On culture (and those laying claim to it)

Three months ago, President Hu Jintao of the PRC wrote an article in the periodical of the Chinese Communist Party, Qiushi, regarding China’s culture and its status on the international stage. He seemed to be under the distinct impression that ‘hostile foreign powers’ are attempting to lay siege to Chinese culture, to undermine it and to Westernise it, dividing China against itself, by ‘conduct[ing] long-term infiltration’ in the ‘ideological and cultural sphere’. More recently, several responses have been made to Mr Hu’s article, including one by Sam Crane of The Useless Tree, one by Charles Custer of ChinaGeeks. These responses do make some decent points, but the larger issues are somewhat evaded. What is culture? What is driving its change? To answer these two questions is to pose two further: who produces it and who benefits from it?

Sam Crane’s argument goes straight down the liberal-libertarian line of folks like Hayek and Friedman (and yeah, let me tell you… when I think ‘culture’, first thing that comes to mind is the economics department at the University of Chicago): culture is ever-changing, a market-driven artefact of the creative individual, and anything a government does can only serve to stifle and disrupt its creation. I am sure this would come as news to the beneficiaries of the National Endowment for the Arts, among other people, but I get ahead of myself. Sam Crane identifies ‘culture’ only with its reified products – in this case, rock-and-roll music – and its worth only with the popularity or economic success of those products. This is, to say the least, an incredibly narrow view which does skirts around the fears of folks like Hu Jintao and Rick Santorum rather than addressing them head-on, and does no justice whatever to his own side of the argument.

After all, culture is not just our consumption habits. At least, for me it isn’t – and I say this as a metalhead and a fan of Renaissance and Baroque church music (not as contradictory a set of tastes as one might imagine). If heavy metal as a genre were to sink or swim according to its popularity and economic success, it would have died in the ‘90’s and been replaced by grunge or whatever the hell Metallica turned into with the Black Album. But it didn’t die. People were drawn to the music on a deeper level; its artists played it and its fans listened to it for love, not because they wanted to get rich or because they wanted to be seen as ‘in’ (and if they did, they were very quickly outed as poseurs). There is a healthy culture (a ‘subculture’, one might say) surrounding heavy metal, because there is a real community surrounding the music, there are real values (loyalty, fraternity, steadfastness, defiance to the bitter end, overcoming even overwhelming adversity) associated with the music, and there is a musical history which each metalhead is bound to respect or at least acknowledge. Is this culture ‘driven by creativity’? Naturally it is. Does it ‘change’? Sure. But such a glib description of culture does it a vast disservice, because (to continue with my previous example) it is possible to distinguish good heavy metal from corporate shit – and such judgements are not just the domain of ‘elite intellectuals and impresarios’. The culture that endures is defined by the values which inspire people to create; and if your sole value is what is profitable, what you produce is not healthy cultural output at all.

Speaking of creativity, though, as a writer and an artist, let me tell you that I’ve written, drawn and painted both for love of the subject, and for marks (‘profit’, as it were), and I can tell you right now which end results were better. The greatest artists’ motivations were never profit (else they wouldn’t be artists!), but rather a love which transcends the self. If the artistic inspiration that drives culture is not something that can be forced (as Mr Crane very rightly notes), neither is it something which can be bought and sold in a market, appealing only to love of self. It is, in the end, only in the numinous realm of the sacred that the aesthetic can be healthily understood and realised.

On the consumption side as well, cultural production can be either healthy or unhealthy. You can either watch or listen to or otherwise support cultural productions which you like, or you can support cultural productions which someone else (usually someone with orders of magnitude more money and power than you have) tells you to like. Advertisement is the reigning example: huge corporations would not spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising campaigns if they did not alter people’s consumption habits in their favour. Sadly, reigning economic orthodoxy is completely and wilfully blind to the root causes of a person’s preferences. To use Sam Crane’s example, the college-rock band Carsick Cars played at a club where 200 people were still waiting outside the doors to get in when they closed. Now, were all of those people there because they genuinely wanted to be, and really enjoyed and were inspired by the music? Or were they there because the Carsick Cars were on 97.4 FM all the time (I don’t know if this is actually the case) and they thought going to a concert would make them look ‘cool’? In other words, were the people going there fans or poseurs? The liberal-libertarian position does not care about this distinction, and indeed goes to massive lengths to deny its existence (all revealed preferences being equal); the people who are served by this are not, of course, consumers or even the majority of producers, but rather only the large producers who have the capacity to command higher market shares through advertising. This is as true of cultural output as of anything else.

Fourthly, dismissing fears of imperialism as mere ploys to ‘bolster the political power of [an] authoritarian regime’, however appropriate it may be in this example, is not a wise move in general. As someone who has spent time amongst the Navajo and Hopi cultures in his youth, I am familiar with the tactics used by those purporting to support their ‘progress’ and ‘freedom’. There is good reason to fear them, as they were subjected to a very deliberate form of cultural warfare. Their traditional economies were undermined at every turn by government-sanctioned theft of their land (and subsequent forced relocation); they were forbidden from practicing their own native faiths; and their languages were actively suppressed in the schools their children were compelled to attend. But I am sure that the present generation of these now struggling cultures are immensely comforted by Mr Crane’s bromides that the cultural changes to which they were subjected were ‘inevitable’, and that ‘foreign bogey men’ were not in the least to blame for their present plight. Though China has been subjected to this degree of outright domination only thrice in her long history, and her culture has survived each time on its own strengths, the purveyors of ‘free trade’ indeed knowingly attempted to curtail Chinese self-expression (to say nothing of their dignity) for their own profit and power, and resorted to force of arms when their attempts were thwarted by the likes of Viceroy Lin Zexu. The fear of domination by imperialist powers (not only Britain, but also the United States, Germany and Japan) is a very real and long-standing one. Hu Jintao may indeed be taking advantage of that fear for political gain, but Mr Crane does no service to his own argument by ignoring the underlying historical rationale. If recognising the destruction which globalised market forces and the governments behind them have historically wreaked (and in some ways continue to wreak) on people who have historically been subjected to colonialism makes me a ‘culture warrior’, then I make no apologies for being one. (I guess it also makes Skyclad and Anthrax ‘culture warriors’, so I’m in some good company there.)

Culture is not only product. It must refer instead to the shared values and norms, passed down from generation to generation, of a community. And it always makes reference to something outside itself; as Zhu Xi put it, culture (or ‘ritual’) is the representation of Heaven-imparted principles (『禮者，天理之節文也。』). Though certainly culture should imply what people are doing now, it is wise to distinguish between what people do that is psychologically and socially healthy for them, and what is unhealthy. Government control may not, in many cases, be the way to go about it. But then, neither is ignoring the systematic aggression inherent to a globalised, hegemonic and equally government-backed culture.