American Culture: What is Its Center and Will it Hold?

         American Culture: What is Its Center and Will it Hold?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 4/8/18

            Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

             Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote these disturbing words in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I.  Yeats was rightly disturbed.  The war was over, but what was the peace like?  Countries were in shambles.  The victors were redrawing national lines.  The world was unsteady.

            At the time, America was not exactly a world power, but was rising fast.  Freedom tends to lead individuals and nations to great heights.  Industrially, America was on the move.  Culturally, the nation was no longer British-America.  A frontier people hardly over one hundred years old, we could now aptly speak of “American culture.”

            I was 20 years old before I correctly understood what “culture” means.  I thought culture was the collective term for such high-tone things as classical music, art, ballroom dancing, and elaborate architecture.  My world of Southern Gospel, cornfields, protestant Christianity, country and western music, livestock shows, and dinners on the ground surely wasn’t “culture.”  But of course it was.

            America has always been multi-cultural.  It’s more precise to say we are a nation of subcultures that are marked by interests, tastes, and geographical distinctions such as dialects.  Our regional differences, unlike so many divisive ones across Europe, have been a source of fun and jokes.  Southerners know that Yankees talk funny; Yankees know that Southerners can’t read, but they sure can write, even though they go barefooted.

            Today our nation is beset by a cultural shakiness that is both striking and dangerous.  One must ask, as did Yeats, what is our center?  What customs, values, and principles do we hold that are decidedly American and are the glue that binds us?

            Political differences are not America’s chief problem.  Who but political wonks watches all of the food fights on cable TV?  Some of us are still at work.  Television newsyness is now theater and we are not as politically divided as that theater tries to reflect.  Nor are we so racially divided.  I see good race relations several times a week.  Our common pop culture, particularly sports, unites us far more than we realize.

            There is no great divide between Americans.  In fact, what we are doing together poses a greater problem.  Together, we are surrendering all sense of cultural norms.  For instance, how many definitions are there of the word family?  How many genders are there?  How are we defining achievement?  Why does dress no longer matter?  Why have parents ceased to be self-confident authorities over their children, yielding to the view that children should be treated tenderly and youth are to be consulted?   

            No one would have asked these questions 50 years ago.  Everyone knew what a family was and why families were needed.  We knew that dress was far more about respect than it was style.  We knew that language is the dress of our thoughts and that if we talk ugly, we reveal an ugly thought world.  As for parenting, we knew that the pot does not inform the potter.

            All of these matters transcend race and socio-economic class.  In these matters we are quite unified.  Unified downward.  The majority of us are dressing down, no matter the occasion, not realizing that casualness is the enemy of excellence. Ours is a culture of narcissism, one in which the “I’s” have it.  We demand enjoyment.     

            Many preachers are leading the way with sloppy dress, in effect arguing we must become like those we wish to influence.  We’re calling graffiti “urban art;” perversion, an alternative lifestyle.  On Mondays, elementary teachers must fight Dave and Buster’s sensory overload.  High school teachers fight the mind-warping, mushy effects of television, smart phones and mall culture. 

Robert Bork says we are “slouching toward Gomorrah.”  Georgia’s Phil Kent describes current conditions as “the marks of a decadent culture.”

            Dark thoughts, I know. But we don’t dispel intellectual or cultural darkness by embracing it.  Rather, we reclaim old landmarks, resurrect sturdy values, think neighborhoods, and become good Samaritans again.  We start teaching our children well again and stop catering to them. 

            Finally, we must overcome what C.S.Lewis called “our fear of the Same Old Thing” and accept the fact that verities are verities.  “Cultural norms” may be an old-fashioned expression, but without them we travel not in a wilderness where there is some delight, but in a cultural cul-de-sac that spins us into numbness and eventual meaninglessness.

Roger Hines

4/5/18