What the Generations Do with What They Inherit

This piece ran in the newspapers in May, 2025

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Most of the time, when I think about the history of cultural systems, what strikes me is what I call “the persistence of culture” – meaning how much it continues to be what it was, even though the humans carrying the culture get replaced with the turnover of generations.

I was struck, for example, with the extent that Chinese culture emerged out of two centuries of subordination and humiliation by European imperial powers still carrying the traditional Chinese sense of themselves as being the special society at the center of the world, the Middle Kingdom.

Likewise, I noted how aspects of English culture persisted through centuries—for example from the Magna Carta limiting the power of kings over nobles, through the English saying that “A man’s home is his castle,” to the Americans of English descent putting into the U.S. Constitution (as the Fourth Amendment) that the state cannot subject a citizen to “search and seizure” without permission (a warrant) from an independent judiciary.

It is no wonder that culture “persists,” because a “culture” is the sum of those dimensions of human life that are not part of genetic transmission but are of human creation and passed along from generation to generation.

That inter-generational transmission, however, can be an occasion for change as well as for persistence. For better or for worse: i.e. the new generation can embody improvements in the culture into which they were born, or they can fail to uphold the virtues of the culture of their parents and grandparents. History is full of both.

In my lifetime, one striking example of a change for the better was the transformation of the political/moral culture of Germany in the aftermath of World War II. One might say that the Nazi nightmare was a historical aberration in German history, but it was also a magnification of some of the long-standing tendencies in German culture. The wounds that fed Nazism didn’t heal overnight. And in some ways, the dark tendencies required the turnover of generations to be overcome. But within a couple of generations, Germans seemed to have become a positive player in the world that their grandparents had terrorized.

But this moment in history is, on balance, not a time of improvement but of cultural and moral deterioration. The global nature of this overall trend raises one set of questions. But in each country, it seems that the breakdown has it’s own specific causes.

In the case of Israel, a nation founded by idealists who’d fled from persecution, has become a nation ruled by people lacking in scruples that would restrain their becoming the persecutors of others.

The founding generations had learned – from being the victims of injustice — to value justice. But the continuing threat to the survival of the Jewish state changed the people—a “bad” neighborhood proved a difficult place for idealism to survive. And then there are the temptations that come from the change of Israel from being the David to being the Goliath of the region. “The strong do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must” became appealing.

Old generations die out, and the new generations do not replicate all the spirit of those that went before.
Another nation that seems to have lost ground – in terms of overall cultural/political health – in recent decades is the United Kingdom.

I’m an Anglophile – an admirer of the Britain during World War II, and of the English contributions to literature and film – so it has been with great sadness that I’ve watched how the turnover of the generations seems to have brought a degradation of the moral fiber and political integrity of the British nation.

I imagine some of this decline is a kind of demoralization of a nation that used to command the world’s greatest empire and that is now just a middling power. But then there’s also the most stunning expression of British breakdown — the disaster of Brexit – in which a whole political Party (the Tories) abandoned failed the nation, abandoning it to be governed by racism and the long-standing English self-concept of being an island people apart from the main.

Of course, nowhere has the passage of time seen so profound a national degradation than in our own United States. On a whole variety of levels, it would appear that the Force that works for the Good is weaker than it was in earlier post WW II generations.

Having studied this deterioration closely for more than 20 years, I have identified a number of contributing factors that have made it possible for the political realm of the nation – the arena where power is gained and lost – to have become destructive in ways that would have seemed unthinkable in the era of Eisenhower or Reagan.

Among those contributing factors:
• The continued evolution of America’s Corporate system to the point where concern for the common good sank significantly;
• The rise of an exceedingly well-organized and well-funded force with plutocratic purposes;
• The organization of an exceptionally effective propaganda system that fundamentally changed the moral perceptions of a significant part of the American electorate (perhaps combined with that electorate becoming more manipulable);
• And the blindness and weakness of the political forces to whom fell the task of defending democracy, decency, the Rule of Law, and America as a force for good in our troubled world.