Every Century But This, Every Country But His Own

“Ordinary Americans, frankly, resist such notions as best they can, but they receive little support from the nation’s professional intellectual class, of which the artistic class is only the most demented and most estranged. People in most cultures throughout history, after all, have historically ‘stuck with their own,’ been ‘ethnocentric,’ thought their own culture best. People’s desire to hold a high opinion of themselves is considerable, and traditionally this desire has led them to hold a high opinion of most things with which they were associated, including their society, their country. But in the West we now have a class of people who have a high opinion of themselves, indeed, but think the society from which they emerged contemptible” [Richard Grenier, Capturing The Culture (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1991), pp. xxi-ii].