Can the American experiment continue if we are ignorant and hate our own past?

"Unless we have an active memory of, and feel a certain awe for, those now dead and too often forgotten -- who built our universities, erected our majestic buildings, crafted the protocols of our government, and won  our wars --then we have become dead souls of a sort, who drift among the infrastructure they left behind."

A classicist, Victor Davis Hanson takes as his starting point, the Funeral Oration of Pericles

The first is to remind the Athenians that they were simply born lucky: the imperial grandeur that they enjoyed was due to their fathers and grandfathers, who “handed it down free to the present time by their valor.” Such gratitude and humility in the moral sense are, of course, important for a free people, likely to think their present success is all their own, and therefore, in their self-congratulation, prone to hubris and a lack of reflection. Recitation of the accomplishments of earlier others also reminds Athenians that they are a mere link in a larger chain. And therefore they carry obligations to their children not to squander what the sacrifices of their parents achieved.

Victor Davis Hanson warns of the Perils of Cultural Amnesia at the 2008 Bradley Symposium.

The perils Hanson sees are

1. Forgetting the Drudgery of the Past.
We make no allowance for the horrific frontier experiences of millions of poor immigrants of all races, whose real enemies were not always each other, Native Americans, or the “system”....but rather the physical world itself.  In pre-industrial times, how did people head westward without good maps, with only horse-powered wagons, when a strep throat, a pregnancy, or an infected small cut could mean a painful death.

2. Forgetting what was important
The loss of a proper notion of magnitude about the past not only means we elevate the less important over the seminal, but also lose any yardstick of the past by which to measure the present. Today we speak of the 4,000 American dead in an ongoing war for a democratic Iraq as part of the “worst” decision in American diplomatic or military history. But only a generation that was ignorant of the nearly 23,000 casualties suffered in a single day at Antietam, or the 81,000 dead and wounded lost at the Battle of Bulge, or the over 5,000 Americans killed in the first four years of the Philippines insurrection could employ such superlatives of their own experiences with war in Iraq.

3. Losing the ability to understand dilemmas
or the need to accept a bad choice when the alternative is far worse...History is tragedy... If we do not understand the sometimes bleak choices of history, then in the present and for the future we place upon ourselves such utopian burdens that almost any result will be caricatured and second-guessed. And the ultimate result with be a moral stasis,and the bankrupt notion that inaction is not an error of omission.

4. Our present hypocrisy .  A symptom of our cultural amnesia is the too easy casual judgment on past deeds especially in the academy and by taking our present affluence and prosperity for granted while condemning those in the past for those were largely responsible for it.

So what are the ramifications of our cultural amnesia?

Ignorance for one, self-indulgence for another.

Our present generation has nearly bankrupt the social security system, accumulated trillions of dollars in national debt, lost a war in Vietnam, spent trillions of dollars in national wealth on cosmetic surgeries, and induced a crass popular culture of conspicuousconsumption and self-indulgence—and yet has rewritten our public school history textbooks to emphasize the sins of our prior generations. The more we demonize the dead, the more we the living are then free to rewrite the rules of our own moral behavior.

If we can only see our history, Hanson concludes, in terms of racial, gender and class oppressions, what reason is there for the American experiment to continue?

The hard work of uniting diverse peoples under uniquely humane principles is the work of over two centuries; the easy task of ending it can by accomplished in a mere generation through our ignorance or hatred of ourselves and own past.