Ross Douthat interviews Peter Thiel, who is clueless

Ross Douthat, Peter Thiel and the Antichrist, NYtimes, June 26, 2025.

They start out with economic stagnation:

Douthat: So I want to start by taking you back in time about 13 or 14 years. You wrote an essay for National Review, the conservative magazine, called “The End of the Future.” And basically, the argument in that essay was that the dynamic, fast-paced, ever-changing modern world was just not nearly as dynamic as people thought, and that actually, we’d entered a period of technological stagnation. That digital life was a breakthrough, but not as big a breakthrough as people had hoped, and that the world was stuck, basically.

Thiel: Yes.

Douthat: You weren’t the only person to make arguments like this, but it had a special potency coming from you because you were a Silicon Valley insider who had gotten rich in the digital revolution.

So I’m curious: In 2025, do you think that diagnosis still holds?

Thiel: Yes. I still broadly believe in the stagnation thesis. It was never an absolute thesis. The claim was not that we were absolutely, completely stuck; it was in some ways a claim about how the velocity had slowed. It wasn’t zero, but 1750 to 1970 — 200-plus years — were periods of accelerating change. We were relentlessly moving faster: The ships were faster, the railroads were faster, the cars were faster, the planes were faster. It culminates in the Concorde and the Apollo missions. But then, in all sorts of dimensions, things had slowed.

I always made an exception for the world of bits, so we had computers and software and internet and mobile internet. And then the last 10 to 15 years you had crypto and the A.I. revolution, which I think is in some sense pretty big. But the question is: Is it enough to really get out of this generalized sense of stagnation?

The conversation goes on in that vein, and then:

Thiel: Well, I think there are deep reasons the stagnation happened. There are always three questions you ask about history: What actually happened? And then you have another question : What should be done about it? But there’s also this intermediate question: Why did it happen?

People ran out of ideas. I think, to some extent, the institutions degraded and became risk averse, and some of these cultural transformations we can describe. But then I think to some extent people also had some very legitimate worries about the future, where if we continued to have accelerating progress, were you accelerating toward environmental apocalypse or nuclear apocalypse or things like that?

But I think if we don’t find a way back to the future, I do think that society — I don’t know. It unravels, it doesn’t work.

The middle class — I would define the middle class as the people who expect their kids to do better than themselves. And when that expectation collapses, we no longer have a middle-class society. Maybe there’s some way you can have a feudal society in which things are always static and stuck, or maybe there’s some way you can ship to some radically different society. But it’s not the way the Western world, it’s not the way the United States has functioned for the first 200 years of its existence.

Two things: 1) Back in the 1990s my friend Abbe Mowshowitz was talking about virtual feudalism, which is where he saw us headed. He hired me to ghost an article about that but, alas, he was unable to publish it, so I eventually posted it as one of my working papers: Virtual Feudalism in the Twenty-First Century.

2) I sorta' kinda' agree with Thiel about being stuck. But I think about history in a very different way. I think in terms of cultural evolution, specifically, the theory of cultural ranks that David Hays and I sketched out back in the 1990s. [Here's a brief guide: Mind-Culture Coevolution: Major Transitions in the Development of Human Culture and Society.] At the moment we're stuck "treading water," as it were, in Rank 4, but haven't made it to the next level. Just what that next level will turn out to be, that's not at all clear, & that's where I talk about the Fourth Arena, thus: Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted. When I say that Thiel is clueless, that's what I'm talking about; he has no sense of cultural evolution, of a succession of cognitive architectures, or the mind itself, taken collectively, as a driving force in history.

Back to the conversation, and Homo economicus:

Douthat: So you think that ordinary people won’t accept stagnation in the end? That they will rebel and pull things down around them in the course of that rebellion?

Thiel: They may rebel. Or maybe our institutions don’t work, since all of our institutions are predicated on growth.

Douthat: Our budgets are certainly predicated on growth.

Is that a law of nature, or a contingent matter of historical circumstance?

On the nexus of Silicon Valley, stagnation, and Trump:

Douthat: What did Trump do in his first term that you felt was anti-decadent or anti-stagnation? If anything — maybe the answer’s nothing.

Thiel: I think it took longer and it was slower than I would’ve liked, but we have gotten to the place where a lot of people think something’s gone wrong. And that was not the conversation I was having in 2012 to 2014. I had a debate with Eric Schmidt in 2012 and Marc Andreessen in 2013 and Bezos in 2014.

I was on “There’s a stagnation problem,” and all three of them were versions of “Everything’s going great.” And I think at least those three people have, to varying degrees, updated and adjusted. Silicon Valley’s adjusted.

Douthat: And Silicon Valley, though, has more than adjusted ——

Thiel: On the stagnation question.

Douthat: Right. But a big part of Silicon Valley ended up going in for Trump in 2024 — including, obviously, most famously, Elon Musk.

Thiel: Yeah. And this is deeply linked to the stagnation issue, in my telling. These things are always super complicated, but my telling is — and again, I’m so hesitant to speak for all these people — but someone like Mark Zuckerberg, or Facebook, Meta, in some ways I don’t think he was very ideological. He didn’t think this stuff through that much. The default was to be liberal, and it was always: If the liberalism isn’t working, what do you do? And for year after year after year, it was: You do more. If something doesn’t work, you just need to do more of it. You up the dose and you up the dose and you spend hundreds of millions of dollars and you go completely woke and everybody hates you.

And at some point, it’s like: OK, maybe this isn’t working.

On Mars, AI, and progress, with a conversation between Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis (CEO of DeepMind):

Thiel: Yeah. And the rough conversation was Demis telling Elon: I’m working on the most important project in the world. I’m building a superhuman A.I.

And Elon responds to Demis: Well, I’m working on the most important project in the world. I am turning us into interplanetary species. And then Demis said: Well, you know my A.I. will be able to follow you to Mars. And then Elon went quiet. But in my telling of the history, it took years for that to really hit Elon. It took him until 2024 to process it.

Douthat: But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe in Mars. It just means that he decided he had to win some battle over budget deficits or wokeness to get to Mars.

Thiel: Yeah, but what does Mars mean?

Douthat: What does Mars mean?

Thiel: Well, is it just a scientific project? Or is it like a Heinlein, the moon as a libertarian paradise or something like this?

Douthat: A vision of a new society. Populated by many, many people descended from Elon Musk.

Thiel: Well, I don’t know if it was concretized that specifically, but if you concretize things, then maybe you realize that Mars is supposed to be more than a science project. It’s supposed to be a political project. And then when you concretize it, you have to start thinking through: Well, the woke A.I. will follow you, the socialist government will follow you. And then maybe you have to do something other than just going to Mars.

Douthat: So the woke A.I., artificial intelligence, seems like, one, if we’re still stagnant, it’s the biggest exception to the place where there’s been remarkable progress — surprising, to many people, progress.

It’s also the place — we were just talking about politics — where the Trump administration is, I think, to a large degree, giving A.I. investors a lot of what they wanted in terms of both stepping back and doing public-private partnerships. So it’s a zone of progress and governmental engagement.

And you are an investor in A.I. What do you think you’re investing in?

Thiel: Well, I don’t know. There’s a lot of layers to this. One question we can frame is: Just how big a thing do I think A.I. is? And my stupid answer is: It’s more than a nothing burger, and it’s less than the total transformation of our society. My place holder is that it’s roughly on the scale of the internet in the late ’90s. I’m not sure it’s enough to really end the stagnation. It might be enough to create some great companies. And the internet added maybe a few percentage points to the G.D.P., maybe 1 percent to G.D.P. growth every year for 10, 15 years. It added some to productivity. So that’s roughly my place holder for A.I.

It’s the only thing we have. It’s a little bit unhealthy that it’s so unbalanced. This is the only thing we have. I’d like to have more multidimensional progress. I’d like us to be going to Mars. I’d like us to be having cures for dementia. If all we have is A.I., I will take it. There are risks with it. Obviously, there are dangers with this technology. But there are also ——

Now that was interesting, very interesting, Mars as a political project. Hmmmm. And then they launch into a conversation about smart people:

Thiel: But I share your intuition because I think we’ve had a lot of smart people and things have been stuck for other reasons. And so maybe the problems are unsolvable, which is the pessimistic view. Maybe there is no cure for dementia at all, and it’s a deeply unsolvable problem. There’s no cure for mortality. Maybe it’s an unsolvable problem.

Or maybe it’s these cultural things. So it’s not the individually smart person, but it’s how this fits into our society. Do we tolerate heterodox smart people? Maybe you need heterodox smart people to do crazy experiments. And if the A.I. is just conventionally smart, if we define wokeness — again, wokeness is too ideological — but if you just define it as conformist, maybe that’s not the smartness that’s going to make a difference.

I note that smart people aren't going to get anywhere if they're working with the wrong ideas. There were a lot of smart people in the 17th century, but they didn't have radios and airplanes. It's not that they weren't smart enough, rather, the intellectual foundations weren't there for them to work from.

And then they veer off into transhumanism and Christianity and cryonics and and ... the Antichrist? That's where I get off the bus, but you might find it interesting.

Culture, Religion, and Identity: Can't We All Get Along? [Walter Benn Michaels on Diversity]

This is from the ancient days, at The Valve (now defunct). It's an extended footnote to: Politics Beyond the Personal: Diversity, Identitarian Rhetoric, and Equality.  If you take a dive into the WaybackMachine you can read this post in its original context, where it is followed by some comments.

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Now that we're going hot and heavy on religion, I'd like to take another look at Michaels, who devotes his 6th and penultimate chapter (of The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality) to “Religion in Politics: The Good News.” The news is good because, Michaels says, at last he has found something that cannot be assimilated to the identity engine.

I don't have a well-formed argument in mind. I just want to raise some issues.

Religion vs. Culture

The first issue I want to raise is a rather pedantic one about the notion of culture that Michaels has been employing throughout the book. Consider this relatively early passage in the religion chapter. (p. 174):

Like ideological affiliation but more radically, religious identity is very different from racial or cultural identity. The big selling point of cultural identity (the selling point, really of the very idea of identity) is that cultures are essentially equal. That's what makes them different from classes, since classes are essentially unequal - they involve more or less money. And it makes them different from religions too, since if Christianity tells the truth, all other religions must be false.

I find this treatment of cultures and religions as different kinds of entities to be a bit odd. The oddity isn't quite of Michaels's own making - I do believe it to be inherent in the ideas Michaels is critiquing - but it is not clear to me why Michaels takes this at face value.

I would think that most professional social scientists and humanists regard religion as itself a cultural phenomenon - at least in large part, for there is a great deal of speculation these days about possible biological roots for religion. That is to say, from the point of view of these intellectual specialists “culture” is a category that subsumes religion and so cannot be in conceptual parallel with it, as Michaels treats it. I understand that Michaels is not analyzing the concepts of professional intellectual specialists, that he is analyzing politically active concepts, but the fact that he nowhere even acknowledges this somewhat different notion of culture, not even in a footnote, bothers me.

I note that, when intellectual professionals talk of culture in this way, so that religion is a facet of culture, they are also “standing outside” not only any particular culture, but outside of all cultures. Sometimes the stance of a hypothetical Martian anthropologist is invoked in this regard. I further note that, the concept of cultural relativism was originally an epistemological and methodological one. The idea was that you can't understand another culture in terms of your own; you must understand it on its own terms. In taking this stance the intellectual professional is not, of course, called on to adjudicate the truth claims made within various cultures and stated as universal truths.

Of course, the idea that professional intellectuals can “stand outside” has been called into doubt - an issue I've touched on in my earlier piece in this Michaels-fest. If you can't stand outside, then cultural relativism makes no sense as an epistemological principle. It simply collapses into an ontological notion, that all cultures are somehow equal.

So where is Michaels standing in The Trouble with Diversity? Is he attempting to stand outside the political field he is critiquing or is he critiquing it from within? It's not clear to me what kind of issue this is, whether it matters, and how it bears on Michaels's general treatment of religion. It's all a muddle.

Belief and Practice

Then there is the question that's arisen in the discussion Adam Roberts initiated on Dawkins and Eagleton: What is the relationship between statements of belief and religious practice? This is also at issue in Alan Wolfe's review in Slate:

Nor do all religions assign the same priority to belief as evangelical Christians do; observance, for some, is more important than belief, and so long as a society allows them to keep their strict observance, they can easily live together with others of different convictions. And even those who believe that Jesus is the way have come to accept that others can find God in other ways. Since Nostra Aetate (1965), the Vatican has worked assiduously to recognize the validity of Judaism to Jews, and the great bulk of American evangelicals, for all their talk of witnessing the faith, do not routinely tell their Hindu co-workers that they will burn in hell. In a world in which intermarriage is a fact of life and switching congregations hardly worthy of notice, religious diversity is an inescapable fact, not a logical impossibility.

It does seem to me that Michaels concentrates on doctrine. Consider this long paragraph (p. 180):

The problem, then, with thinking of religious diversity on the model of cultural diversity is that it turns what should be a debate about the validity of different religious beliefs into a consensus about their equal worth and thus obscures their relevance to public policy. It's precisely religion's claim to universality that makes what Neuhaus calls “religiously based public values” matter in American public life. By public, he means first that the religious component should not be privatized; can can't think of someone's faith the way Jefferson famously did when he remarked that “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” If my neighbor's belief in God involves also, say, a belief that abortion is wrong, it does and it ought to affect me. It cannot be treated as a merely private fact about him, such as the fact tht he likes Chinese food or opera. And by public, Neuhaus also means that the religious arguments made in the public or political sphere should themselves be what he calls “transsubjective.” “Public decisions,” he says, “must be made by arguments that are public in character. A public argument is transsubjective. It is not derived from sources of revelation or disposition that are essentially private and arbitrary.” Identities can be private - it really does do me no injury if my neighbor is black. Identities are not transsubjective - the things that make me who I am need not make anybody else who she is. But beliefs, Neuhaus rightly insists, are neither.

It is one thing to point out that competing claims to universal truth cannot all be true. At most, only one claim can be true, though it is quite possible that none of the competing claims is true. That is one thing.

But it is not at all clear to me, given the kinds of examples that Wolfe has given, that the question of competing truth claims is the central political question. It is an issue, certainly, but it is not clear to me that it dominates the politics of religion. What are the practical limits of peoples willingness to accommodate competing beliefs and practices? I don't think they are unbounded, nor should they be, but I don't think we can determine those limits through logical examination of doctrine.

Fear of Fundies

Finally, let us consider the specific context in which Michaels is arguing. Though he tends to make his arguments in universal terms, i.e. about truth claims of any and all religions, he isn't arguing about politics in Japan or India or Brazil or France, for example. He's concerned about politics in the United States. In that context, the religious right is the focal point of religion in politics. That religious right consists largely of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, mostly, but not entirely, Protestant.

I've got this vague impression that the fundamentalists and evangelists we (the progressive left) find so fearsome are, to some extent, a figment of our imaginations. For whatever reason, we prefer to demonize them rather than dialogue with them. This is not something I'm prepared to argue in detail, but . . .

Consider the following paragraphs from an article Malcolm Gladwell published last year:

Not long ago, the sociologist Christian Smith decided to find out what American evangelicals mean when they say that they believe in a "Christian America." The phrase seems to suggest that evangelicals intend to erode the separation of church and state. But when Smith asked a representative sample of evangelicals to explain the meaning of the phrase, the most frequent explanation was that America was founded by people who sought religious liberty and worked to establish religious freedom. The second most frequent explanation offered was that a majority of Americans of earlier generations were sincere Christians, which, as Smith points out, is empirically true. Others said what they meant by a Christian nation was that the basic laws of American government reflected Christian principles-which sounds potentially theocratic, except that when Smith asked his respondents to specify what they meant by basic laws they came up with representative government and the balance of powers.

"In other words," Smith writes, "the belief that America was once a Christian nation does not necessarily mean a commitment to making it a 'Christian' nation today, whatever that might mean. Some evangelicals do make this connection explicitly. But many discuss America's Christian heritage as a simple fact of history that they are not particularly interested in or optimistic about reclaiming. Further, some evangelicals think America never was a Christian nation; some think it still is; and others think it should not be a Christian nation, whether or not it was so in the past or is now."

As Smith explored one issue after another with the evangelicals-gender equality, education, pluralism, and politics-he found the same scattershot pattern. The Republican Party may have been adept at winning the support of evangelical voters, but that affinity appears to be as much cultural as anything; the Party has learned to speak the evangelical language. Scratch the surface, and the appearance of homogeneity and ideological consistency disappears. Evangelicals want children to have the right to pray in school, for example, and they vote for conservative Republicans who support that right. But what do they mean by prayer? The New Testament's most left-liberal text, the Lord's Prayer-which, it should be pointed out, begins with a call for utopian social restructuring ("Thy will be done, On earth as it is in Heaven"), then welfare relief ("Give us this day our daily bread"), and then income redistribution ("Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors"). The evangelical movement isn't a movement, if you take movements to be characterized by a coherent philosophy, and that's hardly surprising when you think of the role that small groups have come to play in the evangelical religious experience. The answers that Smith got to his questions are the kind of answers you would expect from people who think most deeply about their faith and its implications on Tuesday night, or Wednesday, with five or six of their closest friends, and not Sunday morning, in the controlling hands of a pastor.

The entire article is worth reading. And you might want to take a look at some of the papers at Christian Smith's website.

Inter-Racial Sex: A Passage to India and Light in August

Over at 3QD Morgan Meis tells us that this is the 100th anniversary of A Passage to India. Accordingly I'm bumping this to the top of the queue. It's one of the oldest posts here, having originally been posted on May 6, 2010. It is the third in a series of five posts dealing with the symbolic deployment of racial difference. The first was about Shakespeare's Caliban while the second was about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. All five have been collected into a working paper,  Five Easy Pieces: Race in the Symbolic Universe (June 2014).

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Now I want do deal with projected sexuality as depicted in two more recent novels: William Faulkner's Light in August (1932) and E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924). Faulkner, like Twain, is central to the recognized canon of American literature and Light in August is one of his most important works. Forster of course, is British, not American, and, as such, is a more direct heir to the psycho-cultural dynamic of Prospero's magic island. But Forster's novel is worth discussing because it displays much the same psychological dynamics as Faulkner's even though the racial Other is an Asian Indian rather than an African American. The psycho-cultural dynamic I'm concerned about didn't originate in America. The European settlers brought it with them. It is a Western problem, not an exclusively American one – nor, for that matter, is it exclusively Western (whatever that means), but that’s well beyond the scope of this post.

A Passage to India centers on Adela Quested and Dr. Aziz. Ms. Quested came to India to be with her fiancé, Ronny Moore, who was stationed there. Dr. Aziz is a local physician who befriended her in her desire to see the "real" India. In particular, he took her and some companions to see the Marabar caves, a local natural wonder that was sacred to the Hindus. While walking in one of these caves Ms. Quested become confused, lost all sense of herself, and after coming out concluded that she must have been raped by Dr. Aziz. From that suspicion came a trial and during the trial Ms. Quested admitted that Dr. Aziz had not followed her into the cave at all. Hence he could not have raped her.

Why would Forster make such an incident the center of his novel? Because he wanted to underline a hidden sexuality in the British attitude toward the Indians. Just as Tom Sawyer used Jim as a screen on which to project his fantasies of escape and capture, so Forster's British used the Indians as a screen on which to project their own sexuality. Ms. Quested came to India to be with her fiancé, a man she found to be stilted, boring, and less interesting than the enthusiastic Dr. Aziz. The warmth and sexuality she saw in Aziz was the warmth and sexuality she wanted in her fiance, but was unable to find. And the outrage which the British community felt over this alleged rape had more to do with their collective fears and hidden desires than it had to do with justice.

Much of the book is conversation. And much of that conversation is that of one social group trying to make some sense out of the actions of another social group. For the most part we have Indians trying to make sense out of the British, and British trying to make sense out of the Indians. Much of the mutual puzzlement can justifiably be attributed to cultural difference. But these conversations aren't matters of mere curiosity about the others; they are part of a social process. And that social process is one of oppression. The British, in their conversations, talk of the inferiority of the Indians and, hence, the justice of British rule. The Indians are concerned both with insulating themselves from the British and with maintaining their dignity in the face of the ruling raj.

Forster's British men think of the Indians as women (or children). And, just as man is destined to rule over woman, so the British are destined to rule over Indians. Indian women have almost no role in the book; the key Indian characters are all male. And they are depicted in ways that give them many of the stereotypical attributes of women—they are emotional, dependent, changeable, they take poetry seriously. Forster is quite clearly sympathetic to these men; but his British males are not. Let us grant that Forster's sympathetic portrayal of Aziz and friends is accurate—I certainly don't have any grounds on which to question it. As such, it does reflect real cultural difference. But that cultural difference functions in this novel as sexual difference, the politics are sexual politics. The cold, rational British male must rule over warm, emotional creatures - such as women and Indians.

We see a typical example of this attitude in the testimony of the Superintendent of Police, Mr. McBryde, who opened the trial for the prosecution. At one point McBryde remarked, under the general heading of Oriental Pathology, that "the darker races are physically attracted by the fairer, but not vice versa . . ." At this point someone in the court most ungraciously commented "Even when the lady is so uglier than the gentleman?" McBryde's comment is standard racist fare. The "darker races" are sexually rapacious and inevitably drawn to white women. The anonymous reply, while certainly not meeting current tests of political correctness, restores a measure of volition and even dignity to the sexual preferences of the "darker races." The statement doesn't deny sexuality, but it clearly indicates that Aziz and others exercise discrimination in their choice of objects. They are not the slaves of mere whiteness.

Tight Like This: A Tale of High Adventure in Ancient Nubia [the fourth arena]

Yet another bump, and less than two years after the previous bump, In August of 2022. This time I'm preparing for the 3QD piece that's due of Mar. 24, for posting on the 25th.

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I'm bumping this to the top of the queue. Why? Because I can, that's why. Because the world's got to change and it's got to change NOW. You know, now's the time! We've been mugged by the future and don't realize it. We're still waiting for jet packs when the time for jet packs has done come and gone. There isn't going to be any AGI (artificial general intelligence) coming down the pike, not in time to make a difference and maybe not ever. Get real and figure out how we're doing to deal with a network of self-driving cars that can learn. Anyhow, this is going to require major changes in how we think, and that's going to require a new mythology. I figure maybe old Golfotep and the Mystic Jewels have something to say about that.

I published this on The Valve some years ago and, as the introductory note says, I'd published it on Meanderings, now defunct, before that. No doubt I will republish it somewhere else sometime in the future. Or maybe someone will make it into a movie. Who knows.

Oh, and be sure to check out Tight Like This (this is Wynton Freakin' Marsalis, Armstrong link in text below).  High drama & low-down hoochie coochie. 

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Jivometrics

Back in the mid 1990s, about the time Mosaic was being unleashed on the internet, I met a fellow in the African-American Forum at AOL Online. Called himself Cuda Brown. We hit it off and began emailing privately. Before you know it we were collaborating on a website called Meanderings - which later became Gravity. Cuda did most of the work, including all of the HTML coding and the back-end database coding. I helped editorially, wrote some pieces, and did some art.

One day I sent Cuda an email containing a spur-of-the moment paragraph satirizing Afrocentrism, something much discussed at Meanderings. While Cuda and I were sympathetic, we were doubtful about the more inventive flavors of the brew. Thus I had improvised something about golf being invented by one Pharoah Golfotep: the primo white-shoe Anglo country club plus-fours game was invented in ancient Egypt. What could be sillier? Over the next two weeks, however, this little bit of satire jes grew and grew, like Topsy, and became something else.

So, we posted it in Meanderings, which may have become Gravity by that time, I forget. And people read it. In time, however, Gravity died. Since then I've been looking for a place to revive “Fore Play.” Well, here it is. Let's call it a cultural studies primer for the new millennium.

Some of it is a bit dated. Who remembers Dennis Rodman, much less his experimental tonsorial stylings? Back then Tiger Woods was more potential than achievement – but what potential! – while boom boxes have now bifurcated into iPods and beat boxes. "Muggles" hadn't become a Potteresque term of art for – well, just what exactly, non-magicals? (I've never read any of the books.) Back then I used it as the name of a Louis Armstrong blues and I'm sticking to it. It's also old New Orleans slang for something Bill Clinton didn't inhale.

Otherwise, it's pretty much now as it was then. Only back then the turn of the millennium was in the future. Now it's in the past.

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Fore Play:

A Lesson in Jivometric Drummology


Jefferson Ribonucleic Parker IV

aka

Mr. Ribs

Tiger Woods is only the most recent in a long line of fine black golfers. In saying that I refer to players other than the moderns such as Charles Sifford, Jim Thorpe, Jim Dent, Lee Elder, Calvin Peete, and Renee Powell. Truth be told, the tradition of sepia swing masters started in ancient Egypt, where the game was invented. In that company Woods would be no more than a middling player.

By today's standards Tiger is ferociously talented and filled with promise for the future. Perhaps he'll become the best in post-modern times, the primo putter of the 21st Century, the first master to break par on the New Savanna. But those African drivers of ancient Egypt were giants the like of which haven't been seen in thousands of years.

Their stories, like so many stories, have been suppressed by the Europeans. Fortunately many of those stories have been collected by The Order of Mystic Jewels for the Propagation of Grace, Right Living, and Saturday Night through Historic Intervention by Any Means Necessary. The Jewels are dedicated to preserving the ancient stories and to intervening in history in ways variously clever and indirect. They are the chief source of that version of Afrocentric thinking known as Jivometric Drummology. In her classic study, Klactoveededstene: Riffing the Noumena, Ella Birks Roach defined the basic concept thus:

Jivometric Drummology: A philosophical system grounded in African and African-American musical practice. “Drummology” indicates that the governing logos is that of the drum, of rhythm, of hands and sticks coaxing sound from skin, of people joining together, each playing a simple rhythm, with the many simple rhythms melting into a single stream of infinite diversity. “Jivometric” is here because of the way it rolls off the tongue and tickles the ear; its meaning is secondary to its sound. Jivometrics is thus a principle of grace. When jivometrics is in play outer sonic auras join in the creation of tones played by no one, but heard by all. A treatise may have drummological ideas, but if the language lacks grace, then the treatise is not jivometric -- jiveturkey is all too often the appropriate term. In the most profound works of this school jivometrics and drummology are joined through agape

The Mystic Jewels, however, are not mere signifiers. They signify with a stern purpose. For example, Harriet Beecher Stowe was invented by the Mystic Jewels. They knew the abolitionists would never get beyond a lot of grand indignant talking so they figured a novel that stirred the imagination would be just the thing. A light-skinned sister named Eleanor Gough McKay changed her name to Harriet Beecher, married Calvin Stowe, and wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. That book, as President Abraham Lincoln acknowledged, is what gave the North the guts to wage the Civil War.

Anyhow, my mother's father, Cassius Photon Gaillard, aka Slim, was a Mystic Jewel and took a special interest in the history of golf. The following story is based on information from his papers.

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The Origin of Golf and the Lights in the Sky

Golf was invented by the ancient Egyptians – well, that's what we call them now, but they were really Nubians, and proud of it, too. Most of the details have been lost, but the general shape and thrust of the story has been preserved.

It began in the reign of Pharaoh Ramses Golfotep LVII of the 'N Baa Dynasty. One day Rams was hanging out with some of his friends in the Lark Meadow gazebo at his summer palace. As usual, they were playing bid whist and sipping Mount Gay and Coke, with a twist of lemon. As so often happens, they got to talkin' trash about their wives and girl friends. Ramses talked about how he particularly liked going into a special glade with his wife Cleopatra and a boom box loaded with some righteous jams. The best time was early evening when things were cooling down and the sun lit the sky with orange fire. They'd meander down this long narrow opening among the palms and get to a secluded spot ringed with patches of sand. The ground was firm and the grass kept closely cropped so they could dance freely. Inevitably the dancing would lead to a little fooling around, and that little fooling around generally led to more and before you know it Cleo was baking Ramses' sweet potato in her oven. That was some fine sweet potato pie they'd cook up. Yes indeed.

The invention of the West

Steven Poole reviews, Josephine Quinn, How the World Made the West (2024), in The Guardian. The opening paragraph:

Like the railway and the telegraph, western civilisation was invented in the 19th century. It had located its noble roots in classical Athens and Rome, and from then, so the story went, white Europeans embarked on a smooth progression of gradual sophistication and enlightenment that culminated, not coincidentally, in the glories of the British empire.

That’s not quite how it all got started, argues ancient history professor Josephine Quinn in this fascinating account of the cultural and martial doings around the Mediterranean in the two millennia BC, and thence up to the middle ages. For her, “civilisational thinking” itself is the enemy, not only in historiography but in modern geopolitics. [...]

But “western civilisation” would not exist without its Islamic, African, Indian and Chinese influences.

I agree. A bit later:

With such relentless trade and travel comes, naturally, cultural commingling. “Overseas exchange meant that Cretans could pick and choose from different cultural options, and they did,” Quinn remarks. Cultural appropriation was not yet an affront; indeed, it could be a strength, as we learn later from Polybius’s remark about the upstart Romans: “They are unusually willing to substitute their own customs for better practice from elsewhere.”

The book is rich in marvellous detail, and succeeds in making the pre-classical world come to life. There is something of the modern wheedling teenager in the complaining minor royal who ends a letter to the king of Egypt with the line “Send me much gold”.

Still later, after this and that:

Meanwhile, it didn’t take until the 19th century for the idea of “the west” to arrive, as Quinn notes. The “earliest known version of a binary polarity setting Europe against Asia”, she observes, is found already in Herodotus’s tales of the Persian wars; and Frankish Christians began thinking of themselves as “European” in the wake of the Arab conquest.

Doubtless, though, those fusty 19th-century gentlemen historians were blinkered, in the same way that we shall appear blinkered to historians a century hence. Quinn makes this point beautifully when discussing the “stories of warrior women in the Steppe” in the first millennium BC, which were long dismissed as fantasy by scholars. “There was no room in civilisational thinking for cultures run aggressively and successfully by women,” she observes. “In recent decades, however, more than one hundred women’s graves containing axes, swords and occasionally armour have come to light in Russia and Ukraine.”

I've been making a similar argument for a long time. Although it has long been convention to trace "the West" back to ancient Greece and to Israel, and those genealogical connections are real, the idea that there this cultural entity, "the West," extends back into ancient times is more on the order of a founding myth than a summary history. It should be obvious on the face of it that if any contemporary citizen of a Western country were transported back in time to the ancient world, anywhere, they'd find themselves in a very strange culture that they do not at all recognize. For that matter, the England of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I would be barely recognizable as English by contemporary speakers of the language. The language would be difficult to understand and to speak, and the customs strange.

In "The Evolution of Cognition" David Hays and I point out that contemporary Western culture would have been impossible without arithmetic imported from the Arab world. In "Culture, Plurality, and Identity in the 21st Century" I point out that the idea of a Western cultural identity is relatively recent and was preceded and facilitated by the idea of Christendom that emerged in Europe in the 16th century.

H/t 3QD.

Politics Beyond the Personal: Diversity, Identitarian Rhetoric, and Equality

This post originally appeared in The Valve (now defunct) on October 6, 2006. It was part of a "book event," as it was known, in which a number of writers would give their views on the chosen book. Some of the writers were regular columnists at The Valve, and some weren't. Generally, a good time was had by all. This book event was devoted to Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. Diversity is an even more pressing issue back now than it was back then, when Bush II was President, which is why I'm posting my contribution here. You can find the whole book event here, in the trusty Wayback Machine. 

Caveat: Some of the links have probably rotted. I've not checked them nor attempted to repair them.

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Prelude: Shantytowns

Back in April one Tyler Cowen published an article in Slate suggesting that shantytowns be constructed in post-Katrina New Orleans:

Since so many homes were destroyed, the natural inclination is to build safer or perhaps impregnable structures. But that is the wrong response. No one should or will rebuild or insure expensive homes on vulnerable ground, such as the devastated Ninth Ward. And it is impossible to make homes perfectly safe against every conceivable act of nature.

Instead, the city should help create cheap housing by reducing legal restrictions on building quality, building safety, and required insurance. This means the Ninth Ward need not remain empty. Once the current ruined structures are razed, governmental authorities should make it possible for entrepreneurs to put up less-expensive buildings. Many of these will be serviceable, but not all will be pretty. We could call them structures with expected lives of less than 50 years. Or we could call them shacks.

I haven't given the matter much thought but, on the face of it, the suggestion seems worth considering. Cowan made the curious mistake, however, of concluding that piece with this fairytale:

To be sure, the shantytowns could bring socioeconomic costs. Yet crime, lack of safety, and racial tension were all features of New Orleans ex ante. The city has long thrived as more dangerous than average, more multicultural than average, and more precarious than average for the United States. And people who decide the cheap housing isn't safe enough will be free to look elsewhere-or remain in Utah with their insurance checks.

Shantytowns might well be more creative than a dead city core. Some of the best Brazilian music came from the favelas of Salvador and Rio. The slums of Kingston, Jamaica, bred reggae. New Orleans experienced its greatest cultural blossoming in the early 20th century, when it was full of shanties. Low rents make it possible to live on a shoestring, while the population density blends cultural influences. Cheap real estate could make the city a desirable place for struggling artists to live. The cultural heyday of New Orleans lies in the past. Katrina rebuilding gives the city a chance to become an innovator once again.

While it is true that remarkable creative activity has managed to survive in unfortunate physical circumstances, I would think the proper view of this relationship is that creativity thus survived in spite of those circumstances, not because of them.

Cowan's disingenuous praise of creativity among the poor is an example of the kind of thinking that Walter Benn Michaels eviscerates in The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. The cultural creativity that sometimes manages to flourish amid poverty is, in Cowan's view, somehow supposed to compensate for that poverty or to demonstrate somehow that poverty really isn't such a bad thing. In Michaels's view such thinking is self-serving rationalization. He is right to critique it.

However, I'm not going to concentrate on the book's main argument; I'll leave that to my fellow bloggers. I am concerned about the book's very odd conclusion, which is about Michaels himself. In some entirely reasonable scheme of things, that conclusion is irrelevant to the argument - Michaels himself says so - but still, it is there, 12 pages all about Walter Benn Michaels in a 203 page book. Why?

As Miss Piggy Says: Moi Moi Moi

Michaels begins his conclusion by climbing into the third person and telling us (p. 191):

Walter Benn Michaels teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He makes $175,000 a year. But he wants more; one of his motives for writing this book was the cash advance offered him by his publishers.

As it happens, that paragraph is the first thing I saw when I opened the book. I wasn't intending to read the conclusion, the pages just happened to part there when I opened the book.

So I began reading that paragraph and promptly splattered myself on the ceiling in anger and disgust: “another narcissistic mea culpa from an opportunistic pomo critic.” That's what I was thinking. “And he's bragging about his salary too,” which is quite high for a humanities professor, though it's only martini money on Wall Street - something Michaels is at pains to point out.

Once I had scraped myself off the ceiling and gathered my wits about me, I was puzzled. I associate such self indulgence with identity theorists, who seem to believe that a frank acknowledgment of their own positionality will magically insulate them from misconstruing the thoughts and actions of the Others about whom they write. But Michaels is not such an identitarian; he's quite opposed to such thinking, and says so in this book (and others as well). Why is he making such a typically identitarian move? And, at 6% of the page count, in such an exaggerated form in such a prominent position, the end of the book?

One possibility, of course, is misplaced vanity. That seems to be what University Diarist thinks:

He ran out of things to say but he had a book contract, so he's filling up pages . . . with cultural self-flattery. In that particularly repellent mode UD calls KISS ME I'M HONEST. Says he's got an enormous household income but wants much more because he wants to be the super-rich he envies in the pages of the NYT ... that the homeless guy outside his house pisses him off rather than inspires him to become Albert Schweitzer ... that he thinks he has better taste than other people ...

When Michaels tells us, in a book about the economic greed, blindness, and insensitivity of American elites, that he himself is an invidious grasping sort, it doesn't humanize him or interestingly complicate the redistribution problem.... If indeed he “does not feel rich” even though he's hugely affluent, one can only conclude that it's because of people like Michaels that we're in the cruel winner-take-all fix he himself deplores.

I'm can't go along with that final comment, but I certainly resonate to the KISS ME I'M HONEST branding. Yet, while I am quite willing to believe that academic superstars, such as Michaels, are sometimes prey to vanity and self indulgence, I have been unable to convince myself that Michaels wrote those final pages out of nothing but vanity. There is something else going on.

Let us read a bit more (p. 191):

Some readers will be tempted to see a discrepancy between these facts and the arguments against economic inequality made in the preceding chapters. But they should remember that those arguments are true (if they are true) even if Michaels's motives are bad, and they would be false (if they were false) even if his motives were good. Not to put too fine a point on it, the validity of the arguments does not depend on the virtue of the person making them.

I quite agree. So why doesn't Michaels simply allow people to judge his ideas on their merits, free of any information about who he is, how much money he makes, that he is Jewish, or what he thinks about the homeless man he saw outside the window of his study? Why not simply present his arguments and be done with it?

Consider the following passage by sociologist Robert Merton, from a 1945 article on “The Sociology of Knowledge” which is reprinted in his collection, Social Theory and Social Structure (Free Press 1957, p. 457):

With increasing social conflict, differences in the values, attitudes and modes of thought of groups develop to the point where there orientation which these groups previously had in common is overshadowed by incompatible differences. Not only do there develop distinct universes of discourse, but the existence of any one universe challenges the validity and legitimacy of the others. The co-existence of these conflicting perspectives and interpretations within the same society leads to an active and reciprocal distrust between groups. Within a context of distrust, one no longer inquires into the content of beliefs and assertions to determine whether they are valid or not, one no longer confronts the assertions with relevant evidence, but introduces an entirely new question: how does it happen that these views are maintained? Thought becomes functionalized; it is interpreted in terms of its psychological or economic or social or racial sources and functions.

Thus knowledge of a thinker's position in society, his identity, will be used to discount the arguments he makes.

The conditions Merton described in that mid-century article are certainly true of current intellectual life in America, both in the academy and in the larger civic sphere. Difference and distrust are rampant and any and all ideas can be interpreted as deceptive moves in a struggle for power and domination of one sort or another. Thus throughout Michaels's career it has been common for literary scholars to discount arguments by reference to some hidden agenda of the person making the argument. This argument is capitalist, that one is paternalistic, that other one over there assumes white privilege, and so forth. These days psychoanalysis is anathema to one group of intellectual tribes while evolutionary psychology is anathema to another. Of intellectual cooties there is no end.

One move in such a game is for a writer openly to declare his identity, his position in the matrix of potential discounting factors, in the name of openness and honesty. Identitarians do this all the time, especially when they are considering the work of people whose identity is different from their own.

This is the context in which I wish to consider Michaels's conclusion. It bears on his argument, not in a rational-deductive way, but in a rhetorical way. Rationally, the conclusion is irrelevant to the arguments in the body of his book. But rhetorically, that's different. In the manner, however, of Laurence Sterne, I propose to progress through digression. Thus I will first consider, at some length, two examples of standard authorial positioning statements in identitarian contexts.

Other People's Culture

Let us begin with a casual example of authorial positioning, from an article in Krin Gabbard's anthology, Jazz Among the Discourses (1995), one of a pair of anthologies arguing that “jazz has entered the mainstreams of the American academy” (p. 1). The general purpose of the anthology is to help ensure that this new discipline is in harmony with the latest developments in postmodern humanities scholarship. One Steven Elworth contributed a paper examining the critical transformation of jazz into an art music: “Jazz in Crisis, 1948-1958: Ideology and Representation.”

In the course of his argument, Elworth offers this observation (p. 65):

The major paradox of all writing about culture is how to take seriously a culture not one's own without reducing it to an ineffable Other. I do not wish to argue, of course, that one can only write of one's own culture. In the contemporary moment of constant cultural transformation and commodification, even the definition of one's own culture is exceedingly contradictory and problematic.

While the entire passage is worthy of comment, I want to consider only the first sentence: Just what “culture not one's own” is Elworth talking about? Since this article is about jazz I assume that jazz culture is what he's talking about. While the jazz genealogy has strands extending variously to West Africa and Europe, has been and continues to be performed by Blacks and Whites, before audiences both Black and White - though, in the past, these have often been segmented into different venues, or different sections of the same venue - the music is conventionally considered to be Black. That convention is justified by the fact the music's major creators have been overwhelmingly Black. Thus it follows that jazz culture is, as these conventions go, Black culture.

That convention leads me to infer that Elworth is White. I do not have any hard evidence for this assumption; I've never met the man, I've seen no photographs, and the contributor's blurb certainly doesn't indicate race. But the same set of conventions that dictate that jazz is Black music also make it unlikely that any Black scholar would refer to jazz culture as “a culture not one's own.” It follows that Elworth is White, or, at any rate, not-Black.

Fables of Identity, European and American [Oppositional Trickeration]

I'm bumping this piece, from August 2012, to the top of the queue on general principle. Plus, it's about American identity, which is a vexations and trying matter, even more so now than it was back then.

Judging by a remark in the final paragraph, I wrote “Beyond Oppositional Trickeration” sometime during the O. J. Simpson trial and published it in Gravity within a month or two before “Fore Play: A Lesson in Jivometric Drummology.” The tone is conversational, a bit hip, but without the Lord Buckley embroidery of “Fore Play.” As I recall “whiteness” was being discovered at the time and, though I never read any of the books resultant upon that discovery, I read certainly articles and interviews. Could hardly miss them, they were thicker than snow at the North Pole. The influence of those ideas is obvious.

Were I to develop these ideas more formally, I would devote considerable effort to delivering on this informal observation, which I make early on: we must orient ourselves to that whole range of experience we have access to beyond our immediate family and neighborhood. What I had and have in mind is that, to the extent that we are aware of human history, we must situate ourselves within it in some role that gives us some place in history. By identifying with some ethnic, religious, or national group, we make contact with history through the role that group has played in history.

One can argue that such identifications are ideological formations, that they organize history and culture into patterns owing more to stance and desire than to fact, but such unmasking does not in itself eliminate the need for such identities. Nor does it provide alternative means for satisfying that need. Perhaps we should devote some effort to understanding just why human brains and groups and humans need such fictions. But that's rather more than I attempted in this piece and certainly more than I am now prepared to undertake.

This piece offers sketches of whiteness and blackness and how their opposition is more than mere opposition. There is a psycho-cultural dynamics at work that is rather independent of reasoned argument. For what it is worth, when I wrote this piece, I had no intimation that, a decade later, America would trick itself into fighting a nebulous "war" on terrorism, and thereby wage a real and hopeless war in Iraq. But the mechanism of "oppositional trickeration" I describe is what drives that nebulous war.

Note: This piece was originally published in Meanderings, which became absorbed by Gravity. It was one of the first sepia-toned joints on the web, and remains so to this day. Thanks, Cuda! BTW, here's Cuda, that's Cuda or Cooter Brown, a nom de plume for a most distinguished gentleman who shall remain nameless (dig the digressions!) writing about his star-struck youth. Very intense. Very.

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Beyond Oppositional Trickeration: 

American Identity in the 21st Century, a Just-So Story

White folks weren't always white. By this I don't mean only that, like everyone else's, white folks' ancestors were from the African continent. That is true, but we don't really know what that signifies colorwise.

The fact is, we don't know what colors the original humans were. All we know about them is what we can deduce from some bones, pot shards, flaked stone tools and weapons, remains of fires and other assorted bits and pieces of stuff. None of this speaks to the issue of color. Those originals might have been mocha java, hazelnut, lion tawny, watermelon pink, eggplant purple, lilac lavender, tulip red or speckled striped blued and tattooed. Who knows. I'd like to think that, in fact, their color was like Satchel Paige's age:

What color would you be if you didn't know what color you was? That's what color I am.

And this brings us back to the question of white folks. There was a time when they were the same color as the rest of humanity, no color and all colors. They changed all that during their Renaissance, a word which, you may recall, means rebirth. They rebirthed themselves and came out Christian, European, and white.

This essay is about identity, about how Europeans created their collective identity, and how African America responded in kind. Needless to say it's about time for us to move beyond the pale and into the multi-hued savanna of new civilizations.

STANDARD DISCLAIMER: In this essay I follow a ubiquitous, if not universal, convention of talking about black and white, African American and European American, and so forth, as though these terms have simple and obvious meanings, as though they designate homogeneous and mutually impervious groups. I know better than that and so do you, so please, don't start dogging either one of us on that score until you get far enough into this piece to see where it's going.

Persuasion, Clueless [Media Notes 77] {mediated desire}

I’ve just watched the recent movie adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Clueless, which is a loose adaptation of Austen’s Emma. First, I want to comment very briefly on the Girardian nature of both plots and then offer some comments on adaptation.

Mimetic desire in the films

For whatever reason I didn’t watch Persuasion in a single sitting. I forget whether it was late in the first sitting or during the second sitting that I noticed, Hey! this story is steeped in mimetic desire. The heroine, Anne, doesn’t realize that she’s still in love with an old flame until he is both pursued by and pursues her best friend. That’s classic Girard, and in the medium in which he did his original research, the novel.

A couple days later I decided to watch Clueless, though I have a vague sense that I may have seen it in theaters on original release in 1995. Sure enough, about two-thirds of the way through or so the heroine, Cher, realizes that she’s in love with Josh when she realizes that she’s jealous of Tai’s interest in him (Tai is a new friend).

In both films we see mimesis working in other relationship pairings as well, but I have no intention of working any of this out. This is mostly a note to myself.

I will observer, however, that I’ve never been a Girardian. I became aware of his ideas about mimetic desire and sacrifice from lectures he gave a Johns Hopkins when I was an undergraduate. Later I read Violence and the Sacred with some care when the English translation came out in 1977, but I’ve forgotten it. Girard never made it into my working repertoire until earlier this year I decided to write about Jaws, and there I called on my friend, David Porush, to validate my Girardian interpretation as David knows Girard’s thought much better than I do.

Here's the thing: If I’m to do much work with Girard’s ideas I’m going to have to recast them into a more contemporary intellectual form. I have no idea what that would look like or how much apparatus building it will require. As it is, Girard is just another humanist with his feet in the 19th century.

Adaptation: Clueless

Since I’ve not read Emma, I have no idea just how loose the adaptation is. Obviously the setting has changed enormously. Mores have as well; there’s a fair amount of talk about virginity that wouldn’t have happened in Austen. But it’s the plot that matters most and I have no way of judging that.

However, I’m pretty sure that the film makers were not counting on an audience familiar with Emma, any more than the makers of Forbidden Planet were counting on an audience familiar with The Tempest. They’re just doing what story tellers have always done, borrow, steal, and adapt.

Adaptation: Persuasion

Persuasion is a different story. Here I think there is some presumption that viewers will at least know that this is an adaptation of an early 19th century novel and even that a significant portion of the audience will have read the novel. I have not, but I do know that it is a 19th century novel. Apparently it has received quite a bit of criticism for anachronism. I supposed I could care less about “breaking the fourth wall,” nor am I so much concerned that Anne apparently is a bit more free-spirited that Jane depicted her, though perhaps this should bother me.

But I am somewhat puzzled that the film offers up black aristocrats in early 19th century England, which is certainly an anachronism. Surely they don’t think any viewers will believe that this is authentic. I have a vague general idea about why this is being done – something about egalitarianism – but that general idea collapses upon inspection. For the same general sensibility argues against so-called “color blind” casting on the grounds that only black people can pretend to be other black people with full depth and authenticity, only East Asians can pretend to be and so forth and so on. Except in this case, 21st century black actors can play early 19th century white English aristocrats.

In this case I suppose one can resort to Ralph Waldo Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Somehow, though, I don’t think this is what he had in mind.

What are the chances we’ll outgrow this?

Beethoven in Memphis [on the limits of civilization and sexuality in music]

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue in part on general principle and in part in response to Tyler Cowen's strategic juxtaposition of Mozart and Mick Jagger in this recent post on the decline of classical music (see also this reply to Cowen on Lisztomania).

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In 1838 Ole Bull, the Norwegian violin virtuoso, gave the first classical concert ever heard in Memphis, Tennessee. I don’t know what he played on that occasion, but that’s beside the point. What could he have played? That was the year that Felix Mendelssohn thought of writing a concerto in E minor—which would come to be known simply as the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, a staple of the classical repertoire—for his friend, Ferdinand David. Obviously Bull could not have performed this work. But he could have performed Bach, Hayden, Mozart, or Beethoven. Classical music was in full flower and the blues, jazz, rock and roll, they were still in the distant and unforeseeable deeply unpredictable future.

I would like to think Ole Bull performed some Beethoven, who had been dead for eleven years. Even more, I would like to think that Ole Bull was a pianist, not a violinist, and that he performed Beethoven’s last piano sonata, Opus 111, the one with rocking and rolling passages in the second movement (starting are roughly 14:20):

That passage certainly marked the remotest outpost of the Western musical imagination, which didn’t become comfortable with that kind of expressive material for another three-quarters of a century. Even then the comfort was strictly circumscribed. And Memphis in 1838 would certainly have impressed Ole Bull, or any other civilized European, as being pretty near the dropping-off point of Western civilization.

The sexuality which Beethoven had evoked and expressed so directly in the second and third variations of the “Arietta” was quickly sublimated, urging composers to ever more subtle and complex chromatic games, stretching movements over longer and longer time periods, from ten minutes to twenty, to half an hour or more for a single movement of a Mahler symphony. Haydn and Mozart wrote complete symphonies that weren’t that long. It did the same thing to opera, most particularly, to Wagner’s opera. Wagner would stretch it to four, five, or six hours, flowing and ebbing, building and collapsing, and ultimately exhausting. But never really fulfilling.

At roughly the same time when Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring scandalized Paris society (1913) with its driving rhythms, the blues, ragtime, and jazz would emerge in still-barbarous America. W.C. Handy wrote his “Memphis Blues” in 1912 and “Beale Street Blues in 1917. But back in 1838, Ole Bull could not have imagined music like Stravinsky’s nor could he have heard music like Handy’s, though the music he played contained the roots of one and the music he heard on the street was the roots of the other. In point of sophistication and complexity, the music Bull heard would have been less so than the music he played, just as Handy’s blues was less sophisticated than Stravinsky’s ballet. Yet with all these differences and distances these musics did meet, and that miscegenationating rhythm has been a driving force in twentieth century culture, popular, high American, Western, and world. Through these rhythms the mind of man, and woman, has been seeking a more generous and fulfilling interaction with the body.

Fantasia and Transnational Film Culture

I'm bumping this 2012 post to the top of the queue primarily for the argument (starting halfway through) it makes about film culture being fundamentally transnational. 

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I have argued that Disney’s Fantasia is a signal work in a film culture that is fundamentally transnational. By transnational I don’t mean universal, or anything like it. I mean only that film culture at that time, the mid-20th Century, operated across national borders and, indeed, had been doing so since its inception.

This argument goes back to a piece I’d originally published in The Valve in 2006 and republished here in 2010: Disney’s Fantasia as Masterpiece. First I want to reprise aspects of that argument and then I’ll flesh out some things I didn’t get to back then.

Fantasia as a Singular Work

In order to argue that Fantasia is a masterpiece I had to argue that it is not, as it is so often considered, an unordered collection of autonomous episodes. That the film is not a narrative is obvious. What is not so obvious is that it is, I argue, an encyclopedia. The episodes have been carefully, if unconsciously, chosen to indicate the whole of the cosmos. In making that argument I called on two literary critics, Edward Mendelson and Franco Moretti:

In 1976 Edward Mendelson published an article on “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon” (MLN 91, 1267-1275). It was an attempt to define a genre whose members include Dante's Divine Comedy, Rablais', Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Goethe's Faust, Melville's Moby Dick, Joyce's Ulysses, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Somewhat later Franco Moretti was thinking about “monuments,” “sacred texts,” “world texts,” texts he wrote about in Modern Epic (Verso 1996). He came upon Mendelson's article, saw a kinship with his project, and so added Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung's (note, a musical as well as a narrative work), Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and a few others to the list. It is in this company that I propose to place Fantasia.

And so I did.

You’ll have to consult that old post if you want the full argument where I consider the contribution of each of the film’s eight episodes. In this post I’m concerned with only one aspect of the argument, that these encyclopedic works are special kinds of cultural markers:

One other characteristic looms large in Mendelson's formulation. These works are identified with particular national cultures and arise were these nations become aware of themselves as distinct entities. This creates a problem for his nomination of Gravity's Rainbow as an encyclopedic work because Moby Dick already has the encyclopedic slot in American letters. He deals with the problem by suggesting that Pynchon is “the encyclopedist of the newly-forming international culture whose character his book explicitly labors to identify” (pp. 1271-1272).

Fantasia presents the same problem, for, like Moby Dick before and Gravity's Rainbow after, it is nominally an American work. But there is no specifically American reference in the film. None of the music is American, none of the segments are set in America nor refer to American history or culture. It is not, in any ordinary sense, a nationalist work, an expression of national identity. Rather, it is an expression of a naïve middle-brow universalism, unaware of the cultural specificities on which it depends.

That seems right to me, a naïve middle-brow universalism, one that circulated transnationally. That’s what Disney was after and the company still pursues it, I suppose, long after the founding genius, Walter Elias Disney, has died.

Nationalism Gets in the Way

First of  all, we need to recognize that national boundaries are not good markers of cultural kinds, though nationalist ideologies insist otherwise. I’ve argued this point at some length in a working paper, Culture, Plurality, and Identity in the 21st Century. The physics conducted behind Japanese borders is not Japanese physics in any culturally significant sense. It is just physics that is done on Japanese soil in Japanese-built structures and is readily intelligible to anyone who knows contemporary physics.

Nor is the golf played on American golf courses an essentially American game merely because American citizens play it on American soil. That the game originated in Scotland is one thing; that it is now played the world over is another. What that implies about cultural identity, I don’t quite know. But we’ve got to step back from the automatic practice of hanging national labels on cultural formations.

Culture doesn’t work that way, and never has. Cultural practices have circulated freely among human groups long before the nation state was invented. Upon its invention, though, which happened relatively recently according to Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge 1990), it set out to create a myth of cultural homogeneity within its borders. Of national languages Hobsbawm writes (p. 54):

National languages are therefore almost always semi-artificial constructs and occasionally, like modern Hebrew, virtually invented. They are the opposite of what nationalist mythology supposes them to be, namely the primordial foundations of national culture and the matrices of the national mind. They are usually attempts to devise a standardized idiom out of  a multiplicity of actually spoken idioms, which are thereafter downgraded to dialects, the main problem in their construction being usually, which dialect to choose as the base of the standardized and homogenized language.

Of France, for example (p. 60):

However, given that the dialect which forms the basis of a national language is actually spoken, it does not matter that those who speak it are a minority, so long as it is a minority of sufficient political weight. In this sense French was essential to the concept of France, even though in 1789 50% of Frenchmen did not speak it at all, only 12-13% spoke it ‘correctly’—and indeed outside a central region it was not usually habitually spoken even in the area of the langue d’oui, except in towns, and then not always in their suburbs. In northern and southern France virtually nobody talked French.

Italy was even more problematic, with only 2½ % speaking Italian in 1860 when the country was unified.

One aspect of this nationalizing process that shows up in university curricula is the teaching of national literature and history to undergraduates as an aspect of training them to be good national citizens. Ironically enough, in American universities, it was, until relatively recently, English literature that was taught to undergraduates, not American. There were no courses in American literature at Johns Hopkins when I was a student there in the 1960s, nor were there any Americanists in the faculty of the English Department. That situation was not unusual for the time, though that time has since passed.

American national mythology has it that America is a melting pot, implying that many cultures went into it but we’ve all come out the same: American. But we haven’t. America wasn’t culturally homogeneous when Disney made Fantasia and it isn’t homogeneous now.

National boundaries and national institutions, political, economic and military, certainly have cultural consequences. But they do not constitute cultural essences. Cultural formations cross national borders all the time.

Film Culture as Transnational

In this perspective, the assertion that film culture is transnational would seem almost a trivial truism. By the late nineteenth century, when motion picture technology was invented and put to practical use, European conquest had linked the world with lines of trade and exploitation, which necessarily involved global circulation of cultural materials and practices of all kinds. The World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893—where Elias Disney, Walt’s father, had worked as a carpenter—had exhibits from 46 nations around the world and was attended by 27 million people. Eadweard Muybridge exhibited moving pictures of animals at the fair.

The early film industry was, of course, built on silent films. So language was no barrier to circulation of films. According to Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America (1994, p. 22) American film-makers copied the comedies of Georges Méliès as soon as they landed—copyright was not established for films until 1912. Until World War I the French company Pathé Frères was the world’s largest film producer (p. 29). The Europeans were the first to make long films, a market the American producer, Adolph Zukor entered into in 1912 (pp. 42-44).

Zukor, like many of the early movie moguls, as a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe. This fact prompted Neal Gabler to write An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, in which he argues that the Hollywood film industry was built by such men used it as a vehicle to make themselves into Americans, but also to make an imagined America in their image, as Christopher Lehman-Haupt notes in this review:

But above all things, these moguls ''wanted to be regarded as Americans, not Jews; they wanted to reinvent themselves here as new men.'' And in doing so, ''the Hollywood Jews created a powerful cluster of images and ideas - so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination.''

By the time we get to Disney—the studio was founded in the early 1920s—the American film industry may have been the largest but the industry was itself a world industry in which it was  routine for films to circulate outside their countries of origin.

That was certainly true of Disney’s cartoons, which were known around the world. Mickey Mouse, and Mickey Mouse merchandise, was not exclusively American. By the time Fantasia came out, 1940, Mickey was known around the world. By then Disney had become so dependent on overseas exhibition that the advent of World War II hurt him badly, forcing him to stop making feature films and to make propaganda and training films for the Federal Government in order to keep the studio solvent.

Disney himself may have been an example of the rags-to-riches story so central to American mythology, and he may even have thought of his films as pure Americana. But pure they were not. He and his artists borrowed freely from many cultures in making their cartoons.

Disney Culture

Consider the first five feature length films, the ones completed before Disney shut down feature production at the beginning of World War II. Two of them, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio, are based on European sources and take place in European settings. Bambi is set entirely in the woods and so could take place anywhere with the appropriate flora and fauna, which is a rather large part of the world. The many settings of the episodes in Fantasia defy easy geographical reference, though The Rite of Spring takes nothing less than the solar system as its setting. That leaves us with Dumbo, which is set in America, starting in Florida with the winter quarters for the circus. But the circus itself is a European cultural form that was brought to America in the 19th Century.

Yes, these films are American in the sense that they were made in America and it is probably the case that most of the men and women involved in the making were born in America. But not all of them. Danish illustrator Kay Nielson joined Disney in 1939 and did concept art for the Ave Maria and Night of Bald Mountain sequences of Fantasia. More to the point, Robin Allen (Walt Disney in Europe) has documented a wide range of European influences in Disney’s cartoon imagery in general. In the particular case of Fantasia Kendall O'Conner, an art director on the Dance of the Hours, asserted African and Japanese influences (quoted in John Culhane, Walt Disney's Fantasia, pp. 168, 170).

Finally, all of Fantasia’s music is European; none of it is America. This was generally true of  soundtrack music for feature films. It may have been composed by American composes, some of them European immigrants, but the idiom was 19th Century European romanticism. Cartoon music was different. While much of it was from the 19th Century European classics—which were, of course, not in copyright—swing and jazz did show up in soundtracks, but not on the soundtracks of any of these old Disney features.

So, where does that leave the cultural identify of Disney’s cartoons, but most particularly, of Fantasia? If we insist on assigning them an identity, then the obvious identity is Disney. They’re an expression of Disney culture, but not in the contemporary sense of corporate culture, where, for example, the culture of Apple is said to be different from that of Monsanto or Goldman Sachs. The cultural identity of those films is Disney in the more interesting sense that it is an amalgam of diverse cultural influences that Disney himself—for he was very much a hands-on micro-manager for at least the first two decades of his studio—authorized and, to some extent, sought out.

In this process Disney and his artists did not confine themselves to American sources. That this Disney amalgam has something of a middle-brow universalism about it, that is interesting. And it is not too difficult to see how that would have a broad transnational appeal. Not universal, though. Just transnational. A lot of people in a lot of nations like Disney films, some more than others. And many, especially intellectuals, feel that they are trite and kitschy as well, not at all authentic. That’s OK as well, though not compatible with my belief that Fantasia is one of the great works. But THAT’s a different argument.

THIS argument is simply that, in the large, film culture is inherently transnational in that, from the beginning, films have circulated across national borders and film-makers in one nation have been influenced by film-makers in other nations. Yes, there ARE national cinemas, and there is more to that than the mere location where the film is made. Any number of  Hollywood Westerns, for example, can plausibly be said to be somehow culturally American in a way that Fantasia is not. And that is my argument in the small, that Fantasia in particular is not culturally American, despite having been made in America by people who were, for the most part, American citizens.

American Culture?

Is there such a thing as American culture? I believe so, though I’m not sure just what it is. I’ve already mentioned the Hollywood Western. I think a case can be made that it is authentically American. But it hasn’t stayed in America—think of the spaghetti Westerns from Italy. There is a national political mythology that encompasses the Revolutionary War, George Washington and the cherry tree, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, not to mention the Constitution and any number of such documents. And there’s Thanksgiving, a specifically American holiday. And so forth.

Such things constitute the cultural formation of American identity and, as such, of course they are American. And no doubt much else besides. All nation states have cultural apparatus specifically devoted to validating national identity and thus obscuring what actually takes place, on the ground, in modern nations with international trade, travel, and communications.

It precisely on account of that nationalist mystification that I think that we must be wary of the reflexive identification of cultural formations with nation states. And these large identities such as Western, Eastern, and African culture are even more doubtful. Such reflexive and pervasive identifications beg too many questions and get in the way of understanding cultural dynamics.

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Note: The Wikipedia has a short entry on transnational cinema:

A key argument of Transnational cinema is the necessity for a redefinition, or even refutation, of the concept of a national cinema. National identity has been posited as an 'imaginary community' that in reality is formed of many separate and fragmented communities defined more by social class, economic class, sexuality, gender, generation, religion, ethnicity, political belief and fashion, than nationality.

The references are quite recent.