Our Time Honored Tradition of Cannibalism

For the next installment in my ongoing series in the exploration into the idea of “Culture,” I’m going to, instead, try to explore what Culture is not; or at least what inhibits Culture and its tangible manifestations: Art, Values, Traditions, etc. Sometimes a negative definition can be much more useful than a positive one because it is less definite—less constrictive and determinate; it can allow for a greater range of interpretations and positive creations to flow from it by not limiting its manifestations to a finite scale.

A good example of this would be the Bill of Rights—all of the Rights enumerated within it are defined in the negative:

-Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of Religion
-The Right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed
-The Right of the People…against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated
-Etc...

The absence of an explicitly expressed meaning of these laws allows for a great range of interpretation—which can be a good and bad thing—but, in fact, they do well to achieve exactly what they were conceived to do: provide for a broad basis for interpretation and enactment of what Freedom means to each unique Individual. They declare: You have the Right to not be forced, in this case by the Government, to do some something that is against your Conscience, but, in turn, also have the positive Right to create your world however you see fit (well as long as it doesn’t violate an-Other’s Right to do the same).

Sorry that was a bit of long tangent, but I think one that illustrates my initial point pretty well.

So, what is Culture not; or what, perhaps, inhibits the ability of Culture to flourish and to be a positive, active force in the world? Everyone today says that they respect Culture and thinks that it is an important aspect of the Human Condition; and just about everyone today also agrees that Human Values are relative to an Individual’s Culture—that they are Socially and Historically constructed—and that what is important is not so much the content of the Culture, but merely the fact that an Individual participates in one—which is what accounts for the beautiful diversity of the world.

The other day, I went to my local “Progressive/Alternative” Art museum to experience some “Culture.” They were having a presentation of an Afro-Brazilian/Samba-Reggae drumming group, called Batala Percussion Band—a 90% White, 100% Women troupe from DC. They played a very lively, all percussive style of music meant to make you move; to get up and dance; to shake off the shackles of Self-consciousness and really live!

A sizable group of about 75-100 people turned out for the event—mostly White, all Middle-Upper Middle Class, and if not White, at least fully immersed in the average American Life-style. The drumming-group came out to—what I can only generously call—a lukewarm round of applause from the gathered mass, after the group’s attractive, mid-20’s, White, female conductor’s introduction and explanation about what we were about to “experience.”

Before the group began playing we were warned by the conductor that the group’s drums could get “pretty loud,” and that we should all take our fingers and push that little flap on the outside of our ears in, so as not to damage our delicate eardrums. Maybe I just think about things too much—which, come to think of it, is undeniable—but this seemingly innocuous instruction sent my mind reeling down a path from which I could not divert throughout the rest of the performance.

What happens when one pushes the flaps into their ears? It dampens the sound; it creates a barrier between the receiver and the experience; it attenuates the sensual energy of the performance. And I realized that the “experience”—the occurrence, event or happening; the adventure, exploit or escapade—was not the point of the presentation to which I was attempting to experience. The point of the presentation was “Recognition”—in the political sense of the word: as in “Recognition of Rights.”

As I peered around the room, I noticed an evidently apparent lack of engagement from the audience. Despite the high level of energy emanating from our entertainers, there was a conspicuous absence of reciprocal transference from the audience back to the stage. Most people stood quite still, projecting an unaffected continence in both Body and Soul. After each song, there was an unenthusiastic, perfunctory round of applause, but little truly appreciative reaction.

I began wondering what accounted for this tepid participation. Why was the audience just not “feeling it”? What was the source of this evident disconnect between what this music should be invoking in the listener and what I was so apparently witnessing?

I believe the reason for this disconnect is that once you take a piece of “Culture,” remove it from its native context and so evidently present it as something that we should Self-consciously respect, the work is in turn robbed of all psychic and emotional power. Once you take it and place it in a museum it becomes dead—an interesting artifact, maybe, but it is ultimately stripped of its ability to “move” us. That is the problem with Tradition and Culture: once it becomes recognized simply as such, it no longer contains the power to inspire or create meaning for us. And even more so if the Cultural Artifact has no tangible connection to our History or Self.

This is the fundamental problem of the so-called “Culture Movement.” They are so caught up in feelings of Liberal Guilt and trying to right the wrongs of History that they have lost objectivity and cannot even see how inept their attempts to achieve this have become. The Recognition of Rights of formerly oppressed Minorities is the only goal—it doesn’t matter if they render the Cultural expressions meaningless, as long it is granted an equal presence in the public sphere; as long it makes you realize that your Culture is not special—instead just one of a plurality of Cultures all of equal worth.

And it’s not like I don’t get it, that I don’t understand the source of this Liberal Guilt or “feel bad” for what my “Culture” has done with its preeminence as a world power. Yes, White People have done some pretty awful things to People of Color for a very long time, all over the globe. I just think that Liberal Guilt is a useless, debilitating emotion: there is nothing you can do to change the Past, there is however plenty of things we can do to create a better Future—for Everyone. And as I have tried to get across in this post, the tactic that we currently employ to achieve this, I think, does just as much harm as it does good.

By forcing people to indiscriminately accept everything and “recognize” the fact that the world is made up of many, many different Cultures—all, by the way, with extremely conflicting concepts of the Good—will only result in the eventual inability to have any Cultures. What will happen when the rest of the world discovers Post-Modernity’s favorite little secret: that all basis for preference is nothing more than an accident of where you happened to be placed during the Lottery of Birth, which has no inherent value to it? That is what we—college educated Americans—now believe (unlike those backwards “Real Americans”).

Do we think that we are special—at some greater level of understanding of the Human Condition? Why is it not ok for those ignorant, prejudiced (as in based on opinion, not evidence) “Real Americans” to believe in their Culture, but it is for every other one? And, more importantly, I wonder if are we ever planning on eventually sharing that destructive little insight with all those foreign Cultures we now so valiantly try to protect?