[A-List] Culture Death

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (July 18 2007)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


A few weeks ago, one of the readers of The Archdruid Report posted a
comment asking whether I thought the white race would survive the
decline and fall of industrial civilization. At the time I more or less
brushed the question aside; since "the white race" doesn't exist in the
first place, after all, speculating on its long-term survival makes
about as much sense as wondering whether unicorns will make the
endangered species list. In retrospect, though, my reader's question
deserved a more thoughtful answer. It remains true that "the white race"
is a cultural construction rather than a biological entity, and one that
has been used to justify far too many crimes to pass unchallenged.
Still, labels such as this one point toward critical issues of
collective identity that need to be taken into account in any attempt to
sense the shape of the future ahead of us.

The concept of race as a source of collective identity was itself the
product of an earlier age of crisis, and really can't be understood
apart from the rise and fall of the nation-state, arguably the most
distinctive social innovation of modern times. From the Peace of
Westphalia in 1648 to the wave of national revolutions that swept over
Europe exactly two centuries later in 1848, the great questions of
European cultural politics centered on the struggle of nation-states to
define themselves against local loyalties rooted in the old feudal
system, on the one hand, and participation in the transnational
community of Christendom on the other. People who grew up, as their
grandparents' grandparents did, thinking of themselves as Cornish or
Poitevin or Westphalian, on the one hand, and members of the universal
Body of Christ on the other, struggled to cope with a new social reality
that demanded that they think of themselves as English or French or German.

This was anything but a fast process, and it succeeded only where
certain specific circumstances fostered it. The nation-state as a source
of identity depends on a deliberate blurring of categories in which a
population, a culture, a language, and a system of government fuse in
the imagination into a single national entity. One of the consequences
of this category-blending is that very often, distinct populations,
cultures, and languages become gaming pieces in the struggles of local
and regional power centers to define and defend themselves against
national governments. Watch debates over the Welsh language in Great
Britain, for example, and you have a ringside seat for the struggle
between centralizing and decentralizing forces in British political
life. The notion of race had similar origins as members of multiethnic
societies tried to define their nations in ways that excluded their
economic or political rivals.

These issues have special relevance today, because the relative success
of the nation-state in seizing control of the imagination of identity in
the Western world has drawn most of its strength from the increasing
economic and political integration of Western nations over the last
three centuries, and this in turn has been inseparable from the rise of
an industrial economy powered by fossil fuels. It's not accidental that
Britain, the first nation-state to make the breakthrough to
industrialism, was also one of the first to form a coherent national
identity. The transportation networks that made industrialism work in
economic terms - first canals, then railroads, then highways - also made
it possible for national governments to extend their reach throughout
their territories in ways few previous societies ever managed.

The history of regional power in North America provides a good example
of this process at work. In 1861 it was still possible for many people
in the mostly agrarian South to think of themselves primarily as
Virginians or Georgians or Texans, and only secondarily as citizens of
the United States. Sixty years later, even the Ku Klux Klan had to
define its repellent goals as "100% Americanism" in order to find an
audience. In 1861, the North American railroad network was still in its
infancy, mostly concentrated in portions of the Northeast and Midwest.
By 1921 it blanketed the continent with one of the most successful
transportation systems in history, and was already being supplemented
with highways and airlanes. As transport expanded, so did the reach of
the federal government, and so did the focus of most Americans' sense of
identity.

It's been common enough for believers in the mythology of progress to
argue on this basis that national governments will soon go the way of
the feudal provinces and half-independent states that were swallowed up
by the growth of the nation-state. They would be right, too, if we could
count on an ever-increasing supply of the cheap abundant energy that
makes modern transportation networks function ... but we can't. The
peaking of world fossil fuel production promises exactly the opposite: a
future in which energy is neither cheap nor abundant, and economic
arrangements that require goods to be shipped halfway around the planet
as a matter of course become too costly to survive. Those who dream of a
unified world government and those who dread the prospect will both have
to find new targets for their respective hopes and fears, because the
sheer diseconomies of scale in a world of declining energy availability
make attempts at global government an exercise in futility.

Rather, as energy becomes scarcer and more expensive, transportation
networks that depend on vast amounts of inexpensive fuel will begin to
unravel, starting with the most extravagant and going from there. Air
travel will probably be the first to go, followed by the personal
automobile, while bus and truck traffic on the deteriorating highways
will likely continue long after cars have become one of the prerogatives
of the very rich. Those countries that still have viable railroad
systems will likely be able to maintain those long after the highways
are silent, and the networks of last resort, the canal systems that made
18th century industrialism work, remain viable in some European
countries and may just put a floor under the process of decline if their
value is recognized in time.

The United States, by contrast, scrapped most of a world-class rail
system in the third quarter of the 20th century, and only a few vestiges
of its early 19th century canal system still survive today. Once the
private car has become an anachronism and the energy costs of
long-distance trucking make local production of most goods a better
bargain, the economic glue that holds together a sprawling highway
network and the many industries necessary to maintain it faces rapid
dissolution. That same glue is most of what holds the United States
together as a nation-state, and its breakdown will likely see the
unraveling of the United States as a primary focus of our collective
identity. Just as the rapid growth of transportation links turned the
grandchildren of Virginians and Californians into Americans, the
disintegration of those same transportation links may well turn the
grandchildren of Americans into something else.

It's unlikely to turn them back into Virginians and Californians,
though, because the triumph of the nation-state in the 19th century was
followed, in the United States more than anywhere else in the world, by
the triumph of the market economy over culture. A faux culture designed
by marketing experts, produced in factories, and sold over the newly
invented mass media, elbowed aside the new and still fragile national
culture of the United States and then set to work on the regional and
local cultures this latter had only just begun to supplant. By the
second half of the 20th century, nearly all of the functions filled by
noneconomic culture in other societies were being filled by the market
in America, and increasingly in other Western countries as well. The
tunes people whistled, the recipes they cooked, the activities that
filled their leisure hours and the self-images that shaped their
thoughts and behavior no longer came out of such normal channels of
cultural transmission as family and community; they came out of the
market economy, with a price tag attached that was not denominated in
dollars alone.

The second half of the 20th century, in fact, saw the death of anything
that could reasonably be called American culture. Most examples of what
anthropologists call "culture death" have seen people beaten and starved
into relinquishing their traditional cultures; what the modern American
experience shows is that people can also be bribed by prosperity and
cajoled by advertising into doing the same thing. Granted, in a society
awash in cheap abundant energy, it's easier and cheaper to buy one's
culture ready-made from a store than to make the investments of time and
energy into family and community needed to maintain a living culture in
the true meaning of the word. Equally, in a society where "fashion"
driven by media campaigns takes the place of any less mercenary guiding
force, making traditional American cultures look as bad as possible was
just another bit of marketing. Think of the movie Deliverance, with its
likeably cosmopolitan heroes struggling to survive against the brutal
malevolence of backwoods villains, and the banjo riff that provided the
movie's leitmotif defining traditional American culture itself as a
hostile Other: that same message has flooded the American media for much
of a century.

Culture death is a traumatic experience, and I suspect that a great deal
of the shrill anger and maudlin self-pity that fills American society
these days has its roots in our unwillingness to face up to a trauma
that, in the final analysis, we have brought on ourselves. As the age of
cheap energy comes to an end, though, I suspect there are worse traumas
in store. A nation that has sold its own culture for a shiny plastic
counterfeit risks a double loss if that counterfeit pops like a soap
bubble in its collective hands. Equally, a people that has come to see
its role as that of passive consumer of culture, rather than active
maker and transmitter of culture, may have very few options left when
the supply of manufactured culture to consume runs out.

The impact of these dilemmas on our collective imagination of identity
is likely to be drastic as the manufactured culture of the present comes
apart. We are already seeing people in contemporary American society
turn to almost any resource you care to imagine in the search for some
anchor of group identity less transient than the whims of marketers;
religion has often filled its time-honored role in this regard, but so
have racial fantasies, sexual habits, apocalyptic social theories, and
much more. Nor is it hard to find Americans who are trying to redefine
themselves as members of some other culture, past, present, or imaginary
- speakers of Klingon or J R R Tolkien's Elvish languages, for example,
outnumber speakers of quite a few real languages. This is still a fringe
phenomenon, though much less so than it was twenty years ago; twenty
years from now, as the deindustrial age opens around us, they may impact
the social mainstream in ways impossible to predict in detail today.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/


http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com
http://www.ashisuto.co.jp