Who are you?
It may be the most important question a person can answer. Increasingly, it is also one of the most difficult.
Modern culture tells us that identity is something we create for ourselves. We are encouraged to look inward, trust our feelings, and become whoever we choose to be. As singer Taylor Swift told graduates at New York University, “It is totally up to you.” For many Americans, this has become the defining creed of our age.
It is also one of its greatest illusions.
Identity is not invented. It is received. We discover who we are by belonging to something larger than ourselves. We learn our name in the context of a family, our purpose in the context of a community, and our place in history through the story of a people.
This truth reaches far beyond individuals. It applies to nations as well.
As America celebrates its 250th birthday, we find ourselves asking an uncomfortable question.
Who are we?
For generations, Americans shared a common civic story. We did not agree on everything, but we broadly agreed on the nation’s ideals, its history, and its aspirations. Those shared convictions formed the cultural glue that held together a remarkably diverse people.
Today, much of that glue has dissolved.
Instead of identifying primarily as Americans, many people now identify first by race, class, gender, political party, or ideology. Our common story has been replaced by competing stories. We have forgotten the larger narrative that once united us.
Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington warned that a nation cannot endure without a common culture and a shared understanding of itself. Democracy depends upon more than elections. It depends upon citizens who believe they belong to the same national story.
Public education once embraced this responsibility. John Dewey argued that schools exist not only to teach skills but also to prepare citizens by passing on the values, traditions, and habits that bind a society together. Whether one agrees with all of Dewey’s philosophy or not, he understood an essential truth. Every generation must intentionally hand its story to the next.
Consider a child growing up in foster care who does not know his parents or his family history. Such children often wrestle with profound questions of identity and belonging. They ask, “Who am I?” and “Where do I fit?” Those questions are not answered by a birth certificate alone. They are answered through enduring relationships and a shared story.
Nations are no different.
A people who forgets their history eventually lose confidence in their future. When a society no longer knows who it is, it struggles to know where it is going.
America’s 250th birthday should be more than a celebration of fireworks and parades. It should be an invitation to recover our shared civic story. Not a sanitized story that ignores our failures, nor a cynical story that remembers only our sins, but an honest story that tells the truth about both our achievements and our shortcomings.
Healthy families tell their children where they came from. Healthy nations do the same.
If we fail to recover that story, we may gather on the Fourth of July to sing “Happy Birthday,” but we will do so like guests at a stranger’s party, celebrating a nation whose identity we no longer understand.
A people without a shared story cannot remain a united people. Before America can renew its future, it must remember who it is. Schools must once again play a big role in this remembering.
Books by Dr. John Seel:
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