted as the unquestioned paragon of virtue and upright values that she likes to think herself. Certainly, America has been generous and altruistic, and deserves appreciation for the amazing competence and energy with which she accepted the people of the world and built a new nation with them. But now, after two hundred years, the self-congratulation has been wearing thin in the face of a world that says, “Have you looked in the mirror lately?” What they might tell America is that independence and self-reliance appear to have shaded into greed and self-regard, competition and can-do into ruthlessness, and national pride into judgement and a demand for conformity.

Admittedly, it’s probably easier for someone from outside the country to see all this. I was raised in post-war Britain and watched as that country was forced to accept itself as a post-imperial power. It was burdened with debt from WWII, much of it in loans to America (later repaid). Former colonies had slipped away, gaining the independence promised for their cooperation in the ruinous war. Many things were still rationed long after the war, and any British traveling abroad were severely restricted as to how much money they could take out of the country. When we went to France, my mother and I either rode bicycles or hitchhiked. Still, I watched my mother and her friends cling rather pathetically to the notion of still being a powerful nation. In fact, Britain was making the transition from being powerful and feared into being respected. But Mum couldn’t see that something positive was happening.

Transition isn’t easy. Being respected, for example, has different requirements from being feared. The latter is easy if the nation is willing to pour all its national treasure into maintaining a massive army and developing unpleasant weapons that kill people in ugly ways. Being respected, on the other hand, requires self-awareness, honesty, tact, and, perhaps even more important, a degree of humility. It’s downright hard work. Britain had her re-vision forced upon her through the megalomania of a European madman, who was very probably the product of his own childhood. America’s re-vision seems to be coming from the emergence of a developing world with its own agendas and also from the ultimate fatigue of her own founding principles. Strident individualism may not be the best way to govern—or even possible—in a country of 300 million.

John Stuart Mill defined liberty by saying that it existed except where the government had a legitimate reason to curb it as in causing other people harm. The problem here is the word, harm. Over time, the cultural and political meaning of language can change. Second-hand smoke is now considered harm and regulated accordingly. I think most of us might agree that the result of unregulated derivative trading is harm, given what has happened to the US economy—yet, there are still many who would not agree.

I’d love to see a national debate over this concept of harm and the role of government. I think it would be a major step out of national childhood and into statesmanship. But I’m not going to hold my breath. It’s far too easy to send teabags rather than engage in profound and fundamental thinking.