Likelihood of Success

How catchy is Anglophilia — or perhaps Anglophonilia? — exactly?

Over at Chicago Boyz, an article by Jay Manifold jumps from a review of a new book called Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland (and we already know some of the surprising places fruits have fallen from that tree!) and asks the question, “What are the limits of diffusion for the Anglosphere?”

To make the question less conceptual: can a relatively small American presence, backed by the gravity well of an $11 trillion economy, the largest language in the world (over 1 million words), and enormous charm industries – and frequently accompanied by aggressively evangelical religious proselytizing – draw much of humanity into its orbit? Are the conquests of the past the only sufficient mechanism, or can the soft power of the present and future do it all?

The usual objection is that ancient cultures have too much momentum, or perhaps merely inertia, of their own to be supplanted by a young upstart. But the inhabitants of the British Isles had been there for at least six thousand years before they began speaking Celtic, and another thousand when Anglo-Saxon arrived. Why should we think it unusual if most of humanity, with no European ancestry whatsoever, is speaking English, and going about their daily lives in startlingly American-seeming ways, by the end of this century?

The point cannot be overemphasized: ancestry is not destiny. Cultural diffusion matters; an emphasis on processes, or simple pragmatism, matters; ideas matter. Watch for the spread of English as a first language (the Netherlands), of dollarization (Ecuador, El Salvador), of “Southern Christianity,” of common law legal systems. Most of all, watch for neat definitions of the Anglosphere to become less workable as its boundaries blur. The near future may see the massive, yet bloodless, displacement of the language and folkways of billions of people.

Some people regard this with glee. Others experience the same romantic dread with which they view the demise of blacksmithing, aboriginal cultures and the treatment of women as chattels in charming non-western locales. Some want to blow us up over it. Others (this is where you know the writer is describing himself) can acknowledge the trend and admire the general inclination toward more liberty and more choice for individuals, and still wonder just how homogenized, and how flattened and hollowed out, human existence will be when everywhere looks like Long Island or even San Diego.

You can ask the question, after all, with some foreboding. We — “we,” whoever that is; it’s the “we” of a faceless phenomenon, I suppose, not something you or I have any control over, but anyway — we have, after all, bulldozed, however welcomed we were, not only foreign and dank cultures, but some of the more admirable aspects of our own just lately. But at least we’ll be able to ask for directions.