July 17, 2024

Cultural Roots

The discourse on roots is always a bit ambiguous. It is not that peoples, as racists and nationalists fantasize, have a fixed and immutable character. On the contrary, they change continuously, sometimes slowly and sometimes rapidly.

For example, the Swiss were the quintessential mercenary soldiers (the Pope still has them), but now they are the quintessential peaceful people. The Viking pirates were the terror of people, and now their descendants constitute the quintessential civilized peoples. Similarly, the Greeks, the inventors of culture in antiquity, are now one of the most backward peoples in Europe, and so on.

So, what does "roots" mean? Essentially, it means how we were a long time ago and how we no longer are.