Who We Are. What We Are.

We are heirs to the English legal, intellectual, literary, social, racial, psychological, economic, political, religious, class, racial, cultural, even sexual, traditions. We all are: Kipling, Hemingway, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Donne, you, I, Hobbes, Hume, Adam Smith, the American colonists, Madison, FDR, Bernard Bailyn, Donald Trump, America, India, Australia, Jamaica, Hong Kong, South Africa--wherever the British Empire went, and it went everywhere, we are all heirs. When we have nothing else in common we have the English language. It is now in our DNA, it is now biological, and we cannot escape it if we wanted to. Read any serious book in the language and you are reading, to greater or lesser, even if infinitesimal, all books in the language. And we have perpetuated our legacy. We have been built upon and we have built upon. Even those of us (practically everybody) who have cast off British political rule have maintained to greater or lesser extent, the traditions. Thus we, the heirs, have feet in different worlds; we have identity confusion, we play multiple roles: master and servant, feminine and masculine, agent and double agent.