It’s a good thing to hold onto the positive traditions of your culture, to find your from in them to the extent that you can. But we must ultimately find our from in our destination, the goal at the end of our pilgrimage. Once there, we will find that all that is good from our culture, our history, our tradition will find its place in the kingdom, burnished bright and revealing its deeper, spiritual significance that we can only glimpse barely, if at all, in this world.

I’ve been thinking a lot about roots lately, inspired by a story Paul Kingsnorth told in his substack:

Two months ago I was standing on the west coast of Kerry, in view of the Blasket Islands, with one of Ireland’s best-known traditional musicians, a man from a long-established musical dynasty. We’d only just met. He was the sort of man that the Irish west used to produce by the dozen, but who is rare enough now. He knew who he was and where he was, and he wouldn’t shy from saying it.

Where are you from? he asked me.

England, I said.

I know that, he said, but where?

Well, my family are from London, I said, so I suppose I’m a Londoner.

You can do better than that, he said, and then looked directly at me until I did.

Well, I responded, hesitantly, I don’t really come from anywhere. The southeast, I suppose. My family moved around. But my surname is Kentish. Kingsnorth is a village in Kent. I can trace my ancestors back there a thousand years. I’ve visited the churchyard they’re buried in.

Well then, he said, that’s where you’re from. Those are your people.

Yes, I said, I suppose that’s right.

That got me thinking. Where am I from? The answer is complicated and I think important because of what it says not only about me but about America and modern societies in general.

Finding Our Roots

All four of my grandparents moved to the U.S. in the early twentieth century. They came from different parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My father’s family was from what was then Austria but now is Poland; My mother’s family came from Moravia in modern Czechia, from Slovakia, and from Hungary. I guess you could say I’m pan-Central European.

But there’s more to it than that. When they got here, they ended up settling in New York, my father’s family in Brooklyn and my mother’s in Astoria, Queens. My grandparents were going to be Americans, so they did not even teach their children their native languages, cutting them off from their roots. My parents lived in New York for a while after marrying, then moved to New Jersey, where I was born and grew up. I have since lived in Michigan, Maryland, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan again, Connecticut, and now Indiana.

So where am I from?

My story probably isn’t much different from other people in America. Aside from native Americans, we’re all from somewhere else. As a society, we are highly mobile. We leave home for college; we move for jobs; our children leave home for college then go wherever they can get a job; in retirement we move to be where our kids are or to a state where it’s warm. Some adventurous people choose to live as expatriates. Some of us maintain a connection to the old country as Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and so on, but for many of us, our connection to our ancestry is tenuous at best, with the sole exception of recent immigrants.

So where are we from?

We have grown so distant from our roots that a few years ago, genetic testing became popular as a way to answer that question. But genetics is only part of the answer, and not even the most important.

Where we are from includes our culture, our rituals and traditions, our heritage. It explains who we are. For most of history, these things were connected to geography and genetics, but in our highly mobile, modern world, this is no longer the case, and nowhere more so than in America. And that means that we have lost touch with those things from our ancestors that gave shape and meaning to their lives.

American Culture

My grandparents, parents, and my generation, the Boomers, replaced our old traditions with American culture. The great metaphor was America as a melting pot, where people from all countries (in principle if not in practice) could come, assimilate, and enrich America by adding some of their culture—music, food, whatever—into the mix.

This culture like all modern cultures turned out to not be as thick as traditional cultures. We had some major and minor holidays which became occasions to shop the sales. We had television, usually less than 5 channels, radio stations that played many of the same songs, movies, often in theatres with only one screen, and so had something of a common entertainment culture. And we had sports: baseball, football, and basketball, along with the World Series and the Superbowl. March Madness got added to the mix.

There were ideals as well, again, at least in principle. Freedom was probably the biggest, and that was tied to free markets (i.e. capitalism). Equality. Justice. Ideals to aspire for even when we fell short. These were based on the founding myth of the country, and there was a sense that wherever we came from, this was our history if you were an American (unless you were Black or Native American).

And we believed in progress. We believed that we could make a better life for our children, especially economically. America was protean, always growing, developing, evolving. That doesn’t provide a stable foundation for thick culture or for strong roots, but we assumed that at least our ideals would continue into whatever the future might hold, assuming we didn’t get nuked out of existence.

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