Pretty exciting title huh? I thought about entitling this post “Why silly liberal college professors should stop pretending to like underground hip-hop, Indian dance, and obscure subtitled movies from Mongolia and Thailand out of a sense of moral superiority and distrusting the rectitude of those who don’t share their enthusiasm and instead try to build up the steam-rolled mainstream American culture that produces drivel like Twilight, Two and a Half Men, and Miley Cyrus today when it used to put forth works like Absalom, Absalom! and Huck Finn, and artists like Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Hank Williams, and Johnny Cash,” but the present title seemed more succinct somehow, punchier. – You may have noticed that all the cultural products given as positive examples are from the South, while for the moment it is enough to note with pride (assuming you’re Southern) that all the most natural examples of American excellence in these fields happen to be from the South – the only that could perhaps be added would be Moby Dick, Dylan, and Elvis (who was also from the South of course), it is important that the examples are local I think, but more on that later. (Also as much I like, say, Fleet Foxes or Iron & Wine for example, it will be interesting to see how they hold up over time; survival to posterity is broadly a meritocracy although there are always some good things that slip through the cracks.)
Despite all possible appearances to the contrary, this will not be a takedown of multiple cultures; it will be a takedown of the culture of multiculturalism that values diversity as an end in itself. Rather being broadly catholic in taste and accepting the products of a given culture on the basis of merit, many seem to value these products of other cultures simply for their exotic nature – proof above all else that the multiculturalist is not a racist. This comes, I think to the heart of the problem: multiculturalism identifies the physical or intellectual products of a culture so completely with the members of said culture that rejection of the products constitutes a rejection of the culture’s members (e.g. accusations that musical critics who dislike rap are therefore racist). Thus their support for the products of a minority culture becomes a moral act, lending to them the cachet of an insider finding exotic products to astound their friends with and the moral superiority of being globally conscious and broadly accepting. The actual members of the culture, the concrete individuals, the images of God, are secondary to their cultural products; they are not valued in themselves for those things which unite the two (producer and, unfortunately, what can only be described as consumer), but rather they are valued simply for their diversity, instead of their excellence. Excellence is of course diverse in nature, it seems because God has willed it so (in sharp contrast to the popular conception of faceless cherubs sitting on identical clouds strumming non-descriptly on their harps, it is Hell that, as Lewis writes in The Great Divorce is the “grey town”). In some ways it is the multiculturalist who is more susceptible to a type of racism (or culturalism, if that, despite spell check’s testimony to the contrary, is a word), patronizing others for diversity’s sake regardless of their merit. It is quite possible to dislike the entire production of a culture while still loving individual members of it. As a Christian this goes from the realm of possibility to that of a command to “love thy neighbor”, though this does not, I assume, preclude discriminating taste in music.
This multiculturalism is, I think, more a Northern phenomenon than a Southern one. The North has always had a voracious appetite for other cultures it seems, eating up anything to fill the void within itself. An example may help say for example you were set up on two blind dates the first girl is described to you as, “your typical Southern belle, from Savanna, Georgia,” the second as, “your typical girl from Branson, Missouri.” Which one was easier to picture? Which would you feel more comfortable meeting now, knowing what you do? The upshot is that it is difficult to imagine the stereotypical Northerner. Would it have made any difference in your picture of the second girl if she was instead from Iowa, New Hampshire, Oregon? Lacking any real sense of a cultural identity, the Yankee has taken to identifying with many cultures, eclecticism being the humanizing aspect as it is all nominally run through the consumer’s taste. The person thus becomes identified through their stuff, rather than producing culture from their own identity, resulting in turn in superficiality when the consumer tries to turn producer themselves. It is only it seems the minority, that because of their differences from the prevailing culture can identify themselves, that is capable of producing lasting cultural products. One can talk for example of the Harlem renascence or that of the South, or praise the Jewish literature of such authors as Chaim Potok or Saul Bellow (the former I have read and heartily recommend, the latter I haven’t, but have heard good things and invite you, dear reader, to go read him and tell me if I’m missing something), but the Great White North has produced no such movements. The problem with the South is that bright, bustling Atlanta and oil-and-space rich Houston have replaced old seedy New Orleans and the (formerly at least) insane denizens of South Carolina and Charleston as the leading cities of the New South, more reconciled and lest distinct than the South has ever been in its history. This creates two possible solutions, manifesting themselves as symptoms of a common disease: one either accepts his places, feels alienated and rootless, and stocks up on cultural products wherever he may find them, or else embraces the relics of Southern culture root and branch, often stressing the parts most controversial and least accepted by the rest of the country as primary to distinguish himself all the more clearly from the rest of the country (e.g. the Rebel flag). Lying back behind all this is the intuition that the prime days of the South have passed by and that either an anachronistic, sometimes belligerent self-imposed exile to the mythic past or an uneasy acceptance of the shallow present are the only viable options left.
All this said, no culture is monolithic and one must talk of Southern cultures as seen in the earlier example of perhaps the two most outstanding Southern musicians (excluding Delta bluesman like Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters who might also merit a place) Louis Armstrong and Hank Williams who came from quite different contexts but nevertheless can both be considered Southern. Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles releasing albums of country music or Johnny Cash covering old blues songs serve as good examples of what from the outside appear to be cross-cultural exchanges but to their practitioners seemed natural. Ideally this would still be true and locality would be the determining factor in culture, but media technology has progressed to the point where this is no longer the case. In music for instance, the lack of local DJs (in the old sense of people on the radio selecting the music, not folks doing funny things with turntables) and the shriveling local music scene (related to the lack of local radio) mean that individuals are no longer limited in their access to music by location. Splintered locals, uprooted from any tie to their soil, form virtual communities around their tastes, but it is unclear yet if such communities will be able to produce a coherent style in the same way local ones have in the past (e.g. Dixieland jazz or the 60s and 70s New Orleans funk of Dr. John and the Meters). Multiculturalism seems to me to be an enemy of this, pursuing eclecticism and globalism at the expense of depth and a local culture. At its extreme end, diversity becomes an end in itself, not a natural product of excellence in its many forms. Inter-cultural borrowing is a very natural process, but without a coherent culture of one’s own by which others may be understood, superficiality is the only possible outcome
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