We Think As We Speak

"There was no sense of the US being one country on a planet of many countries"

Reading American journalist Suzy Hansen's piece in The Guardian (courtesy of Narratively of August 20th) titled 'Unlearning the myth of American innocence', in which she details her personal experience of what is often described as American Exceptionalism, brings back memories from my post-WWII childhood in the UK. We were living then during the rapid dismantling of Empire while still being taught it was the greatest in history, the only one on which "the sun never set". Folk from a modest island on the outskirts of civilization had sailed out to dominate and settle throughout the globe to a hitherto unprecedented degree. We had brought with us democracy, justice, literacy and fairness - the exceptionalism of Classical Greece delivered up to modern barbarians. 

Our ruling class still studied the Classics at university and spoke with a special accent inculcated during a schooling bottled up as boarders inside privileged and expensive teaching centres oddly known as 'public schools'. Despite the political triumph of socialism after peace came in 1945 and the post-Third Reich embarrassment of still 'owning' colonies, the behaviours and beliefs of centuries of imperial thinking remained implicit in much of what we were taught and heard. Many of those who recently voted for Brexit are old enough to have absorbed the feeling that our way of life was somehow special, and superior to that of other European nations. Watching the current film epic 'Dunkirk' we are reminded how that glorious episode (and the subsequent Battle of Britain in the air) saved that Europe for the Light of democracy.

A conceit of formerly successful imperial nations is that their contribution to history greatly exceeds that of lesser peoples, and this applies to their speech. Just as Latin lived on as a language of religion and scholarship many, many centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, so we can expect to see English survive the mid-C20th demise of British imperialism and the already underway decline in the American global hegemony. In the continued use of such imperial speech beyond its founding political support network's disappearance, we witness the perpetuation of the ideas inherent in its phraseology and locus. The thought patterns of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism are likely to remain with us for many years into the future. English is the lingua franca ('the language of the Franks' - the common language of Christian rulers during the Middle Ages) of today's mechanistic and secular Modern Age, and may well remain so right up that civilization comes to end.

Colonization by Another Name

One of the elephants in the room around Putin's loud and aggressive championing of Russian speakers and ethnics in former Soviet states is the fact of Russian colonization. Ethnic Rus have been settling regions well beyond their historical homeland for many, many generations.  When Ronald Reagan called then Soviet Russia an 'Evil Empire' he was not just referring to Russian troops garrisoning Warsaw Pact 'allies'.

Throughout the long Soviet era Russians took up residence in many countries across their borders, while at the same time expelling other ethnicities from their own territories (Crimean Tatars, Swabian Germans, and others).  In the 18th and 19th Century Russian settlers spread across Asia and even into North America via Alaska. Russian Orthodox churches remaining today on Vancouver Island are testimony to how far down the North American continent Russian pioneers went. The Russo-Japanese War of a century ago was a conflict of imperialists and colonizers. The present Russian Federation is the most ethnically diverse country on the planet, yet we hear next to nothing about its non-Russian citizens in official propaganda.

While Latvia may seem harsh in not granting full citizenship to a third of its 27% of population of Russian stock, its reluctance is understandable - these people are colonists, and staffed the local KGB who terrorized the natives in Soviet times.  Unlike most other imperialist colonizers, Russian settlers have never had to defend and atone for their usurpation of indigenous landholdings across Eastern Europe and Asia. There has been no accounting for their genocides, forced indoctrination programmes of Russian language and dogma, and land theft.

Yesterday in Canada we celebrated National Aboriginal Language Day.  Having extirpated or severely limited the use of our great variety of native languages, we are finally recognizing that they and their speakers are cultural assets. Americans have restored French as an official language in Louisiana and recognized the Gullah of rural black Carolinians and Georgians and the Hawaiian language as national treasures. Formerly obscure languages like Frisian and Scots Lallans are recognized and funded in the European Union.

While wringing our hands over the excesses of our Western European colonization in the Americas, Asia and Africa, we singularly fail to include Russia in our list of aggressive global colonizers with skeletons in their closets.

Memories of a Romanized Childhood

I studied classical Latin from the age of six to sixteen, an eon by the standards of today's school curricula. Though I can't say I'm in any way an adept at it, the language of the ancient Romans has come in handy from time-to-time for things as varied as winning a car rally as the only participant who could translate an inscription over a gate, to knowing what the many medical terms I met in my health care career probably mean.

I've had something of a Latinate turn of mind ever since my upbringing in one of the great river valleys that lead into London. During the first Roman invasion of England the region where I lived was the western edge of the lands of a powerful and sophisticated tribe of Britons known as the Trinovantes.  Visible across the valley from our house was the River Lea, the most storied tributary of the River Thames. When I was of primary school age, archaeologists excavating in the water meadows where we played unearthed weapons and armour from a battle that had taken place between these local Britons and the legionary invaders. We inquisitive kids got some great up-close looks at these exciting finds.

Hirising the Countryside

A recent Council meeting in our bucolic and largely rural township discussed planning progress on major developments at the southern end where we edge the 'big smoke' that is widely known as the Greater Toronto Area. It was refreshing to hear my county councillor wonder aloud about the logic of government policy that seeks to press ever higher housing densities onto rural community developments. He pointed out that he had yet to meet someone who planned to move up here to live in high-density dwellings! As a resident of a nearby once-historic township for over 40 years, I saw a lot of poor decision-making around the preservation of social continuity.  I now fear that much of what is socially and historically meaningful will be lost in what is being developed hereabouts under the pressure of blanket policies forced upon our town and mandating increasing density and industrial / retail space.  

Urban planning guru Jane Jacobs may have got it right for cities, but a New Urbanist strategy for our still-remote byways, small villages, spacious prime farmland and seemingly endless treed hills is nonsensical. If the price of rapid population growth is the disappearance of a sense of place and the past in once-cohesive communities as happened within one generation where I last lived, what hope is there for social consensus down the years?

The Disappearance of Patrimony

Nowadays I try to focus more on my local surroundings. After a career of jetting to global 'centres of biotechnology excellence', I loathe the sight of airports. Back then I didn't mind them so much and had little time for what was up right next door. My teacher wife, who had, tried to keep me posted but the details passed me by, except when a new campground was to be across the road or a row of pylons on the back field.   

Just a twenty minute drive away are the monthly meetings of the Heritage Caledon Committee, a worthy thirty-five year-old creation of our Town Council that I was recently invited to join.  I'm now a convert to the good fight against urban accretion and its tendency to destroy all in its path. Generally our enemy is developers large and small.  But as I roll up my sleeves to get down and dirty in this my new and as yet untested role, I am amazed to read about A Developer whose Focus was Heritage