Five Feet of Books

Around 1910, Charles Eliot, President of Harvard, came up with the ‘five-foot shelf of books’ – a series of volumes that would provide a relatively thorough education to a reader at home. Others have picked up the idea, such as Blackwell’s in Oxford, who have a list of some 70 volumes that comprise their five-foot shelf.

So I decided to do the same. 

I measured it, too, just to make sure (although the photo has some substitutions due to works that are in anthologies, or later swapped out in the final list). I didn’t repeat authors, either, for breadth of voices. Also, for the purposes of a physical stack, I only used books I do actually own – I have some favorites that aren’t on my shelves, and therefore not included. Lastly, while graphic novels are permitted, comic collections were ruled out (such as the Complete Calvin and Hobbes).

Here, then, are my 75 books for a ‘five-foot shelf’:

 

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren

Answer to Job – Carl Jung

The Apology – Plato

Ariel – Sylvia Plath

Atonement – Ian McEwan

Averno – Louise Gluck

Barabbas – Par Lagerkvist

Beloved – Toni Morrison

Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates

Blindness – Jose Saramago

Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking

Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather – Gao Xingjian

The Cheese and the Worms – Carlo Ginzburg

Children of Gebelawi – Naguib Mahfouz

Citizen: An American Lyric – Claudia Rankine

Collected Fictions – Jorge Luis Borges

The Compleet Molesworth – Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle

The Dawn of Everything – David Graeber and David Wengrow

Death and the King’s Horseman – Wole Soyinka

Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion – David Hume

The Discoveries – Alan Lightman

Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes

Eichmann in Jerusalem – Hannah Arendt

Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre – Walter Kaufman

Fleurs du Mal – Charles Baudelaire

The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy

Guns, Germs, and Steel – Jared Diamond

Hamlet – William Shakespeare

The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende

Human Acts – Han Kang

The Hunger Angel – Herta Muller

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou

In Pursuit of the Unknown – Ian Stewart

The Invention of Tradition – Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger

Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino

Jacques the Fatalist – Diderot

Kaddish for a Child Not Born – Imre Kertesz

Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

Maus – Art Spiegelman

Memoirs of Hadrian – Margeurite Yourcenar

Middlemarch – George Eliot

Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

The Misanthrope – Moliere

Moby Dick – Herman Melville

Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

Native Son – Richard Wright

Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro

Odyssey – Homer

Oedipus Rex – Sophocles

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov

Pedro Paramo – Juan Rulfo

The Periodic Table – Primo Levi

The Plague – Albert Camus

Platero and I – Juan Ramon Jimenez

Play It as It Lays – Joan Didion

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas – Machado de Assis

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Society – Erving Goffman

Romance of the Three Kingdoms – Luo Guanzhong

The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir

Season of Migration to the North – Tayeb Salih

Silent Spring – Rachel Carson

Sleepwalking Land – Mia Couto

Two-Part Prelude and Tintern Abbey – William Wordsworth

The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead

Voices from Chernobyl – Svetlana Alexievich

Watchmen – Alan Moore and David Gibbons

Why Societies Need Dissent – Cass Sunstein

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind – Shunryu Suzuki

Does Western Civ Exist?

My students are taught a simple list that defines ‘civilization’ as distinct from ‘culture’. All seven of the following developments are requisite in order to qualify:

Art

Religion

Technology

So far, so easy. All cultures have various beliefs, make and practice art, and create man-made tools. The line between ‘tool’ and ‘technology’ is a little blurry, but carrying on:

Social Structure

Stable Food Supply

 These are harder – a stable food supply rules out hunter-gatherers, and insists on pastoralists or farmers. A social structure means different jobs and tasks – more common, perhaps, but it rules out the egalitarian societies. Finally there are the two big disqualifiers:

Government

Written Language

A nomadic group may have a government – a democratic council of elders overseen by a hereditary king, perhaps – or they may not. It is by no means required. ‘Government’ also seems to imply ‘laws’ and not just ‘norms’.

Written language is the real sticking point: Very few cultures developed writing. The Middle East and Egypt were first, then India and China. From these centers all Eurasian and African languages developed. In the Americas only the Maya and later Aztecs had written language. Australia and Polynesia had none.

This definition of seven traits, though, still leaves room for blurry boundaries. For example, the Indus Valley Civilization had writing, but seemingly no government. The Inca, on the flip side, had a massive empire, but no writing – the only nonliterate empire in world history.

 

Given these traits and the potential for blurriness, what is Western Civ – or what was it? People say ‘the West’ doesn’t exist in the era of globalization. In some ways that’s very true. Economically, the West is entangled with the world as a whole, in mind-boggling supply chains. These are made possible by modern technology, which increasingly seems global, too – computers may have been invented in the West, but their use is global. The power of the U.S. dollar influences the stock market in Japan, and USBs, created in Singapore, were once prevalent in European homes. The “developed world” or “first world” economies are hardly exclusive to the historic West. South Korea has a higher standard of living than Portugal. Disparities within the West abound: Chile outshines Bulgaria. New Zealand is more developed than Moldova.

          Politically, things get muddled again. NATO exists to be a counterweight to Russia – but is Russia not part of the West? Turkey, twenty years ago, was applying to be part of the E.U. And does Ukraine get to be a member of the E.U.? Religion gets mixed into this, as well. Europe was predominately Christian and Jewish, with Muslim enclaves. But since at least the 1500s, and perhaps as far back as the Crusades, the Islamic world has been seen as geographically and culturally distinct. Yet, the boundaries are blurry again – Islam is monotheistic, and based on the same faith as Christianity and Judaism. Greece and the Balkans were part of the Ottoman Empire well into the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s. Islam, meanwhile, stretches from Iraq to India to Indonesia – and is hugely popular throughout Africa. Atheism, too, complicates the picture, as much of the West is increasingly secular.

As for social structure, arts, stable food supply – these are clearly intertwined. Hunter-gatherers are a tiny percentage of the population, isolated in places like Papua New Guinea and the Amazon. Everyone else has bought into the global agricultural food chain. Everyone else has complex hierarchies of social strata and differentiation of jobs. The arts are globalized, too, as K-pop bands become popular the world over playing on Western – not traditional Korean –instruments. Bollywood movies are enjoyed in Europe, and American TV shows translated for Vietnamese audiences. Nigeria’s Fela Kuti is nominated for Ohio’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

 

Based on all this complicated intermingling of the other traits, this leaves one final outpost: written language. And it’s here, I think, that some vestige of Western Civ still survives. There are three stages to this story. The first, previously mentioned, is the infrequency of developing writing. Outside of a few areas, most of the world did not develop written language. The Middle East and Egypt spread their language to Europe, geographically proximate to the region, but not further south into Africa – due to the impenetrability in the ancient world of the Sahara barrier. India’s first language went extinct, but a second replaced it, and China developed a script which became the basis for both Korean and Japanese. These Asian centers had their writings migrate and morph down into Southeast Asia, but, again, did not make the leap to Australia or Polynesia. The Mayan language didn’t move outside of their Central American region – despite being part of a continent-spanning trade and cultural network.

The second stage of our story is that of two very different waves of colonization. The reason why The West exists in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, is because those European populations came to stay and settle, and to replace the indigenous cultures they encountered. In those areas, settled between the late 14- and 1700s, the languages of the West came to be the languages of the region. English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Afrikaans, French. The parts of the globe where these are the *primary* spoken languages, are still seen as Western. From Argentina to Jamaica to Quebec – the Americas became Westernized as they spoke the language, and thus inherited the literature, history, and culture that comes with written transmission.

            The later wave of colonization, which covered the Middle East, South Asia, and most of Africa, did not have this linguistic force. The colonizers remained a veneer atop the existing civilizations and cultures. English, French, and Dutch may have become popular secondary languages – but not what people learned and spoke at home. As opposed to, say, Brazil, which, in this period of 19^th century colonization, was well a part of Portuguese culture, having spoken the language for centuries. Angola and Mozambique – Portuguese colonies that gained 20^th century independence – each have populations where far less than half the people speak the European colonizer’s language at all.

Most countries which got rid of colonization in the 20^th century simply did not stick to their colonial language. Many people in Madagascar, Laos, or Syria may speak French, but the majority do not. Compare that with Haiti, in which a French Creole is the norm. There are exceptions, but usually these are very small and or isolated nations where a European language will help connect them to the world. Fiji is a nice example, Singapore another. Even though they are culturally very disparate from Europe, both maintain French and English, respectively, as their primary languages.

Very simply: for cultural purposes, language helped define the boundaries of Western Civilization from those areas that merely experienced colonial occupation.

 

The third, and final, stage explaining why Western Civ may still exist due to language, is literacy and population. In 1900 there were around 1.2 billion people in the world – and only 12-15% were literate. By 1996 there were 6 billion people, and the literacy rate had reversed – only around 15% were illiterate.

This is the sneaky truth we’ve been dodging: Even “literate” civilizations, like China, India, and Europe, actually boasted very, very few people who could read and write. The Mayan language never spread north or south, because only a vanishingly small number of nobles and priests could write it – and they saved it only for the most important stone inscriptions. Public schooling and mass literacy are very recent concepts, historically, and only enforced in a post-WWII world. In 1952 three-quarters of the U.S. Senate didn’t have a college degree, and nor did the President, Harry S Truman. But Truman was the last to hold that distinction, and today only one Senator in 2025 doesn’t have a college degree (from Oklahoma).

Literacy can, of course, mean just simple writing and reading, as the European monks did in their medieval cloisters: rote recitations and transcription of volumes. But literacy with a cultural impact – poetry, plays, novels – was also hampered in the 20^th century, thanks to political problems. China was the largest country on earth, but under Mao and subsequent rulers there was little to no free speech. Indonesia, the world’s fourth-largest nation, had two lengthy dictatorships repress their freedom of expression from the end of Dutch colonization until the early 21^st century. Sub-Saharan Africa teems with examples: The first half of the century they were under colonial oppression, then dictators took control – and in some places are still in charge. In such circumstances creating a vibrant literary tradition will be nearly impossible. The Middle East and Central Asia (and the rest of the formerly Soviet-controlled bloc) suffered similar hampering due to political forces. By around the mid-20^th century most of the world knew how to read and write – but huge swaths could not do so freely or safely. Obviously places like China, Russia, and Afghanistan are all examples of places still without free expression in 2025.

 

So, when we put all the pieces together, the situation looks something like this: A handful of places developed literacy, and in the first wave of colonization one of those places, Europe, spread that literacy, culture, government (and the rest) to a broader West. By the dawn of the 20^th century most of the world, including the West, was illiterate, but that changed by the century’s end. The stifling effects of colonization and dictatorship also lifted – although only so far. As we’ve become more globalized economically and politically, the West still persists through the linguistic inheritance and the culture that goes with it.

 

Now this is not to say there isn’t sharing. In the Philippines Christianity – a Western hallmark – has become the primary faith. 7.2 million Jews live in Israel, and 7.5 million in the United States. Japan makes movies based on Shakespeare’s plays, and the English, in turn, enjoy eating sushi, teriyaki, and ramen.

That said, regarding the sharing of language and literary culture, there is the major hang-up of translation. Nowadays, in visual media, we consider translation normal. If Disney is going to make a movie for millions of dollars – from Star Wars to animated features to the MCU – they will ensure it is translated into scores of languages, to maximize distribution and profit. Translating the cultural heritage of other countries, though, isn’t so easy. India’s works date back three thousand years at least – and none were translated into English until 1785. China has a literary history going back three thousand years as well. The first work translated to English was compiled in 1841. Mayan texts only go back 1,000 years – but in English we finally got good translations a mere 30 years ago.

Cultural literacy is bound geographically, but, as I hope is now clear, also linguistically. A teacher from America working with students in Malaysia probably sees themselves as a visitor – despite living in Kuala Lumpur, they are still a ‘Westerner’. At least, that is, depending on their heritage – and the assumption they will probably go home after. As many have noted, first- and second-generation immigrants often struggle with their identity for this very reason. An Egyptian woman whose parents moved from Egypt to Canada, may try to erase their “Egyptianness”, may embrace it all the more, or may try to balance it with their “Canadianness.” Indigenous identities in Western societies can be equally complex, as can ethnic and racial descriptors.

So, while you can eat Mexican food in Cambodia, and Ethiopian cuisine in Australia, accessing the literary culture of these communities may be harder to achieve than ordering a tamale or some injera. Those literary communities are still bounded by linguistic heritage.

 

Most Americans, to take an example, are ignorant of the rich history, built over millennia, of Indian philosophy, or even a basic knowledge of the subcontinent’s main sacred texts of Hinduism and Buddhism – despite being worshipped by some 1.5 billion people. Japan’s famous Noh dramas are likely unknown by Greek audiences. The West African epics, like the Sunjata and Mwindo, are not commonplace in Colombia, I suspect. This all may suggest that we are still divided into linguistic civilizational blocs.

Notably, though, these are all examples of Western ignorance. In nations where the colonizers brought their culture, does the same apply? Do Nigerians know King Arthur? Are Malaysians fond of Robin Hood? Does Jordan still teach its pupils Chaucer?

Increasingly, no.

Those countries which had only the veneer of Western colonization are typically not very keen on preserving and transmitting the culture of their former oppressors. A surge of post-colonial emphasis on a pre-colonial identity is the norm. As such, the literary heritages retreat to their former, more geographically-bound, origins. The written word – and the culture it transmits – is keeping civilizational identities alive. Whether that is a good or bad thing is somewhat a matter of perspective.

That said, I am fairly certain that, unless you dedicate your entire life to studying civilizational heritages outside your own, you will remain woefully ignorant of the complexities and depth these legacies have to offer. Which leaves you with two options: Skim a little of each, and get a haphazard taste of their cultures and identities, or, ignore them all together, and have no real sense of their identity. But this latter option (I suspect the option most take) comes at your own peril. Robert McNamara, to take a famous example, thought Vietnam was going to be a puppet of China, due to his view of Ho Chi Minh through a Cold War lens. He didn’t know that Vietnam had historically loathed China for millennia – and would never follow their lead. McNamara's lack of understanding, which he later admitted, cost thousands of lives.

 

Will Western Civ – in some form, with all its complexities – continue? I suspect it will, at least for a short time. Two generations from now, this may not be the case. There are demographic concerns that will affect its continuation. Most of the economically developed world is undergoing a population constriction, which will only make their cultural heritage more fragile. Each generation is tasked with choosing what will be passed down. For three centuries, in the Protestant English-speaking world, from London to San Francisco, Pilgrim’s Progress was an essential text, transmitted faithfully as vital to their identity. That is no longer the case. The bulk of Classical Greek and Roman writings, once the hallmark of a university education in Oxford, Bologna, or the Sorbonne, is still, as then, read by a tiny minority off specialists – literacy and education have increased, but the proliferation of voices has allowed us to study and read people from our own time.

 

Does Western Civ exist? Yes, for now – and it did for an extended period. But whether it survives as populations drop below the replacement rate, as their own past is increasingly not read and transmitted, and the heritages of others are made more available – that seems, increasingly, unlikely.

NaNoReMo 2025

Yes, once again, it's time for NaNoReMo: National Novel Reading Month. First popularized by John Wiswell, the idea is that you take March to tackle a novel, perhaps a classic that you've meant to read, but never gotten around to. You set aside excuses, and read the novel by the end of March.

Zora Neale Hurston is an author I've always meant to get to, but kept putting off. So, for my NaNoReMo, I'm going to tackle Their Eyes Were Watching God. And it will be a challenge - the book is written in dialect, which I always find challenging to read.

Happy reading!

100 Greatest Books of All Time?

So, after nearly 25 years, I finished reading the 100 Greatest Books of All Time - the Bokklubben World Library. It's a grand, and good, list. From Gilgamesh to the late 1990s, and all over the world - it's a broad, and carefully constructed "world library". You could do worse, if looking for a way to spend your time. 

That said, some took some real tracking down. The Masnavi, by Rumi, is not extant in an English edition. I read as much as I could (from the Oxford publications). "Devil to Pay in the Backlands" is a poor translation of "Grande Sertao: Veredas" and was only printed in English once, in the 50s. It was not easy to get a hold of. So proceed with caution.

Here's my ranking, then, which is fairly personal, of the works included:

 

Essential

 

Don Quixote

Hamlet

Oedipus Rex

The Odyssey

Middlemarch

Collected Fiction – Borges

Children of Gebelawi

Memoirs of Hadrian

Mrs. Dalloway

The Brothers Karamazov

The Divine Comedy

Beloved

Blindness

The Tin Drum

Midnight’s Children

Buddenbrooks

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Madame Bovary

Jacques the Fatalist

Pippi Longstocking

 

Great Reads

 

Gilgamesh

Death of Ivan Ilych

Iliad

Ramayana

Moby Dick

Pedro Paramo

Devil to Pay in the Backlands

Pride and Prejudice

Leaves of Grass

To the Lighthouse

Hunger

Season of Migration to the North

Ulysses

Anna Karenina

1984

Mahabharata

The Stranger

Journey to the End of the Night

Thousand and One Nights

Gargantua and Pantagruel

Lolita

The Old Man and the Sea

Love in the Time of Cholera

Selected Stories – Chekhov

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Book of Disquiet

Complete Poems – Celan

The Red and the Black

A Sentimental Education

Fairy Tales and Stories – Anderson

History – Morante

Complete Tales – Poe

Old Goirot

Dead Souls

 

Good Books

 

King Lear

Canterbury Tales

Aeneid

War and Peace

Gulliver’s Travels

Orchard – Saadi

Independent People

Njal’s Saga

Complete Stories – Kafka

Faust

Othello

Remembrance of Things Past

Medea

The Possessed

The Idiot

The Man Without Qualities

Essays – Montaigne

The Sound of the Mountain

Metamorphoses

Invisible Man

The Golden Notebook

Berlin Alexanderplatz

Recognition of Shakuntala

Trilogy – Beckett

Great Expectations

Nostromo

Things Fall Apart

Gypsy Ballads

Decameron

Poems – Leopardi

 

Over-rated

 

Diary of a Madman – Lu Xun

The Magic Mountain

The Book of Job

A Doll’s House

The Trial

Crime and Punishment

Tristram Shandy

Confessions of Zeno

Wuthering Heights

The Sound and the Fury

 

Why???

 

Sons and Lovers

The Tale of Genji

The Castle

Masnavi

Absalom, Absalom

Zorba the Greek

 

So. 20 Amazing, 34 Great, and 30 Good – 84 that I’d recommend with virtually no reservation. That’s a really solid list. The bottom 16 are not very good, but only the final two are irredeemable (I truly can’t fathom how they got on there).

2025 Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts

After last year’s depression parade, it actually was a bit nervous going to this year’s screening. Fortunately, there was far less trauma, and far more humor. Indeed, there were no bad options, and I won’t mind if any of them wins.

Since the five contestants were all lengthy, it also meant no ‘highly commended’ features at the end. In order of appearance, then:

 

Magic Candies

 

This Japanese short had gorgeous world-building and backgrounds. The lonely boy who gets magic candies that help him gain confidence, is sweet. A relatively safe choice, there were some good moments – but the overall arc felt off.

 

In the Shadow of the Cypress

 

An Iranian film gets this year’s coveted ‘parental trauma’ award! Yes, the Oscars seem to always nominate at least one feature (sometimes more) regarding parental abuse, dementia, death, PTSD, or some other trauma and how it affects children. Here a father is violent and oppressive and his daughter wants to get away, but is stopped by having a burden she needs to take car of : a beached whale. Symbolism!

 

Yuck!

 

A funny and sweet French offering, tweens make fun of adults kissing, but then two of them want to kiss. Most family-friendly of the offerings, and not undeserving.

 

Wander to Wonder

 

A very dark sense of humor infuses this tale of three mysterious little people who have to survive when the producer of their TV show dies. With elements of ‘Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared,’ but without the same level of horror, this may be my favorite choice, in terms of novelty and execution.

 

Beautiful Men

 

Three guy friends want hair transplants, but due to a mistake only one appointment is scheduled. The premise of middle-aged male loneliness doesn’t do much for me, and the story didn’t quite work. Oddly the production was from the same folks as the previous film, including much of the same cast.

 

Preferred Ranking:

Wander to Wonder

Magic Candies

Yuck!

In the Shadow of the Cypress

Beautiful Men

2025 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Nominees

Not a bad crop this year – except, as usual, for women. There are only two lead nominees, both of which should be inducted:

Mariah Carey – an undeniable vocal talent, and

Cyndi Lauper – an 80s icon, who has won all the awards

Really? No 90s women? Alanis Morissette, Liz Phair, Fiona Apple, PJ Harvey, Sleater Kinney… Ridiculous. Anyway, then, like Foreigner and Peter Frampton being inducted last year, you have the Oldies rock staples, who’ve sold well, whose songs you know, and who are totally fine:

Bad Company – I guess they’re fine

Joe Cocker – Had some big hits

Billy Idol – punk!

Chubby Checker – Sure, why not! Other inductees from the early days of rock aren’t as deserving, so Checker is fine by me.

The 90s get some love, too:

Soundgarden – perennial nominees at this point, a fine grunge band

Oasis – having a moment, kinda like they did in the 90s

The Black Crowes – Never a huge band, not really sure why they’re on here…

There are a few offbeat acts thrown in, for good measure:

Phish – I like their ice cream

Mana – a top-selling Mexican rock band. So far Richie Valens and Santana are the only Spanish-language inductees. So this would be the first rock band inducted from a non-English-speaking country. Which opens an interesting can of worms. A few years back Fela Kuti was nominated a couple of times, but didn’t get in. If you’re in the Hall of Fame, and not American, you’re from Canada, the UK, Ireland, or Australia. So, if Mana makes it, then things may begin to change. Whether that’s good or bad is difficult to say, but I lean towards good.

Then we have the real stars, the pioneers and innovators:

The White Stripes – one of the best rock bands in the past 25 years

Joy Division / New Order – been arguing for them for ages

Finally rap gets a single shout-out:

Outkast – Totally, this is deserved

Top Picks:

Cyndi Lauper

Mariah Carey

The White Stripes

Joy Division / New Order

Outkast

Good Alternatives:

Chubby Checker

Billy Idol

Phish

Joe Cocker

Not Great, But Fine:

Bad Company

Soundgarden

Oasis

Mana

Best Not:

The Black Crowes

What Does It Mean to Be an American?

Nationalism is, mildly put, tricky. A sense of identity based on a shared, mythologized, past is ever more elusive in an era of tribalism and division. My history of America probably doesn’t look like yours.

So what is our shared past? What is the basic American story? Here, again, we run into trouble. History has – with good reason, clearly – become a battlefield in the culture wars. Schools are fighting over whether they can even mention slavery – much less discuss its lived experience or effects.

Is there any shared identity and past we can agree on? I think there is at least some. Here’s a very stripped-down version of the real story – the sketchy cartoon – that, unfortunately, far, far too many Americans have as their understanding. Tragically, due to poor education, most Americans get a lousy retelling of mostly 1800s U.S. culture – further eroding a sense of unity and national identity. Its relevancy is largely unclear, so why bother paying attention? But I think even the casually invested kid would pick up on something like this:

“The colonies were British, and settled by people seeking religious freedom. The colonists wanted their rights, and wrote the Declaration of Independence. The Revolutionary War was due to unfair taxes from the British, and was won by George Washington, later our first President. The Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The North was free, and the South had slavery on plantations. Pioneers headed out to settle the western lands, and fought with Indians, including the Trail of Tears. We won the Mexican American War, gaining lots of land. People realized slavery was bad – which some people had said all along like Harriet Tubman – and so they fought the Civil War…”

Even here, the paths diverge. We had the “lost cause” narrative, and the “states’ rights” narrative for so long, that many probably don’t even understand why the war happened, or see the gentility of the Southern aristocracy as ‘noble’. But to return to the story:

“The Civil War was won by the North, thanks to Abraham Lincoln, who was tragically shot. Black people were freed, but then things got worse again during Reconstruction. Meanwhile, brilliant Americans like Thomas Edison were industrializing the country, and railroads were being built. Cowboys helped tame the west. The Gilded Age saw people get very wealthy and build enormous mansions, which Mark Twain wrote about. America went to war with Spain and gained land overseas. European immigrants poured into the U.S., and lived in tenements, near the Statue of Liberty. The production line was made by Henry Ford. World War One took place, and Americans went and fought with our allies in Europe…”

This is around where the story would stop, for many – likely most. From my experiences teaching and as a student in multiple states, it’s a rare classroom that makes it past WWI. But let’s say they do…

“America was doing well in the 1920s, and women got the right to vote, but then there was the stock market crash, prohibition, the Dust Bowl, and the Great Depression. Things turned around under FDR, with the New Deal. We won World War II, defeating Hitler, and ushering in a new era of prosperity, and the 1950s culture of the suburbs. Civil Rights were led by Martin Luther King Jr., and segregation was ended…”

Note that the start of segregation is largely glossed over.

“Then America fought the Cold War against the Russians, and the Vietnam War during the 60s. This was the same decade as the hippies.”

And by this point, really, hardly anyone gets past. I’ve never seen a curriculum make it past Vietnam and the 60s – ever. Even the AP US course has one section on “1980-present” and it’s only worth 5% of the total of the exam. It says the following is important:

“Conservativism became popular under Reagan, and the Cold War ended, which America won. Our southern border became the main source of illegal immigration. The technological advancement of computers and the internet made things more complex. The end.”

Note that Nixon and Watergate are absent… So, yeah. I think this is the basic story – at best – that most Americans have of their country. It is full of holes, at times nonsensical, and troubled. But hey: At least it’s definitely ‘semi-mythical’.

*          *          * 

That’s the dry stuff, the frame story. What people, culture, and arts do Americans know, and share?

I fear that there is a yawning generational divide on this. Historical knowledge and popular culture have, for a century at least, had generational divisions – but they are much, much starker now. I think the Millennials, Gen Xers, and Boomers have a relatively shared culture. I was too young for Johnny Carson and Walter Cronkite – but I know who they are. They were too old for South Park and Ren & Stimpy – but they know who they are. You don’t have to have watched Cheers to know the significance of “Norm!”, Friends to know “We were on a break!” or The Office to get “Parkour!”

The same applies for music – we all know Elvis Presley, Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson. Boomers know who Kurt Cobain was, and Millennials know Tina Turner. Film, likewise: It’s a Wonderful Life, The Godfather, The Matrix: all shared. Even literature, thanks to popular classics, means most people have read or are familiar with To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, and Of Mice and Men.

But the Boomer to Gen Z and Gen Alpha gap, is enormous. 20% of the U.S. is Boomers, and Gen X make up another 20%. (5% are older than Boomers – Silent Generation.) Add in Millennials – and you get another 20%, totaling 65% older than Gen Z. So roughly a third of Americans don’t fit into this shared mold: and that’s obviously going to grow.

Gen Z is from 1997-2012. The oldest members are pushing 30 – it’s a major bulk of the culture. Even Gen Alpha, 2013-present (the final roughly 15%) are now entering high school, when cultural impact on society really begins. But these digital natives have grown up in a balkanized online culture that has little overlap between groups, much less people who aren’t part of that world. Influencers, YouTubers, podcasters – everyone has their own little niche culture now.

I think, to be culturally shared, you need to have at least two, and ideally three things: Your name is known, with at least some sense of identity; you are recognized visually; and a significant portion of the population, say at least a fifth, knows you well. Albert Einstein, for example, is universally recognized, people have heard his name, and they know he’s a scientist or physicist. A good portion of the population knows his work fairly well. I have never seen an episode of Power Puff Girls, but I recognize them on sight, know their names and their nemesis, and roughly know that they fight… crime?

The good news: Some culture is still universal. However, it’s very corporate – the billionaire juggernauts and franchises. We all know Taylor Swift, Star Wars, and SpongeBob. If you never grew up reading Stan Lee comics, you sure as heck know who The Avengers are now. Beyond this sort of dominance, though, it’s too compartmentalized and divided. Music has become a free-for-all; YA literature is overwhelmingly vast. There are way too many TV shows to keep up with. Only a handful of prestige dramas cut through the noise – and most people aren’t watching those. Shogun, in 2024, won all sorts of awards (Emmys, Golden Globes) and was a critical darling. 9 million people watched it in the first weeks. Compare that to the original Shogun of 1980 – where well over 20 million people tuned in. Roots, in the 70s, had more than half of American households watch. I Love Lucy commanded even higher proportions in the 50s.

But those days seemingly are gone. Whether that’s good or bad can be debated. Freedom of choice, individuality – these are things we prize, and rightly so. Conformity is often bad. But some conformity is necessary for a shared sense of identity: we have to have some things in common. And so, nationalism, as a consequence, begins to break down even further.

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Most troubling is what people turn to for identity if they don’t have a shared story and culture: things like religion, gender, and race.

Together we build our culture, and our history. It is our choices and actions as a collective that make us who we are, in a national identity. We are: The people who defeated the Saxons. The people of the purple hills. The people who play the gamelan.

For much of our more tribal past, these identities were religious, based on kinship, or based on dynasty. The Hakim tribe. The Zionist nation. The Empire of the Sun. The power of democracy is that we have more say and control of who we are, as a people. We are not defined by our race, religion, color or creed. Or at least, we’re not supposed to be.

Without shared identity – a sense of what makes Americans, Americans – the roots of democracy have begun to wither. Around 40% of American youth thinks a different form of government would be better. Many are open about the desire for authoritarianism, in the U.S. and around the globe. Not surprisingly, the older generation, that may have been through this, is less inclined.

But if we are no longer The People Who Watch Cronkite, or The People Who Listen to Stevie Wonder, or The People who Put a Man on the Moon, then we can be divided, instead of united. And divided, we can be easily conquered.

That division will be from within, and we can see it in voting patterns. Men and women vote differently. People of different races vote differently. Religion, gender, sexuality – these things become wedges instead of celebrated. Racism, sexism, antisemitism – all of these terrible ideas will start to reemerge and, unless fiercely stamped out, spread and grow. A host of invasive species in the ecosystem of our national identity.

So, what do we do?

Do we try to limit the balkanization of culture with more uniformity – more conformity? Do we encourage greater cultural diffusion, and intermingling? Do we ensure a shared, accurate, historical narrative through teaching? Do we force people to spend time together through service or bussing in schools? Do we focus more on teaching values and the characteristics that reinforce pluralism, empathy, tolerance, and democracy? I would say yes – to all of the above, and more. But none of it will be easy.

The alternative, however, is far worse. An America where sex, gender, and sexuality have a hierarchy. A caste system based on race, or religion. A land where not all are created equal. A land where democracy is derided, and strongmen rule, imposing their will and their whims upon us. A land where our identity is not forged by us, the citizens, but by the ruling class – whether that be corporations, an aristocracy, or kings.