| Posted: 29 November 2006 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | 11
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Compliments of Neal Stephenson:
Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped into Orlando's civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia, and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while.
To traditional cultures, especially world-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords - multiculturalism and diversity - are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multi-culturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other - to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.
The lesson most people are taking home from the twentieth century is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on the globe (or even in a neighborhood), it is necessary for people to suspend judgement in tihs way. Hence (I would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility toward, all authority figures in modern culture. As David Foster Wallace has explained in his essay "E Unibus Pluram", this is the fundamental message of television; it is the message that people absorb, anyway, after they have steeped in our media long enough. It's not expressed in these highfalutin terms, or course. It comes through as the presumption that all authority figures - teachers, generals, cops, ministers, politicians - are hypocritical buffoons, and that hip jaded coolness is the only way to be.
The problem is that once you hace done away with the ability to make judgements as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor and being pumping bullets into Westerners. They perfectly understand the lesson of McCoy Air Force Base. When their sons come home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways, the dads go out of their minds.
The global anticulture that has been conveyed into every cranny of the world by television is a culture unto itself, and by the standards of great and ancient cultures like Islam and France, it seems grossly inferior, at least at first. The only good thing you can say about it is that it makes world wars and Holocausts less likely - and that is actually a pretty good thing!
The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than this global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And - again - perhaps the goal of all that is to make us feckless so we won't nuke each other.
Might be appropriate for this thread, might not.
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