The Death of Cultures

...Friedman and Annan might well feel that such a family displays exactly the future they hoped for on the first day of 2000...

...Both the multiculturalism of the Left and the "family values" of the Right are futile attempts to recapture a past that is gone forever...

...For how long will their descendants remain identifiably either Chinese or Jewish...

...FOR LARGE PARTS of the world, the intractable struggles engendered by different ethnic groups living in close proximity greatly outweigh the advantages...

...There were contests to see who could have the first baby of 2000, a competition in which, for obvious reasons...

...Being of Italian or Polish descent no longer offers much predictive value about a person's life, including whom that person will marry...

...BY all odds the most contentious questions raised by postculturalism have to do with formerly distinct ethnic groups that see their identities threatened and want to preserve or restore them...

...Yet admirable as the Schandler-Wongs undoubtedly are, their union raises in acute form the question of exactly what cultural heritage survives in such a merging of traditions...

...Millions of people watched parts of this program without attaching much geotheological significance to it...

...To begin with," he declared, "despite the rising dominance of American culture around the world, you couldn't help but delight in all these other cultures celebrating Y2K in their own unique costumes, with their own music and their own traditions...

...Although others received most of the credit for it, Keyes even helped shame Bob Jones University into abandoning its longstanding policy against interracial dating...

...I remembered that handy piece of folk wisdom back in January when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman celebrated what he called "The Spirit of Y2K...

...Not all traditional cultures were murderous toward outsiders...

...The Internet, whatever its impact as an organ of information, will no more obliterate well established cultures than the Latin language did in the Middle Ages, when it was the lingua franca of Catholic Europe...

...Similarly, although the Schandler-Wong children were given bar and bat mitzvahs, their commitment to Judaism, and their enthusiasm for their father's Chinese heritage, is inevitably a pick-and-choose procedure...

...Let's hope the next thousand will be an improvement...

...Well, maybe...

...America is the first postcultural society: An unstable mixture of freedom and nostalgia has largely replaced the familiar demands that culture—any culture, native or immigrant—made on the majority of individuals even half a century ago...

...Actually ladera is a Spanish word for hillside...

...Most of us have too many choices...

...After all, the last thousand years were no treat for most people, and the 20th century was especially rough, what with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and their imitators...

...One of the most encouraging and least reported stories of the recent Presidential primaries was the popularity of Alan Keyes, a black Northerner, among socalled Christian Right voters, particularly in the South—that part of the United States with the most persistent regional culture and (historically) the strongest racial prejudices...

...The whole experience resembled a Disneyland notion of multiculturalism, with entertainers donning picturesque costumes nobody anywhere would dream of wearing on a normal day in order to display the visual, musical and gastronomic diversity of cultures that presumably existed sometime in the past...

...Being a Hopi Indian is another matter, but only so long as one lives on a reservation and associates primarily with other Hopis...

...At the same time Norman Rockwell's paintings of an idealized smalltown America have become more popular than ever...

...Meanwhile, much of the rich particularity in American life, its teeming variety, is replaced by market-tested counterfeits of a diversity that really belongs to the past...

...Still, the Québécois dilemma may not be wholly different from that of the Jews: secede (like the ultra-Orthodox) or disappear...

...What could be a more hopeful, even admirable example of openness, equality and courage than a generous sharing of valuable traditions—in short, multiculturalism at its ideal best...

...Whether anything more powerful or lasting will take the place that a peremptory culture used to hold in people's lives is a mystery wrapped in the new millennium...

...Increasingly Americans grow up in places with no identity, like the California tract whose developer proudly told the New York Times Magazine: " 'Ladera' doesn't mean a thing...

...On the underside of the coin, the freedom that lies beyond culture may be a mixed blessing...

...The question is rapidly becoming academic...

...marry that person, not this one...

...The whole thing was a harmless, superficial exercise in tourism...

...On the other hand, what better manifestation could you hope to find of global mush—or for that matter of Western pre-eminence—than a worldwide TV travelogue that has every "culture" taking its performance cues from the Gregorian calendar and from clocks synchronized with Greenwich, England...

...On a less apocalyptic level, why should anyone be forced to choose once and for all between knishes and curry...

...Being black, or AfricanAmerican, is also an exception, though to a diminishing extent...

...Some dramatic relapses notwithstanding, strong, distinct cultures like the Hutus of Rwanda, or the Serbs, are becoming rarer...

...Of course, the situation of French Canadians differs significantly from that of American Jews, who have no province where they constitute a majority...

...As everybody knows who has not already forgotten, Y2K was the electronic disaster that was supposed to happen when the world's computer programs failed to turn the corner from 1999 to 2000 and instead took us back to 1900—together with our brokerage accounts, Social Security checks, and nuclear missiles...

...Who would have thought," Friedman wrote appreciatively a few days after the event, "that the biggest stories out of Y2K would be newborns, not nightmares...

...But despite the fact that in careless moments multiculturalists treat culture and race as if they were synonyms, blackness is a color, not a culture...

...Elsewhere in the world, the same nostalgia has given rise to a phrase that was unknown before the 1990s: ethnic cleansing...

...If it were not immediately visible, the power of black skin over the lives of those who possess it would have vanished long ago, together with their "cultural" distinctiveness...

...A galaxy of inflammatory social issues, from affirmative action to bilingual education all the way through the alphabet to school prayer and zero immigration, revolve in erratic orbits around the reality of culture and its loss...

...For Friedman, however, the real story was "the world's first global prom," a marathon television program that hurtled around the world tracking New Year's festivities westward from Beijing to Honolulu...

...According to some well attested figures, Jews in the United States are currently intermarrying with non-Jews at a rate exceeding 50 per cent...

...Obviously large parts of both traditions had to be jettisoned for the marriage to take place at all...

...It could never have happened at a time or place where either culture was at full strength...

...What Americans and other technologically advanced peoples increasingly have in common is the negation of cultures, the repudiation of the demands an inherited way of life imposes in every area of behavior...

...When none of these calamities came about, Y2K morphed into a modish name for the dawn of the new millennium...

...Both men work for institutions in New York City, the world's Mecca for immigrants...

...In fact, Alvin Wong's parents were right to say his conversion meant complete assimilation to America, where nearly all ancestral differences are ultimately melted down...

...The idea of such a marriage, resulting in a son and daughter who were reared as inheritors of two great civilizations, strikes a responsive chord in the American psyche...

...One concerns the American Jewish community (community, like culture, has become a much abused buzzword), about whose survival an enormous amount has been written in the past 20 years with a rising sense of urgency...

...East Asians had an insurmountable advantage...

...Nevertheless, the power of culture as a determinant of beliefs or behavior is in steep decline while the word itself, increasingly empty of meaning, paradoxically spreads like kudzu...

...Would we rather live on a peaceful planet epitomized by indistinguishable airports and suburbs, or accept the mortal risks that real difference, real "others," have always presented...

...The only exceptions were those few societies still trying to work by nonChristian calendars and the occasional purist who pointed out that the millennium really begins in 2001...

...Language and nationalism are two major resistant forces...

...Consider the Schandler-Wongs of Honolulu...

...Is the hope of universal cooperation that they represent to Friedman, Annan and other well-meaning observers sufficient reward for a drastic reduction in real cultural variety...

...No wonder so many parents find themselves attracted by the prospect of raising their children in planned communities like the Disney Corporation's Celebration, Florida, which imitates the appearance and "lifestyle" associated with a small Midwestern or New England town around 1900...

...With few exceptions, the most significant dividing lines among Americans at present are age and income, not ancestral origins or region of residence...

...But how can they know what they are, or where they want to go, in an environment where even the names on the map are meaningless...

...Nor does being Hispanic or ArabAmerican...

...Contrast American Jews for a moment with the French-speaking inhabitants of Quebec, a minority culture whose current political leadership has made resisting assimilation its highest priority...

...Is this an example of multiculturalism (a term that originated in Canada) or its opposite...

...I describe this condition and its dramatic effects on life at greater length in Faded Mosaic: The Emergence of PostCultural America, just published by Ivan R. Dee...

...it's value-neutral...

...There is plenty of room for ambivalence about these issues...

...Indeed, the recent aggressiveness of such cultures is in part a desperate reaction to the threat of their disappearance, to the rapid loss in the modern world of much that makes them distinct...

...All of the peoples who live there came from somewhere else, making their interactions fluid and relatively egalitarian...

...Nor—I see the bottom of the page coming and need to get this off my chest —do I really have a Texas grandmother...

...They say: Do this, don't do that...

...And they mean it...

...So the residents can hang on the word the idea of what they are...

...Quebec has held two referendums on independence from Canada and will probably hold another...

...Like other Americans, though more spectacularly than most, they are children of postculturalism...

...For a man whose biggest headache is a growing number of peacekeeping operations designed to keep Tutsis and Hutus, Albanians and Serbs, and others too numerous to mention from slaughtering each other, it was an understandable surrender to the sentimental escapism television is so good at providing...

...worship our God, not somebody else's...

...Asian Americans, too, practice exogamy at a rate approaching 50 per cent...

...To be sure, there may be natural limits to the decay or merging of cultures across national boundaries...

...Fortunately, the globe is not growing more multicultural...

...At its deepest level, postculturalism is the outgrowth of liberties that people in many countries would, and frequently do, die for...

...Real cultures are not primarily a matter of costumes and dances...

...Now postculturalism is transforming the world...

...they may increase as cultures and subcultures continue losing the capacity to impose a uniform outlook on their own members...

...Still, as Ruth Benedict pointed out in her anthropological classic Patterns of Culture in 1934, "Outside of the closed group there are no human beings...

...But newspaper columnists are paid to draw lessons, and Friedman—an economic globalization enthusiast—thought he found some...

...What struck me," said United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, "was the way we all celebrated each other's diversity, without anyone saying mine is better than yours...

...It seems that despite globalization, we haven't been turned into global mush just yet...

...Freedom from narrow group identities is one of the most powerful and constructive ideas in all of history...

...A global version of those counterfeits is what we saw on TV last New Year's Eve...

...What "tradition" of Japan, China, India, Turkey, or Nigeria told them that their native time zones had something to celebrate for the cameras at a particular moment in the middle of this particular night...

...it does not necessarily strengthen or liberate individuals...

...The decline of cultural identity may reduce some sources of conflict...

...Or to put the advantages positively, why shouldn't we all be free to choose from all the earth's possibilities, not only in food but in the realms of art, attitudes, heroes, philosophical insights, and mate selection...

...That means, among other things, outlawing the use of English in as many public settings as possible...

...Although English has become the world's second language, as long as (let's say) French, Russian and Chinese continue to be the first languages of large, important countries, many traditional features of Chinese, Russian or French culture will survive...

...Two at most...

...It is unevenly following America's lead toward a condition better described as postcultural...

...Today American life is dominated neither by one big culture nor by an assortment of smaller ones...

...One generation...

...When Alvin Wong decided to convert to Judaism," the New York Times summarized in reviewing Gabrielle Glaser's 1997 book Strangers to the Tribe, "his assimilationist parents were overjoyed by this proof that their son— from whom they had calculatedly withheld instruction in the use of chopsticks —was now really an American...

...Few pass on their ancestral languages...

...The murderous tribalism that horrifies us when it shows up on CNN is the other face of the same nostalgia for cultural differences that the Y2K television extravaganza reflected so benignly...

...Each tradition has become a menu of choices for them rather than an unchanging diet...

...That's right, newborns in the sense of tiny girls andboys...

...Their freedom to innovate is tempered only by their nostalgia for a past they never knew...

...A more urgent question is whether the separatism and hatred of outsiders that often accompany such policies are inextricable from any serious attempt to preserve a distinct culture today...

...In many ways it confuses and impoverishes them...

...We see similar conflicts virtually everywhere in the modern world, with outcomes ranging from assimilation to velvet divorce to genocide...

...In the United States this nostalgia, uniting Left with Right, constitutes one of the most striking characteristics of public and private life at the beginning of the 21 st century...

...The more prickly differences among cultures, which have so often led their members at best to ignore and at worst to massacre one another, were safely forgotten...

...As any frequent flier knows, we have less choice every year...

...Probably it is unfair to quote the things people say on stressful occasions like the moment most of the world agreed to celebrate as the beginning of a new millennium...

...As with so many religious conversions, Alvin Wong's resulted from marriage—in his case, to Trudy Schandler, whose Orthodox Jewish parents lived in Asheville, North Carolina...

...Granted, the loss of cultural distinctiveness does not mean that differences based on other factors will cease to exist...

...People who have been properly brought up will pretend not to notice...

...Like Chief Seattle's famous speech, like "Desiderata," like the hooey about walking in another man's moccasins or teaching him to fish, the pithy aphorism with which I began was dreamed up for a particular occasion in the modern world— namely, this essay...

...The builder's ignorance and the advantages he saw in a name with no meaning merely emphasize the uncertainties of postculturalism...

...Two more or less peaceful North American attempts at cultural preservation may give a better idea of what is at stake...

...New Yorkers inhabit a place where ethnic diversity is deceptively visible, audible, familiar—more often celebrated as a "gorgeous mosaic" than deplored as a source of parochialism and conflict...

...In a postcultural time we can invent folk wisdom and we can claim ancient identities to our heart's content, changing them as often as we want...

...If they are, one reason will be that the distinct cultures Friedman and Annan were applauding have gone into longterm decline...