There was a related article in the NYT magazine last week, of moderate interest. From a conservative source, apparently, but at least someone who's apparently read more broadly than the usual suspects.
No Politics Are Local nytimes.com
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
As readers of Adult Video News and the 2005 federal budget will be aware, Attorney General John Ashcroft is staffing up the Justice Department for a prosecutorial assault on America's $10 billion pornography industry. Moderate civil libertarians have traditionally taken the side of pornographers on such matters. While a local community can make its own rules, they say, prosecuting smut at the federal level is Orwellian overkill. But this localist view makes less sense in the Internet age. It is unfair to ask bluenoses to band together to sway their city councils when most porn gets made not by some louche photographer living in a trailer across the railroad tracks but by multinational corporations with lobbyists in Washington.
One Ashcroft target is a company near Los Angeles whose films show simulated rapes and murders. You would think that would pass muster as obscene in any setting -- at least according to the Supreme Court's ''Miller test,'' which defines as obscenity anything that disgusts ''the average person, applying contemporary community standards.'' But Ashcroft isn't taking any chances. The Justice Department placed an order for the offending videos in Pittsburgh and will prosecute the company before a jury there. Now, suddenly, porn executives are changing their tune on localism. Pittsburgh is not the real community under which the Miller test should be enforced, they argue. The real community is the broader ''community'' of Internet users.
The battle between Ashcroft and the pornographers fits a pattern. By consensus of the adversaries, divisive issues are being argued in ever-widening jurisdictions. The natural arena for discussing them turns out to be not the bedroom or the town but the nation or even the world. This is not what most people expected of our age. Ever since the media theorist Marshall McLuhan announced that electronic interdependence was turning the world into a ''global village,'' we have put the stress on the adjective ''global.'' The wired world would bring a bigger choice of cuisines, we thought, but no increase in aggravation. Instead, the key term turns out to be the noun ''village.'' And villagers are notoriously bad at tolerating differences that bug them.
Why else should the enthusiasm of Massachusetts judges and a San Francisco mayor for same-sex marriage be such a big deal to the rest of the country? It is not because the issue pits libertarians against moralists, dionysiacs against prudes. (On the contrary, what worries the skeptical global villager is not that gay marriage will bring moral laxity but that it imposes a rigorous notion of tolerance on those who may not want it.) Two moral orders that worked fine in isolation -- human rights and traditional values -- wind up locked in a death struggle when, thanks to the Internet, television and the pressures of law and politics, each cannot get out of the other's hair. And it is in the national arena that it will be decided which of those orders emerges as the new uniform morality.
Many gay-marriage advocates claim that same-sex marriage should remain a local issue. They argue that once one state recognizes gay marriage, there is little danger that the Constitution's full-faith-and-credit clause will compel other states to follow suit. But this is little more than the signature debating trick of our time: trying to advance one's own effort to enforce national standards in the guise of a modest localism.
It's a trick that gets deployed in the most unlikely venues. Look at this month's rejection of a proposed Wal-Mart megastore by the people of Inglewood, Calif. Superficially, this ballot-initiative vote looked like local government in action, but it was hardly that. A Wal-Mart official complained that ''outside special interests'' had snookered the natives into rejecting the store. If so, those outsiders can't have been more aggressive than Wal-Mart itself. After Inglewood's city council initially rejected the store, the company's national headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., began collecting 10,000 signatures to put the matter before the voters. Today, even when it comes to opening a store, no politics are local.
This spring, national governments all over Europe were engaged in village politics of their own. Ireland began enforcing the E.U.'s most comprehensive smoking laws. The incoming Spanish prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, promised that his government would wage an ''unceasing fight against criminal machismo.'' Both efforts put moral absolutism before local pragmatism. Ireland is not allowing a few spots to welcome smokers so that a little piece of Dublin can stay as it was when James Joyce haunted the pubs. Spain is not going to carve out an exception whereby Basques or Estremadurans can boss women around in the time-honored Iberian fashion.
We (stupidly) believed that McLuhan's global village would be a friction-free Brotherhood of Man. But McLuhan never said that. In his last television interview, in 1977, his interviewer began, ''I had some idea that as we got global and tribal we were going to try to --''
McLuhan interrupted. ''The closer you get together, the more you like each other?'' he said. ''There's no evidence of that in any situation that we've ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savage, impatient with each other.''
That is why what used to be penny-ante administrative arguments or obscure regional quarrels have been transformed into high-stakes battles over universal values. Of course, McLuhan's readers weren't the first to mix technology and visionary optimism. Walt Whitman, considering ''the steamship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the wholesale engines of war,'' asked: ''Are all nations communing? Is there going to be but one heart to the globe?'' Apparently there is, and it's waiting for us to fight over it.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard. |
