Dear Gavin,
As we discussed on the phone, I think we have covered most of the waterfront. At the same time, as a matter of summarizing and wrapping up, I think I have two more letters in me. There may be some repetition here, but I want to come at a few things from a different angle.
In one of the earlier letters, I shared a good definition of ethnic identity that came from Steven Bryan. Here it is again.
“The building blocks of ethnic identity are (1) a shared name, (2) a shared sense of place, (3) a shared sense of the past, (4) a shared sense of belonging or kinship, and (5) a widely shared set of beliefs and values that give rise to a shared set of practices and norms. This fifth building block comprises . . . such things as religious beliefs and practices, language, cultural conventions, and customs, as well as cultural ‘products’ such as literature, music, architecture, and art”(Steven Bryan, Cultural Identity and the Purposes of God, p. 43).
This is a good definition, but Bryan is not Euclid, and ethnic groups are not triangles. People are people, and people do know how to smudge things up. Let me give you two examples.
One of the most defined ethnic groups in the world would have to be the Jews, and their relationship with #2 in Bryan’s definition is a challenging one. While there has been a territorial “place” for Jews since the founding of Israel in 1948, most of the world’s Jews don’t live there. And prior to 1948, for almost two thousand years, almost none of them did. One could reply that they had lived there for thousands of years prior, but at some point the ancestral memory would have to grow a bit dim, would it not?
Another really interesting case would be the Swiss. They really are a distinct tribe, a distinct nationality, and they are very much aware of it. But they smudge up #2 in a way quite distinct from the way the Jews do. The Swiss are identifiably Swiss, and yet . . .
They are divided into three major religious groups—Reformed, Catholic, and Lutheran. They speak four different languages—German, French, Italian, and Romansh. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of that fourth one either. They all share the same mountainous territory, but we shouldn’t forget that Italian-speaking Italians also live in mountainous territory, as do some of the French, and also Germans. There are Italian Alps, and French Alps, and German Alps, and right across the border are the Italian-speaking Swiss, who want to be groups with the German-speaking Swiss and not the Italian-speaking Italians. The Swiss are their own thing, for whatever odd historic reasons. Like I said, if we were defining triangles, we would be in trouble.
Now I am going to appear to be changing the subject here for a minute, but I am not really. In his great book Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis undertook the challenging task of analyzing different kinds of books. He concluded that a good book was one that elicited a certain kind of response from a certain kind of reader. A good book was one that a reader could return to, again and again. The disposable book, the kind someone buys in an airport for a long flight, just in order to kill time, should not be ranked as a good book. That’s just a brief summary. A good book was one that elicited an affectionate response. Evaluating books is not defining triangles either, because there is a subjective element in it. We see the same kind of thing going on when we react to the pairing off of various odd couples, and we have no idea what she sees in him. But she apparently does see something in him, and they are happily married, and so there you go.
One of the objections to a biblical worldview approach to this is that the “nation/state” is a modern invention, and a product of the Enlightenment, and that means that no biblical allegiance or affection is owed to it. When Christ told us to “disciple the nations,” He did not have in mind lines on a map. He was not thinking of nations in our modern sense, but rather of tribes—ethnic groups, united by common descent, language, and so forth. This is said to justify dividing Americans up into various ethnic subgroups, the result of which will be Balkanization . . . and much sorrow.
But I want to borrow something from Lewis here. A nation is an entity that is capable of eliciting a national response of loyalty and affection. If it can do that, then it does not much matter how the book came to be “published.” The Japanese are a very specific breed of reader, and that affection is there. The Swiss are an odd sort of Euro-mutt, and yet that affection is there. America is a great nation across a sprawling continent, with hundreds of millions of people—ranchers in Nevada and deli-owners in Manhattan—and yet both sorts of people are capable of reacting to their book in a similar way. Some books are slim volumes, and others are whacking great novels, but if they draw a certain kind of reader, then that provides us with all the definition we need.
Now remember that in a huge novel, there is plenty of room for sub-plots and B-stories. American culture does in fact contain such sub-cultures . . . which elicit their own set of loyalties. When those loyalties are stronger than the one binding the whole, then the integrity of the whole is certainly challenged. This can happen in noble ways, as with Robert E. Lee’s loyalty to Virginia, or in less reputable ways, as when somebody makes something up as a way of creating division where it did not exist before, e.g. making up a holiday like Kwanzaa. Or say a black man named Robert Smith, from a long line of very American Smiths, decided to take a name like Alemayehu Zungu. Even though I am of Scots/Irish descent, if one day I decided to change my name to Cainnech o’ the hills, someone should suspect that I was up to something.
One last thing. As I am arguing for a de facto and descriptive approach to such things, I am saying that tribes and subcultures can come into existence where they did not exist before. Just as they can vanish, so also they can be created. And it may be that the forces that created them were malevolent, or just the way it happened, or the result of a deliberate policy that was perhaps well-intentioned. For the latter, consider the Protestant Irish being settled there by King James, or the British practice of shipping felons to Australia. In the “just the way it happened” category, we may place whatever it was that created the Swiss.
In the malevolent category, I would put the terrible ideas that arose out of the civil rights movement of the sixties, and the resultant downstream demonization of whites, along with all the woke DEI crap. In the older forms of bigotry of whites against blacks, the negative tribal identity based on skin color was assigned to the blacks, and they were treated accordingly. What is happening now is a bit different. Whites are starting to think of themselves that way, only in positive terms, and so it is that they are being tempted to give credit to their skin color for accomplishments that we actually the result of the gospel coming to their ancestors.
Enough for now. Next letter I would like to finish with a discussion of the ordo amoris, that which will enable us to tie all of this together.
Cordially in Christ,
Douglas Wilson