The hidden name of the enemy of the new American revolution is the bastard's old father, Europe

It is possible to look at America from the emergency of the Beat Poets in the 50s on as a culture in which not one but a series of social, cultural, and political movements were agreed in moving away from something, but not about what that in essence was, not what they were moving towards. History can be like that. The politics of intersectionalism and multiple forms of oppression and marginality is unconvincing in this regard as theories of multiple causes and effects typically are. Though what unified those movements was perhaps a broad opposition to forms of oppression, the militant forms of it styled partly after the Black Power movement that took the African-American Civil Rights Movement of the late 50s and early 60s into more militant or militant-style territory. I have a different suggestion, and it takes into account other things like the New Age and the proliferation of therapeutic spiritualities, health crazies, and the like. My hypothesis is that in a triumphant America after the war, a shift in the balance of power in the Atlantic Alliance centered around England and France towards the United States was part of the context for cultural shifts that some people in the arts and world of ideas wished to argue for. Indeed, the dominant motif in this shift was not to embrace as models either African or Native American cultures (for example), one of which had been largely annihilated in this country, and the other by now well-integrated in some ways in the arts though still segregated in social life. No, the shift was to the great “East.” And it was chimerical. Its object does not even really exist; it was invented, cobbled together from various sources in religious or “spiritual” traditions that were essentially ancient. They were dominant in China before the twentieth century, and are relics there now. India and China were constructed into a hybrid, and this was the new American Orientalism, as sinister surely as the European appropriations of Muslim culture that Edward Said would under that name denounce.

The Orientalism of the New Age is an invention that corresponds to basically nothing on the other side of the Pacific Ocean from California. It has roots in American cultural history, such as with Thoreau. Its deeper root is the ambivalence that has always been the norm for Americans searching for anything to move towards or away from, in relationship to the paternal figure, or parental figure, but it was paternal, indeed, of "Europe." Act too European and New Agers will hate you, and many other Americans might too, not knowing what it is they dislike and why. This ignorance will be revealed in the strength of their antipathy and the certainty with which they seem to hold it. If they can accuse you of criminal thought, or better, feeling, or personality, they may very well do so.

Another candidate for a great cultural shift, and we ought to agree that one has been happening, is feminism, with gay/queer (and trans) liberation very likely folded into it. Anyone with a sense of history and its “longues durées” as Europeans generally have can only be amazed at how rapidly these changes have in fact come to our culture.

And yet "patriarchy" was mostly a straw man. Invoked today, it either is almost meaningless (as an anarchism attributed to a gender politics?) or it references somthing no one really defends anymore. It seems to me that the hidden agenda, unrecognized largely even to those who advocated it, of progressive social forces in the last 50 years was to turn American culture more decidedly and with some serious militancy away from European models.

Another proposal is that of the late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who suggested in a 1996 essay, “Postscript on societies of control,” was of a shift from a disciplinary model of society, defined by Foucault through apparatuses based on architecturally facilitated large gatherings of people in schools, military outfits and barracks, prison, hospitals, and similar institutions; we could perhaps add the concentration camp, which is not necessarily murderous, as it includes refugee camps and the like, as well as the Chinese re-education camps for the Muslim citizens their government fears. The shift is away from blatant authoritarianism. It is towards forms of social organization that are looser, freer, more creative, more “flowing,” even more chaotic, and people are not so much driven from behind as captured from out front, by such apparatus as surveillance devices, which can function like ankle bracelets or house arrest without people even knowing. They are less obviously constrained, it is social control “sans entraves,” without constraints that you normally see and feel. Spontaneity and creativity can now be privileged along with self-management in forms that can certainly pose their own difficulties and can be quite serviceable in new forms of exploitation. (On this, see the work of German philosopher and social theorist Byoung-chul Han, particularly in The Burnout Society, available as of this writing on Scribd).

This theory seems quite credible and accounts well for most of the shifts in personality that can be associated with feminism. (For more on this, see my recent essay on the films “Ema” and “A Fantastic Woman,” on this site).

But people who want to change things tend to need both a vision of a happier future and an image of the past they want to criticize and leave behind. My suggestion is that while the vision of the future is murky, as is so often the case in history, which requires much time to pass before we really know what has happened and what its meaning is for us, the image of the past is easier to understand. It is this: American culture has always had an ambivalent love-hate relationship to Europe. Rebels, of either gender and any sexuality, rebel most forcefully against fathers, and that is part of their function in societies like ours. The American cultural image that is most widely shared is of a very difficult and problematic father who is European, or rather, Europe as such. The original colonists were mostly escaping it, each group with their own story of oppression, which is a very American concept indeed. The American Revolution was made in the name of liberations form the oppression of a tyranny, and that tyranny was the constitutional and liberal but monarchical government of England, whose democracy excluded the colonists, who though enjoyed their own form of it in the Town Hall. Later generations of Americans would work out their own versions of a difficult filiality to the European cultural paternity, which of course is equally a maternity, as most people learn their native language in the company of both mothers and fathers. Women therefore who rebel no more than men will be destined to replace the structures of familial authority as such. And making those structures of a different cultural character is often a less interesting proposition than you might think. In part because women and men are not that different always or necessarily. They are when anyone is giving birth, and they are not when anyone is ruling the state, as Lenin said housewives should (also). They are not that different as factory, office, or scientific and artistic workers either. Women who rebel against patriarchy are rebelling against particular forms of authority, and like all rebels, if successful, will implement their own. At least until there is true anarchy. We surely will not be ready for no government until we are beyond capitalism. You can recognize this as an obvious truth without having to become exactly a Marxist-Leninist. In the aftermath of patriarchy there will be not matriarchy but anarchy, no rule, rule of no one.

But ideas of Europe and European seem ugly to many Americans, intuitively, because our culture is rather different and has different values. For instance, Europeans will insult each other with a far greater tolerance than Americans. And, incidentally, black Americans in this regard usually are more like than unlike their white counterparts.

Jews used to be very European, but American Jews have become a lot less so.

I have informally found this hypothesis accidentally tested and confirmed often in my case. With a German father, who was himself something of a philistine, though prominent as a professor in a scientific occupation, I could tell as a schoolchild that the things culturally speaking that most naturally appealed to me would cause my school classmates to think of me as weird. Later I learned how dangerous it is in America—still—to be thought different or abnormal. Nor is it obviously true that everyone who is (is allowed to be) has as excuse for it a demographical category of accepted marginality that they can claim as a badge and handicap. Gay? Matter of indifference. I think men and women ought in a general way to like and love persons who can be masculine or feminine or whatever. Jewish? Judaism and Jewish culture, which to me are European, interest me very much, thank you. Or how about mental illness? Which you like to be declared possibly fit only for disposal in a special hospital for people who in the end are just too different for someone who finds it profitable to dispose of them there. Or how about an artist, like a writer? I am that, and I guess that is an identity predicate in a way. It’s sad to think only specially selected out people who enjoy looking at paintings or listening to sonatas are entitled to be—what? Not hated? In my picture of manhood, real men are scholars and thinkers, just like real women; it is my picture of maturity in persons with intelligence, which I believe is those who want to be more than it is anyone born with a privilege. My choosing to study European philosophy and literature and arts, including film, left me I think even more vulnerable to Americans who instinctively hate intellectuals. Sometimes it has occurred to me that I ought to accept that the way many others will see me is in some sense the truth, but then I am left feeling almost devastated, because this truth has in it almost nothing I find interesting. It is a business society, of barbarians, where guys in my generation were supposed to be jocks, and where if you argue with anyone you can find yourself being hurt or punished very horribly indeed. Basically, I think in this country, as I have put it, “if you say anything, to anyone, about anything, you take your life into your hands.”

The essential problem with anything can only be what it itself in essence is. The problem with America is the Americans. The problem with America is America. The problem with any society that is a culture is its self-understanding. To me, America is a bastard son of a European mother and father imagined a bit unrealistically as having died. Tell the French that, will you? They seem to get us, while we don’t get them. They seem also to have a good sense of how to become just as modern as we are but with maybe fewer of our stupidities and vices. The bastard has forgotten the history of his ancestors; but the true son who will triumph (isn’t King Lear Shakespeare’s most problematically conservative play?) is pure myth. Better to be myth’s bastard than her heir.