Grant Klokeid (@klokeid)

Our ancestors acted with awareness of membership in the clan: trying to be worthy of their own ancestors, and not to disgrace them. But they also tried to surpass them. And in doing so they strove to be known as individuals – not just as “members of the clan.” They wanted their names to be remembered for all time, and their deeds to be celebrated. This suggests a fundamental tension in our people – a real tension, not just a “philosophical problem.” The tension is between acting as a member of the group and at the same time acting so as to individuate oneself, to distinguish oneself from the group. But it is this striving for individuality that really sets us apart from other peoples. Others are content to efface their individuality and to merely be continuations of clan or caste. Insofar as they are exemplary, they are exemplary members of caste. One sees this pattern in India and in the Far East, in China and Japan. The Japanese culture of the Samurai has much in it to admire, but ultimately the exemplary samurai was one who effaced himself as a perfect servant of the lord. There are no “sagas” of samurai. One finds traces in the East of something like a saga literature, of something celebrating individual achievement and heroism, exactly where one would expect to find it: in the oldest Aryan epics and heroic literature. But it is still nothing like what one finds in Europe, where there are unaccountable examples of this celebration of the individual in the traditions of both the North and South. It is present in Greek epic poetry, mythology, and tragedy. However, one finds many more examples in the Northern Europe, especially in the saga literature of the Norse.