Good point. I think a lot of a culture's attitude is based on cultural memory, which comes from lessons learned (or not) from history. Americans abroad are of

Good point. I think a lot of a culture's attitude is based on cultural memory, which comes from lessons learned (or not) from history. Americans abroad are often elbowed about how young their country is (ugh, I lived in Beijing and they always trot out 4000 years of Chinese civilization. Nevermind the CCP is only 80 years old), but what this means is relatively less cultural baggage. Americans have less cultural memory to look backwards at and reference (and a lot we see back there like destruction of Native Americans, black slavery, etc is painful to examine), so as a result Americans have no choice but to look forwards.