America’s cultural strengths are less obvious to Americans because we live immersed in our culture. To say that I am not a typical American; would be a very typical American thing to say. What our culture is and isn’t is less obvious than the results American culture has achieved. We are truly the most successful society on Earth. High literacy, high GDP, low inflation, low infant mortality, high standard of living, extensive scientific breakthroughs, military victories, etc. We are by no means the world leader in all areas, but we used to be in almost all of them. Few could deny that America has been a phenomenal success. Our success has not been despite our culture but rather, because of our culture.
Sadly, I’ve heard many Americans proclaim “we have no culture” (If ignorance is bliss, then why aren’t more people I meet who say this kind of thing extremely happy?). Ignorance of one’s own culture is just as harmful as ignorance of other cultures. Having been socialized here, most of us have naturally internalized the unspoken rules for interacting with each other. Things like how we do eye contact, handshakes, speaking volume, personal space, etc. But by and large Americans don’t consciously understand American protocol, or possess the capacity to explain it. Obviously no one culture invented manners, when different peoples act politely our styles of being polite vary from culture to culture and from sub-culture to sub-culture.
Why would our way of doing things offer inherent advantages? Similar to how English evolved not just from one language but several, so too has our culture evolved having been influenced by a wide variety of sources.
The Phoenicians developed a superior system of writing. Instead of using signs and pictographs to represent words and syllables as the Mesopotamians or Egyptians used, the Phoenicians streamlined their written language by using twenty two letters to spell out all the words in the Phoenician language. This efficient system of writing was passed onto the Greeks. It is from the Greek alphabet that the Roman system of writing originated, the same alphabet that English uses today.