Re: You prattle a lot about the US being a monoculture. That is only true if you get all of your information about the US from TV and movies,...
...and American social scientists --clue:
Is There a Common American Culture?
by
Robert N. Bellah
This article is reprinted with written permission from Oxford University Press and was originally published in The Journal for the American Academy of Religion, Volume 66, Number 3, Fall 1998, pages 613-625.
I might begin my talk this morning somewhat facetiously by asking the question, not whether there is a common American culture, but how is it that a plenary session of the American Academy of Religion is devoted to this question in a society with so powerful and monolithic a common culture as ours? The answer, however, is obvious: it has become part of the common culture to ask whether there is a common culture in America.
K. Anthony Appiah, Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy at Harvard, in a review of Nathan Glazer’s recent book We Are All Multiculturalists Now (whose very title makes the point) quotes the book as saying “The Nexis data base of major newspapers shows no reference to multiculturalism as late as 1988, a mere 33 items in 1989, and only after that a rapid rise—more than 100 items in 1990, more than 600 in 1991, almost 900 in 1992, 1200 in 1993, and 1500 in 1994. . . ” Appiah adds, “When it comes to diversity it seems we all march to the beat of a single drummer.” There is something very congenial to multiculturalism in common American culture, but such congeniality is not to be assumed as natural or shared in all societies today. It is worth looking at the contrast case of France. Rodney Benson, a graduate student in my department, is writing a most interesting dissertation, which, among other things compares the fate of multiculturalism in France and the U.S. Benson describes a nascent French multiculturalism of the late 1970s and early 1980s as ultimately being rejected by virtually the entire ideological spectrum in favor of a universalistic republicanism in the late 1980s, just when multiculturalism in the U.S. was taking off. Why American culture has been so singularly receptive to multiculturalism as an ideology is a point to which I will return.
But first, a sociological point about why there not only is but has to be a common culture in America: culture does not float free from institutions. A powerful institutional order will carry a powerful common culture. An example of just how important this relation between culture and institutions is comes from the recent reunification of Germany. In the last days of the German Democratic Republic the protesters chanted “Wir sind ein Volk,” and the chant stirred euphoria among West Germans as well. But the painful and unexpected experience of living together, as made vivid to me by an outstanding Harvard doctoral dissertation filed earlier this year by Andreas Glaeser, using the integration of East and West German police officers into a unified police force in Berlin as a microcosm, showed that they were not, after all “ein Volk,” but indeed “zwei.” It wasn’t just that the “Ossies” and the “Wessies” (“Easterners” and “Westerners”) had different views on common problems, they had different and to some degree mutually unintelligible ways of thinking about the world altogether. Forty-five years of radically different institutional orders had created two cultures which to this day are very far from united, although the experience of a unified institutional order will, almost certainly, though not without time and pain, ultimately reunite them.
The United States, surely, has an exceptionally powerful institutional order. The state in America, even though it is multi-leveled and, to a degree, decentralized, has an enormous impact on all our lives. For example, the shift in marriage law in the late sixties and early seventies toward “no-fault divorce” was a response to but also an impetus for the emergence of “divorce culture” in America as a serious competitor to “marriage culture.” The state is even responsible to a degree for the construction of multiculturalism through the little boxes that must be checked on a myriad of forms. Haven’t you ever been tempted to check them all or to leave them all empty? If the state intrudes in our lives in a thousand ways, the market is even more intrusive. There is very little that Americans need that we can produce for ourselves any more. We are dependent on the market not only for goods but for many kinds of service. Our cultural understanding of the world is shaped every time we enter a supermarket or a mall. I taught a senior seminar of about 20 students this spring, roughly divided into one-fourth Asian-American, one-fourth Hispanic, one-fourth African-American, and one-forth Anglo. What was remarkable was how easily they talked because of how much they shared. Beyond the ever-present state and market, they shared the immediate experience of coping with a vast state university, with its demands and its incoherence.
Education, which is linked largely though not exclusively to the state, and television (and increasingly the Internet) linked to the market, are enormously powerful purveyors of common culture, socializers not only of children but of all of us most of our lives. Not only are we exposed from infancy to a monoculture, we are exposed to it monolingually. The cultural power of American English is overwhelming and no language, except under the most unusual circumstances, has ever been able to withstand it, which is what makes the English Only movement such a joke. As Appiah notes, 90 percent of California-born Hispanic children of immigrant parents have native fluency in English and in the next generation only 50 per cent of them still speak Spanish. One more generation and you can forget about Spanish. When third generation Asian-Americans come to college they have to learn Chinese or Japanese in language classes just like anyone else—they don’t bring those languages with them. Appiah contrasts our society with his own experience growing up in Ghana where there were three languages spoken in the household: English, Twi and Navrongo. “Ghana,” he writes, “with a population smaller than that of New York State, has several dozen languages in active daily use and no one language that is spoken at home—or even fluently understood—by a majority of the population.” Ghana is multilingual and therefore multicultural, in a way that we, except for first generation immigrants, have never been. When language, which is the heart of culture, goes, then so, in any deep sense, does cultural difference. I don’t say identity, which is something I will come back to, but culture. Serious multicultural education would begin by teaching native English speakers a second language, but that, unlike most of the rest of the world, almost never happens in the United States. The half-hearted effort to teach Spanish in California public schools results in very few native English speakers with a secondary fluency in Spanish. Why don’t most Americans speak another language? Because we don’t have to—everyone in the world speaks English—or so we think. Tell me about multiculturalism. (The truth is that American culture and American English are putting their stamp on every other culture in the world today.)
There are exceptions, though they are statistically small, but I had better talk about them. Enclaves of genuine cultural difference, centered on a language different from English, can persist, or even emerge, under special conditions: where socio-economic status is low and residential segregation is effective. A particularly poignant example is the emergence among one of the oldest groups of English speakers in America, African-Americans, of enclaves of Black English dialects in a few inner cities in the Northeastern U.S. that are mutually unintelligible with standard American English. This can happen under conditions of hyper-segregation where opportunities to participate in the larger society are almost completely denied. Native American languages survive on a few reservations, though many are dying out, even with strenuous efforts to maintain them. Since there is much less hypersegretation of Hispanics or Asians than of Blacks, enclaves of Spanish or Korean, or other Asian languages, have the generational transience of, say, Polish or Italian a hundred years ago.
If I am right, there is an enormously powerful common culture in America and it is carried predominantly by the market and the state and by their agencies of socialization: television and education. What institutions might withstand that pressure and sustain genuine cultural difference? In simpler societies kinship and religious communities might do so, but in our society families and churches or synagogues are too colonized by the market and the state to provide much of a buffer. They may give a nuance, an inflection, to the common culture, but families and even religious communities are almost always too fragile to provide a radical alternative. Nevertheless such nuances and inflections are important, not only in their own right, but because they can provide the wedge through which criticism of the common culture, and the possibility of altering it, can occur.
What, then, is the content of this common culture? If we realize that the market and the state in America are not and have never been antithetical, and that the state has had the primary function, for conservatives and liberals alike, of maximizing market opportunities, I believe I can safely borrow terminology from Habits of the Heart and say that a dominant element of the common culture is what we called utilitarian individualism. In terms of historical roots this orientation can be traced to a powerful Anglo-American utilitarian tradition going back at least as far as Hobbes and Locke, although it operates today quite autonomously, without any necessary reference to intellectual history. Utilitarian individualism has always been moderated by what we called expressive individualism, which has its roots in Anglo-American Romanticism, but which has picked up many influences along the way from European ethnic, African-American, Hispanic and Asian influences. Here, too, the bland presentism of contemporary American culture obliterates its own history. Our Anglo students do not come to college with a deep knowledge of Jane Austen or Nathaniel Hawthorne any more than our Japanese-American students bring a knowledge of Lady Murasaki or Natsume Soseki. What they bring, they bring in common: Oprah Winfrey, ER, Seinfeld, Nike, Microsoft, the NBA and the NFL. If the common culture is predominantly Euro-American, or, more accurately, Anglo-American, in its roots, the enormous pressure of the market economy, and the mass media and mass education oriented to it, obliterate the genuine heritage of Anglo-American, European, African and Asian culture with equal thoroughness.
And yet, and yet. . . Nestled in the very core of utilitarian and expressive individualism is something very deep, very genuine, very old, very American, something we did not quite see or say in Habits. Here I come to something that will be of especial interest to this audience, for that core is religious. In Habits we quoted a famous passage in Toqueville’s Democracy in America: “I think I can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on those shores.” Then we went on to name John Winthrop, following Tocqueville’s own predilection, as the likeliest candidate for being that first Puritan. Now I am ready to admit, although regretfully, that we, and Tocqueville, were probably wrong. That first Puritan who contained our whole destiny might have been, as we also half intimated in Habits, Anne Hutchinson, but the stronger candidate, because we know so much more about him, is Roger Williams.
Roger Williams, banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony by John Winthrop, founder of Providence and of the Rhode Island Colony, was, as everyone knows, a Baptist. The Baptists in seventeenth century New England were a distinct minority, but they went on to become, together with other sectarian Protestants, a majority in American religious culture from the early nineteenth century. As Seymour Martin Lipset has recently pointed out, we are the only North Atlantic society whose predominant religious tradition is sectarian rather than an established church. (1996:19-20; for a detailed contrast of the influence of church and sect religion in America see Baltzell 1979) I think this is something enormously important about our culture and that it has, believe it or not, a great deal to do with why our society is so hospitable to the ideology, if not the reality, of multiculturalism.
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