Culture, Plurality, and Identity in the 21st Century

Culture, Plurality, and Identity in the 21st Century

William L. Benzon

Abstract: These five essays deal are about separating the concept of culture from that of geo-political identity. They make two points: 1) Such terms as "French culture", "Egyptian culture", "Oriental culture", and so forth are geo-political concepts that no more identify KINDS of culture than such terms as "African wildlife", "Pennsylvanian wildlife", and "Japanese wildlife" identify KINDS of animals. 2) Social groups have systems of identification that are parts of the group culture, but that the identification systems of nation-states and religions tend to appropriate all of culture to themselves and thus obsure our thinking on these issues.

Introduction: Separating Culture from Identity .................................................................. 1 Is American Culture Western? The Case from Music ........................................................ 4 Beyond Oppositional Trickeration: A Just-So Story .......................................................... 8 Politics Beyond the Personal: Diversity, Identitarian Rhetoric, and Equality .................. 15 Michaels and Religion: Can’t We All Get Along? ........................................................... 24 American Wildlife and Culture ......................................................................................... 27

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Introduction: Separating Culture from Identity

We are a nation primarily because we think we are a nation. This ground we have buried our dead in for so long is the only ground most of us have ever stood upon. . . . Most of

our people are remarkably merciful to Africa, when you consider how Africa has used us. --Hannah Nelson, in J. L. Gwaltney, Drylongso

My intellectual life has been dominated by an interest in culture, an interest I have pursued through the study of certain kinds of expressive culture—literary texts, music, films, graffiti, the close examination of a few examples, e.g. “Kubla Khan,” and Apoclaypse Now, and the study of cultural evolution. The question of culture’s nature—what it is and how it works—is a deep and curious one and one that has now become particularly acute for me. On the one hand, my investigation of metaphysical pluralism has brought culture to the fore through the most preliminary of essays into aesthetics and ethics.1 It has become clear to me, as I will explain in another essay, that cultural relativism is central to a pluralistic ethics. A bit more concretely, I am considering writing a book on animated feature films that will include considerable discussion of Disney’s Fantasia.2 I have already argued that that film is an expression of a transnational cultural formation that has emerged in the 20th Century. To the extent that we identify the notion of culture with that of nation—an identification that is quite common in even the most sophisticated of circles—that transnational culture can’t be anything other than American capitalism and its transnational extension must therefore be cultural imperialism, including jazz, rock and roll, blue jeans and McDonald’s hamburgers. If, however, the identification of cultures with nations is deeply problematic, then my argument can take a different turn. Maybe Fantasia, with its European music and imagery derived from European painting, really IS transnational. Maybe. I’m not going to argue these two matters—pluralistic ethics and Fantasia as cultural expression—here and now. I bring them up only to indicate why I find it important to cut the almost reflexive link we make between nations and cultures, a link that treats American culture, Western culture, Swiss culture, Philippine culture, Indian culture, and African culture all as distinct kinds of culture.

The Concept of Culture There is a sense in which culture was discovered in the 20th Century. Depending on your taste in such matters, culture emerged in the world with the evolution of songbirds, or perhaps with apes and monkeys, but certainly with the emergence of sapiens in the genus homo. And human culture can be differentiated from animal culture by its abundance and fecundity; it feeds on and outdoes itself. It is human culture that these essays address. I mean culture, of course, in the anthropological sense, not the ordinary sense. In the ordinary sense, “culture” is taken to mean the “finer things,” things the appreciation of which will raise one above the common rabble, things like season tickets to the opera, a knowledge of the great European novels, the ability to tell a Rembrandt from a Frans Hals from a Vermeer, an appreciation of fine wine, and so forth. All those things are, yes, elements of culture. But culture in the anthropological sense consists of beliefs, practices, customs, and artifacts people. All humans have culture in that sense. 1 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2012/11/unity-of-being-2-choosing-life-ways.html 2 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/11/disneys-fantasia-as-masterpiece.html

But thinking about culture in THAT sense is difficult. It is such thinking that I have in mind when I say that culture was discovered in the 20th Century. For it is in the 20th Century that anthropology came into its own as an intellectual discipline and, in particular, it is 20th Century anthropology that gave birth to the idea of cultural relativism. The central figure here is the American anthropologist, Franz Boas, who saw each culture as a collection of

unique adaptations to their own particular circumstances. And this was precisely how Boas viewed various societies. Each was a unique adaptation to a unique and particular set of circumstances. When Boas applied this to anthropology he introduced the principle of "cultural relativism". The idea that each culture was the product of a unique and particular history, and not merely generated by race and environment, was another important contribution by Boas.3

As such, other cultures are not to be judged by the standards of the anthropologist’s own culture. In time, alas, this idea has transformed into an anything-goes relativism, that all values are relative and therefore nothing matters. That’s the notion of cultural relativism that dominated the so-called culture wars that broke out in American politics in the last quarter of the 20th century.4 Those wars confused cultural practices with national identity, a confusion that had been lurking around all along. That confusion is inherent in such usages as “American culture,” “Japanese culture,” “Western culture,” and so forth, usages that identify culture either with nations or with groups of nations. Three of the essays in this collection deal with this confusion, the first two and the last: Is American Culture Western?: The Case from Music; Beyond Oppositional Trickeration: Europe Invents Itself; and American Wildlife and Culture. My point is a simple one: Such terms as French culture, Egyptian culture, Oriental culture, and so forth are geo-political concepts that no more identify KINDS of culture than such terms as African wildlife, Pennsylvanian wildlife, and Japanese wildlife identify KINDS of animals. There are many different kinds of animals in Japan and there are many different kinds of cultural formations in Egypt.

The Plurality of Identification The other two essays look at how sophisticated academic discourse, in this case that of Walter Benn Michaels, is confused and incoherent on the question of culture. Both are contributions to a symposium that The Valve held on Michaels’s book, The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (Metropolitan Books, 2006).5 In the first of those two pieces—Politics Beyond the Personal: Diversity, Identitarian Rhetoric, and Equality—I simply argue that Michaels, by using the notion of identity employed in those culture wars, is himself guilty of confusing culture with nationhood. At the end of that piece I offer Charlie Keil’s notion of layered identity, in which people, in fact, identify themselves with different cultural formations, each activated in a particular social setting. In the second piece—Michaels and Religion: Can’t We All Get Along?—I argue that he makes a related mistake with religion. He treats religion and culture as different and opposable things, rather than treating religion as an aspect of culture, which it certainly is. That is, to treat religion as a locus of identification, Michaels has to treat it as a formation that is parallel to culture, which he is also treating as a locus of identification. In so doing he tends to lose sight of concrete cultural practices, which don’t necessarily line up with identifications. It seems to me that what’s going on is that we—Americans, Europeans, Trobriand Islanders, all of us in at least one way, many of us in several ways—we have specific cultural practices of identification. One such set of practices is linked to the complex mass of mythology, symbolism, and customs associated with the national state. To become an American one must participate in these 3 http://www.nndb.com/people/861/000097570/ 4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war#United_States_of_America 5 http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/archive_asc/C50

practices. That set of beliefs includes a belief that America is different from all other nations in various ways; this is American exceptionalism. This set of beliefs opposes “the American way” to other national ways—and opposition is important in these practices of identification, a point I argue at length in the oppositional trickeration piece. One is American as opposed to Russian or French or Chinese. But one is also Protestant as opposed to Roman Catholic, and Christian as opposed to Moslem, for religions too have their rituals and systems of identification. And so do fraternities and sororities of all types. All kinds of groups and societies have their identification apparatus. But the identification practices of nation states and of religions tends to get coupled into politics in such a way that they dominate other systems and, by corralling the concept of culture, tends to confuse our thinking about culture. We can no longer tolerate such confusion. What are the practical limits of peoples willingness and ability to accommodate beliefs and practices which are different from their own? The answer to that question sets limits on practical politics. On the evidence of what people actually do and have done, I don’t think that we an unbounded capacity to accommodate different cultural formations. Nor do I think or even wish that we had such unbounded capacity. We have the biological capacity to live according to widely varying Life Ways, ways that on some points will be mutually exclusive. Just as 21st Century politics is going to have to come to terms with global climate change, it is going to have to come to terms with cultural difference. Our lives dependent on it, so it’s time we get it right, in both cases. But these essays only address one of those cases, that of culture.

Is American Culture Western? The Case from Music Sometime between ten and twenty years ago I was casually chatting with David Hays, friend, colleague, and mentor, and asked, “in what sense is American culture a kind of Western culture? What are the general features that mark a culture as Western and what special features distinguish American culture from other varieties of Western culture, say Canadian, or Italian, or Finnish?” He thought the questions rather peculiar, as did I. That’s why I asked them. And yet we talk about things like Western culture and African culture and Oriental culture and Mexican and Indonesian culture as though they are meaningful designations. We certainly endow them with a heavy burden of geopolitical meaning. But I’m not at all sure they’re meaningful categories for cultural analysis. I rather suspect that, as they’re currently used, they’re useless; whether they can be made descriptively and analytically meaningful, I don’t know. My thinking on this issue is bound up with my efforts to understand the role of African American music in America’s musical culture, but it has more general implications. Here’s a short piece I first published to the web over a decade ago in Meanderings.

If African-American Music Isn't Western, What is It

and Who are We? Western culture began to fall apart on me when I decided to write about the impact of African-American musical culture on American music. It is clear that African-American music owes a substantial debt to Africa. It is also clear that African-American music has had a dominating influence on American music in general. By applying a familiar syllogistic mechanism to those propositions one can see that American music is indebted to Africa. That it is, in some measure, African. So far so good. However, music is not an autonomous cultural process or product. It expresses the values, attitudes, and strategies of the society in which it functions. Thus behind the question of the relationship between African musical culture and American musical culture is the larger and more general question of the relationship between African culture and American culture. If, through African-American music, African music has been driving American music, then is it also the case the African culture has been driving American culture? And if that is the case, how far has the process gone? Given that African cultures are not Western cultures, has the process gone so far that American culture should no longer be considered Western? Just how much African culture can American culture absorb before it ceases to be fundamentally Western in nature? Let us begin with the relatively concrete question of whether or not African-American music is Western music. Some authorities clearly think it is. Thus, in Music of the Common Tongue (1987), Christopher Small (p. 4) asserts that

...the Afro-American tradition is the major music of the west in the twentieth century, of far greater significance than those remnants of the great European classical tradition that are to be heard today in the concert halls and opera houses of the industrial world, east and west.

Small will go on to argue that African-American music carries values which are at odds with the dehumanizing industrial cast of European and American society and that those values are good and important. More recently, and from a more conservative location in the political universe, Marsha Bayles has also claimed Afro-American music for the West (Hole in Our Soul, 1994 p.22):

I realize that a great many musicians and writers will reject the proposition that Afro-American music is an idiom of Western music, on the grounds that it is, root and branch, totally "black," meaning African. This attitude is usually called "cultural nationalism," but I prefer to call it "cultural separatism," because, instead of Affirming Afro-American music by sharing it with the world, it takes a jealously proprietary stance.

Bayles will go on to argue that the virtues which African-American music has brought to the world are being threatened by decadence which began at the turn of the century and has become frightfully pervasive in our own time. Both recognize that African-American music is quite different from classical music and European folk musics in its devices and emotional tenor. But neither of them see this as a reason for thinking the music is not Western. I find this situation most curious. For it seems to me that if Western music is defined in such a way that it is home to both Ludwig van Beethoven (19th C. European classical) and Charlie Parker (African-American, bebop jazz) , to J. S. Bach (18th C. European classical) and Bessie Smith (African-American, blues), then it is not entirely clear to me whether or not Western music should not also encompass the sitar playing of Ravi Shankar (North Indian classical) and the singing of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (Sufi devotional song from Pakistan) as well. And if we admit them into the fold, can any music reasonably be excluded? But what purpose (beyond that old devil, cultural imperialism) could possibly be served by a conceptual scheme which sees much, perhaps most, possibly even all, of the world's music as Western? We need to think about just what is going on when we make such classifications, a very tricky business. To that end, let's step back a minute and imagine that we are Martian ethnomusicologists. Our electronic devices have detected music from all the Earth's cultures but somehow have failed to pick up any other information. So, we have recordings of a great deal of music and no information whatsoever about where exactly that music came from or whatever else is going on there. We know the beings producing this music must have some kind of culture, but the music itself is all we know about those cultures. We know nothing about the geographical distribution and history of those cultures. Our job is to listen to all this music and develop a classification system. How likely is it that we will place the music of Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart into the same class? Not very likely. What about the music of Mozart and Hayden? Yes. And that of Ellington and William "Count" Basie? Again, yes. Ravi Shankar and Ellington? No. Ravi Shankar and Mozart? And again, no. By making such comparisons it seems to me that a Martian ethnomusicologist would be likely, at some given level in the taxonomy, to put Ravi Shankar in one category, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in another category, Yacub Addy (traditional music of the Ga people in Ghana) in another, Mozart in a category different from the first three, and Ellington in a category different from the first three. It seems very unlikely, however, that Ellington and Mozart would end up in the same category, even one different form the other three. They would be in different categories from one another. Now, in making these judgments I am imagining that Martian ethnologists would classify music on the basis of its techniques and devices. A classification system which says that a Beethoven composition and a Charlie Parker improvisation are the same kind of thing is going to have difficulty excluding much of the music which heretofore had been regarded as non-Western. These two musics have a very different rhythmic feel, and differ in the degree to which they emphasize rhythmic elaboration. They also differ in the scales they employ, their characteristic forms of ornamentation, their harmonic techniques, and large-scale structural devices. If we then assert the Beethoven's choice of scale pitches represents the same musical principle as Parker's choices, we may well have to include Ravi Shankar's

choice of scale pitches in this same class. Either that, or decide that our classification system will not attempt to be a rational one. But a classification system which is arbitrary has no conceptual value; it tells us nothing about the world. If the world is, in fact, a random confluence of forces and events, then an arbitrary classification system will do just fine. But if the world were so arbitrary, we wouldn't be here trying to puzzle out its order. What we want of a classification system is that it places similar things into the same category and dissimilar things into different categories, that it recognize what philosophers call natural kinds). Let's consider perfectly ordinary "folk" classification of animals. Dogs, cats, cows, and giraffes are similar in that they have four limbs (and walk over land on them), a head and a tail, and are covered in fur; call them "beasts". Hummingbirds, vultures, wrens, and parrots are covered with feathers, have two legs, two wings (which they use for air transport), a head and a tail; call them "birds". Birds are different from beasts and we expect that any animal classified as a beast will resemble other beasts more than it resembles any bird. In this classification system bats are a bit problematic: Are they flying beasts or fur-covered birds? Such cases are annoying, but annoyance is OK as long as it doesn't become a way of life. When the number of annoying cases is considerably less than the number of obvious ones we can live with it. Only when the number of annoying cases gets to be rather large must we begin to question the logic of the classification system. Now consider a classification of animals that has parrots and giraffes in the same class; call them borogoves. Are vultures and dogs borogoves as well? What if it turns out that while vultures and gnats are to be considered borogoves, dogs, wombats, hummingbirds and wrens are considered to be toves? Thus we have:

BOROGOVES: parrots, giraffes, vultures, gnats TOVES: dogs, wombats, hummingbirds, wrens

What is the difference between a tove and a borogove? What do all toves have in common? What do all borogoves have in common? What is the rational principle behind this classification system? Perhaps it is not too difficult to find one–I leave that as an exercise for the reader. But, can that principle, whatever it is, be reasonably extended to cover the same domain as that covered by beasts and birds and do half as well? That is the kind of problem we invite when we include J. S. Bach and Thelonius Monk within the fold of Western music while trying to exclude Ravi Shankar. I do not think that Ravi Shankar's music, excellent though it is, should be included in Western music. It's devices are too different. By the same reasoning, I think Thelonius Monk should be excluded from Western music as well. This all seems obvious enough and yet it seems not to have occurred to Christopher Small, Marsha Bayles, and, probably to many others as well. Since I don't know either of them I am in no position to say just why such reasoning has not occurred to them. But I would guess it hasn't occurred to them because they take the concepts of "the West" and "Western Culture" at face value. We all know what the Western nations are and what Western Culture is and that is that. As the United States is a Western nation, and African-American music originated within that Western nation, it follows that African-American music is Western. If we think about it a bit we may even conclude that the chain of reasoning I have just characterized as "obvious enough" is at least as odd as it is obvious. For that chain of reasoning treats the concept of Western Culture like a taxonomic category in biological classification. As such, "Western Culture" would surely be a high-level taxonomic category covering various lower-level categories such as "French", "Canadian", "Swedish", "Greek" and "Portuguese." While that seems true enough, it also seems strange. We may think of Greece and Canada as Western nations, but we don't really think of their cultures as being varieties of Western culture in the way that oak and ginkgo are varieties of tree. We think of trees as having certain properties--brownish trunks, a branching structure, greenish leaves, and so forth--and oak and ginkgo possess those general

properties plus differentiating properties specific to each, a particular shade and texture of bark, a particular range of branch angles, leaves of a certain color and shape, and so forth (this is inheritance in the sense discussed in the next section). We do not generally, however, think of Western culture as having certain general properties while Greek and Canadian culture have those general properties plus specific differentiating properties. This situation gets odder when we realize that biological taxonomy implies genetic relationships. To think of Western culture as being analogous to a higher-level biological taxon would thus imply that French, Canadian, Swedish, Greek, and Portuguese culture are all descended from the same ancestral "proto-Western" culture. What would that ancestral culture be? That question seems deeply odd. Those cultures are surely Western cultures, but we don't really think of them as descending from a common ancestor. Certainly, they have been subject to common historical forces, but that is not the same thing has having a common ancestor. So, where does this leave us? It is tempting to treat this issue as mere semantics. Having recognized a linguistic problem, we isolate it, agree to use various words and concepts more carefully, and the problem disappears. In the case of African-American music we could, for example, agree to give it sui generis status, suggesting that it has so thoroughly absorbed and transformed its various Western and African sources that it cannot be subordinated to either of those sources. I rather like this approach; I would be willing to argue it in considerable detail; and I suspect that Small could live with it, for the substance of his arguments--who played what music and when, the values inherent in this music or that, and so forth--don't much depend on the specific scope of Western Culture. Nor does Bayles's argument. However, she seems more committed to an ideological identification with something she calls, in common parlance, the West, and might have trouble with the notion that the music she so loves is not Western. And she would certainly have difficulty with my suggestion that American culture, in general, is no longer Western, though that suggestion, whatever it implies about where the culture has come from and where it might be going, obviously doesn't change the principles and practices of the culture. It is Bayles's ideological commitment to "the West" that is troublesome, though, of course, it is not just Bayles's ideological commitment that I'm concerned about. the current "culture wars" about cultural canons, curriculum content, the evils and vicissitudes of Eurocentricity, and the multitude of other X -centricities (where "X" is a variable standing for some ethnic group) which accompany multi-culturalism, assume cultural essences which are treated as though they are carried in the blood. These commitments have force in the mundane world where they influence what is taught to our children, how people and their representatives vote, and, in too many cases, who bears arms against whom. These culture wars are serious business. But if "the West" proves to be, upon further analysis, a shaky notion, then are these wars about anything at all or are these folks fighting simply because they need to fight? If we aren't Western, then what are we? Has the West already retired from the historical stage without having the decency to inform us?

Beyond Oppositional Trickeration: A Just-So Story White folks weren’t always white. By this I don’t mean only that, like everyone else, their ancestors were from the African continent. That is true, but we don’t really know what that signifies colorwise. The fact is, we don’t know what colors the original humans were. All we know about them is what we can deduce from some bones, pot shards, flaked stone tools and weapons, remains of fires and other assorted bits and pieces of stuff. None of this speaks to the issue of color. They might have been mocha java, hazelnut, lion tawny, watermelon pink, eggplant purple, lilac lavender, tulip red or speckled striped blued and tattooed. Who knows. I’d like to think that, in fact, their color was like Satchel Paige’s age:

What color would you be if you didn’t know what color you was? That’s what color I am.

And this brings us back to the question of white folks and their color. There was a time when they were the same color as the rest of humanity, no color and all colors. They changed all that during their Renaissance, a word which, you may recall, means rebirth. They rebirthed themselves and came out Christian, European, and white. This essay is about identity, about how Europeans created their collective identity, and how African America responded in kind. Needless to say it’s about time for us to move beyond the pale and into the multi-hued savanna of new civilizations. It’s time for some African American leadership.

STANDARD DISCLAIMER: In this essay I follow a ubiquitous, if not universal, convention of talking about black and white, African American and European American, and so forth, as though these terms have simple and obvious meanings, as though they designate homogeneous and mutually impervious groups. I know better than that and so do you, so please, don’t start dogging either one of us on that score until you get far enough into this piece to see where it’s going.

Home & Identity Who and what we think we are, our identity, starts at home and in the neighborhood. We are the children of our parents, the grandchildren of their parents, we are brothers & sisters to our siblings, and them to us; we are parents of our children & grandparents of theirs, aunts & uncles to the children of our siblings, and cousins to the children of our parents’ siblings. We are friends or enemies to those who live near us, and to those who live near them. These relatives and neighbors are the people we relate to. We share meals with them, sleep under the same roof with them, play on the streets or lawns or fields or vacant lots with them, work with them to keep the neighborhood safe and clean. We quarrel with them and make up as well. They are involved in our lives, we in theirs. All these relationships we have with them, in blood and in acquaintance, in amity and enmity, that variegated web is our identity. Or, more precisely, that’s where our identity begins. And, for some people, that’s about all there is to it. People living in so-called primitive cultures don’t do much traveling, or, if they do, the travel tends to be confined to established routes. Children don’t go to school, where they might hook up with

children from other neighborhoods. Adults don’t have jobs in the sense that adults in our culture do. Young girls grow up to become women and do whatever it is that women do in that culture and young boys become men and do men’s things. Neither enter into a work world that brings them a set of social relationships beyond those of family and neighborhood. Many people in more advanced cultures lead similarly circumscribed lives. Lots of people in many times and places have lived very circumscribed lives and their sense of identity is similarly circumscribed. At heart we too are like that. We live in a world made by the people we know and interact with. However, we do go to schools which widen our world beyond our immediate neighborhood and later on we take jobs and thereby gain a wider circle of acquaintance. Some of us may serve in the military, and that helps broaden our experience. Beyond this direct experience there is the world we come to know though the mass media, TV, magazines, newspapers, radio, and through education. This broader experiential reach requires changes in our identity. For we must orient ourselves to that whole range of experience we have access to beyond our immediate family and neighborhood. Very little of these broadening institutions and media existed as the European peoples began to pull themselves out of the Dark Ages. At that time those peoples lived very local, very circumscribed lives. What we need to understand is just how those very provincial people came to think of themselves as European, as white. Where did they get the experience which forced such identification on them?

Oppositional Trickeration: Europe Invents Itself The European Dark Ages were, as the name implies, dark. The Roman Empire had fallen through a combination of over-extension and internal sloth and complacency and, with the major exception of Moorish Spain, most of the European tribes collapsed into barbarism. Few people had any identity beyond their local village or town. No one thought of themselves as French or Italian or German or Swiss or English and so forth, for those polities didn’t exist, not even in the imagination of ambitious aristocrats. No one thought of themselves as European. Europe was just a name on a map and not many could afford to own a map or had any use for one. However, many people did think of themselves as Christian. While those various tribespeople didn’t simply give up on their own religious beliefs, a good many of them did become Christian and manage some compromise between Christianity and their beliefs in Faeries and Norns and such pagan creatures. As John Hale notes in his recent account of The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, threads of Christianity crisscrossed the continent and formed the basis of the 1st identification which linked people beyond the 5 or 10 square miles which defined their daily routines. As the decades ticked off these various peoples began to think of themselves as Christendom. Christianity is deeply imbued with oppositional spirit. The ancient Hebrews were nomads and captives. They had no homeland to which they could attach an identity. Instead, they took their identity from a jealous god who forbad that they put other gods before him, who promised to lead them, his chosen people, to a new land. Christianity began as a reform movement within Judaism, with the holy man, Jesus of Nazareth, tossing the money-changers out of the temple and urging resistance against those leaders who urged compliance with the Romans. Christianity is a religion of resistance, of opposition. Thus it was inevitable that European Christians, especially the nobility, saw themselves in opposition to the infidels, primarily the Islamic peoples who held sway in Spain and around the eastern end of the Mediterranean sea. Christian peoples of Europe traded with these folks, warred with them, were more than a bit taken aback at the superiority of Islamic civilization to their own, and managed to recover some of the ancient Greek and Roman past through contact with these more civilized folk. Out of this rich range of contacts and interactions came the so-called Renaissance, the rebirth of ancient learning on European soil. These peoples began to forge nations, god-fearing Christian nations. Then came the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. Christendom was now irrevocably shattered. European

peoples thus found it easier to think of their difference from others as matter of being European rather than being Christian. Protestants and Catholics may have had grave doubts about one another’s Christianity, but they were sure that they were European. As we continue on, we need to keep these two things in mind:

1. These various European civilizations were hybrid creations, drawing on accomplishments of a wide range of peoples in Africa and Asia in addition to various indigenous European cultures.

2. The concept of Europe is inherently oppositional. Part of the point of being European is that one is not a savage, barbarian, infidel, one is not dark-skinned. One is white.

Europeans used their navigational and naval technology to travel to the ends of the earth where their military technology helped them subdue the peoples they encountered. Wherever they went they worked hard at maintaining a sense of difference from other peoples. And not only of difference, but of moral superiority. However much they were fascinated by and desired the spices of India, the silks of China, however much they admired the noble savages of the New World, they insisted on difference-from and superiority-to. Europeans invented their whiteness to justify their imperial activities. The fact that these people, for the most part, were able to succeed in this far-flung enterprise suggests that their sense of superiority was no mere ethnocentric illusion. Their technology, on the whole, was superior to that of other civilizations, and their methods of social organization more effective in large-scale economic and military enterprises. But, whatever justification it may have had, their sense of superiority had destructive underpinnings. As sociologist Talcott Parsons noted in his classic 1947 article on “Certain Primary Sources and Patterns of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World,” Europeans project many of their aggressive impulses onto other peoples so that, in attempting to dominate those peoples, they are, in a psychological sense, attempting to attain mastery over themselves. By defining “European-ness” in opposition to other cultural identities in which they secretly hid part of themselves, Europeans yoked themselves to the never-ending task of conquering other peoples. Because the European psyche cannot take responsibility for its own actions it cannot find satisfaction for its desires. No matter how thoroughly it may dominate others, that domination brings no final satisfaction because it rests on a debilitating fabrication. At this point the mechanisms of European identity have gone beyond the simple oppositionality inherent in the Judeo/Christian tradition. Now oppositionality has become psychological trickeration. The European rebirthing enterprise required tremendous emotional repression. Some poured their repressed emotional energy into work—I’m reminded of Max Weber’s classic study of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—while others turned their repressed emotional energies against people of other nations and, above all, of other races. Europeans came to punish others for their own sins. Imperial domination and economic exploitation become intertwined with the need for self-control and discipline, a confusion documented in great detail in Peter Gay’s The Cultivation of Hatred. For the white man, taming “brutal savages” became a defense against the brutality of the savage elements in his own heart. The weakness of this oppositional psychology becomes evident in a recent statement made by Mario Cuomo, ex-governor of New York, in The New York Times Magazine (March 19, 1995):

The Second World War as the last time that this country believed in anything profoundly, any great single cause. What was it? They were evil; we were good. That was Tojo, that was that S.O.B. Hitler, that was Mussolini, that bum. They struck at us in the middle of the night, those sneaks. We are good, they are bad. Let’s all get together, we said, and we creamed them. We started from way behind. We found strength in this common commitment, this commonality, community, family, the idea of coming together was best served in my lifetime in the Second World War.

This is an extraordinary statement by an astute politician, uttered with no apparent sense of irony. What kind of dissension afflicts this American family if it can find deep unity only in battle with an external enemy? What happens to that unity when the enemy is defeated or simply collapses? The mechanisms of oppositional trickeration became became intensified in the United States of America where advanced ideals of democracy and universality came into conflict with chattel slavery, and with the cultures of African peoples. The enslaved black population served many Americans as an “internal” enemy against which they could unite. Blacks also served as a standard of comparison against which “whiteness” could be defined and elaborated.

Made in America In Playing in the Dark, a set of essays on race in American literature, Toni Morrison is led

to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature . . . are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence. . . . Through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, through the way writers peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence—one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness.

That is to say, the sense of American identity embodied in our literature is at least partially achieved through reference to African Americans. While literature is not the whole of a culture, it is not a trivial bit of decoration on the national cake. Literature has historically proved to be one of the means through which a people forges a national identity. Racial matters have certainly been important in American literature. Early on we have James Fennimore Cooper’s fascination with Native Americans. In the middle of the 19th century Harriet Beecher Stowe would write a book which was second in sales only to the Bible; that book was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. That book was so influential that Abraham Lincoln referred to her as the woman who started the Civil War. Characters and scenes from the book became a central part of popular culture and they were played over and over again in the minstrel shows and later on in early movies. Late in the century Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would move to center stage in the national consciousness. Coming into the 20th century movies and radio become important entertainment vehicles and race figures deeply in those media. Is it any accident that the first major feature-length movie was a racist myth about the white South, The Birth of A Nation? Is it any accident that people would schedule their day around a radio show in which a pair of white men imitating black men named Amos and Andy? It is not simply a matter of literature; it is the whole culture. Whatever else has had the attention of the White American Mind, that Mind has always been concerned with matters of color. For some reason it was easier to define white identity in opposition to black identity than to define an identity independently of color. Part of the reason, no doubt, is to be found in the diversity of the white immigrant population, a diversity which increased considerably in this century as large numbers of people migrated from southern and eastern Europe. Whatever differences they may have had with one another, whatever problems more established Americans may have had with them, they were all white, as in NOT black, NOT slaves or the descendants of slaves. Deeper even than this, though, is the emotional trickery inherent in the deepest forms of racism, those which go beyond ignorant prejudice to active hatred. In this regard white Americans were more “fortunate” than the various European peoples, who either hated one another, which they did quite well, or hated the native peoples of far flung and distant colonies, a rather abstract hatred, one not so abundant in its cruel satisfactions as hating African slaves who were under your thumb. Of course, the flip side of this emotional trickeration was the opportunity to learn from these Africans and their descendants. The culture of Britain was only weakly influenced by the cultures of India, the crown jewel in the British Empire. The French did not take the impress of those peoples they colonized in Africa. But America was deeply impressed with and by the cultures of those Africans they

enslaved. In America we had the widespread and intimate CULTURAL cross breeding of peoples from Europe and from Africa (as well as, of course, Native Americans, and Asians as well).

Freedom Over Me The various African peoples who were forced to come to the Americas underwent a process of identity formation similar to that undergone by Europeans & Americans as they discovered themselves to be white. The original slaves were not generic Africans. They were women and men of the Akan, Ga, Bantu, Fon, Wolof, Mandingo, Yoruba, Bakongo, Igbo peoples and many others. Only in America did they come to see themselves as Africans. Imagine that you are a first generation slave back in the early nineteenth century, born in Africa, whipped and beaten in transit, and worked in the fields of the New World. Being of philosophical mind you tried to make sense of your situation. You knew your name, and longed to hear it spoken by another of your people, someone calling you to a feast, a ceremony, perhaps a day in the fields or on a hunt, or just a friendly evening conversation. But Africa was fading fast, and with it the sound of your natal tongue, for you had no fellow tribesmen on the plantation. The other Africans all spoke strange tongues; African tongues, not European tongues, but still, strange. You also knew the name by which your owner and master called you, an even stranger tongue. This was a name you wanted to escape, it was not you, but it was being forced into you, even being whipped into your skin. So, who are you? Which name is real? How will you name your children? And who, in this New World, are your people? What is the name of your new tribe? In Africa your people were free and proud, a heritage generations deep, a heritage you could hear recounted by the griot. Here you would have to be your own griot. But what is a griot without a people? To accept this new land, these new people, you would have to accept your servitude. If you were an American, then you were a slave, hardly human, merely an Aristotelian featherless biped. To be a tribesman of America was thus hateful. That identity would deprive you of all human dignity and eliminate all hope for the future. You struggled to remain an African, to create a new African identity in this strange white world, to wear America as camouflage to protect you, however ineffectually, from your master's capricious whims and wants. But how would you protect your children? How would you give them African souls, teach them that their home was elsewhere, that America was just a shroud? Thus, through a process described by Sterling Stuckey in his study of Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America, the many different peoples of Africa discovered themselves to be Africans, as in NOT white, NOT of the Master’s race. Their need to survive in a situation of common oppression overcame whatever differences and antipathies their peoples may have had on the African continent. African Americans created a potent American subculture built around elements of African expressive and social practice transported transmuted transformed and transubstantiated into the New World. Unfortunately, an element of oppositional trickeration persists in some versions of African-American identity. The fact that African-Americans have been and continue to be the objects of racist bigotry does not justify nor extenuate black racism and anti-Semitism. And all too often Black Pride is created in part by putting a negative sign in front of the attitudes, practices, and accomplishments of self-styled Whiteness. As Cornel West notes in Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times:

. . . if you are concerned about the degradation of things African by Europeans, then you don’t simply want to degrade non-African things in order to make Africans look good. That would be imitating the worst of European civilization. If you are concerned about promoting mature forms of self-love and self-regard, it means that we have to come up with way [sic] of promoting self-love and self-regard without putting down others. And I think we have paradigms for that. Jazz is one paradigm. . . . you see Charlie Parker didn’t have to worry about whether he thought his music was linked to Africa, linked to monuments or linked to Europe. He just played his music and

people listened. Because it was building on a tradition that didn’t put whiteness on a pedestal, nor did it put whiteness in the gutter. He actually believed that white people were simply human beings like everybody else. You see, for oppressed people that is hard to admit. Because the propensity is to demonize or deify. If you have a narrow assimilationist position, then you deify. . . . the flip side is to put whiteness in the gutter . . .

As necessary as it is, the move toward a free and unfettered identity such as Dr. West calls for is more difficult in the implementing than in the suggesting. As long as white racism persists, blacks have no choice but to dig into the African mine to carve out new realms of black identity, a process Nelson George has discussed in his account of The Death of Rhythm & Blues. Like Tar Baby, oppositional trickeration is a sticky creature who ensnares all who contact it, willfully or by accident. The only way out of this quagmire is for both blacks and whites to help one another to end the creation of identity through oppositional trickeration. While I do not know how we are going to get there, I am sure that that is where we must go if we wish a better world for future generations. The world of oppositional trickeration cannot ever be one of peace.

What Can America Become? The question of American identity thus comes to a single choice:

Do we attempt to struggle on as the Western Division of Western Civilization (with Europe as the Eastern Division), or do we move decisively into a new cultural era, one in which Western Civilization recedes into history and leaves its finest achievements to the common good of human kind in consort with the finest achievements of other peoples?

It is clear that the majority sentiment is in favor of struggling on with “the West,” if only because the possibility of pushing the West into the dustbin of history has not been clearly articulated. It’s high time that we begin articulating that alternative, not as a fundamentally aggressive or destructive act, but as a creative act. For the for the majority sentiment is hopelessly misplaced. During the 1950s America was indeed the leader of Western civilization. Prosperity reigned, and so did Senator Joe McCarthy. America rebuilt Europe and engaged the Soviets in a Cold War. And Rosa Parks and Elvis Presley stepped into this triumphant oppositional trickeration and set forces in motion which would upset these best laid plans of mice and men. The Civil Rights movement once again called America to account for its racism. Rock and roll, like ragtime, blues, and jazz before, once again allowed some African magic to touch the souls of whites. From this came the counter-cultural chaos of the 60s only to be followed by the economic comeuppance of the 70s. The Arabs upped the price of oil and Japan took over a large part of the automobile market. Since then the pride and joy of the West has been dazed and confused, looking for a role to play in a world which will no longer be dominated by Europe and its ex-colonies. On these grounds alone an American continuation of the Western Dream has become implausible. To this we must add that, in point of ACTUAL PRACTICE if not IDEALISTIC PRINCIPLE, America-as-a-Western nation has not been kind to its Citizens of Color. It is time to move on. It is time to create a new national mythology, one in which the claims of African Americans and Native Americans and Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans are honored along with those of European Americans. For only in the context of such a mythology can we move beyond hyphenated identities. On this we must be absolutely clear. For it has often been argued in debates about multiculturalism that only the West has been able to create societies tolerant of dissent, that the very existence of such multicultural debates is a testimony to the strength of Western institutions. Yes,

America’s toleration of dissent has given more scope to oppositional voices than perhaps any other nation on earth. But, that is not good enough. Those ideals were founded in the European Enlightenment with its valorization of Reason. If human life were governed entirely by such Reason, racism would have disappeared long ago. The tragic fact of the matter is that the evils of oppositional trickeration have gone hand in hand with the pursuit of reason. They belong to the same culture, the same social mechanisms. It is time to count our winnings and our losses and move on to a new game. America is an unprecedented experiment in cross-cultural pollination. Our history is rich with material for such a mythology and, of course, many have begun the work of creating it. Just how, for example, will we rethink the herohood of Christopher Columbus? His voyage to America required imagination, courage, discipline and tenacity. It was an extraordinary achievement with extraordinary consequences. One of those extraordinary consequences was the decimation of Native Americans and the creation of an arena for enslaving African peoples. If America is to embrace all its peoples, then it must come to terms with such divided legacies. To do that it must come to terms with the tragic and liberating complexities of human nature. Perhaps the complexity of this diverse legacy is behind our current fascination with the trial of OJ Simpson. How is it that one man can be a great athlete, a winning and affable celebrity, a mediocre actor, and an abusive husband, both a symbol of human excellence and an example of human frailty? Which of those is the”real” OJ? The answer, of course, is that all of them are real. When we live in a culture in which it is a simple and routine matter to accept such division within ourselves, when we live in a society where an OJ Simpson can be tried with the privacy and dignity such a grave event requires, then we will have escaped the limitations of the Western imagination. Then we will be in a new world. We aren’t there yet. The question remains: Is that where we are headed, or are we going to lapse back into the worst barbarities of oppositional trickeration?

Politics Beyond the Personal: Diversity, Identitarian Rhetoric, and Equality

Note: This is one of several pieces that The Valve published in a multi-author examination of Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (Metropolitan Books, 2006). You can find all of the posts, and discussions of them, here: http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/archive_asc/C50

Prelude: Shantytowns Back in April of 2006 one Tylor Cowen published an article in Slate suggesting that shantytowns be constructed in post-Katrina New Orleans:

Since so many homes were destroyed, the natural inclination is to build safer or perhaps impregnable structures. But that is the wrong response. No one should or will rebuild or insure expensive homes on vulnerable ground, such as the devastated Ninth Ward. And it is impossible to make homes perfectly safe against every conceivable act of nature. Instead, the city should help create cheap housing by reducing legal restrictions on building quality, building safety, and required insurance. This means the Ninth Ward need not remain empty. Once the current ruined structures are razed, governmental authorities should make it possible for entrepreneurs to put up less-expensive buildings. Many of these will be serviceable, but not all will be pretty. We could call them structures with expected lives of less than 50 years. Or we could call them shacks.6

I haven’t given the matter much thought but, on the face of it, the suggestion seems worth considering. Cowan made the curious mistake, however, of concluding that piece with this fairytale:

To be sure, the shantytowns could bring socioeconomic costs. Yet crime, lack of safety, and racial tension were all features of New Orleans ex ante. The city has long thrived as more dangerous than average, more multicultural than average, and more precarious than average for the United States. And people who decide the cheap housing isn't safe enough will be free to look elsewhere—or remain in Utah with their insurance checks. Shantytowns might well be more creative than a dead city core. Some of the best Brazilian music came from the favelas of Salvador and Rio. The slums of Kingston, Jamaica, bred reggae. New Orleans experienced its greatest cultural blossoming in the early 20th century, when it was full of shanties. Low rents make it possible to live on a shoestring, while the population density blends cultural influences. Cheap real estate could make the city a desirable place for struggling artists to live. The cultural heyday of New Orleans lies in the past. Katrina rebuilding gives the city a chance to become an innovator once again.

While it is true that remarkable creative activity has managed to survive in unfortunate physical circumstances, I would think the proper view of this relationship is that creativity thus survived in spite of those circumstances, not because of them. Cowan’s disingenuous praise of creativity among the poor is an example of the kind of thinking that Walter Benn Michaels eviscerates in The Trouble with Diversity. The cultural creativity that sometimes manages to flourish amid poverty is, in Cowan’s view, somehow supposed to compensate for that poverty or to demonstrate somehow that poverty really isn’t such a bad thing. In Michaels’s view such thinking is self-serving rationalization. He is right to critique it.

6 http://www.slate.com/id/2140224/entry/2140206/

However, I’m not going to concentrate on the book’s main argument; I’ll leave that to my fellow bloggers at The Valve. I am concerned about the book’s very odd conclusion, which is about Michaels himself. In some entirely reasonable scheme of things, that conclusion is irrelevant to the argument – Michaels himself says so – but still, it is there, 12 pages all about Walter Benn Michaels in a 203 page book. Why?

As Miss Piggy Says: Moi Moi Moi Michaels begins his conclusion by climbing into the third person and telling us (p. 191):

Walter Benn Michaels teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He makes $175,000 a year. But he wants more; one of his motives for writing this book was the cash advance offered him by his publishers.

As it happens, that paragraph is the first thing I saw when I opened the book. I wasn’t intending to read the conclusion, the pages just happened to part there when I opened the book. So I began reading that paragraph and promptly splattered myself on the ceiling in anger and disgust: “another narcissistic mea culpa from an opportunistic pomo critic.” That’s what I was thinking. “And he’s bragging about his salary too,” which is quite high for a humanities professor, though it’s only martini money on Wall Street – something Michaels is at pains to point out. Once I had scraped myself off the ceiling and gathered my wits about me, I was puzzled. I associate such self indulgence with identity theorists, who seem to believe that a frank acknowledgment of their own positionality will magically insulate them from misconstruing the thoughts and actions of the Others about whom they write. But Michaels is not such an identitarian; he’s quite opposed to such thinking, and says so in this book (and others as well). Why is he making such a typically identitarian move? And, at 6% of the page count, in such an exaggerated form in such a prominent position, the end of the book? One possibility, of course, is misplaced vanity. That seems to be what University Diarist thinks:

He ran out of things to say but he had a book contract, so he’s filling up pages . . . with cultural self-flattery. In that particularly repellent mode UD calls KISS ME I’M HONEST. Says he’s got an enormous household income but wants much more because he wants to be the super-rich he envies in the pages of the NYT ... that the homeless guy outside his house pisses him off rather than inspires him to become Albert Schweitzer… that he thinks he has better taste than other people… When Michaels tells us, in a book about the economic greed, blindness, and insensitivity of American elites, that he himself’s an invidious grasping sort, it doesn’t humanize him or interestingly complicate the redistribution problem.... If indeed he “does not feel rich” even though he’s hugely affluent, one can only conclude that it’s because of people like Michaels that we’re in the cruel winner-take-all fix he himself deplores.7

I’m can’t go along with that final comment, but I certainly resonate to the KISS ME I’M HONEST branding. Yet, while I am quite willing to believe that academic superstars, such as Michaels, are sometimes prey to vanity and self indulgence, I have been unable to convince myself that Michaels wrote those final pages out of nothing but vanity. There is something else going on. Let us read a bit more (p. 191):

Some readers will be tempted to see a discrepancy between these facts and the arguments against economic inequality made in the preceding chapters. But they should remember that those arguments are true (if they are true) even if Michaels’s motives are bad, and they would be false (if they were false) even if his motives were good. Not to put too fine a point on it, the validity of the arguments does not depend on the virtue of the person making them.

I quite agree. So why doesn’t Michaels simply allow people to judge his ideas on their merits, free of any information about who he is, how much money he makes, that he is Jewish, or what he thinks about the

7 http://margaretsoltan.phenominet.com/2006/09/peculiarly-bifurcated-book-new-walter.html

homeless man he saw outside the window of his study? Why not simply present his arguments and be done with it? Consider the following passage by sociologist Robert Merton, from a 1945 article on “The Sociology of Knowledge” which is reprinted in his collection, Social Theory and Social Structure (Free Press 1957, p. 457):

With increasing social conflict, differences in the values, attitudes and modes of thought of groups develop to the point where there orientation which these groups previously had in common is overshadowed by incompatible differences. Not only do there develop distinct universes of discourse, but the existence of any one universe challenges the validity and legitimacy of the others. The co-existence of these conflicting perspectives and interpretations within the same society leads to an active and reciprocal distrust between groups. Within a context of distrust, one no longer inquires into the content of beliefs and assertions to determine whether they are valid or not, one no longer confronts the assertions with relevant evidence, but introduces an entirely new question: how does it happen that these views are maintained? Thought becomes functionalized; it is interpreted in terms of its psychological or economic or social or racial sources and functions.

Thus knowledge of a thinker’s position in society, his identity, will be used to discount the arguments he makes. The conditions Merton described in that mid-century article are certainly true of current intellectual life in America, both in the academy and in the larger civic sphere. Difference and distrust are rampant and any and all ideas can be interpreted as deceptive moves in a struggle for power and domination of one sort or another. Thus throughout Michaels’s career it has been common for literary scholars to discount arguments by reference to some hidden agenda of the person making the argument. This argument is capitalist, that one is paternalistic, that other one over there assumes white privilege, and so forth. These days psychoanalysis is anathema to one group of intellectual tribes while evolutionary psychology is anathema to another. Of intellectual cooties there is no end. One move in such a game is for a writer openly to declare his identity, his position in the matrix of potential discounting factors, in the name of openness and honesty. Identitarians do this all the time, especially when they are considering the work of people whose identity is different from their own. This is the context in which I wish to consider Michaels’s conclusion. It bears on his argument, not in a rational-deductive way, but in a rhetorical way. Rationally, the conclusion is irrelevant to the arguments in the body of his book. But rhetorically, that’s different. In the manner, however, of Laurence Sterne, I propose to progress through digression. Thus I will first consider, at some length, two examples of standard authorial positioning statements in identitarian contexts.

Other People’s Culture Let us begin with a casual example of authorial positioning, from an article in Krin Gabbard’s anthology, Jazz Among the Discourses (1995), one of a pair of anthologies arguing that “jazz has entered the mainstreams of the American academy” (p. 1). The general purpose of the anthology is to help ensure that this new discipline is in harmony with the latest developments in postmodern humanities scholarship. One Steven Elworth contributed a paper examining the critical transformation of jazz into an art music: “Jazz in Crisis, 1948—1958: Ideology and Representation.” In the course of his argument, Elworth offers this observation (p. 65):

The major paradox of all writing about culture is how to take seriously a culture not one’s own without reducing it to an ineffable Other. I do not wish to argue, of course, that one can only write of one’s own culture. In the contemporary moment of constant cultural transformation and commodification, even the definition of one’s own culture is exceedingly contradictory and problematic.

While the entire passage is worthy of comment, I want to consider only the first sentence: Just what “culture not one’s own” is Elworth talking about? Since this article is about jazz I assume that jazz culture

is what he’s talking about. While the jazz genealogy has strands extending variously to West Africa and Europe, has been and continues to be performed by Blacks and Whites, before audiences both Black and White – though, in the past, these have often been segmented into different venues, or different sections of the same venue – the music is conventionally considered to be Black. That convention is justified by the fact the music’s major creators have been overwhelmingly Black. Thus it follows that jazz culture is, as these conventions go, Black culture. That convention leads me to infer that Elworth is White. I do not have any hard evidence for this assumption; I’ve never met the man, I’ve seen no photographs, and the contributor’s blurb certainly doesn’t indicate race. But the same set of conventions that dictate that jazz is Black music also make it unlikely that any Black scholar would refer to jazz culture as “a culture not one’s own.” It follows that Elworth is White, or, at any rate, not-Black. I don’t know anything about Elworth beyond this article and a note indicating that, at the time of publication (1995), he was completing a doctorate at NYU. The fact that he is writing about jazz suggests that he likes it a great deal and knows more than a little about it. It is quite possible that he grew up in a house where folks listened to jazz on a regular basis. If not that, perhaps he discovered jazz while among friends or relatives and came to love it. He may also attend live performances, perhaps he is a weekend warrior, jamming with friends either privately or in public. He may well have been to weddings where a jazz band played the reception. He is comfortable with jazz; it is not exotic music. That is to say, it is unlikely that Elworth discovered jazz in some foreign land where no one speaks English, nor eats and dresses American style, nor knows anything of Mozart or Patsy Cline, among many others. Jazz is a routine and familiar part of Elworth’s life. So why doesn’t he think of it as his culture? Why must he caution himself (and us) against “reducing it to an ineffable Other.” On both counts the answer is the same: convention. The same set of conventions would require that Leontyne Price think of Puccini’s music as belonging to someone else’s culture, though she sings the music superbly, and may also require that a Black physicist – such as Shirley Jackson, currently president of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute – think of Newton and Einstein as belonging to someone else’s culture. On the other hand, I may claim both physicists for my culture despite the fact that I’ve not studied physics since high school and make no use of it in my professional life. These are the sort of conventions that Michaels has found severely wanting, and properly so. Still, however convincing Michaels’s argument is, I think it worthwhile to look a little deeper into Elworth’s curious, if utterly common and conventional, usage. While odd and incoherent, I don’t think Elworth’s usage is unintelligible.

Society, Culture, and Layered Identity Let us ask another question: What does Elworth’s love for jazz tell us about his circle of acquaintances? In my experience, nothing beyond the likelihood that some of them also like jazz. In particular, there is no particular reason to believe he has any Black friends, people with whom he breaks bread at home, and on holiday occasions. He may, and he may not. It is a signal fact of American social life, however, that music passes freely back and forth between different racial groups. But this movement of cultural artifacts and actions doesn’t necessarily forge bonds of personal friendship and commitment between individuals in those groups. And this too has a great deal to do with why politically self-conscious Whites, such as Elworth, think of jazz as the music of another culture. That sentence, however, might more accurate if we substituted “society” or “social group” for “culture.” For all practical purposes, the music Elworth routinely listens to is his culture, but it may not have originated in his social group. Some baggy-pantsed b-boy may never have heard of Louis Armstrong, but his grandmother may have grown-up with Armstrong or with Sidney Bechet or Earl Hines. Such links of acquaintance are likely to be weaker for Elworth, though he may know jazz

considerably better than most b-boys. The distinction I have just made between culture and society is one I’ve been making for years, though it is not mine. I learned it from my teacher, David Hays, and he learned it from his, Talcott Parsons. Society is a concrete network of relationships between people. Culture is a set of ideas, attitudes, and practices: what people speak, sing, believe, the cut of their clothes, and so forth and so on through a long list. The distinction is a bit strange if you are not used to it – it doesn’t play in Michaels’s discussion at all, which assumes a conception of culture that does not differentiate between a social group and its practices, attitudes and ideas – but it becomes comfortable enough through use. Now let us journey back in time to an earlier moment in the interaction between Blacks and Whites. Early in the seventeenth century, at about the same time Jamestown was being settled, Richard Jobson, an English sea captain, journeyed to the Gambia River area in what is now Senegal to explore its commercial potential. He subsequently published The Golden Trade or a Discovery of the River Gambra and the Golden Trade of the Aethiopians in which he observed: “There is without doubt no people on the earth more naturally affected to the sound of musicke than these people; which the principall persons do hold as an ornament of their state, so as when wee come to see them their musicke will seldom be wanting.” Jobson certainly belongs to a social group that is historically distant from those he observed and his culture differs from theirs as well. They are outsiders to one another’s societies and to one another’s cultures. A century and a half later, in 1755, the Rev. Samuel Davies heard slaves in Virginia and remarked that “Negroes above all the Human Species that I ever knew have an Ear for Musick, and a kind of extatic Delight in Psalmody; and there are no Books they learn so soon or take so much pleasure in, as those used in that heavenly part of Divine Worship.” And psalmody was certainly important to these colonists, many of whom were religious dissidents who saw in America an opportunity to create a perfect Christian community, a New Jerusalem free of European institutions. Here many White colonists and early Americans found a common cause with their Black brethren. For the religious practices those Africans carried with them were even more expressive and emotional than the sermons and conversions of revival Christianity. Anecdotal accounts of mixed-race camp meetings in the early nineteenth century suggest that the Whites were much influenced by the vigorous psalmody of the Blacks. Thus it was that the ecstatic techniques of African animism mingled with and helped to stabilize the ritual practice of large numbers of charismatic Christians. These practices then became standard among large numbers of Black and White Christians and fueled the revivals that have been a feature of American public culture for two centuries. This situation is quite different from Richard Dobson’s. Dobson lived in one social group, with its culture, and the Africans lived in different groups, each with its culture. These Black and White Americans lived in the same larger society, one, however, that was riven by divisions of region, race, ethnicity, class and caste. One result of this is that, whatever American culture was and is (and, as I discuss in other sections of this working paper) I have reservations about such notions as “American culture”), it has many variants that are local and specific to these different groups. One of the peculiarities of this cultural interaction between groups of Whites and Blacks is that southern Blacks were called on to play dance music for their masters, in European styles and on European instruments, while northern Whites began developing minstrelsy on Black models, based on their conception of what plantation life was like. By the middle of the nineteenth century minstrelsy was well on the way to becoming America’s first medium of mass entertainment. After the Civil War Black minstrel troops began traveling the country even as the Fisk Jubilee Singers toured America and Europe in triumph. Late in the century minstrelsy gave way to vaudeville and to Broadway. In the early twentieth century Blacks and Whites met in urban ballrooms where White dance and music adopted forms of Black sexual expressiveness. Thus we arrive at the Cotton Club in Harlem in the

1920s where Duke Ellington had a five-year run in which his so-called “jungle style” came to maturity. What is so very interesting and peculiar about this situation is that he developed that style before an audience that was exclusively White; society “swells” mixed with gangsters and the demimonde, who downed expensive drinks while watching all-but-naked “high yellow” chorus girls dance to Ellington’s pseudo-African jungle exoticism. The Club maintained a strict difference between the clientele and the talent, nor do we have much reason to believe that that segregation disappeared outside the club. We have one venue where people from two different social groups interacted under strictly controlled circumstances. The music pleased the clientele, otherwise they would not have been there, and we can only assume that it pleased Ellington and his musicians as well. If they thought of themselves as pandering to the unsophisticated tastes of a White audience none of them has ever, so far as I know, said so within hearing distance of a journalist or historian. In standard accounts of jazz history Ellington’s music of this period earns high praise. So, whose music is it? Which of the two social groups does it belong to, Black or White? Does it belong to the audience whose taste was satisfied and who paid the bills, or the musicians who provided that satisfaction? How do we talk about cultural praxis that “belongs to” two segregated social groups? Nor should we think that this peculiar situation is exclusively an American one. In their recent book and accompanying CD, Bright Balkan Morning: Romani Lives & the Power of Music in Greek Macedonia, Dick Blau, Charles & Angeliki Vellou Keil, and Steven Feld document a similar socio-cultural configuration in contemporary Greek Macedonia.8 There we have a social-cultural arrangement in which Romani musicians (aka Gypsies) provide live music for Greek celebrations of various types. The Romani are residentially segregated and occupationally segregated beyond their role as musicians. They work jobs that other Greeks do not want. Thus we have two cases – America and Greek Macedonia – where a segregated minority provides musical services for a more powerful and wealthier social group. Beyond this, Keil has argued that this particular situation is quite wide-spread. In case after case it is the Other People who have the coolest music, the funkiest grooves. It is by no means clear to me just what we must do to gain a deeper understanding of these structures and mechanisms. One thing we must do is take a deeper look at the complicated psycho-cultural dynamics of racism – I’ve taken a few steps in this direction in my “Music Making History: Africa Meets Europe in the United States of the Blues.”9 We also need to consider a more sophisticated approach to conceptualizing lived identity. In order to begin accounting for what he discovered in Macedonia, Charlie Keil has begun developing a notion of layered identity (Bright Balkan Morning, pp. 87-117). Reductive ideologies of national and ethnic identity do not and will not countenance the notion of multiple identities, but that does seem to be how many of us live. Returning to Elworth’s statement, I believe that, at least in part, his reference to jazz as other people’s music represents nothing more than a conventionalized White understanding of Black music as Other. This understanding is unrelated to the current state of “facts on the ground,” about how and where Elworth has come to know of jazz. That’s just how “we” think about these things. Note, however, that this mode of thinking implies that “we” conventionally locate something very private and personal, our response to certain music, in an Other. What happens to this identification as identity becomes more deeply politicized?

8 http://brightbalkanmorning.com/ & http://musicgrooves.org/articles/GroovologyAndMagic.pdf 9 http://ssrn.com/abstract=1678064

Expressive Politics Now let us examine a more elaborate example of authorial positioning, from Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place, by George Lipsitz. Before presenting that example, however, I want to tell you a little about Lipsitz’s book and to contrast it with another book, Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues. Lipsitz is interested in a range of musics generally marketed as “world beat.” These musics generally involve African-derived practices cross-bred with other musics, generally indigenous to a particular time and place. His book is 181 pages long and consists mostly of stories about musicians and their music. Most, but not all, of the musicians are people of color, many of them from third world countries. many of the stories are quite interesting. Thus we learn what Fela Kuta learned about Africa when he visited the USA, about how a Bob Marley tour of Australia galvanized aboriginal musicians, about how five black youths in Birmingham made a reggae video that got national play in the Britain and the USofA, about rai music in Northern Africa, and so forth. My guess is that 80% to 90% of the book’s prose is devoted to telling these stories, some only a paragraph or two long, some taking several pages. None of these stories, so far as I know, is fiction. None are told as mere entertainment. They are presented as truth, intended to tell us something about how music works in the world. If you are interested in this general subject – which I am – then I urge you to read this book. However, Lipsitz sets these stories in a pseudo-political framing that is intellectually worthless. As far as I tell, each and everyone of the stories in Dangerous Crossroads has the same meaning: capitalism and the West are evil, people of color and oppressed people are good; good is often successful in the battle with evil, but not often enough. That of course is a caricature. Lipsitz assumes a reader who knows about capitalism and Western imperialism and about the struggles of third world people to resist that evil. Lipsitz tells us that what they do is send messages encoded in the lyrics of songs and in the images of video tapes. He tells us something about those messages; he decodes them for us. But he tells us precious little about the music industry. He assumes we know that it is capitalist and, as such, is evil. I believe he mentions here and that that the recording industry is dominated by a small handful of large international companies —and he’s delighted that third-world musicians can sometimes use these companies as vehicle for their subversive messages. But he doesn’t tell us what they are, or how they came to dominate the industry. What is worse, he doesn’t even seem curious about or interested in such things. It is quite possible that he does not even cite a single book that has such information. One book he could cite is Nelson George’s The Death of Rhythm and Blues. As far as I can tell, George’s politics are leftist as well, but he doesn’t drop phrases about “supremacy of transnational capital” and “imperial capitals” as ways of indicating the source of evil in the world. While George has a moral perspective, it doesn’t seem so simple as Lipsitz’s. Like Lipsitz, George is interested in how Black musicians (and their fans) make their way in a world dominated by White folks and their economic interests. Unlike Lipsitz, however, George is very interested in how the music business works. That interest allows him to evade Lipsitz’s simple-minded morality play and provide us with information and insight into the music business. Thus George tells us about radio stations and the role of Black radio. He talks about specific DJs and their programs, about specific music representatives and how they related to DJs. He tells us about record deals, mergers and buyouts, market reports, business strategy. Where Lipsitz makes vague allusions about the ways of capital, George tells us who put up the money, how much, how long it lasted, and why the deal went sour. George actually knows a great deal about how the music industry works; he knows what has to happen to get capital to finance musical production, to identify markets and create

product that will sell in a market. He knows something about how capitalism actually works. It is not at all clear to me that Lipsitz does. On general principle I assume that he knows what capital is, what investment is, but he doesn’t seem to know that in any detail. The fact is, Lipsitz’s political framing is so simple-minded that he could eliminate it from his main text and write a short paragraph at the beginning stating his belief that capitalism is evil and oppressed people are good and that readers should interpret all his stories in that way. Given only that much, it would be relatively easy for readers to arrive at the appropriate interpretation of individual stories. Thus, where George discusses business arrangements in a way that is analytical and explanatory, Lipsitz is expressive in his treatment of similar matters. Lipsitz frames his stories as a way of expressing his solidarity with the oppressed and his hostility toward the oppressor – identified as capitalism. Lipsitz is expressing his identity where George, by contrast, is attempting to understand how the music business has functioned in its treatment of Black artists. Now we are ready to examine Lipsitz’s mea culpa and to see it as a consequence of his expressive framing (p. 64):

As author of this text, I know that my own Euro-American identity offers unearned privileges and imposes unpayable debts to aggrieved racial groups whose subjugation has underwritten my own privileges throughout my life. Yet, while it is impossible to speak from a position of purity, strategic anti-essentialism may enable us to understand how our identities have been constructed and at whose expense, as well as offering insights into how we can pay back the debts we incur as examples from others show us the way out of the little tyrannies of our own parochial and prejudiced backgrounds.

That is to say, Lipsitz sees his “Euro-American identity“ as being at odds with his implicit identification with the people and music he writes about, who stand “as examples [that] show us the way out of the little tyrannies of our own parochial and prejudiced backgrounds.” There is a conflict within himself and he feels that, in all honesty, the reader must know about it. Hence his confession. I’m skeptical. I prefer George’s genuine interest in economic arrangements to Lipsitz’s symbolic moralizing.

Good Guy or Gonif, Does it Matter? Let us now return to Michaels, and to his conclusion. How does it compare with Lipsitz’s mea culpa? There are three obvious points of comparison:

1) Michaels says considerably more about himself than Lipsitz does and devotes more space to saying it. 2) Michaels’s discussion is separated from the rest of the book into a section of its own, the conclusion. 3) Michaels discusses himself in the third person rather than the first.

Setting that first issue aside for the moment, the other two have the effect of distancing that authorial intrusion from the rest of the book. Let me suggest that what Michaels is doing is simply separating the personal (the book’s final section) from the political (the book’s main argument). As such he is reversing that venerable mantra from the 60s, “the personal is the political” (see also here). That mantra and the ideas associated with it, after all, is part and parcel of the identitarian politics that Michaels’ is critiquing. In staging his book in this way, Michaels is doing more than simply asserting that we must learn to separate the personal from the political. He is – to use a distinction from fiction writing 101 – showing us how to do it rather than simply telling us that it must be done. Let’s read a bit further into that conclusion. In discussing Lipsitz I noted that his mea culpa hinged upon a conflict between his identity as a professor (in a certain school in a certain society with a certain economic system) and his implicit identification with the people who make the (oppositional)

music he so loves. Since Michaels is arguing on behalf of the poor, does he demonstrate or betray any identification with them in his conclusion? No. In fact, Michaels rather pointed rejects such an identification (pp. 191-192):

During the summer in which most of this book was written, a homeless man lived in the railroad underpass Michaels can see out his study window. A more virtuous person might have been at least tempted to go down and bring him some breakfast or maybe even invite him in for a shower and a meal. It never occurred to Michaels to do either of these things. Mainly he wished the man would go away.

This does not put Michaels in a good light; Michaels obviously knows this and makes this small confession for just that reason. Michaels also knows, of course, that many of his readers have faced a similar situation and, in similar fashion, done nothing to help. Life is complicated and good people cannot and do not always help those in need. In writing those sentences, then, Michaels is simply stating an unpleasant truth, not only about himself, but about any of us. Still, it’s a truth that puts him in a bad light, and it comes shortly after he broke a taboo by revealing his income. Michaels concludes the paragraph:

And his desire for the man to just not be there does not contradict the argument of this book; it’s more like the motive for the argument of this book. The point is not that we should be nicer to the homeless; it’s that no one should be homeless.

Thus ends the first paragraph of “Conclusion: About the Author.” In so far as possible, Michaels has put the elimination of homelessness outside the sphere of the personal, of things that Walter Benn Michaels likes or dislikes. The elimination of homelessness is stated as an incontrovertible and impersonal good. It is not something for which Michaels argues in any direct or explicit way that I can see; he just flat-out states the no one should be homeless. Nor, as far as I can tell, does he explicitly argue that (extreme) economic inequality is bad. He believes it is bad, he has written this book to show how concern for diversity has diverted attention away inequality, but he hasn’t provided arguments on the matter. There are certainly people who would disagree with Michaels on this issue, but he does not seem interested in arguing with them. He simply wants to assert the need to give more political attention to inequality. Is mere assertion sufficient to his purpose? For Michaels intends this book “to help alter the political terrain of contemporary American intellectual life” (p. 7). It is one thing to argue that diversity is in the way, that it is being co-opted by regressive forces. But you still need specific policies and programs to move beyond diversity-mongering and move to toward greater equality. Michaels hasn’t provided these. In the end, I would have preferred for Michaels to conclude with an explicit defense of economic equality and with a coherent set of programs to achieve it. As Miriam Burstein has remarked, Michaels has written “a very English professor-y sort of book.”10 It is by no means clear to me that his demonstration of the separation of the personal from the political will have much effect on those – even the English professors – who remain entangled in the conflation of the two. That entanglement is willful. It is one thing to use an identitarian rhetorical strategy against itself. It is another thing to drop identitarian discourse entirely. Michaels has not quite done that. The only way to be free of it is simply to walk away.

10 http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/what_we_like/

Michaels and Religion: Can’t We All Get Along? Now that we’re going hot and heavy on religion [at The Valve], I’d like to take another look at Michaels, who devotes his 6th and penultimate chapter to “Religion in Politics: The Good News.” The news is good because, Michaels says, at last he has found something that cannot be assimilated to the identity engine. I don’t have a well-formed argument in mind. I just want to raise some issues.

Religion vs. Culture The first issue I want to raise is a rather pedantic one about the notion of culture that Michaels has been employing throughout the book. Consider this relatively early passage in the religion chapter. (p. 174):

Like ideological affiliation but more radically, religious identity is very different from racial or cultural identity. The big selling point of cultural identity (the selling point, really of the very idea of identity) is that cultures are essentially equal. That's what makes them different from classes, since classes are essentially unequal — they involve more or less money. And it makes them different from religions too, since if Christianity tells the truth, all other religions must be false.

I find this treatment of cultures and religions as different kinds of entities to be a bit odd. The oddity isn’t quite of Michaels’s own making – I do believe it to be inherent in the ideas Michaels is critiquing – but it is not clear to me why Michaels takes this at face value. I would think that most professional social scientists and humanists regard religion as itself a cultural phenomenon — at least in large part, for there is a great deal of speculation these days about possible biological roots for religion. That is to say, from the point of view of these intellectual specialists “culture” is a category that subsumes religion and so cannot be in conceptual parallel with it, as Michaels treats it. I understand that Michaels is not analyzing the concepts of professional intellectual specialists, that he is analyzing politically active concepts, but the fact that he nowhere even acknowledges this somewhat different notion of culture, not even in a footnote, bothers me. I note that, when intellectual professionals talk of culture in this way, so that religion is a facet of culture, they are also “standing outside” not only any particular culture, but outside of all cultures. Sometimes the stance of a hypothetical Martian anthropologist is invoked in this regard. I further note that, the concept of cultural relativism was originally an epistemological and methodological one.11 The idea was that you can’t understand another culture in terms of your own; you must understand it on its own terms. In taking this stance the intellectual professional is not, of course, called on to adjudicate the truth claims made within various cultures and stated as universal truths. Of course, the idea that professional intellectuals can “stand outside” has been called into doubt – an issue I’ve touched on in my earlier piece in this Michaels-fest (Politics Beyond the Personal). If you can’t stand outside, then cultural relativism makes no sense as an epistemological principle. It simply collapses into an ontological notion, that all cultures are somehow equal. So where is Michaels standing in The Trouble with Diversity? Is he attempting to stand outside the political field he is critiquing or is he critiquing it from within? It’s not clear to me what kind of issue this is, whether it matters, and how it bears on Michaels’s general treatment of religion. It’s all a muddle.

11 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_relativism

Belief and Practice Then there is the question that’s arisen in the discussion Adam Roberts initiated on Dawkins and Eagleton:12 What is the relationship between statements of belief and religious practice? This is also at issue in Alan Wolfe’s review in Slate:

Nor do all religions assign the same priority to belief as evangelical Christians do; observance, for some, is more important than belief, and so long as a society allows them to keep their strict observance, they can easily live together with others of different convictions. And even those who believe that Jesus is the way have come to accept that others can find God in other ways. Since Nostra Aetate (1965), the Vatican has worked assiduously to recognize the validity of Judaism to Jews, and the great bulk of American evangelicals, for all their talk of witnessing the faith, do not routinely tell their Hindu co-workers that they will burn in hell. In a world in which intermarriage is a fact of life and switching congregations hardly worthy of notice, religious diversity is an inescapable fact, not a logical impossibility.13

It does seem to me that Michaels concentrates on doctrine. Consider this long paragraph (p. 180): The problem, then, with thinking of religious diversity on the model of cultural diversity is that it turns what should be a debate about the validity of different religious beliefs into a consensus about their equal worth and thus obscures their relevance to public policy. It’s precisely religion’s claim to universality that makes what Neuhaus calls “religiously based public values” matter in American public life. By public, he means first that the religious component should not be privatized; can can’t think of someone’s faith the way Jefferson famously did when he remarked that “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” If my neighbor’s belief in God involves also, say, a belief that abortion is wrong, it does and it ought to affect me. It cannot be treated as a merely private fact about him, such as the fact that he likes Chinese food or opera. And by public, Neuhaus also means that the religious arguments made in the public or political sphere should themselves be what he calls “transsubjective.” “Public decisions,” he says, “must be made by arguments that are public in character. A public argument is transsubjective. It is not derived from sources of revelation or disposition that are essentially private and arbitrary.” Identities can be private – it really does do me no injury if my neighbor is black. Identities are not transsubjective – the things that make me who I am need not make anybody else who she is. But beliefs, Neuhaus rightly insists, are neither.

It is one thing to point out that competing claims to universal truth cannot all be true. At most, only one claim can be true, though it is quite possible that none of the competing claims is true. That is one thing. But it is not at all clear to me, given the kinds of examples that Wolfe has given, that the question of competing truth claims is the central political question. It is an issue, certainly, but it is not clear to me that it dominates the politics of religion. What are the practical limits of peoples willingness to accommodate competing beliefs and practices? I don’t think they are unbounded, nor should they be, but I don’t think we can determine those limits through logical examination of doctrine.

Fear of Fundies Finally, let us consider the specific context in which Michaels is arguing. Though he tends to make his arguments in universal terms, i.e. about truth claims of any and all religions, he isn’t arguing about politics in Japan or India or Brazil or France, for example. He’s concerned about politics in the United States. In that context, the religious right is the focal point of religion in politics. That religious right consists largely of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, mostly, but not entirely, Protestant.

12 http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/terry_eagletons_traditional_theology_and_a_new_version_of_pascals_wager/ 13 http://www.slate.com/id/2150826

I've got this vague impression that the fundamentalists and evangelists we (the progressive left) find so fearsome are, to some extent, a figment of our imaginations. For whatever reason, we prefer to demonize them rather than dialogue with them. This is not something I’m prepared to argue in detail, but I’ll offer an indication of what’s on my mind. Consider the following paragraphs from an article Malcolm Gladwell published last year, The Cellular Church:14

Not long ago, the sociologist Christian Smith decided to find out what American evangelicals mean when they say that they believe in a "Christian America." The phrase seems to suggest that evangelicals intend to erode the separation of church and state. But when Smith asked a representative sample of evangelicals to explain the meaning of the phrase, the most frequent explanation was that America was founded by people who sought religious liberty and worked to establish religious freedom. The second most frequent explanation offered was that a majority of Americans of earlier generations were sincere Christians, which, as Smith points out, is empirically true. Others said what they meant by a Christian nation was that the basic laws of American government reflected Christian principles—which sounds potentially theocratic, except that when Smith asked his respondents to specify what they meant by basic laws they came up with representative government and the balance of powers. "In other words," Smith writes, "the belief that America was once a Christian nation does not necessarily mean a commitment to making it a 'Christian' nation today, whatever that might mean. Some evangelicals do make this connection explicitly. But many discuss America's Christian heritage as a simple fact of history that they are not particularly interested in or optimistic about reclaiming. Further, some evangelicals think America never was a Christian nation; some think it still is; and others think it should not be a Christian nation, whether or not it was so in the past or is now." As Smith explored one issue after another with the evangelicals—gender equality, education, pluralism, and politics—he found the same scattershot pattern. The Republican Party may have been adept at winning the support of evangelical voters, but that affinity appears to be as much cultural as anything; the Party has learned to speak the evangelical language. Scratch the surface, and the appearance of homogeneity and ideological consistency disappears. Evangelicals want children to have the right to pray in school, for example, and they vote for conservative Republicans who support that right. But what do they mean by prayer? The New Testament's most left-liberal text, the Lord's Prayer—which, it should be pointed out, begins with a call for utopian social restructuring ("Thy will be done, On earth as it is in Heaven"), then welfare relief ("Give us this day our daily bread"), and then income redistribution ("Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors"). The evangelical movement isn't a movement, if you take movements to be characterized by a coherent philosophy, and that's hardly surprising when you think of the role that small groups have come to play in the evangelical religious experience. The answers that Smith got to his questions are the kind of answers you would expect from people who think most deeply about their faith and its implications on Tuesday night, or Wednesday, with five or six of their closest friends, and not Sunday morning, in the controlling hands of a pastor.

The entire article is worth reading.

14 http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_09_12_a_warren.html

American Wildlife and Culture I have previously argued (in Is American Culture Western?) that the notion of “Western culture” is unintelligible when considered as a term of cultural description and analysis. The term is ideological and finds its meaning in geopolitical struggles, not the study of culture. I feel much the same way about the phrase “American culture.” Such phrases, when employed to talk a general way about politics, society, and history, tend to designate some undifferentiated metaphysic substance. In one case that substance is associated with the West, but not Africa or the Orient. In the other case the substance is associated with the United States of America, but no other nation. I want to do a bit of thinking aloud and explore this matter by contrast that usage with a phrase such as “American wildlife.” That phrase simply designates the wildlife living in America. Given that America includes Alaska and Hawaii and some miscellaneous territories, the term's geographical range is ambiguous, but that is easily enough clarified in any given context. My point is that, whatever geographical range one specifies, the term does not imply that the wildlife species in question has some special essence that makes the species American. Some species are found only in America whiles others are found elsewhere. Whatever the case may be, we have a body of biological theory that allows us to understand the situation in terms of geography, climate, and history (both near-term, going back 500 or 1000 years, and deep, going back millions of years). Now, let us construe “American culture” as meaning simply the cultural practices taking place on American soil - however you wish to understand its geographic scope. Given the wide range of peoples who have migrated to America, it follows that there are a wide range of cultural practices taking place on American soil that cannot reasonably be considered American. Without even attempting to characterize those more specifically, let's just cross them off the list and go on to some less obvious cases. For example, consider the culture of 20th century physics. There's a lot of that in America, but the practice of physics is international in scope and it doesn't make much sense to identify it with any one nation. There may be more such physics practiced in the United States - as measured by, say number of Nobel Laureates, number of college and university physics departments, number of professional physicists, etc. - but that doesn't make physics peculiarly American. Local variants are likely to reflect the influence of specific individuals or institutions as much as, or more so, the influence of geo-political nationality. What about Christmas? It is certainly very important in American national life. Many businesses, for example, organize their business year around Christmas season and the appropriateness of Christmas ritual objects - e.g. a crèche - for display on certain public property is a matter of annual contention. But the holiday itself is not specifically American; it is Christian. And the specific customs associated with Christmas in modern America owe as much, if not more, to Victorian England15 than to America itself. By contrast, Thanksgiving is specifically American, as are a various civic holidays of which Independence Day, July 4th, is the most obvious. And then there is baseball, known as America's pastime16 since the late 19th century. The history of the game17 seems rather obscure, at least to the writers of the Wikipedia, but mostly English and

15 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas 16 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball 17 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_baseball

American. The first published rules of the game were written in 1845 by one Alexander Joy Cartwright for Manhattan club called the Knickerbockers. That's as convenient an originating point as any but no particular origin seems to justified privileged status. Like many things cultural, the game evolved over a period of time in many different places. The game is certainly important in America's sports ecology, but it is also important in Cuba, Korea, and Japan18 and has been played in those countries since the first half of the 19th century. That makes the game Cuban, Korean, and Japanese in a merely geographical sense, but in a cultural sense? Probably not. But is it culturally American and, if so, what characteristics make it American? Does it share those characteristics with, for example, American football? The answers to these questions are not so obvious. Let's consider one final example, the American novel. As a literary form, the novel is not specifically American. Just what it is, is a question I'll leave to those more expert in the subject than I am. And I'm pretty much going to do the same with the American novel. But, whatever it is that makes a novel American, it is not the birthplace of the novelist or where the novel was written, but what the novel is about and, perhaps, its style and manner. Characterizing those traits is not an easy business. At this point we have come rather a long way from the trite point that, to be a meaningful term in the analysis of culture, the phrase “American culture” has to be something more than, other than, a mere geographical qualifier. But it is not at all obvious to me just how to characterize this “more than,” this “other than.” It is difficult enough to characterize it in once fairly circumscribed case, the American novel. How would you characterize it in a fully general way? I do not have an answer to that question. What is worse, I suspect that it is the wrong kind of question to ask. But I am going to leave that for another day.

18 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_baseball_outside_the_United_States

Culture, Plurality, and Identity in the 21st Century

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