In Praise of Anglo-Saxons

This being an age of social justice, I want to recognize the achievements of today’s most ruthlessly marginalized and stereotyped ethnicity: the Anglo-Saxons. In film, television and the news media, the mandatory depiction of the Anglo-Saxon is either as a plutocrat or a hillbilly. The little Monopoly guy with the top hat and the monocle? He’s an Anglo-Saxon. The inbred yokel in “Deliverance” who kills anyone not married to his own sister? An Anglo-Saxon of the worst kind.

By Anglo-Saxon I mean everyone originally from the island of Britain, including Scots, Welsh, Cornish and other assorted Celts who for centuries have roosted on the branches of the vast English tree. Let’s face it: To us non-Anglo-Saxons, from a distance, they all look alike. I also include the Scotch-Irish, who are really Scots who lived in Ireland before they left to improve their lives in Appalachia. But I most certainly do not include the actual Irish: If I were to call the Irish Anglo-Saxons, soon after, I’m certain, the Irish Republican Army would be knocking on my door.

It’s true that the Anglo-Saxons are plutocrats and hillbillies—but they are so much more! Start with sports, the activity that best exemplifies the Anglo-Saxon ethos. Now, it is an irresistible impulse of the human animal to pick up sticks, spheres or both, and play games with them. This has been so in all continents and cultures, from the beginning of time. But only to the Anglo-Saxons did it occur to legislate a game into a sport. They accomplished this by mandating a bunch of arbitrary but unyielding rules (“three strikes and you’re out”) and the usage of words that were sometimes vaguely moralistic (“error,” “penalty”), sometimes weirdly suggestive (“love” for a tied score) and suddenly you had modern tennis, baseball, basketball, cricket, golf, hockey and football, both of the American and the lesser kind.

This was their gift to the world. Once you know the rules and the words, anyone can play. Today, the best tennis players are Spaniards and Slavs, the best soccer players are Brazilians and Argentines, the best basketball players are Black Americans and the best cricketeers come from the Indian subcontinent. The Anglo-Saxons have been completely outplayed at their own sports. You might expect them to take away their sticks and spheres and say something like “I don’t wanna play anymore”—but that never happens. Along with sports, Anglo-Saxons have perfected an attitude they call “sportsmanship”: the knack of losing while being cool. Since human life consists mostly of a series of losses ending in one big final defeat, this is a tremendous moral advance. No matter what the score, to the bitter end, we can still be cool.

As an extension of their love of sports, Anglo-Saxons invented both parliamentary and presidential democracy. While other nations had emperors and maximum leaders who made things up as they went along, Anglo-Saxons devised a bunch of rules (“rules of order,” “rule of law,” etc.) about how the game of government was to be played, then staffed all positions of power by means of competitive elections. Those who disdain the “horse race” approach to elections should remember that the horse race—another popular Anglo-Saxon sport—is precisely what democracy is about. With dictatorships you get all horse, no race.

The electoral winner is told to stick by the rules. The title isn’t “Majesty” or “Excellence” but “Mister” or “Madam.” The loser is expected to display good sportsmanship and say “We’ll getcha next time!” You can see why, though Anglo-Saxon democracy has spread, it remains far less popular than basketball or soccer. It’s a tougher sport to play.

Anglo-Saxons love rules and words because they are a transactional crowd. Unlike the Germans who panted after the Absolute or the Spanish who would die for a point of honor, all Anglo-Saxons craved was to close the current deal and then move on to the next one. An infamous and much-criticized example of this pragmatic approach can be observed in Article I of the Constitution, where slaves are turned into three-fifths of a human being for census purposes. This is considered to be dehumanizing—and of course it is—but it’s an absurdity as well, a rule as arbitrary as “three strikes and you’re out.” No German or Spaniard would ever put up with such nonsense.

But the men of the Constitutional Convention were in a transactional mood. They wanted to close the deal—and the deal, in this case, was the United States of America, what one eloquent Anglo-Saxon later called “the last best hope on earth.” If, to avoid this morally putrid compromise, the U.S. had been aborted, and all its rules and words cast into the abyss, the slaves would have continued to suffer under cruel masters, and the tens of millions who have come here from less fortunate nations, myself included, would have found no safe harbor.

The question of race has tarnished the Anglo-Saxons’ reputation. Many people accuse them of being racists—and it’s totally true. Plus, they’re terrible snobs. In the U.S., they discriminated against other races and nationalities. That was easy. In Britain, though, they were forced to discriminate against themselves—it was all they had to work with. Anglo-Saxons dreamed up the in-crowd, the frat, Studio 54, the White House press room and many other ways to let you know I’m inside and you’re not.

Yet, in the end, exhausted and perplexed about who should discriminate against whom, the Anglo-Saxons have gone big on equality. They didn’t exactly invent the thing, but—you guessed it—they gave us the rules and the words. George Mason, Virginia planter and Anglo-Saxon to the core, authored the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which inspired both our Bill of Rights and the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man, which in turn served as models for the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

These are of course the freedoms and protections that prevent villains in office from abusing their power. But look closer. Virginia’s civil rights—the rules—became the world’s human rights. By a magic known only to themselves, Anglo-Saxons can take the transactional and make it universal.

But wasn’t George Mason a slave owner? For certain, he was. And so was Thomas Jefferson, another Anglo-Saxon, who without irony wrote the words “all men are created equal.” Abe Lincoln (whose surname harked back to an English shire) called that statement on equality the “proposition” on which our country was founded, and wielded this argument to destroy slavery. And Martin Luther King Jr., speaking in front of the temple to Lincoln, quoted Jefferson’s words to the crowd at the Washington Mall and to millions of watching Americans. The Black liberator, the Anglo-Saxon emancipator, the slave owner whose words broke chains—the three walked peaceably together, arm in arm, toward the realms of universal freedom. That’s pretty magical too.

Because the arts aren’t susceptible to rules and words, the Anglo-Saxons haven’t been particularly proficient in them. The Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Michelangelo, for example, is Jackson Pollock, whose paintings look like they have been vandalized by climate change terrorists. No Beethovens will be found, either—though it should be noted that Anglo-Saxons provided the hillbilly half of the mixed-race marriage we call rock and roll. Elvis Presley, all four Beatles and—yes!—that seismic phenomenon, Taylor Swift, are Anglo-Saxons.

To overcompensate for their deficiency in the arts, Anglo-Saxons have created a sublime and enduring masterpiece: the English language and its literature. Little could the ragged bands of Angles and Saxons—with their diminutive friends, the Jutes—have imagined as they arrived at the shores of Roman Britain, that their Teutonic dialect, mashed up and remixed, would one day become the spoken and written tongue of the human race.

English is an example of hybrid vigor: It shamelessly absorbs words from other languages. The Vikings left behind skirt and skis. The Frenchified Normans fleeced sheep but ate mutton. Pioneers who traveled to the Spanish Southwest brought back the barbecue, the rodeo and that quintessential American figure, the vaquero—otherwise known as the cowboy. Such grand theft has resulted in an enormous vocabulary—around a million words, compared to 200,000 for French and a similar number for Spanish. More to the point, English is an extraordinarily sensitive descriptive instrument: “Royal” and “kingly” mean the same thing but derive from different roots and vibrate to different connotations.

English binds the world together. Scientific and technical journals are published in English. Travel and tourism everywhere are conducted in English. This transactionally adaptive language has become universal. I first realized this many years ago in Tuscany, on hearing a German tourist and an Italian waiter (next-door neighbors among nations) conversing in good English. Neither man probably knew it, but they owed their ability to connect to the Anglo-Saxons.

Many countries have splendid literatures but none approach the glories of the English language. Over the centuries, from “Beowulf” to “Hillbilly Elegy,” the depth and scope and imaginative power has been unequalled. The names alone make you dizzy: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Keats, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, Dickens, Tennyson, Wilde, Twain, Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway. Their narratives and poems betray the soul of the Anglo-Saxon. It is not governed by rules or laws. It’s restless and often violent, with a streak of ugliness, of puritanism mixed with hooliganism, kept barely under control. The journey is always about personal freedom, but triumph over external tyranny only begins the struggle against oneself. Anglo-Saxons, I mean to say, first brewed whisky for a reason.

Americans inhabit an Anglo-Saxon culture. All of us feel comfortable calling Washington and Jefferson our “forefathers.” True, at the moment a clique of zealots is trying to tear the culture down, but this strikes me as pathological and ultimately self-defeating.

So long as we imitate Anglo-Saxon attitudes, we should recognize this appropriation. Or as we now say, we should acknowledge it. Back in the bad old days, when colonists took land from the people formerly known as Indians, they offered beads in return. In our more enlightened era, we give them land acknowledgement statements, along the lines of “We know we stole this land from your tribe, it was disgraceful and we feel wretched about the whole thing—but we’re not giving it back.”

I propose that every institution in this country draft an Anglo-Saxon cultural acknowledgement statement. Something like: “Thanks for your politics, government, language, literature, civil rights, rock and roll and, above all, the crazy exciting sports—best Super Bowl ever!—we love each of these gifts of yours so much, we’re never going to give them back.” It’s the least we can do, literally.