A long time ago now I was drawn into an effort to promote a minority ethnic culture. I say "drawn in" because I didn't want to do it but I felt like I couldn't refuse because that might come across as racist. It was no accident that I felt that. The woman who drew me into the thing, not herself a member of the minority ethnic group, spent a lot of time driving home the notion that it would be racist to refuse.
As I went along I noticed two things. The first was that the members of the ethnic minority in question didn't live their culture. They were like hypocritical Christians who are fully Christian for the duration of Sunday services and then maybe an hour or so afterwards and then purely secular the rest of the week. They showed up for events but tuned right back out the second the events were over. The second thing I notices was that they were quite right to do so. For their culture was boring.
And it's not just their culture, all ethnic minority cultures are boring. If it was all you had, it would do but it's not all we have.
Most of us live with the culture we pretend to hate, which is to say commercial culture. It's not nearly as bad as it is made out to be. With all its faults, commercial culture beats any ethnic minority culture in the world. Any ethnic minority given the chance to vote with their feet will rapidly abandon their traditional culture in favour of commercial culture.
We may think we like some minority cultures but that is because we only have to visit them. The subculture of black Americans, for example, has a huge appeal to those of us who are not black Americans but only as a source of variety. Having only it would be like being forced to eat Thai food three meals a day, 365 days a year; no matter how much you like Thai food, you'd hate having it all the time.
And yet commercial culture not enough. It's not that we want to reject commercial culture, although, as I say, we all pretend we want to, but we want something better. If you trust the culture mavens, we have only two choices. One is authenticity, which is to say some sort of ethnic culture, and the other is high culture.
I don't buy that. I think middlebrow is just fine.
As I went along I noticed two things. The first was that the members of the ethnic minority in question didn't live their culture. They were like hypocritical Christians who are fully Christian for the duration of Sunday services and then maybe an hour or so afterwards and then purely secular the rest of the week. They showed up for events but tuned right back out the second the events were over. The second thing I notices was that they were quite right to do so. For their culture was boring.
And it's not just their culture, all ethnic minority cultures are boring. If it was all you had, it would do but it's not all we have.
Most of us live with the culture we pretend to hate, which is to say commercial culture. It's not nearly as bad as it is made out to be. With all its faults, commercial culture beats any ethnic minority culture in the world. Any ethnic minority given the chance to vote with their feet will rapidly abandon their traditional culture in favour of commercial culture.
We may think we like some minority cultures but that is because we only have to visit them. The subculture of black Americans, for example, has a huge appeal to those of us who are not black Americans but only as a source of variety. Having only it would be like being forced to eat Thai food three meals a day, 365 days a year; no matter how much you like Thai food, you'd hate having it all the time.
And yet commercial culture not enough. It's not that we want to reject commercial culture, although, as I say, we all pretend we want to, but we want something better. If you trust the culture mavens, we have only two choices. One is authenticity, which is to say some sort of ethnic culture, and the other is high culture.
I don't buy that. I think middlebrow is just fine.
Hmmmm. This is interesting and I can't decide what I think. I've had some experience with minority cultures, and people who believe deeply in them. On one level I feel really supportive, I'm really sympathetic with people who try to support their culture, their language. At the same time there's all these things that get stuck on, political positions, anger, resentment...
ReplyDeleteAnd I agree with you that authenticity is not all it's cracked up to be. But I don't think you need to buy into authenticity 100% to support your ancestral or local culture. It's like your family: your family might have all sorts of screwed up characteristics that you wouldn't want to emulate, but you still have some sort of obligation to them.
ReplyDeleteSome random thoughts as that is all I have in response to your good questions:
DeleteI agree that authenticity is not a condition of supporting your own ethnic culture. I can also imagine, however, conditions under which you would reject it. (Religious conversion for example).
It's a really weird thing though, that we are encouraged to think of certain minority cultures as more authentic than our own. In Canada we are sometimes encouraged to approach Aboriginal culture as something special even though we know that every aboriginal home has a television and that they spend as little time watching APTN as anyone else.
A shocking amount of most "authentic ethnic culture" is stuff someone made up in the last few decades. And I don't mean just the terribly obvious targets like Kwanzaa which is as convincing as Festivus. Traditional Irish music consisted of single performers with voice or instrument. There is no tradition, absolutely no trace anywhere, of polyphonic performance or harmony anywhere in the history of Irish music. So that stuff the Chieftans play, it's beautiful but it's utterly fake.
In my case, I grew up with two ethnic cultures, Irish and Quebecois. And there was a point in my life when I realized I would have to choose one or the other or neither. That had a huge impact on how I think about these things.
Most people grow up nowadays with a play acting sense of their own ethnic culture. They know there is one because they are Italian, Irish, Black American, Jamaican or whatever. But the truth is that ethnic culture is only drawn out on special occasions. Most of the time they live something else. For a Dutch-Canadian kid being Dutch is something that comes out when they do Christmas a little differently than other kids. They put the part on for a few weeks.
The bizarre irony in this is that we are now taught to regard these cultures as more authentic when they plainly are not the way they are experienced here in North America at least. WASP culture, OTOH, which is so often mocked for its lack of authenticity, actually has greater claim to authenticity than any other. When I was a kid and we'd spend the end of August on Cape Cod visiting family every year, it used to stagger me to visit WASP families in their homes and realize they were WASP to the core. Their culture was not something they put on for special occasions but their whole lives.