Culture -- Mass and Otherwise

The cultural relativist position that all societies are ultimately the same is based on rhetoric, but not on history or fact. Humans may be the same at the core, but human culture and the values contained within those cultures -- which are ultimately communicated via story and myth -- vary widely. Upon observing that modernity is busy pursuing a suicidal trajectory, it can be edifying to study other cultures and their histories and stories... and why not start with the people who lived on this continent for 12,000 years before the arrival of the Europeans? According to Native American scholars and artists such as Jeanette Armstrong, Vine DeLorean, John Trudell, the primary reason that indigenous peoples were able to live on the continent since the last Ice Age without destroying the soil, the water, the air quality and, ultimately, the climate system can be traced to the fact the founding stories of their cultures do not place humans at the top of some fictional “great chain of being.”

In contrast, the founding stories of European American culture are -- as cultural historian Richard Slotkin demonstrates in his trilogy “Gunfighter Nation” -- based on the bizarre notion that Europeans in the New World are a chosen race who are here to "civilize" Native & African peoples and tame & subdue wild nature. Our stories -- from the first sermons told in Massachusetts to contemporary Hollywood films -- propagate the idea that the European American is constantly under siege and, therefore, all of his violence is justified as noble and self-defensive.

The fact is that the old Western stories are leading us into a rapidly approaching dead end. Literally dead. Culture is the vehicle by which humans’ relations with each other and with our fellow 3.5 million species on the planet are formed. New stories are currently being forged, but the culture industry is successfully blocking their more rapid spread and gestation.

A couple of things I remember distinctly about growing up in the 1970s and 80s in Milwaukee, Wisconsin are the following: The factory farmed and packaged and processed food tasted like shit, the corporate beer tasted like piss and the freeze-dried “coffee” in a can was undrinkable sewage. This was food culture mass produced. Mercifully, those very products are now being produced locally: distinct from the Henry Ford model of culture. I can now eat food without vomiting, enjoy the taste of beer and drink espresso for moments of bliss.

Now it seems that popular music played on the radio has now taken over the mantle of mass-produced tasteless shit. Corporate rap, corporate country & corporate pop are sinister in their banality. Although we undervalue culture and the life of the spirit and the mind greatly in the US, the fact remains that bad art, mass produced and mass marketed, is very harmful to the spirit and the mind. Academics ensconced in postmodernist rhetoric want people to believe that cynically manufactured culture is not harmful to us. That is sophistry. I assert that cynically manufactured culture has very real negative consequences. I believe it explains much of the popularity of Donald Trump, a billionaire racist demagogue reality TV star, for example. His rhetoric makes sense to somebody rendered incapable of critical thought, due to his/her immersion in a culture guided by the logic of manufacturing and mass consumption.