Shared Experience and Nationality

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Hey guys, John here. It is a beautiful, overcast, crisp, clean spring day.

You can hear the birds. I can hear the creek. I don't know if it's coming through the microphone, but it is just wonderful out here.

And I'm taking my morning jog slash walk. And I go past this burial ground all the time.

It's the Ferris Burial Ground. You can see behind me all these broken down gravestones.

Some of them dating back to people who were born in the 1700s. And it hasn't been kept up clearly.

I don't know anyone named Ferris in this area. I'm assuming the Ferris has moved on. They probably went out west, down south.

I don't know. But the family's not here. The descendants aren't here to take care of this, it seems. And what you have are some

American flags from the American Legion, where they've been able to identify a veteran who fought in our wars and sacrificed.

And so those are the people that are upkeeping this, the American Legion. And it's a wonderful thing to see someone noticing the past.

But it's also sad in a way, right? Like the Ferrises aren't here themselves anymore. And so they moved on.

But they made their mark. And one of the things that I've been thinking about, and I think it's so important for us to understand this, is when you're rooted in a place and a people, a shared tradition, you have landmarks like this that really mean something to you.

I know the first time I went to Mississippi and I saw an old family burial ground in a farm area, it meant something.

These were my ancestors. And I didn't know them. But because they lived before my time.

But I'm connected to them. And I'm a link in the chain, right? I stand in their line. And they passed on the good things that they could for me.

And that is so meaningful. That means there's a big identity, I think, hunger that gets met when you're able to tap into some of those things.

When you're able to see right in front of you the story that has brought you to where you are.

And stories are so important. In the Bible, we have a lot of stories. It's not just abstract theology. It's stories of people and places and experiences and traditions that form because there's customs that surrounding a certain event or figure.

And that is the way that people unite, bind themselves to one another, carry out activities in the marketplace, activities concerning common defense.

Because they're defending something that's in common, something that's shared, something that's beautiful to them.

I know in certain parts of Europe, there's shared grazing lands that don't belong to anyone in particular.

And they're able to do this because of sometimes unspoken agreements that have stood the test of time over centuries.

You couldn't just do that instantly. You couldn't just one day say, I'm going to make this plot a shared place that everyone can enjoy and have it not be trashed.

Because that's called the tragedy of the commons in economics. Because people won't respect it because they don't have a stake in it.

It doesn't belong to them. But in regions where you have shared traditions going back a long ways, they'll respect something that, hey, my great, great, great, great grandfather and his great, great, great grandfather made a pact.

We've been intermarried since then. And we've shared in defending our own land.

And we come out for celebrations. And we sit next to each other in church. And we frequent the same places in the marketplace.

Down the line, there's a shared tradition and experience and way of life.

And that shared tradition experience way of life is such a binding element. And it really is the thing that binds nations together.

And if you don't have it, you are going to look for something to bind you together that substitutes for it.

Now, I'm not reductionistic in this. I don't, you know, obviously, when I'm talking about looking at a graveyard, which is where I am, you have shared ancestry here, obviously.

I don't know that, you know, well enough to this because I can't read these gravestones well. But, you know, maybe there's some friends.

It's also going back to a time, you know, when there was slaves. There's actually down the road, a slave cemetery.

I know I'm in New York. People don't expect that. But it's true. It's right. I literally go past this. And then I go past the slave cemetery down the road.

And I don't, I don't think though, I don't, I don't think they're connected. But, but yeah, it could be that there's, there's slaves buried nearby.

It could, it could be that there's, you know, members of the community that aren't pharisees in here. I'm not sure. But this primarily belonged to the pharisees.

And those are the people that are primarily buried here. And so obviously there's this sort of ancestral core that exists in this cemetery that serves as a binding agent.

But my point is that the shared life together that people have with each other.

So the pharisees is here. You know, there's another burial ground, you know, a mile away. That's another family.

There's another, like they're living next to each other. They're coming up with, you know, settlement and kind of early

American times. They're coming up with shared arrangements so that they can have a good life and seek the good for their own children.

It ends up producing a commonality that is, that serves as the binding agent going forward.

And this only happens organically. And this is, I think the main point I want to stress, like, you have to have patience with these things.

They can only happen as you are able to test and trust. And I mean, think about it on an individual level.

You don't tend to just trust a stranger, right? You have to get to know a stranger and then you can trust.

And it's the same thing with, in a broader way, with nationalities, with pharisees.

I don't know because they're gone from this land, but maybe at one time they had a good name in this area.

Maybe that meant something. And you didn't, you could see a pharise and know their last name and you didn't have to know a whole lot more about them to trust them because you know what pharisees are like.

They have a good name. And a good name used to be super important. Like, you would duel over insulting a good name.

We've lost a lot of that, okay? We've been deracinated. That's the, I think, appropriate word. And some of us more than others.

You know, my wife's family goes back to the 1600s in this area. I mean, this is like, this is home.

This is home. The landmarks all mean something. And I've gotten to know that myself. I mean, even without family historians, the lore gets passed down of, you know, your grandfather was here and he did this.

And, you know, up in the hills where she's from, everyone's last name, they're all related.

They're intermarried at such a, I mean, I've joked about it. Like, you know, how close are you guys?

Like, you know, make sure that, you know, your siblings are gonna marry people who aren't their cousins, that kind of thing, right?

Make sure that everything is gonna be okay in the genetic realm here. But there's a beauty to this story, right?

And in cosmopolitan and modern life, we've lost a lot of this. You don't have that stability, that identity.

And then you're left wondering who you are. And you're left wondering, how do I have any shared principle or uniting principle with those with whom

I have a nation or even a town? Or just a life together?

How do I, you have to find an organizing principle to make these things work, but you've lost a lot of it.

Because we've forgotten much of our heritage. We've been, so there's like an entertainment and a media kind of angle to this.

But we've also had a lot of immigration from very different places in large quantities over a short period of time.

And those kinds of things also can upend and deracinate. We've also had people move around quite a bit.

That's happening right now with the great sort. Especially if you're in the South, you got people coming from the North who, yeah, they might be white people, but they're not the same kind of white people.

And I've heard so many Southerners talk about this. We had a white MAGA conservative guy who ended up on our town council.

And then we're like, what are you doing? You're making decisions that are good for the market, but aren't good for us and our heritage and our people.

Knock it off. And the white conservative from Ohio is like, I don't understand. I thought we were both

Trump voters. I thought we had these... Oh, you find out pretty quick, you're different. So anyway, all that to say, only time and action in shared communities can build the kind of trust and organizing principles that are gonna be stable.

You have to have that really. There's no shortcuts. And I think the essence of modernity is to find the shortcuts, to find that scientific basic organizing principle that's instantaneous.

And there's really two options that we're being sold, okay? Primarily. And there's all kinds of spectrums and variations of this, but there's two kind of basic,

I think, pitfalls here. And they're both modern. Here's the thing, they're not in keeping with a conservative tradition, really.

American conservative tradition or just even just fitting into the nature of things. I don't think they fit into the nature of things completely.

They might take one aspect of identity, but then they make that absolute, okay?

So the two options are, it's a propositionation. So shared ideas of equality, especially, or freedom.

Those are the things that bind us together. So you can have someone from across the world moving next to you and you should just be as much at home with them as you are with someone who's like your brother.

Because, hey, they believe in freedom, you believe in freedom. Or they want equality, you want equality. Or there's a

Christian version of this, which is like, hey, as long as they're Christians, that's the only organizing principle. And it's like, well, there's some truth to this.

Obviously, if they don't want the kind of freedom that you want, then there's gonna be conflict there.

But is that it? And I think young guys, especially, are very unfulfilled by this.

They know that this isn't true. They know it's a farce. They know that even when we talk about equality, there's very different versions of that.

You have someone from India coming over, let's say, who's fresh from India. Their ideas of equality, coming from a caste system, are very different than our ideas in the

United States of what equality looks like. Because they're shaped by time, tradition, and that kind of thing.

So that's the one option, right? Like this propositionation, it's just these very basic ideas in your head. It doesn't conform to nature.

It doesn't conform to scripture. Like if you look at the, I wrote a whole chapter on this in the book, but look at Israel.

Look at the way that God treats them and the unique parts of, not just the universal things that apply to all peoples, but the unique traditions, the clothing, the ceremony that God gives to them.

That's unique to them and them alone. That becomes a binding principle for them.

It's not, and it helps them share a life. It's not just the fact that they have similar ideas or even when they go off the path and they're worshiping false gods and stuff, they don't cease to be

Jews necessarily in that moment, right? With time, you see Samaritans pop out because they're mingling so much, they ended up, it affects their natural relations.

They're intermarrying and all of this. And so anyway, that is one option.

The other option is, as opposed to the propositionation, is it's basically all, it comes down to a scientific principle or like an equation, right?

So you take your ancestry test and you find out you're broadly speaking, let's say you're white, or if it's not that, you're black.

I mean, I think different people groups have gone through this in different senses, but right now, a lot of what

I'm seeing is people who are of European descent trying to meet an attack that's against them.

White people are being attacked, so that should become our binding principle, like we're white and we're gonna stand up to this.

And it should be stood up to, there's no doubt about that. But what I see is this idea that like, just that whiteness itself, that like I'm from,

I have a tie back to Europe somewhere. It could be Poland, it could be, some people are trying to like smuggle in Russia or Spain or Portugal or, you know, in the area

I live right now, I'll just say this real quick as a side tangent, like there's a lot of Italians. And I would say we're kind of in process in a way, like we're still in process even after a few generations of sharing a life together.

I think, you know, we found kind of, I say we, like people who live in this area have found kind of like a way to obviously live together.

But people who are like from an Italian tradition and ancestry are very proud of it.

And they are different. The way they, you know, it obviously affects the celebrations we have.

We're gonna have some Catholic celebrations. There's also a high concentration of Irish people not far from here.

So that, you know, you're gonna have St. Patrick's Day. There's also Hispanics or Latinos moving into the area.

So Cinco de Mayo is now becoming bigger. You know, I was in a Mexican restaurant the other day celebrating St. Patrick's Day.

And I'm like, only in this area would you have that? Because it's the unique mingling of peoples here. But, you know, there's still this identity that they carry.

And I'll just tell you firsthand, being working on jobs, playing sports and stuff like that.

Yeah, you are kind of like outside the club a little bit if you're not Italian, when there's like a lot of Italians around.

And I'm not bitter about that at all. Like I understand it. But anyway, it becomes, like what

I'm seeing now develop is like this sort of like, as long as you're European, as long as you can take the test and you find out you're

European, that's the organizing principle. That's what sets you apart from everyone else. It's shared

DNA, basically. And so that's the way you know whether you're in or out.

And in some countries where, you know, they're like Ireland's a country like this, I think, where they've had like mass immigration really quickly.

It's easy to tell like the sort of heritage Irish people from those who are not based on that kind of a test, because it's not just about the

DNA. It also parallels these other things. Hey, our family lived here. Our family has a tradition. Our family died for this land or like all those things factor into it.

With America is not the same. America is a younger country with different waves of immigration in different regions. And it's much harder to find that kind of a stable element based on just something like that, and especially something as broad as white or European.

A lot of people think this is simple. It is not. It is not simple. But there's an assumption behind it that basically your

DNA is what determines other things. Your DNA will, you know, or IQ based on DNA.

That determines the kind of civilization you are. And like I said, I think that this can become a shortcut.

This can become an attempt to take this one little organizing principle and make it the whole and ignore things like shared experience, which is so fundamental to all of this.

So what am I trying to say? My point is myself, and I don't want to name them because I don't want to drag them into this, but some of the other guys who are on the ascendant if you want to call it that, ascendant

Christian right. And I'm not speaking for everyone, but some of the guys that I respect have been saying the same thing for years, you know, at least since like 2016, 2017 that I know of, because I've been connected to some of those guys.

Some of them are getting in trouble now, and they're being broad brushed as fitting into one of these categories. And they're not, they're not in either one.

And their vision for the United States is basically this.

And I'm going to describe my own vision, or at least what we're pushing for. It doesn't mean this is necessarily going to happen, but this seems like in the circumstances we're in the prudent thing.

They are for a broadly speaking, American Anglo -Protestant kind of broad tradition.

Now that is broad. You read Albion Seed, like the four British folkways that came here were also very different.

And that's from Britain. Britain's very, I mean, they've had wars, right? Like, so Scotland and, you know, like I don't know how to go through the history of Britain, but it's this island, but they've had wars, right?

So it was an unstable element in some ways from the beginning, but this is why we had a civil war.

But anyway, like there is this default Anglo -Protestant shared language, some shared tradition, shared religion.

That broadly speaking describes what America is. And people have to, when they come here, be part of that at a basic level.

And that at this point, America is an empire. So that describes the American empire, the default setting for the

American empire. And the ideas that we associate with this, and those include ideas about liberty, freedom, and even our notions of hierarchy and stuff.

That is, that streams from this, okay? You can't just abstract it out.

You can't just like set it in the Middle East and say, now be good Americans. We gave you democracy. It's not gonna work.

So this has to have some generational development to get the arrangements that we've have.

But more primary, perhaps than even that, at least important are your regional distinctions.

And this is where you probably have more of a parallel of nations and regions, whether it's a large city or cities are actually,

I don't wanna talk about cities. Cities is for another podcast. Urban areas today, megapolises are actually, they're their own kind of thing.

And anyway, so let's just talk about region, okay? So regions are where you have a shared, kind of at a scale that makes sense.

Because when it's over 300 million people, it's not a scale that you can share. You can share some things, but it's like, they're superficial.

They become more superficial, at least. Media, you can have this sort of bland Anglo -Protestantism, but it does become more bland and more watered down the more people you bring in from different regions.

So like Lutherans, I had a discussion with a bunch of Lutherans in the Midwest and I was like, you know, what sense are we Anglo -Protestant?

It's like, well, maybe cousins. Like there's certainly similarities here and you obviously have to abide by English law and speak

English in this country and stuff. But anyway, like how do you get these diverse peoples to cooperate in a federation or an alliance, shared market, shared trade, shared defense, shared life?

You have to think in terms of regions and different regions are gonna have different flavors. And that's functionally, and I'm comfortable saying,

I think for me, at least, that's functionally where you see the nation really appear. You know, when you're driving through Arizona and you go through the

Navajo reservation, it's the Navajo nation. And it's in the United States, right?

They can fight in our wars and they can vote in our elections and all of that. But it's a unique thing.

And maybe that's tighter than the South or Appalachia or the

Piedmont area or, you know, these other terms we use to describe different regions.

But I would suggest to you that these regions have uniqueness as well. And that uniqueness is being disrupted by lots of immigration, not just externally, but also internally with certain regions moving to other regions.

So some regions are more stable. Some regions are in flux. And that's, I think, how

I perceive it. When you have, when you're waiting for the dust to settle, when you're in an area like I lived in, like Raleigh, Durham, where it's like, you're just being flooded with people from all over, it starts to, it does create a sort of stripped out, naked public square where it's like, why do people move there?

It's like strip malls and entertainment and good dining, right? There's really not much of a heritage and for people who have been rooted in a heritage and they've grown up from certain regions, like New York, let's say they're rooted in somewhere like an ethnic tradition there.

You can move, you can be fulfilled in that and then move to a place like that and think, oh, this is great. But your children, when they're growing up and they're in their formative years, especially that they miss something and they can feel it.

And they, so they find, they're trying to find that stable uniting principle. And it's, and those are the two options that are given to them.

And I think the best thing for our country is to recognize that there are regions that are in a state of flux that are, that it's gonna take time.

You can't make it instant. There's likely going to be groups of people, birds of a feather are gonna flock together.

You can't stop that. That's kind of a natural thing that just happens in history. And the best thing is to avoid conflict and try to let these things form as much as you possibly can.

Obviously on the national level, you stop immigration. And I do mean stop immigration. Like if we're gonna have an immigration, it's gotta be people who are very, very similar and able to integrate.

And I don't even like talking about that, really. I mean, special circumstances, but for the country as it stands now, it has to be thought of as regions.

And the ones that are stable, and there are plenty of regions that are pretty stable, that people have stayed.

I mean, I was in a place, I was in Nebraska and it was like, it's in a town that was like, I'm like nothing changed here over the last few decades.

It's like people just keep farming and doing their thing and people aren't really moving in. And keep that, right?

Keep that stability. Work to integrate. When new people come, you gotta work to integrate them in as much as possible, if it's possible to do that.

If they come in large numbers, they're gonna form their own thing. That's just how, that's just nature. That's just how

God designed it. That's just how people work and move. And these things obviously take time.

And so you're not gonna find an instantaneous binding principle. It's very difficult to do that. The best thing is to, as an individual, learn what happened in the ground beneath your feet, right?

I'm standing here in a cemetery where that's been forgotten largely. What happens, I don't know how the pharisees contributed.

Maybe I could go online and try to figure it out, something. But I do know a lot of other things that happened in this area.

I know as I go down the hill that I'm on, I'm gonna come across a home that was where the ferry was and was operated out of during the

Revolutionary War. And the British shot a cannon and the cannonball went right near the house.

I try to figure out what happened here. And I think that's important. It flushes out a sense of self.

And even though my family doesn't root back in this particular area, my wife does, but it becomes...

Actually, that's not quite true. I did find out that there is a line way back.

It's kind of distant that does go back to this area. But anyway, putting that aside, if you're someone who does feel deracinated, you're not gonna find it in obviously

Hollywood movies. You're not gonna find it in the pop culture stuff.

You really do have to do some reading, do some digging, visit some landmarks, ask questions of the older people in your family, and then share life together with other people.

Invite them into your life as much as you can do safely and enter their life.

And that's where you're going to in time find stability. And it might be for your children. It might be for your children that the organizing principle finally really manifests itself, that ideal that you're looking for.

And so I reject both of the reductionistic options out there. I just don't think there's anything fulfilling in that.

I think obviously for a nation, to be a nation, there has to be a core ancestry.

Israel had that. It doesn't mean you can't have integration. You can. You can have people come in and assimilate, but you do have to have a core kind of ancestral component of, like the constitution says, ourselves and our posterity.

If you don't have that, you do lose. You do lose that organizing principle. And that's what we're in danger of right now in this country.

We are on the precipice of major, major issues. And if we don't get the immigration issue fixed, we're going to have some conflict.

I'm just telling you right now, we're going to have some real conflict beyond what you've seen. We already had diverse populations that existed in this country that we had to figure out as a whole, how to share life together with.

And you add to that problem, other groups of people that are more dissimilar, you're just going to get more conflict.

It's obvious. So we got to figure that out. But there is, but the shared experience, the shared life, the shared glories, and I mean,

Renan talks a lot about this. I think it's Renan. What is a nation?

And I think his is actually, his conception I think is kind of off too. I think it's too focused on just shared experience, but it is such a central component.

That is the reason, you know, you have goosebumps at a patriotic celebration. It's like, hey, we fought in that war.

Our grandparents or great -grand, great -great whatever, you know, we fought in that conflict. We did a thing.

We did a good thing. And here we are. We're proud of the people who share in the defense of what we consider to be valuable and unique to us.

And that's why we go to the Olympics. And we're proud of our country, right? Why are we proud of our country?

Like what's the uniting principle there? I think less and less people are proud of their country. And because that might be because they don't know what their country is or how they fit into it.

We got to get that fixed. And our education system is not going to help with that either. So it's up to parents.

It's up to parents. It's up to you as a person to educate yourself, figure that out.

And, you know, maybe I told a guy recently, hey, look, use

Ancestry. Go on Ancestry .com and then use that because it has tools to then go find, go into the records and find out like who your grandparents and ancestors were.

And there is obviously this, there is a lineage connection there. Like, but also don't just do that.

Like, look at what happened under your feet. Learn the history of your region. And I think when you're talking, you're going to start to notice that you're not going to be referencing movies as much.

You're going to be referencing, you know, you're talking about a traitor, Benedict Arnold, that becomes the traitor.

You're talking about a virtuous, strong man, George Washington. You know, you're talking about, you know, a time that, you know, we stood tall and we stood strong and men were men, the

Alamo. You know, you start picking up on these things that are part of your story, part of the lore of your people.

And it becomes more important than Star Wars and Marvel Universe. Not knocking, look at me, maybe

I am, but I'm not knocking. You could watch this stuff, but that should be the thing that really animates you.

And people who are deracinated just talk about movies and talk about, I mean, that's their lingua franca.

And then they're wondering like why they don't feel kinship with the people around them.

And I'm not blaming, by the way, people. I understand a lot of people have been dealt a bad hand.

Essentially, they've been deracinated. The decisions had been made for them that they would be separated from their past, but you can reconnect it, all right?

You can reconnect it. So yeah, reject modernity, embrace tradition, I guess.

That's the point of this. And if you have a family cemetery, upkeep it as much as you can, visit it.

On Memorial Day, go see the veterans that have died in your family for your country.