In search of culture

Every so often in my life, particularly around major milestone events or holidays, I get kind of wistful and reflective. I’m not personally religious, and I was raised in a mostly secular household. On top of that, my personal heritage is a mixed bag, with many European countries represented, so I’m sort of generically white. (I’ve heard it referred to as “European mutt.”) All this adds up to mean that I don’t feel like I have many traditions or customs, nor do I feel like I have much of a cultural heritage.

A friend commented to me that this was “a typically American problem,” and I think he’s right. I love my country, I love what it stands for, and I love the life I have here. But I think there’s something about the nature of the United States that leaves me and others like me feeling this way. What do we think of when we talk about American culture? Fast food, Hollywood, clothing brands. When we talk about having or experiencing “culture,” we mean French or Italian opera, or Japanese theater. We mean the clothing and music and food traditional for peoples that are hundreds or even thousands of years old. Culture is something they have and we observe.

I think there’s a natural human instinct to characterize the world and one’s own perspective on it in terms of “people like us.” It allows simultaneously for the freedom of individuality (we are not like them, we are different) and for security in the collective (we are all together, living in our way). Obviously, this has had some extremely negative outcomes—hatred, oppression, genocide—but it also has some positive outcomes, such as personal pride and a sense of continuity, of belonging, of togetherness. It’s nice to be able to look back at history and say, “Look what great things my people have done! I come from that greatness!” and also say, “Look what I am doing, to bring honor to my people, and to improve the world our children will live in!”

To some extent, it’s possible to say such things about the United States, just as it’s possible to say some of this about humanity as a whole. But we don’t all look the same, or speak the same language, or believe the same things, or eat the same food, or listen to the same music, or have the same values and aspirations. In fact, this is what we have in common: we are all different. I am proud of that, of coming from a “melting pot” (or, if you will, a patchwork quilt or a beautiful mosaic). I’m glad that we can celebrate and learn from our differences. I’m glad our system of government enshrines rights which allow us to think and act differently from each other. However, that means that when I say, “I am an American,” I don’t feel that sense of “people like us” which I described above.

Part of the problem, I think, is that the customs I do have somehow seem less than adequate, as though they’re not good enough to “count.” I have traditional food and traditional dress! It’s things like turkey sandwiches and T-shirts, but why can’t that be my culture? Even as I protest this, I still have the sense that it’s true.

And maybe this is an inevitable consequence of living in the modern world, of faster and faster technology, of the nuclear family, of the age of reason. Many of the traditions that do “count” actually seem like mystical, ritual performance—hard to believe that anyone actually put (or puts) much stake in them. Still, probably for the same reason I like old typewriters and fountain pens, I find them beautiful.

So, every time I feel wistful for some tradition, I research some nationality or cultural group that makes up a statistically significant part of that long, hyphenated list I call my heritage. It’s always not really me, but just a piece of me… though maybe someday I’ll pick some parts of it to wear as my own.

What do you think? Have you experienced this? Or is this completely foreign to you?

June 8, 2009 · Written by
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Who can be my president?

I’ve been mulling over the proposal, from our friend Progressive Conservative, that we all take and publicize the Wendell Wilkie Pledge. He’s named it for the Republican presidential candidate who lost to Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. Wilkie’s “Loyal Opposition Speech” is a reminder that politics is about choosing the best policies rather than about personality clashes, and that one can continue to oppose a party’s or politician’s ideas while respecting the rule of law and authority of the office held. In his explanation of the pledge, he writes:

When we vote we are making a promise. A promise to honor the results. A promise to honor the office. A promise to claim the president as our own, even when we disagree with him most. That is the oath I ask you all to take. I urge you to accept the results of this election. Regardless of who you vote for in November, our country can only go forward if we give our new president our loyal support, though I am not asking anyone to blindly follow this President.

I like this idea very much, and I wish that I was writing this post to affirm my support for the pledge and call on others to join me. However, I think the circumstances of this election make that impossible for me to do. I personally support the Obama-Biden ticket, and I would of course honor the results even if the McCain-Palin ticket were to win instead, but I don’t think I could wholeheartedly refer to McCain as “my president” when he and his campaign have gone so far out of their way to specify that they are absolutely no such thing.

I confess: I’ve finished college, and I’m a graduate student. In physics. I don’t live in a tiny town in a landlocked state; I live in a big city, near a coast. (Horror of horrors — the one on the east!) I’m not a Christian. I don’t even believe in a god. Because I’m an educated, metropolitan, “East-coast liberal” atheist, John McCain and Sarah Palin are willing to demonize me and others like me in an attempt to win the votes of everyone else. Why should I pledge my loyal support to a ticket that charges me with the problems of our time?

This hateful rhetoric is not new to Palin, though she did recently refer explicitly to “real America” and “the pro-America parts” of the country. Her speech at the RNC was all about how small-town people are good people (and not-so-subtle implications that if you don’t meet the Mayberry R.F.D. stereotype, you don’t really love your country). I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the irony meter-breaking RNC speech delivered by Mitt Romney, who ripped on “Eastern elites” despite being one himself. Just recently, McCain campaign adviser Nancy Pfotenauer dismissed northern Virginia as not “real Virginia,” but merely infiltrated and contaminated by “Democrats [who] have just come in from the District of Columbia.” North Carolina representative Robin Hayes told a McCain rally that “liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God.” Today, McCain explained to NBC’s Brian Williams that the “elitists” live “in our nation’s capital and New York City.” (In the same interview, Palin pointed out that an elitist is anyone “who [thinks] that they’re better than anyone else,” which puts an interesting new twist on the concept of a political campaign.)

Can you imagine what would happen if Obama and Biden were campaigning in the same way? What if they repeatedly warned of what “conservatives from fly-over states” would do to the government? What if they promised to rid Washington of “Texas bigotry,” or “backwater Mississippi racism,” or “evangelical Christian ignorance?” What if when Republicans derisively referred to Obama’s Ivy League education, Democrats countered by pointing out that McCain graduated 894th of 899 in his college class, and that the best of the four colleges Palin transferred around between was the University of Idaho? I’d love to see each use of the adjective “latte-drinking” as an insult followed by a reminder that the McCain-Palin ticket is instead targeting the alcoholic demographic. Imagine if they argued, as Adam Cadre did not too long ago, that “Republican political ads spew insults — or at least epithets that Republicans think are insults — while Democrats hold out their hands and coo that ‘There is no them — there is only us.’ There’s a reason the guy who said that moved to New York after his presidency instead of back to Arkansas: New York is better than Arkansas.”

Of course, this would be outrageous. The media wouldn’t let the Democrats get away with a presidential campaign with that kind of language in it, and neither would the voters. Even though many of us do believe, deep down, that there’s something seriously wrong with states where creationism is taught in science classes, or where racial segregation is still the norm, or where everything from terrorism to hurricanes gets blamed on “the gays,” we believe that it would be both rude and unproductive to accuse everyone in an entire region of being blindingly ignorant or racist or bigoted as part of a campaign. A candidate willing to make such sweeping and divisive generalizations would be difficult to vote for, even if there were some truth behind them.

It feels like many eons ago now, but there was this time back in April when Obama, at a closed fundraiser event in California, commented that some Pennsylvanians were “bitter” about the government and the economy and as a result “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” It’s a reasonable characterization of what’s going on, and while it’s not something anyone would be happy to hear said about themselves, it doesn’t seem particularly vicious. I could even see it as sympathetic. But when his comments got out, the only words anyone remembered were “cling to guns and religion” which was interpreted to mean that Obama wants to repeal the Second Amendment and ban God. Obama backtracked, calling his statement “boneheaded.”

So then, why is it acceptable, even encouraged, for Republicans to make much worse comments in the opposite direction? I’ll set aside the obvious fallacy of assuming that everyone in New England is a liberal or that everyone in the Deep South is conservative. While that is insulting to our intelligence, it’s at least statistically likely to be true. My bigger problem here is with the divide between the supposedly good Americans and supposedly bad Americans. Republicans seem to think that the good Americans live in the small towns, with limited education, limited exposure to other countries or cultures or ways of life, and limited sobriety. They all work in manufacturing or construction or farming, and this is good, honest work. They all live in “real America,” the states or districts that are colored red on electoral maps. On the other hand, there are the bad Americans, who live in cities big enough to have more traffic lights than you can count on your fingers, tend to go to college and occasionally travel abroad, and have a wide variety of ethnic background and religious traditions. As a result of their college education, they have bad jobs in fields like law, journalism, or scientific research, which means they live in an elite Ivory Tower where they scheme about ways to ruin the lives of good Americans. Naturally, they do not live in “real America,” because their states or districts get colored in blue.

I wish I was making all this up. I wish I could honestly say that we can all get along, but I didn’t make this divide — I usually speak out against it. But when the demonization has gone so far that we appear to have a new Joe McCarthy in Congress, I think it’s gone beyond what I can handle in personal conversations. Republicans need to stop talking about who’s “pro-America” or “anti-America,” who lives in “real America” and who doesn’t. We all love our country; we just have different ideas on how to keep it great and make it better. If Republicans continue to characterize any and all opposing viewpoints as “anti-American,” I don’t see why anyone should be willing to be their “loyal opposition” providing respectful and reasoned debate. Unless John McCain and Sarah Palin suddenly decide to vehemently denounce this kind of rhetoric and seriously apologize for the tone of their campaign and the direction in which they’ve led their party, I just can’t see being able to call McCain “my president.”

October 23, 2008 · Written by
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Patriotism with a reason

I’ve been thinking about American patriotism, particularly my own.  (Blame July 4th.)  Americans are obviously very patriotic, especially compared to Europeans, Canadians, and others in what we would think of as similar countries.  I don’t believe in blind obedience to one’s country.  Maybe “because that’s where I’m from” is a good reason to root for a sports team, and some sort of superficial patriotism can be justified on that ground, but I think deeper patriotism really is irrational without a better reason.  There are a lot of things that cause people to be patriotic that I really think are horrible reasons for caring about the US, but I still feel very patriotic, and I’ve been thinking about what exactly makes me feel that way.  I would be very interested to hear what other people think of these, or what reasons you have.

First, let me eliminate some things from consideration.  There are a lot of good things about the US that aren’t particularly unique.  (It’s a democracy, capitalist, has a generally not corrupt government, and so on.)  These things are good, but inspire in me more a sense of general satisfaction than real pride.  There are also a huge number of admirable historic achievements.  These are quite impressive – first modern democracy, moon landing, arguably saving the world in both the second world war and the cold war, etc.  I don’t want to downplay these at all.  They’re huge.  Nevertheless, I’m really interested in what it is about the US as it exists today that makes me proud of my country, and “it did something great a couple decades ago” just doesn’t do it.

That said, there are a couple things (and I could easily be missing some) that I really am proud of.  One, overly generalized, is the level of rights given to our citizens.  For all the controversy over the Patriot Act and other moves in the opposite direction, the US still has much greater levels of civil liberties (broadly defined) than most places.  For example, take the amount of time someone can be held without charges.  In the US, it’s 48 hours.  In France, it’s 6 days.  In Ireland it’s 7.  Britain just extended it to 42 days (!!), though there are some extra safeguards after 28 and it’s very controversial.  Even with the deep impact of terrorism, the US remains judicious here.  (Good analysis here, hat tip to UK Liberty.)

Another good example is freedom of religion.  Many modern, liberal democracies still have established religions.  I have my problems with the Pledge of Allegiance, and there are plenty of current threats to this, but as it stands the US government is very separate from religious matters.  At the same time, the actions that many “secular” governments take around the world (think of things like headscarf bans in France, Germany, and Turkey) would be totally anathema to almost all Americans.  This is related to a larger point about social acceptance and a sense in which the government stays out of things in a good way.  While France bans headscarves, Britain is having a debate over allowing people to opt into Sharia law.  France and Canada use legislation to carefully protect the French language.  Other countries seem to be having a lot of difficulty with how to deal with this whole category of issues, while the US seems to have, for the most part, figured it out.  General laws and regulations apply to everyone, regardless of culture/religion, and the government generally stays out and lets assimilation occur on its own, gradually, like it should.

Probably the most important thing to me in this category is free speech and political participation.  The US respects a level of free speech unheard of in the rest of the world, where hate speech is routinely banned.  (The NYT had an excellent article on this.)  Extremist political parties are also frequently outlawed.  This seems utterly insane to me, but would surprise almost no one anywhere else in the world.  In most modern liberal democracies, there is a belief that there are some basic ground rules and foundational beliefs that you have to accept before engaging in political debate – things like the equality of all people and the support of democracy as a form of governance.  It’s not that Americans don’t believe in those things being supremely important.  It’s just that we don’t believe the way to deal with those who don’t agree is to silence them.  We let them speak and then outvote them.  This seems clearly better to me.  If those who think these crazy things are a small minority, letting them vote doesn’t hurt.  If they’re a majority, it just fails to make any sense.  The idea of a democracy governing a country where most are opposed to the rules of governance is self-contradictory.

I’ve also decided that I’m pretty proud of our foreign policy.  This is obviously going to be a controversial choice.  There is no shortage of stupid American foreign policy.  It’s important to remember, though, that after the Cold War the US was left as a superpower unrivaled by any other power on earth.  This won’t be the case forever.  Europe will unify, and China and India will grow.  For the time being, though, the US is really alone in this position.  The old “power corrupts” saying isn’t totally wrong.  A country with the power the US has will always tend a little towards the pushy side.  There will always be unnecessary wars.  They’re bad, but if they are wars against tyrannical dictators that then establish (or at least try to establish) democracies in their place, there’s at least a bit of silver lining.  If you really think having the US as a global superpower is awful, imagine what would have happened if the USSR had won the Cold War or a rising China supplants the US.  Extraordinary rendition would be the least of your concerns.  For all the shortcomings, I think the US has been a lot more responsible with it’s power than almost any other country on earth would have been.  It’s easy to say “Wouldn’t it be great if it was Sweden that had massive power?”, but that power would instantly transform Sweden into a somewhat different country.  Given all the corrupting influences and temptations that power has, I think the US has done a pretty good job remaining a responsible international player whose presence benefits the world.

There’s obviously a ton here.  Each thing I mentioned really is worthy of at least a full post on its own.  I’m also sure I missed some things.  Nevertheless, I think this is a reasonably good start.  I’d be curious to see what others think.

July 8, 2008 · Written by
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