There certainly shouldn't be anything wrong with celebrating Anglophone cultural heritage, or the accomplishments of Anglo civilization. And there certainly isn't anything wrong with examining what caused the Anglosphere to become preeminent, the best virtues that helped shape its success.

Where I feel the article fails is in somehow presuming that the former led to the latter. Despite the author's protests of being triumphalist, the article comes off as praising the Anglosphere as an almost unqualified success, and it makes it sound like there is something inherently greater about Anglosphere culture. He mentions many good things that were formative to its rule of law and regard for liberty- and ignores those accomplished by contemporaneous civilizations- the Althing, the Golden Liberty of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Declaration of the Rights of Man. (Oh, sure, he pays lip service to the Swiss, the Dutch, and the Scandinavians- why not the rest of the Low Countries as well?- but should they be discounted simply because their nations and empires were smaller? What makes the Anglosphere greater, its culture better, than those other countries with a long tradition for respect for the rule of law and personal liberty?)

Maybe my disagreement comes from viewing history as a complex system, easily altered with a few tweaks here and there- call it the Sid Meier Model of History. What the Anglophones achieved was great. But they weren't the only ones to achieve it. And they needn't be the only ones to achieve it.

The way I see it, if we were living a couple of millennia ago, we'd be saying the same about Rome. And with good cause. The Roman Empire was glorious. It was a pinnacle of human civilization. But there is always a pinnacle at some point. They come and go, and are not intrinsic to any one culture, nor one people. Success is created as much by luck as it is by culture or people. Perhaps if some battles had happened differently, we'd be remembering Carthage as the great classical empire. Or, had things not fallen apart as terribly as it did in the Revolution, we'd be praising the achievements of the modern Francosphere. Roll the dice, and some other civilization succeeds, not because of their intrinsic greatness, but because there has to be someone at the top. Someone with the most rule of law, the most democratic institutions. The Anglosphere (and the Swiss, and the Swedes, and the Dutch...) won because of their unique set of circumstances, their roll.

(As much as this author tries to bring up parts of the British Empire to show that he's not praising the West as a people or a culture but instead a concept, it's unconvincing. The five core nations of the Anglosphere are made up of Britain, America, and the White Dominions. India's democratic success is not quite at the same level. Singapore is very rich and has a strong rule of law, but is very undemocratic.)

My conclusion is not to bury the Anglosphere's legacy, but neither is it to praise it without reservations. We should certainly take what is good from its history. But we shouldn't pretend that it is exceptional; if we do that, we pretend only one culture is capable of its success. We discount the victories of other civilizations. (We also ignore that perhaps liberal democracy isn't the true end of history- perhaps some alternate government model may in fact arise and be even better for standard of living.) We forget that the Anglosphere is just as human as any other ball. Like Rome, thousands of years from now Anglo-American culture will show its influence from one end of the Solar System to another. But some other pinnacle will exist just the same.

And at the same time, as the Romans said, we should also never forget: Memento mori.